As a word destiny is borrowed from the Old French destinée and from the Latin dēstinātus both suggestive of something ordained by fate or intended to take place. The word manifest, from the Latin manifestus, suggests something more plain or evident which may be seized by hand. When Dee Brown published his account of an Indian History of the American West, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he had suggested that the phrase ‘Manifest Destiny’ referred to an assertion from 1848 that came into being after gold had been discovered in California. That discovery had led to policy makers in Washington inventing the term ‘which lifted land hunger to a lofty plane’. In March 1870 the Cheyenne Daily Leader published the statement that ‘The rich and beautiful valleys of Wyoming are destined for the occupancy and sustenance of the Anglo-Saxon race’. The wealth that for so many years had lain ‘hidden beneath the snow-capped summits of our mountains has been placed there by Providence to reward the brave spirits whose lot it is to compose the advance-guard of civilization.’ The phrase itself seems to convey a sense of an incontrovertible truth and the emphatic resonance of the second word seems to roll out a future which can never be open to question: one can almost hear the word of command. However, the title of Nancy Gaffield’s new collection of poems from Shearsman Books possesses a greater sense of recognition: a sense of a future unfurling, a prospect rising into focus, Destiny Manifest.

The second sequence in Gaffield’s collection bears the title ‘Things Fit Together’ and these twenty-eight prose-poems are a tribute to Geraldine Monk for her 70th birthday and each one opens with an italicized quotation from Monk’s own poems from her collection, Ghost & Other Sonnets (Salt, 2008). Number 13 in Gaffield’s sequence opens with the phrase thermometric liquid before proceeding to a reference to a lost city under the sea:

                                                   She was reading an article about a
         lost city under the sea Fuelled not by volcanic activity, but by
        vents formed when seawater encounters rock from the Earth’s
        mantle,  creating hydrogen,  methane and other gases. Carbon-
        engineered  spires  and  columns that hadn’t been seen before
       drape the cliffs.Delicate fronds reaching upwards like fingers in
       prayer.

The delicacy of a past which reaches out into the present is both moving and full of menace: from a lost world the ghostly fingers seem to reach up in a prayer that carries its implication of hope, fervent hope. The tone of this is then emphatically echoed in the next prose poem, number 14, which opens with Monk’s ‘a forlorn moan at altitude’:

                                                         Supercharged  extreme  weather.
       Tipping  points  and  feedback loops.  Large  volumes of carbon
       dioxide and soot from a Russian plant that burns over £8 million
       of gas  every day.  Giant gash in  the earth’s  surface, land turned
       inside out.  Once fertile  fields  turned sere,  blank, furrowed like
       corduroy. Devoid of vegetation other than a few weeds imbibing
       the margins.Eerie hunger stones from the 17th century re-emerge
       from  empty  European rivers. The environment minister says we
       all  need  to  be less squeamish about drinking water from sewage.

It is not merely hands in prayer that rise from below a little like one might imagine the hands of Eurydice reaching up from the land of the dead but also the evidence of human activity goaded on by a sense of greed. In both Nancy Gaffield’s collection of prose and poetry and Kelvin Corcoran’s Transparent Blue of Everything, a sequence of four sections of poems illustrated by David Rees, there is an unmistakable awareness of how the past and the present are linked together by a human desire for conquest.

A vivid sense of how the past haunts the present weaves its pathway through both of these volumes and I am reminded of what Ruth Padel had written about the importance of syllables in her 2007 account of The Poem and the Journey. After reminding us that the derivation of the word syllable is the Greek sullambano (sun / with and lambano / I grab hold) she goes on to suggest how syllables in language are held together by letters that form words by making active relationships with other syllables. This reaching out and echoing presents the reader with a world of connections and meanings. The second of the three ‘Footnotes’ which open Corcoran’s volume offers a fragment of meaning which moves through air:

      It was a fragment from Troy from Logue from Dave, it was
      a burnt roof tile or a broken plaque frisbeed through time, I don’t know;
      a tile from a toppled tower of Ilium and enough of a message,
      even the words bled into the clay, that was the art of it.

The movement from Homer’s world of the siege of Troy to Kings, Christopher Logue’s 1991 account of books One and Two of the Iliad, on to David Rees’s vivid colours which strike off the page of this Muscaliet publication is like a ‘bloody message’ which can fall from the sky to cause deep rifts in the surface of the NOW:

     These trenches indicate the realignment of a subduction zone,
     running from the Aegean around the whole world from the beginning;
     we will plough the fields with your bones, fill the Scamander with your guts,
     for trade routes, for oil, for influence, for these special minerals and metals.

That compulsive desire in human beings for conquest and possession sings on throughout the centuries. Corcoran asks ‘Did you think after Yemen, Syria, Iraq, things would ever be better than this?’ before replying to his own question that the ‘race is never done’. As if to emphasize how the syllables link up to provide new perspectives he tells the reader to ‘see the underside of words’ which are ‘thick with roots’.

When Oystercatcher Press published Nancy Gaffield’s Zyxt in 2015 Geraldine Monk had described the sequence as ‘a fascinating linkage of poems’ and Carol Watts had referred to them as ‘precise, beautiful windings’ which homed in on the ‘burl inside’. In that sequence Gaffield had suggested that words ‘spiral / in the cochlea’ and that each poem became an ‘exploration / of language in place the poetics of space here in / the undercroft’. She went on to say that ‘I am your ghost I live in language as if it were river’ and I recall being reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 volume in which he had asserted that ‘Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’. In ‘Extinction Diaries’ from Destiny Manifest a similar voice rises from below to record the merciless advance of time and the eerie sounds of man’s control of the world’s destiny can be caught if we ‘Listen to the water’ in which freshwater dolphins had swum for ‘twenty million years’:

     The river ran free, until one day a man appeared who said:
                                                        humans must conquer nature
                                                 & the baiji found themselves
                                                          in a darker louder world
                       of ships dragging lines with hooks snagging &
                                   slashing the tender skin of their young
                                                & the river seethed with foam
                                       laden with heavy metals and sewage.
                                   A sequence of lakes & power stations,
                                             sedimentation turning the water
                    turgid with plastic carried by the river to the sea.

These dolphins had been a part of the Yangtze River ecosystem for millions of years and they were recognized for unique characteristics and cultural significance, often being referred to as the ‘Goddess of the Yangtze’ by local fishermen and boatmen. In 2007 they were declared to be functionally extinct.
A note on the cover of Kelvin Corcoran’s Transparent Blue of Everything tells us that both the artist David Rees and the poet himself ‘engage in an intricate dance in pursuit of a secret biography of Orpheus and the origins of poetry itself’. Weaving its pathway through the haunting lyricism of this poetry is the singing head of Orpheus which turns back to stare at a past diminishing beneath his gaze. The movement of the water carries the floating severed head and as readers we join the ‘troupe of rhapsodes’ who march underground ‘to the sound of the sea roaring’. In the dance-like movement of ‘Zeibekiko’, the third section of Corcoran’s sequence of poems it is

     as if fragments preserved on papyrus change everything,
     as if a singing head might wash up at your feet.

The Zeibekiko Greek dance is a deeply personal unscripted expression of raw human emotion enabling the dancer to give expression to both pain and sorrow with a sense of dignity and pride as the wide sweeping of the arm movements bring to mind the soaring of an eagle moving above a world of heavy trials beneath. The opening lines of this section of the sequence convey a quiet intensity and focuses upon how the lyrical movement of poetry can move across the page:

     At the beginning a Spring night in Delphi,
     snow falling out of mountain darkness
     snow falling to fill the centre of the world;
     as if two eagles on a shared trajectory
     released from opposite ends of the earth
     might meet to fix the first coordinate of zero;
     the wind makes a tuning fork of Parnassus,
     the sky sounds the one note in everything
     the vectors of snow dance an ascendant music.

The slow emphasis echoing from the repetition of ‘snow falling’ recalls the closing lines of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ where ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ Music can map spaces and that repetition in Corcoran’s lines is beautifully used to point to the movement between ‘out of’ and ‘to fill the centre’: this is a journey of sound which has passed down the ages.

In ‘The Blackbook’, the second of Corcoran’s sections, he refers to the philosopher who had so influenced Charles Olson and mentions Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘theory of intensive relevance’. This comes immediately after the line ‘I thought there was a connection between everything’ and a reference to the word apophenia originally defined as the unmotivated seeing of connections between things. But then listening to his neighbours by the door he hears their ‘easy talk / running like the river of perfect volume and pitch’ and hesitates ‘to translate a single word, a single breath’. With an intelligent sense of political compassion that is such an opposite of a manifest destiny he views a worl
     whatever it means, waits for its Ventris to speak
     working from the known to the unknown.

     From the high places you see everything,
     when they come ashore, we take them in
     help them begin another life in a quiet town.

As he had told Andrew Duncan in an interview published in Don’t Start Me Talking ‘The ancient landscape overlays the modern and I see the mythology as local and useful and not detached from the everyday’.

The singing head of Orpheus is the poet who has turned to look at a past which diminishes beneath his gaze and what moves one so much in the Orphic vision of reality is the way one is left wondering to what extent did Eurydice recognise and know the husband who has come to bring her back into the present. The last section of Corcoran’s volume opens with the arrival of Orpheus ‘in the city of the transparent blueprint’, at the door of the ICU, ‘a door sealing a vacuum in a silent loop’: Eurydice is not returning:

     She floated there, unmoved and beyond the shore of reanimation,
     absence spoke with nothing to say – could she even hear him?
     Too late now having turned to see her following,
     having said her name, four clicks secured the lock.

As a poet Orpheus seeks to be heard with his ‘mouth moving under transparent blue of everything’ and his words reach out over the years:

     he found a discrete audience in dusty towns of hopeless youths,
     and an understanding of music as the form and function of the mind.

However, true to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice the inevitability of death closes the sequence:

     We all know, whatever the descent to zero, it’s inevitable,
     and down we go and still we turn to check, knowing what comes;
     and she becomes a name, and the name becomes a breath for song.

 In a reference to the Ute tribe of Colorado Nancy Gaffield quotes Horace Greeley’s urge to “Go West young man / and grow up with the country” and that phrase is related to the expansionist agenda of Manifest Destiny. The opening lines of number 13 of ‘Springtime in the Rockies’ then offers the reader ‘Luminous certainty of the road’ whilst it gestures back to number 8 in the same sequence:

                                               Writing
     is thinking. The page is paved with
     good intentions never really knowing
     why the wheelbarrow’s full of flint.

As we know it is flint that can create the spark of light and poetry moves on as the disembodied head of Orpheus moves down the waters:

     This evening the sky is on fire. Spicer says,“Things fit together.”
     When the heart’s fibres turn inward, they form a vortex in the
     ventricle. Currents collide and merge into a circular flow, like the
     maelstrom at Saltstraumen, the strongest in the world. A funnel
     down a hollow to a funnel of its own. The magnificent horror as
     the mouth howls and bellows. Luring us by the sweetness of the
     song.

Or, as Corcoran tells us what Orpheus was thinking about as he swam to Matapan:

     All about me the sea is a thousand shallow silver dishes
     spilling and refilling, enamelled by the setting sun.

     And then the sea is soundwaves as it always was.

     And the blue terraces rise to the mountains
     making the harbour an amphitheatre of first echoes.

     And then the sea a single path enamelled red.