Consider “The Daze”

                        Ethan Lewis, PhD

Hugh Kenner, within reams of astute critique, has damned more with faint praise than most can boast to have cursed outright.  Of H.D., he notes “Speech held down, held back;…cutting, arresting, limiting, permitting no flow.”  Yet Kenner complains only in part; the very restrictions remarked likewise yield the “few but perfect images” (e.g., “Sea Rose,” “Oread,” “Heat,” “Storm,” “Evening,” “If You Will Let Me Sing”)  composed in her prime.  He censures D., in essence, as a one-trick Dryad – “In her average work, one is more aware of rhythmic constriction than of images.”  Though his comments (unseemly as they seem) on her ex’s negative effects on style and esteem, touch truth.1

Several Siobhan Pitchford poems feature a semi-breathless reticence reminiscent of H.D.’s:

             Black and blue,

            Shadows beneath the surface

            Bring tension,

            Create strange strained flatness

 
Yet because her verse often thematizes, as well as enacts, such pressure, the hesitation sounds appropriate (rings just right, actually).  And this effect is a hesitating, not a halting.  Put another way: Ms. Pitchford writes verse in the literal sense, for she steadily turns from one line to the next.  Her soft enjambments hold (only) – long enough that the impact fully registers.  To continue (as she does):

            
            Create strange strained flatness

            In voices, in glances

            Inside once warm bodies

            Curled in a ball

            Fists clenched, jaw tight

            Body rigid with fright

            Uncertain

            Of everything

            And

            Nothing

In retrospect, once her rhythm operates upon the pulse, even her end-stops oft project beyond the pauses: one discerns blue shadows beneath the surface; “Curled in a ball Fists clenched” in which we likewise process Curl in a balled fist.  Even at such moments when she presents spasm, she fights through it, as a runner endures a hamstring pull and finishes the race.  “Fear,” “Healing,” “The Seat of Stress,” “A Time Limit to Love,” “Caught Between” and other aptly titled counterparts bear this courageous emotional signature.

The movement remarked portends Ms. Pitchford’s break entire from this mood, which, sadly, circumscribed H.D.  Escape is intimated in another ‘’twixt’ poem, enhanced by the flowing syllables and loosened grammar:

            caught between the letters

            images randomly skitter across

            the periphery of my vision

            plow through the half formed thoughts

            scatter them haphazardly until lost

            Chapter and verse are written

            by someone else.

Part of the charge of “Between the Letter and the Meaning” consists in its numbering itself among the pages of that book the poem pretends went unwritten.2  Ms. Pitchford, though, did more than “think about pushing together / all the leftover words into my own / perfect binding.”  The last line’s perfect participle connotes doubly about the intensity of the text and the book’s style.  Though they excellently bind their content, Ms. Pitchford’s forms, like her feelings, impress as unfolding—as, again, in a dual sense, moving

           Crumpled pieces, old love letters caught up

            in April breezes fly beyond my reach.

            I want to read the words written, without

            revealing my own emotions along with

            curiosity.  Carelessly released

            missives, unintentionally thrown in

            to the wind, intrigue.  What secrets they hold

            becomes an obsession, unsatisfied.


            One gust picks them up, scatters them away

            from me with only a glimpse—love’s address

            faded, unreadable, sparks a memory

            light blue paper, worn with time and my tears.

 

            Imagination sails April breezes

            sets my poetry free to dance once more.

The bounding run-ons (neither “Careless” nor “unintentional”) that veritably blow through this sonnet celebrate—by, “once more,” enacting what they describe—Ms. Pitchford’s emotive release.  The chosen mold, moreover, plausibly points up how she skilled herself at proceeding to counterpoint constricting.  With husband David, Siobhan commenced the dialogic sonnet sequence still in progress, Orpheus and Eurydice: Dialogues (on which I’ve written elsewhere).  Continual practice at decasyllabics possibly conditioned her at extending the short line she still wields impressively.3  

Perhaps I’ve now transgressed the frontiers of criticism proper by speculating on compositional training.  In this hinterland, however, I’ll stalk a bit more, toward closure of my review.  Through the Longing Daze does not conform to one strict schema (“April Breezes” appears fourth in the collection); rather, it maps short trails from despair to quiet triumph--routes that replicate their technique of traversal: of incessant, hard-won advance.  Even so, the proportion of happier, hence more flowing, poems steadily rises through the end.  That increase coincides with a narrative trend toward light (from “12:01 a.m.,” whence the collection begins), cast (vis-à-vis brutally “thrown” in poem one) by the protective as productive arc of a loving marriage.  As H.D. offered points to compare, so might a third sensuous poet, whose personal trials somewhat accord with these others’.  The parallels in context and cadence, never mind the fortuitous coincidence of fruit, begs the following collocation.  Anna Akhmatova mused:

 

            He loved three things alone:

            White peacocks, evensong,

            Old maps of America.

            He hated children crying,

            And raspberry jam with his tea,

            And womanish hysteria.

            …And he had married me.4

 

Contrast, nearly ninety years hence:

 

            He brought her raspberries

            And white chocolate

            Aroused her passion

            With ordinary words

            And tears

            Stories of his life

            Stories of his fantasy—

            Of what could be

 

            He gave her jewels

            And poetry

            Enlightened her mind

            With intimate intrigue

            And bold

            Ideas about the world

            Ideas about the past

            --their future

 

            He took her heart

            And love

            Embraced her body

            With passions new

            And deep

            Beyond her past

            Beyond her now

            --her hopes

 

            He offered her life

            And joy

            Trusted her to love

            With new found hope

            And desire

            More than his past

            More than his now

            --his life

 

            He brought her raspberries

            white chocolate

            and himself
 

The fourth stanza clarions that the Pitchfords need not choose between excellence in life or excellence in work5 ­ – that both boons accrue to each partner.  (The mutual assistance rendered to create “the we of you and me”6 cannot go undetected, here or in such poems as “Together We Read,” “Bent Double,” “The Box,” “While You Were Gone,” and “Explore the Shadows.”)  What precedes in “He Brought Her Raspberries,” however, stands – again, abetted by rhythmic and contentual, also triadic likeness – so starkly against “He loved three things alone.”

 

Whether Ms. Pitchford matches the Russian maestra, time will tell.  In her favor, the former has (let’s hope) more than half her work ahead of her.  Yet however dark these days or the considerable talent one possesses, no poet can express a nation’s soul as Akhmatova was positioned to, and did, articulate.  But artists write from joy, of course, as well as heartache; and, God willing, Siobhan Pitchford shall continue her own harvesting of a field neither Akhmatova nor H.D. ever had the fortune to sow.

 

     1.)    Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, 1971), 175-77.

2.)    Hence, she has sealed that chasm “The Hollow Men” iteratively despair of “Between the idea And the reality Between the motion and the act.”  Her book entire is instructively informed if read as a reaction to Eliot’s poem—inclusive of, particularly early, responses empathetic with the speakers.

3.)    “Conditioning the Conditioner,” along with “Get Me Away from the Weekend Getaway,” a genuinely funny poem in the collection, ( – others elicit grins, namely “Heavenly Voodoo,” Wine Wisdom,” “Along Tree Tops,” even “The Seat of Stress”--) exemplifies Ms. Pitchford’s expertise with both shortest and elongated lines.  The crème de la protracteur occurs at the very end.

4.)    Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, trans. D.M. Thomas (London: Penguin, 1985) 16.  The poet speaks of her first husband, the Russian ‘Acmeist’ Nikolai Gumilev.

5.)    Pace Yeats, “The Choice.”  A less contrived conjunction of Ms. P and WBY highlights the complementarity  in her “Cupped in Your Palm”:

 

                                   by pain, lifted by the love in my smile

                                   a luxury not found in other lives.

 

              – to his in “No Second Troy”

 

                                           With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

                                            That is not natural in an age like this.

 

                 The swimming against the iambic tide in these second lines (whether one                          

                 chooses, as I do, to scan them regularly) creates a sound rarely found in poetry

                  of any age.     The singular cadence in each case attests to the strikingness of the

                  figures therein portrayed (the Pitchfords; Maude Gonne).  Note, too, the

                  continued morphology of form to feeling: Yeats’ curtal sonnet miming

                  Maude’s taughtness; the added line to the ‘octave’ of “Cupped in Your Palm”

                   figuring broader breathing room for the lovers.   

 

6.)    Comment on how both incorporate, and harmonize their particular employment of “The we of you and me” in Orpheus and Eurydice: Dialogues.  “Dialogues” is due to be released by Daybreak Press in February 2005.

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Last modified: 10/05/07