Book Launch: Jan Owen
Jan Owen, Poems 1980–2008
It is a pleasure to be asked to launch Jan’s wonderful new book, Poems 1980-2008, a new and selected, indeed virtually collected, edition of her work. And what a collection. In some ways it is best to read a poet’s work in the individual slim volumes, partly, it’s true, for the sake of one’s wrists (think of the collected Lowell), but also because that is how the work was conceived and presented to the world, and each volume is its own world, with its own unique flavour. But there is something striking and impressive about seeing a body of work which has accumulated over time brought together and re-presented in this format. And this is particularly so when we consider the transience of published books. It is not always easy to get hold of volumes which may have been published many years ago, and certainly would have been published in a small print run. A poet’s work thus receives a second life. I remember, in fact, that Jan and I discussed this matter in correspondence some years ago. We had both had books published in William Heinemann’s Australian poetry series, an enterprise which came and went with the speed of a falling star, and we were lamenting the failure of these books to turn up very often in actual bookshops. I made some remark about Heinemann not bothering with that part of the process and just trucking the books straight from the printer to the warehouse and locking the door. “Not the warehouse,” Jan corrected me, “the tip.”
In the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, the article on Thomas Hardy says at one point: “Anyone looking into the Complete Poems for the first time might well be struck by two apparently contradictory features… The first is of the uniformity of Hardy’s poetry; the second is of its variety.” Looking at Jan’s book, I am similarly struck by its variety and also by…well, uniformity is not the word I would use, but by recurrent preoccupations and the immediately recognizable poetic voice and sensibility; these are there fully formed from the beginning and persist through to the most recent poems. It is a sensibility that is endlessly curious about and observant of all that happens on the face of this planet, and in the hearts and minds of its human inhabitants, and maybe its nonhuman inhabitants as well, which is another Hardyesque resemblance, it occurs to me. And just in describing that sensibility I think I have hinted at the variety to be found in the poems: portraits and elegies, celebrations of place and the natural world, meditations on art, flights of imagination and humour, an abiding engagement with science and the vertiginous glimpses it gives us into the very small and very great dimensions of the world. The title poem of her first book, Boy with a Telescope, gives us a rollcall of stars:
Betelgeuse, Rigel, Algol the demon star,
Draco, Antares, Aldebaran —
they peal like bells in the cold air.
And in “Room”, the opening poem in Laughing in Greek, the section of new poems which concludes the volume, they are there again,
Antares, Fomalhaut, Achernar, Sol,
time-lapse traffic grave with light
like our slipstream of love and fear.
As I mentioned, this book collects the bulk of Jan’s published work from her five previous books — Boy with a Telescope, Fingerprints on Light, Night Rainbows (a particular favourite of mine), Blackberry Season and Timedancing — and concludes with new poems gathered under the title Laughing in Greek. I don’t have the time here to give a survey of the whole book and will concentrate on the new poems. I was, however, intrigued to see that Jan has not been afraid to revise some of the earlier poems, quite substantially in some cases. This can be a risky business; not tidying up the odd phrase or line, but performing major surgery on an already published poem, sometimes to the extent that it is almost a newly conceived work. Auden was criticized for doing as much. But looking at the poems Jan has revised I can see that in most cases she has tightened the original conception by removing extraneous matter, particularly where that matter explains rather than embodies the subject of the poem, or emphasizes what is already implicit, thus making the poem more potent. For example, “Cranes”, originally called “Possession”, which seems to be describing a painting, has been reduced from five to three quatrains, the three which specifically evoke the birds and the painting. Two other stanzas, in which the poet intrudes and offers comments, have been deleted, so that now the poem, like the painting, is self-contained.
But now to Laughing in Greek, the book-length section of new poems which concludes the collection. I mentioned portraits and elegies. There is the tender and moving “The Going”, about her mother, which seems to draw its substance out of absence itself:
The Tao of forgetting is just
pure emptiness held in trust
but lifting a little transparency from blue
to farewell sadness…
Her after-image seems a space
where nothing is and yet may be:
In a marvellous image, a favourite bowl of her mother’s is used as an emblem of both presence and absence, since a bowl is both the container and the space within, of fullness and void, since that space within holds
the taupe of deep old water
round the sides and lapping over the rim
like running your mind along a secret
tropic and tasting dusk.
The poem goes on to compare the gold-flecked blue of the bowl’s interior to the firmament itself, another image of abundance from nothingness, and renewal from destruction.
I mentioned celebrations of place and the natural world. There is the sequence “Air Flowers”. Here are the zinnias:
O fiercely classical rectitude,
brazen offerings
on puritanical stems,
rippled plates of delight
on righteous pedestals,
biblical
as in the Song of Songs,
I honour you.
Red-pink-orange-creamly
formal hierarchies of lower air,
your gold dust centres
happiest pannikins.
Each day your stems persist,
small saints of Ikebana,
I straighten further my spine.
You can see the marriage of close observation and wit. As you can in “Mitzi & Co.”:
The Friesian cows, black-mapped,
were shifting Europe languorously around:
Germany grazing, Italy pissing, Spain rubbing a post.
That is from one of a group of ten poems evoking various places in Europe. Jan can make you not just see, but taste, smell and feel the places she describes: “the spent rain lifting vaporous/in early sun on Pelikanstraat with its shutters down/ and all the diamond facets of day suddenly precious.” “The Mosque is abrim with murmuring,/ unison honeys the noon.” “The sea is sibilant as Greek,/ the wind draws tears.”
There are three richly imagined dramas drawn from paintings by Vermeer. There is the extraordinary and exhilarating “Travelling towards the Evidence”, from which the title of the collection comes, a sort of oneiric odyssey which surreally draws together the many and various strands of theme and image found throughout the book, physics, philosophy, people, places, travelling just under the skin of reason, or just beyond its reach.
We start with nothing
but darkness older than bone
and a couple of leftover maps,
some purpose lighting us down
the way a muslin curtain sifts a green day, or a moth on your hand
makes the moment’s longest lover, lifting off…
We travel towards such evidence
trace by trace,
backwards, with our luggage
of lessening light”
It’s not always clear what is happening or why but it hardly matters. As Joseph Brodsky said somewhere: “With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story they tell.” And Seamus Heaney has said: “In a poem, words, phrases, cadences and images are linked into systems of affect and signification which elude the précis maker. These under-ear activities, as they might be termed, may well constitute the most important business which the poem is up to and are a matter more of the erotics of language than of the politics and polemics of the moment.”
Jan has erotics of language to burn. Her poems contain the most precise physicality of the here and now with the most mind-shivering speculations about cosmology. They are, to quote one of her own poems, “a portal to another world”, but that world is within this one, which she so wonderfully makes present. As she says in one of those Vermeer poems, “Mistress and Maid”:
The presence of solid things…
the shiploads and warehouses lush with the lovely
stuff of the world, the lodes and wheres of it all
The lovely stuff of the world: it’s all here in Poems 1980-2008.
Stephen Edgar, November 2008
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