‘Challenging’ would be an understatement; this is downright difficult.
A Bird’s Idea of Flight is a complex and bewildering sequence
of 25 poems, an investigation into death and dying which takes
the form of a journey – thirteen poems out, followed by ‘The Turning
Point’, then thirteen poems back again to the point of departure.
The speaker goes in search of his own death, in pursuit of death
as an abstract and as a concrete, travelling by land and sea.
In his search for a revelation of death, the speaker has a series
of encounters with evasive, gnomic characters who appear both
as manifestations of his own self, and also as figures of death
itself – or herself, or himself. Characters such as archivist,
curator, vintner, pub landlord, whore and hare (yes, hare). The
sequence is impelled by sensations of flight and pursuit, and
of capture and evasion. It has throughout the intrigued and intruguing
air of a thwarted or partially thwarted detective story, at times
strongly reminiscent of the early narratives of Paul Muldoon,
such as ‘Immram’, in which the object of quest is similarly shadowy
and semirealised. Verbally, phonetically (‘clak / clok-clak‘)
and syntactically, Harsent’s learned weirdness is often very close
to the more familiar rhythms and idiosyncrasies of Muldoon.
The Romantic figure of doubling exerts a strong hold on the poet’s
imagination in Idea of Flight. Characters are said to
be confused and conflated with their doubles, which are in turn
doubles of the poet’s own writing persona, itself a double of
the poet. Poem VIII is actually entitled ‘The Double’; this is
one of the whore poems, in which the speaker recounts a seedy
/ sacramental encounter with a seasoned and weary prostitute.
Who is the double? whose double in that case is she or he? The
whore is the traveller’s double? The doubling motif has a way
of doubling and proliferating itself into all departments of the
text, hall of mirrorsstyle; as the prostitute thumbs through a
sheaf of photographs prior to the business in hand, she marks
out for herself other possible and impossible identities:
‘I guess I could be like her
if I fixed my hair; but not like her or her.
And Mother of Christ, I could never
if I lived my own life twice
once look like her.’ But suddenly
she did, for the empty eye, for the half
cocked head, as she spread and readied herself
with a dollop of spit
to her fingerips…
‘XVIII A Room with a View’ – exactly as many poems after the reflectional
midpoint as ‘The Double’ was before it – resumes the theme, and
has the whore becoming a figure of female multivalence. The multiple
identity of the whore, who is for a short time whatever her client
wishes her to be, is embraced by the traveller as a figure of
the ultimate shapeshifter, (feminised) death:
… and when she enfolded me, herself
was who she became…
The counterpart female presence of the multifarious whore is the
hare – a teasing, testing character who provokes the traveller
to further self-defeating, self-fulfilling searches. The hare herself
also becomes the object of morbid display, when she is flayed
of her pelt; this image doubles and resonates with the dissector
of Rembrandt’s anatomylesson painting (‘III The Slab’). The hare,
especially in conjunction with the moon, carries with it a strong
charge of Celtic paganism; Harsent also makes use on occasion
of imagery drawn from the tarot.
‘XIII The Turning Point’, the pivotal poem, is one of the briefer
pieces in the sequence, but no less brilliant for that. The central
trope is cartography – cryptic treasure-maps, mythologicaly embellished
maps, navigation, negotiation of passage. The map of terrain,
either geographical or intellectual, gives way to a mapping of
the human body as the traveller himself becomes a semiotic field,
the context and object of search, his own and others’. The injunction
is to turn back, to make a circular journey, to seek out his origin,
to find that in his end is his beginning. The obscurantist combination
of density and flippancy in the poetry begins to betray that the
text also can be regarded as unreliable cartography – at once your
guide and pathfinder, and your decoy, red herring, worst
enemy:
and bottom right, about east
south east, a brass
bound chest, the lid thrown back
to show the toenail
yellow vellum scroll encoded
with the magic square, abraxas,
abracadabras, all manner
of jiggery pokery and waterworn
scolia…
The whole book is fraught with accident and adventure. It’s funny
too (see especially poem XVIII, in which the traveller scrapes
himself off a pub floor after a killing bout of drinking, a particularly
Muldoony moment). A Bird’s Idea of Flight is inventive
to a fault, fertile, littered with bananaskins, seething with
ideas, and brilliantly written. Quite unlike any new book of
poetry I’ve read for years.
Reviewed by Michael Bradshaw
