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Location: United States

Member Since: July 22, 2014

Peter Anderson

Smashwords book reviews by Peter Anderson

A Shadow in Yucatan on Aug. 06, 2014

"But it is easier to think what poetry should be," John Keats remarked, "than to write it -- And this leads me to another axiom -- That if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all." Philippa Rees is a poet as Keats would have liked: poetry comes to her naturally, abundantly, freshly, wonderfully. She is an outstanding poet. Her great gift is for the striking, even startling, image. Yet for me (and now I can slip into the easier mode of thinking "what poetry should be"), the attempt to use the lyric poem as a vehicle, or rather set of vehicles, in the construction of a connected extended narrative runs into real difficulty. Inevitably, I fear. As the Serbian-American poet Charles Simic has pointed out, the lyric and narrative forms are incompatible. For the building block of the lyric is the image, and the more striking the image, the more it works to arrest time. As a perception that pierces to the very heart of things, the image causes us to stop, to think, to feel, to attempt to integrate, sometimes simply to recover from, what we have just seen. The image subverts the very imperative under which narrative operates, that is to say, the necessity to keep up momentum. To the extent that imagery draws attention to itself -- as it should, perhaps -- it retards the flow of narrative. "A Shadow in Yucatan" is therefore something of a sticky story. Another gifted lyric poet, Derek Walcott, gradually abandons the attempt to write narrative (in his case epic) poetry in his immensely ambitious "Omeros", and allows the lyric, for better or worse, to float the poem. Ted Hughes, in his comic grotesque "Crow", probably the closest thing in poetry to a graphic novel, allows the separate poems to stand as separate panels. Philippa Rees has attempted to write a novella in lyric form, but the poetry tends to operate at the expense of the narrative. Nevertheless, read "A Shadow in Yucatan" for the poetry itself, and you can't go wrong.