Although these are strikingly different books, they not only share a concern with new ways of looking at the world but they all bring a visual poetics or sense of design to bear on this concern. Tonally, the three books diverge widely, ranging from Clark’s quiet minimalism to Glass’s exuberant experimentalism through to Collings’ absurdist humour. Yet they all attend to poetry’s potential to initiate us into new ways of perceiving, envisioning, and engaging with the world.

 

that which appears (Carcanet, 2024) features delicately-nuanced cover art by Laurie Clark and gathers together several of Thomas A Clark’s book-length poems or poetic sequences, three of which were previously published singly by Carcanet and the fourth, eponymous sequence, by Paragon Press. They are now presented in the order in which they were published, and indeed Clark proposes, in a ‘Meet the Author’ broadcast, that these collected pieces should be read as one continuous series or even as one ‘long poem’, dealing with the ‘phenomenology of walking in the highlands of Scotland’. Each of the four pieces is a profound meditation on the ethics of ‘being’ within and alongside the natural world, and each traces an arc from dawn to dusk, lending the whole book a contemplative, diurnal rhythm.  Clark is drawn to those misty, wavering, and liminal places in which the poet can draw near to ‘that which appears’.  The closing sequence, ‘Farm By The Shore’, starts out from ‘the littoral’, a world half land, half water with its ‘tonality or ethos/of a floating world’ and where,

 

nothing is lovelier

than the grey line

that approaches and departs

from precision

 (p.276-7).

 

Clark’s work is often approached as the expression of a walking practice, a poetry of hills, moors, lochans, and coastlines, and he has suggested that many of his poems are notes drafted while walking, as brief and fleeting as the moments of perception they capture. But the collection of these four sequences into one volume illuminates how the poetry’s main concern, beyond this, is with a practice of looking: an ethical or eco-phenomenology, a lightness of perception and disinterested engagement with the natural world, staged in the spacious minimalism, quietness, and spare diction of Clark’s beautifully restrained poems. As ‘The Hundred Thousand Places’ sequence puts it:

 

your eyes walk

over the slopes

 

looking at hills

you are free of concern

filled with distances

volumes

(p.134).

 

Whilst perception is crucially involved in the way things take form (‘perception is a shape changer’ says Clark in his ‘Meet the Author’ discussion of the book), the poet aspires to find a detached or respectful way of looking which allows generous space for the natural environment to progress through its necessary rhythms of instantiation and dissolution. These rhythms are figured in the exchange of light and dark, as things become briefly visible at sunrise (‘the visible is fragile,’ p. 25) and disappear again ‘in a wide/darkness’ as night falls (p.88). The poetry often hovers at the very moment when things take on their distinct, albeit temporary, form. The opening sequence, ‘That Which Appears’, introduces us to the first of many mercurial deer who seem to be hiding just out of sight in the book’s margins. This is an invisible stag who is:

 

unseen in

dawn light

in the possibility

before things

find their limits

 (p.10).

 

The natural landscape is always more than its limited appearance, it is processual and unfolds as we interact with it.  We are also permitted to catch fleeting glimpses of deer at the point of their dissolution, returning to that possibility from which they came:

 

little muntjack deer

running through the corn

in flight from form

in the gloaming

(p. 271).

 

The gentle rhymes and consonance of ‘corn’, ‘form’ and ‘gloaming’, characteristic of Clark’s subtle melodies, allow our ears to experience the dissolve of distinctness into a soft sea of resemblances and future possibilities.

 

The book seems to offer us a more selfless way of looking (including the looking which is part of reading) in which desire and self-interest (described by Clark as ‘predatory self-interest’) are checked to allow space for these rhythms and flows of existence. This is not without its pain:

 

it is the ache

of looking

perceives

behind appearances

that which

appears

(p.27).

 

But if achieved, this kind of vision:

 

leads the mind

beyond islands to a light

or supplement of possibility

 (p. 193).

 

And if we can become ‘one who passes lightly’, the ‘density’ of our conventional grasp on the world ‘loosening’, and like a tuft of sheep wool, ‘twisting and dispersing’, our minds may expand and move more freely (p. 212). Clark gently urges us to consider that it is not only the natural world which might benefit, but we too, as we participate in transient but transformative moments of stillness and presence:

 

a pool in the forest

a place where the stillness

looks back at itself

(p. 61).   

 

Clark’s own Moschatel Press has pioneered investigations into a visual aesthetic and how attention to design can be a vital part of the poem’s meaning. Unsurprisingly, this visual sensibility is brought to play in that which appears. The poems are also ‘that which appear’, their short, spare lines seeming to instantiate out of the luminous backdrop of the page. The stretch of blank space around the words provides a sense of quiet and temporary stillness, a sense of possibility waiting in the wide margins and in the blank pages used as pauses or breathing spaces in some of the sequences. These unwritten pages, which punctuate the volume, slow down the pace of the reading whilst the seriation of the sequences and their lack of conventional punctuation sustain a sense of a constant but unhurried movement. The subtlety and lightness of attention we are invited to pay is palpable here. Rob McFarlane refers to them as ‘quiet poems’ and Clark himself speaks about a generous use of space on the page as providing both a sense of pace and also a quiet around things. This is an ethical minimalism, an ecology of ‘giving space’.

 

If the changing vitality of things exceeds their perceived forms, so does it exceed language: the ‘lovely particulars’ of nature, such as ‘asphodel, milkwort/eyebright, ling’, we discover, are ‘brighter than their names’ (p. 109). Clark’s staging of a disinterested perception is within a spare, consciously elemental diction (‘roots rocks boulders/stops and labials’), and an ease and simplicity of form in which words sit loosely on the page. Clark also deploys an impartial grammar which seeks to divest itself of predication and to demote the linguistic subject from what might be seen as its ‘self-centred’ organisational function. For Clark, the structures of linguistic predication collude in the predatory self-interest he seeks to disperse: a ‘noun intending its object’ is tellingly juxtaposed with a ‘stoat chasing a rabbit’ (p. 302). The shy, ubiquitous deer suggest an alternative which becomes the poet’s aspiration. These modest creatures take their place ‘among shadows/and half-lights’, and exist,

 

in a present

they do not

present to themselves

among trees

shedding

their predicates

 

let them

be there

in the shadows

let them be

(p.143).

 

Within this tolerant and spacious grammar, the written self is perhaps also free to loosen (‘everything dissolves’, p. 305). Clark’s more ethical way of looking at and writing about the world is not just restorative but transformative:

a mountain in mist and rain

you went there and returned

you are not the same

(p.361).

 

As we are drawn into the beautiful pauses and breathing spaces of the book, and into its measured and generous ways of paying attention, we too may be refreshed, gentled and inspired to hope as we approach – or almost approach – tentative moments of experiencing our own potential spaciousness:

 

through the long grass

something runs

from predication and assumption

into possibility

almost successfully

 (p. 307).

 

 

After Heraclitus and Blue Eyes are both published by text artist Tom Jenks’ small press zimzalla which specialises in publishing literary objects. On the publisher’s website, Glass and Collings’ books are presented as objects flanked by other poem objects, such as an erasure poem (Astra Papachristodoulou), photo-poems (Vik Shirley) and poem index cards (Sophie Herxheimer). This resonates with Thomas A Clark’s own interests in concrete poetry and object poems, and certainly an approach to the page as a visual and creative space is shared by all three books reviewed here. Glass also seems to share with Clark a concern with processes of flow and change, here associated with the Heraclitean philosophy of flux. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is famously associated with such aperçus as ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice’ and ‘all things flow’. Glass also shares with Clark a commitment to poetry, and particularly a visual poetic, as a medium for transforming the way we look and see, although Glass’s exuberant, graffiti-style artworks illustrating his book are worlds away from Clark’s Scottish landscape of hills and becks. The opening poem in After Heraclitus is presented as:

         my

Van Leeuwenhoek

microscope

 of

words

 

and the reader is invited to:

 

(look) ~~

what

do you

see?

(p. 3).

 

Glass is an American poet, currently based in Japan, and is known for his experimental poetry and illuminated books. Glass’s universe has an anarchic intensity that is very different from Clark’s quiet places. This is a far more highly coloured, fantastical, funny, yet violent universe through which archetypal beings, such as the serpent-limbed Anguipede and the King Ghost, stride and clash, and the avowed poetic includes the iconoclastic desire to ‘skank it up’ (p. 6). Glass positions himself in a lineage of anarchic artists, stretching from Blake to Banksy. One of his poems is dedicated to the graffiti artist while Blake is evoked in many of his poems and artworks, including the provocatively funny poem, ‘ “Imagine ‘The Ghost of a Flea’ ”Event’ in which the reader is instructed to ‘Imagine it’ and then to say ‘ ”I am imagining it” ’, followed by ‘ “It was imagined” ’. The poem manages to be both humorously reductive and deflationary whilst keeping alive the untameable, imaginative power of Blake’s creation.

 

At the heart of After Heraclitus is a sequence which focuses on Heraclitus, who is presented as himself a Blakean, anti-establishment autodidact. This includes a ‘incomplete’ series of fragments whose witty rhymes and epigrammatic nature provide an irreverent glimpse at the philosopher’s ideas whilst their incompletion mirrors the fragmentary remains of Heraclitus’s own writing and, like the ‘Ghost of the Flea’-event poem, provokes us by being tantalisingly elusive. This title series is initiated by ‘Green River fossil fish’, a sparkling poetic dialogue about Heraclitus aptly framed by the Eocene fossils of Green River, Wyoming with their evolutionary evidence of the world’s state of constant change. The fossils prompt a virtuoso, poetic exchange between a melancholy, philosophising academic and a streetwise, heckling, potty-mouthed anarchist. The poem straddles tragedy (‘the tragic truth’, p.4) and comedy as the two speakers are unable to communicate from their incongruously different registers and we realise this is not a dialogue after all but alternating voices, each presenting their own version of what it means to be ‘after Heraclitus’.

 

Prompted by the fossil fish to revisit the now-derided belief that these ‘paddle-like fins’ were once considered evidence of ‘an inherent form-making force in the earth’ (p. 6), both speakers come to the conclusion that a material or concrete poetic might be a more authentic response to what we have left of Heraclitus;  that lines ‘tenderly scratched on the humblest lattices of a fish turned to stone’ are ‘sumfink reel’ (p. 7). The book concludes appropriately with photographs of just such an inscribed fossil: the fragment ‘strife tips/stasis slips/worlds fall/ change is All’ is engraved onto the fossilised remains of one of the precursors of modern-day fish as we are left to ponder our own tenuous position ‘after’ everything that has gone before.

 

The title Blue Eyes is itself suggestive of Collings’ interest in ways of looking and a new, ‘blue’ kind of vision. The book resembles a gorgeous, swatch-style book, with blue card pages which turn around a silver paper screw. This flags a concern not just with how we look but also with how we read, as we must twist and move the unnumbered pages, even turning them upside down. Vision recurs as a motif throughout the poems which feature ‘blue eyes’ (the very first poem starts ‘Hey, blue eyes’), the game ‘I spy’ (‘I spy’), and eye-like marbles which ‘have blue swirls inside’ (‘Marbles’). The final poem features a word-play game in which ‘eye’ moves from the literal ‘eyeball’ to a medley of more figurative uses of eye (‘eye candy’, ‘one-eyed monster’, ‘look someone in the eye’ etc), surely a playful invitation to the reader to re-think their assumptions, to look again.

 

The world from which this gentle, insistent invitation emerges is an absurd, humorous and fantastical world in which a pair of satirically anthropomorphised animals, a tapir with blue eyes and an armadillo, converse humorously about domestic topics such as cupcakes and shoes, and play word-games which confirm their suspicion that ‘words don’t always mean what they say’ (‘Sometime’). In a beautifully controlled play of tone, Collings ensures that there is something unsettling about these mild, hapless creatures, their playful dialogues taking place against a precarious backdrop of torrential rain, the risk of being chased by predators and their own existential anxieties. In a poem called ‘Insomnia’ the armadillo ponders on reincarnation and his wish ‘to come back as a rock’ which might have ‘some sort of consciousness. Rocks may be thinking for all we know, only very slowly.’  In the poem ‘Munchausen’, the absurd humour takes a more violent turn with the tale of the armadillo’s uncle who narrowly escapes being eaten alive by caimans. The ‘noise and blood’ of this episode disturbs the gentler humour of the surrounding poems and although a lighter tone is reasserted in the final sentence of this poetic fable, when we hear that the uncle had the caiman skin ‘made into a rather comfortable chaise longue’, the darkness stirred up here is allowed to seep into the otherwise cosy dialogues of the main protagonists. In the poem ‘Danger’, the tapir grimly warns her excitement-seeking companion ‘There’s nothing thrilling about being chased’, while the incessant rain eventually turns to an overcast, gnat-ridden mugginess which creates a sense of malaise around the desultory chat of our heroes.

 

The main source of disquiet, however, is the poetic absurdity which is both funny and unsettling as it relies largely on the instability of language. The slippage of meaning within the word-play poems, relying on figures-of-speech and anagrams, is a source of both humour and of anxiety. Collings has great fun with how language can generate its own realities – there is great play, for example, with the uncertain level of reality occupied by a ‘fruit-eating bat’, initially introduced by the armadillo as part of an illustrative sentence but subsequently flitting in and out of autonomous existence and reappearing as ‘not entirely’ hypothetical in the poem ‘Insomnia’. However, the similarly conjured ‘cupcakes’ turn out to be less amusing and lead to the armadillo’s ‘terrible attack of anxiety’. Poem titles such as ‘Depression’, ‘Insomnia’ and ‘Danger’ hint at the possibility that the ‘blue vision’ of this book, with its ability to see the creative and fantastical potential of language also sees its pitfalls and dangers. These ‘Blue Eyes’ are also the ‘blue’ of an absurdist melancholy, reflected in the glum, self-deprecating expressions of Jeneses Imre’s visual depictions of the animals. By turns, intriguing, charming, funny and disturbing, the varied tonality of Collings’s sequence is as volatile and unsettling as the spin of the pages around their screw.

 

References:

Rob McFarlane refers to Thomas A Clark’s work as ‘quiet poems’ in The Old Ways (Penguin Books, 2013), p. 29.

All references to Clark’s discussion of his own work are taken from ‘Meet the Author: Thomas A Clark discusses that which appears’, (April, 2024) available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw2_xBgUlX0