What sets this work apart is that Ralphs manages to be irreverent and reverent at the same time; alive to the fact that we can’t really have one without the other. If the wordplay is something of a motif it never becomes tired – and wordplay was, after all, good enough for the Metaphysicals. For Ralphs, a pattern of speech is a pattern of thought is a pattern of being. Her poems crack words open, spoonerising and subverting our proverbs and buzz-phrases to ask: what are we really saying? A careful and stricken theology emerges, perhaps best summed up in “after St Francis of Assisi”: “cursed are we who know it’s hard to save the world from everyone who wants to save the world.”
The middle section, “Malkin”, dramatises the 1612 Pendle witch trials in a series of lyrical monologues. The narrative of condemnation and murder by the state comes through in terrifying fragments of speeches under duress, with period-appropriate inconsistencies of spelling and syntax, a wild language yet to crystallise:
I felt the valleys shrunc to gutters cloggd
wth sky I saw a hare uneating embers
in th tumbledown of darck and the rains spalling
the Heavens as I stolle a littl lamb
It’s impeccably researched, and avoids familiar territory or historical cosplay in favour of a layered, linguistic intensity. “Malkin” is about rumour, calumny, the exploitation of the weak to curry favour with the whims of those in power. Ralphs doesn’t point out crass parallels in our own time, and doesn’t need to: the voices of the dead (all of our voices, in time) persist in our supposedly rational age. We cannot deny our place in historical atrocities because they’re part of why we’re here; they’re in our dictionaries, our language, our thought. “Oh what’s happened this time”, indeed.
The collection concludes with “My Word”, a jaw-dropping evocation of Dr John Dee, chief astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, drawing on his own “spiritual diary” of his somewhat quixotic mission to discover the true Word. Again, this is challenging stuff (I expect the most erudite reader will still be thankful for the notes), but intellectually generous enough to show us a good time in recreating an era of gravely serious magic, when metaphysical ambition had a place in the civil service: “he who knew annihilation’s knothing, in a daisy is the daye’s eye, / flattened”. It’s impossible to do it justice in less than a dissertation, but – as with this whole collection – I expect to be re-reading it for years to come. LK
Luke Kennard’s poetry collections include Cain and Notes on the Sonnets. After You Were, I Am is published by Faber at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
February: Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
The literary world – well, the bit of it on X/Twitter – had a small conniption recently. One American poet claimed that another’s unrhymed, unmetered sonnets were “not poetry”, merely “prose”. According to the site, their spat drew the attention of a quarter of a million people, far more than will ever buy either writer’s books.
Why does the “Is this a poem?” debate still get people so worked up? Everyone agrees Anne Carson is a poet – to some, the greatest living poet – and her poetry is often in prose. In 40 years of publications, she has consistently answered “yes, both” to either/or questions: fiction or nonfiction, prose or verse, translation or original writing. Her books include verse novels, a poem-essay on Proust, a comic-book version of a Greek tragedy, and a bundle of pamphlets designed to fall out of their box onto the floor in a random order.
Now comes Wrong Norma: reassuringly book-shaped on the outside, 200 pages of uncategorisable “pieces” on the inside, united only by the fact they’re all somehow uncompromisingly intelligent while being effortlessly readable, and – a word critics don’t often use about Carson – fun.
“The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong,” Carson is quoted as saying on Wrong Norma’s back cover. (Weird, an author who blurbs herself.) “Not linked” is either a fib or a failing. Ideas and characters recur in a way that’s intriguing if by design – it must be – but would be unthinkably sloppy if by mistake. “Eddy”, in an early short story of that name, feeds his pet crow toast, and analyses bloodstains professionally. So, too, does the unnamed narrator seeking revenge on gangsters in “Thret” – a blackly comic study in unease. (Martin McDonagh should film it.) Surely he’s Eddy. Then again, the chap in “Thret” is paranoid, and it’s a story filled with doubles, so who knows?
