Great Book

Martin Corless-Smith's books are coming into a new focus as I look back through 'Complete Travels' and 'Of Piscator' from the vantage point of his more recent 'Nota' and his latest 'Swallows'. I'm less wowed by the verbal oddity - six years ago that was what struck me most - now it's the serious historical dimension to the work. A textual politics of language, history, poetry and his own position as a writer 'here' and 'there' (the Englishman abroad). Furthermore, I see his debt to Susan Howe much more clearly - although, as he says in an online interview, their purposes are different.

I also sense his background in painting pervading the work in subtler ways. Not because of the 'arty' covers or drawings (eg 'Complete Travels') but in terms of his sense of composition, how he makes and conceives of his books.

Let's take the cover to 'Swallows' - 'A Wall in Naples' by Thomas Jones, a late 18th/early 19thC Welsh painter who really did exist (with M. C-S you're never quite sure). It's a revealing choice and directly relevant to M. C-S's poetics. You can see the cover via the Fence site: http://www.fencebooks.com/new_titles.html

i) a stretch of wall in what could be an exercise in realism, the picturesque or even a 19thC attempt at a snapshot. Yet it's noticeable how the door, window and empty squares left by fallen bricks move toward abstraction. Similarly, the technique effaces itself in some areas to achieve a pictorial realism while in others remains defiantly painterly in its daubs and brushmarks.

Transfer to M.C-S's poetry and there is a similar tension between depiction and surface formalism. It could be 'safe' and reactionary - a kind of National Trust revival of older Englishes for posterity. Yet, M. C-S is constantly jamming such reassuring nostalgia, problematizing it time and again (a good phrase for this writing) in terms of history, context, register and material distribution.

ii) Formal language - the painter's & the poet's. In the painting each cloth 'is' a colour. Thomas Jones subtly working with the vocabulary of the painter (the primaries etc) just as M. C-S will work his poems via vowel and consonant variations right at the same time a poem seems to be pushing out to a 'tangible' rural landscape or event.

iii) The canvas unframed, photographed (presumably for Gallery archiving?), evidence of curatorial protective brown papers & labels, and - along the bottom edge of the cover - a thin strip of a printer/artist's colour chart.
We're not given a detail - that would be the Penguin Modern Classics approach implying art as 'life-styled' paperback material. Here the image and the status of the image (a painting, on/not on display, part of musuem curatorial decisions and policy, copyrightable, available for reproduction as here, etc) are being deliberately insisted upon.

And so it is with M. C-S's poetry. Take the citations. To accuse him of bulking out a volume by using his reading notes is to miss the point (although on this, see later). Instead, these are citations which call in question themselves, their sourcing, the very act of citation (in good/bad 'faith'?), their relation to the 'original' writing, textual property. And, inevitably, just as a series of works or relics exist in a gallery deprived of their 'original' site - there is an inevitable sense of loss (argh! now I must re-read Thomas Browne, Donne, ... to 'know' the real resonance of the lines) as of gain (how these words sparkle lifted from their textual homes). No wonder one section is called 'Kunstkammer'.

Time prevents me from exhaustively listing the different sections within the volume, the initially disconcerting sequencing of citations, jottings, texts which are/are not poems, an interlude, blank pages. Nevertheless, what's clear is how carefully the volume has been thought out in terms of the significance of sequence, inter-relation of text, separation of material into a discrete entity as against allowing writing to 'disseminate' (or would 'migrate' be a better term?). How William Williamson (the doppleganger of M. C-S?) has left his texts inscribed on the walls of his house (rather like W. S. Graham pinning his poems around his caravan) and there's the (deliberately) poor photo of a putative mss. with its illegible autograph. How, later on, in 'Journal (Home)' we get a page ripped from M. C-S's notebook (reminiscent of Ric Caddell's last book 'Writing in the Dark'). Which is the more 'authentic'? And what is the status of notebook writing to final version?

...... a thunderstorm brewing ... I'll hurry the rest ...

Yes, this book is so carefully thought out. Yet, simultaneously it's pulling itself apart by questioning at every turn (of the page) what goes with what, who wrote what, what value has this (any?) writing. What really differentiates between scribble and inspired insight, holograph and apocrypha? Might the whole volume be a last effort in desperation as M. C-S chucks his work books & failed drafts at the publisher and runs off into the mountains? An appropriately Romantic gesture - nothing but fragments! The Vision has been lost!

...

"There is no home - there is only searching"

A lovely quote - and attributed (of course) to William Williamson (who doesn't 'exist' - but then again, who does?).

Maybe - and remember, I haven't actually read the text yet - this is M. C-S's first novel - a Gothic one, at that. I'm reminded of the interlayerings of 'Wuthering Heights' or 'Dr Jekyll' - as textual, temporal and architectural space shift and merge.

Who else is thinking this carefully about the book and the poems of which it consists? Yes, Susan Howe. Lisa Robertson - eg 'Debbie'; Lisa Jarnot - eg 'Some Other Kind of Mission'; Christian Bok? And Alan Halsey (an obvious mentor for M. C-S). Who else?

I need to.