Black Fens Viral by by Frances Presley ( Shearsman Books 2025 )
Reviewed by Ian Brinton
Trapped in language
What makes Robert Browning’s 1852 poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ particularly disturbing is not simply the horrors which confront the hero but that sense of his being trapped within a landscape out of which there seems to be no escape. Having had his path pointed out to him Roland sets out on a journey:
VIII
So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.
IX
For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O’er the safe road, ’twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.’
The ‘safe road’ has disappeared and the traveller is now trapped in a dystopian landscape which in the contemporary world of the twenty-first century might be seen in terms of individuals being treated as numbers, cogs in a machine, subject to manipulation and control which threatens their humanity. A hundred years after Browning’s poem J.G. Ballard wrote a short story titled ‘The Concentration City’ the conclusion to which seems like a type of signpost:
Take a westbound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and ger a Red elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the stationon Route 175, change to 438 suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blue line to the Plaza, get off at 4th and 275th, turn left at the roundabout and –
You’re back where you first started from.
In England in March 2020 the first Covid lockdown came into force and in June of that year Frances Presley, travelling across the flatlands of Norfolk in the opening scene from Black Fens Viral, was caught in a landscape:
standing water in meres maintain our embankment swaying water in meres on hard
stands swaying slightly on our scarp combed green rows in the shape of a black lozenge
grey sky and rain to mark my dark masked escape loco espresso is closed thank you for
your cooperation operation combed green rows in my throat the shape of a black fen
rasps in the black lozenge grey sky and rain our scarp combed to mark my dark masked
escape standing water in my throat the shape of a black fen rasp in meres combed
green rows in the black fens rasp in my throat the black earth thank you for your
embankment combed green rows in the black fens rasp in my dark masked escape loco
espresso is closed maintain our scarp the black fens rasp in meres on our scarp combed
grey sky and rain to mark masked escape loco espresso is closed thank you for your
scarp combed green rows in the black lozenge rasp in my throat the shape of a black ear (page 9)
The journeying through these flatlands was done by train as well as by foot and one can almost hear the advertising repetition of the railway company encouraging travellers: the gratitude for the cooperation, the repetition of ‘maintain’, the movement of ‘swaying’ and a reminder of the closed café. There are also the five menacing repetitions of ‘scarp’, that inner slope of a ditch surrounding a fortification.
On October 24th 1983 Kelvin Corcoran went to see Peter Riley in Derbyshire intending to write a thesis upon his poetry. Very early on in the interview Riley was to suggest that ‘the best poetry comes out of a confusion of ideas and a sense of, er, abandonment’. Further on in the interview he also added that a serious and total commitment to poetry is ‘the supreme record of the transaction between self and the world.’ Over thirty years later in another conversation soon to be published by Shearsman Books Riley was to tell Corcoran more about his views on the language of poetry:
Before I was cast into all this, I wanted to move the poetry closer to the lives lived, and the traces left on history. It seems that the only language I can really use, now, is a common language, or a sense of common languages, nothing else works, and this currency should be able to work as an instrument for recognizing poetry without exercising any diktats on behalf of itself, and that the items of poetry most worth recognizing are themselves deeply embedded in a common tongue whether apparent or not; open or masked…
I’m not denying that the world is in an increasingly desperate state. J.H. Prynne launched a lot of this by wanting to maintain the global command of Pound by secreting the very substance of language, in a cloak of horrification, that is, a discourse in which the words are savagely disconnected from each other and stand there bleeding, as a picture of the failure of world and language, self-wound mirrors, specific in a way which always escaped me. In all this kind of poetry the sense of crisis was permanent, as if it couldn’t possibly get worse. But then it did, and it still does. Language does show the world’s failure but poetry’s alliance with song redeems it.
Presley’s Black Fens Viral does indeed move poetry closer to the lives lived and like Peter Riley she uses a common language with the reader being left to feel the emphasis of ‘nothing else works’. What Riley referred to as ‘bleeding’ being an image of the failure of the world conveyed by language, those mirrors of self-wounding, seems very appropriate indeed as a comment upon the world of Frances Presley’s journal-based journey. The train journeys across the flat land are threaded with repetition and distortion caught almost as a diary recorded between June 2020 and October 2024 and typical of this merging of language and travel is the entry for August 23, 2023 in which the date seems almost like a trap holding the reader in a prison of repetition:
harvest finished stacks of corn greylag geese junkyard of tyres I began here on the
Norwich line and that was an act of separation from you stupefied with sleep speaking
in text to our phones in the afternoon we are more silent only a child babbles in
another language and her mother says ‘brown ginger brown cardamom’ Brandon
Station barricaded like a fortress threatened on all sides by diggers and gravel hills
of separation I was going whether you came or not an act of tyres Brandon Station a
junkyard of cardomanguage speaking in cardomomext to our phones a child babbles
cardomomly (page 62)
The merging of sound from ‘brown’ to ‘Brandon’ to ‘barricaded’ conveys a restless movement of repetition in what seems to be the unchanging progress of the train; human relationships become blurred in the echoing sound of cardamom becoming cardoman in both mobile phone text and language concluding with the child’s last babble ‘cardomomly’. This merging of sound and meaning had also been central to Gavin Selerie’s late poem ‘Line of What Make or Sort’ which had been written as a dedication to J. H. Prynne for the Shearsman volume of poems and essays in honour of the Cambridge poet’s 80th birthday, For the Future:
But it’s too late, as the other said, to drop back
to the straight-on plot, we go like a verb
through sense.
Can’t unring the bell or be rid
of ventures, Across space you cleave and clutch
to sideling stir.
Presley’s movement of describing an action or occurrence appears on the white page like a Markov chain which indeed seems to travel ‘through sense’ and in her Afterword to Black Fens Viral she refers to the world both of post-Covid effects and also how she came across the Russian mathematician:
I looked out through the train window and observed what was happening around me. I didn’t know if I could write as I had before Covid, often on site and in response to the coast, making use of visual design, verbal and typographic, parallels and slippages. In my new world, working on site was more difficult, and the expansiveness of visual or open field poetics no longer seemed possible. I made notes, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.
Then I discovered a text generator, known as the Markov chain, thanks to poet Steven Hitchins. Mathematician Andrey Markov devised the technique, in the 19th century, by making columns of all the vowels and consonants in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The same or similar algorithms are now used in predictive text and voice recognition softwear, but for Hitchins the most interesting moments are when the algorithm gets it wrong and predicts incorrectly, creating unusual combinations of letters or words. This method differs from the cut-up procedures since, rather than rearranging the words ‘at random’, Markov Chains operate on the probabilities of grammar so that you get a semblance of sense and syntax even while these are disrupted.
As the railway trains move across the flat lands of Norfolk words come through the sound system with monotonous regularity and they refer to a government anti-terrorist campaign which encourages people to report any suspicious behaviour or packages:
SEE IT.
SAY IT.
SORTED.
As Presley wrote on September 24, 2024:
if I could see it and say it and then it’s sorted are you honestly saying I wish I could
just see it and say it … you’re getting off at Ely which is after Deely and before Elfly
can you see a hill we don’t do fucking hills round here we prefer the old flat lands a
couple of trees reeds a few cows walking in between can you see it and say it that’s
it there’s sorted we don’t do fucking in between I wish I could see it before Elfly can
you honestly say the old flat lands a couple of trees reeds a few cows walking in
between can you honestly say it and say it you’re getting in between are you honestly
saying I wish I could see a hill (page 77)
Black Fens Viral is dedicated not only to Gavin Selerie, who had died in June 2023, but also to Presley’s friend from Norfolk, Anthony Mellors, who died some three months earlier. In Late Modernist Poetics, from Pound to Prynne, Mellors had quoted from Selerie’s 1980 anniversary tribute to Charles Olson in which he had suggested that in the Maximus poems the corporate spirit exhibited in the city ‘is literally a shared act of perceiving, and it is the poet’s business to bring images back into the eye’. Unsurprisingly therefore one of the early poems in Black Fens Viral, ‘Envoi’ (for Anthony), takes its title from Pound’s 1919 poem which had been included in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ subtitled ‘Life and Contacts’. Pound’s ‘Siftings on siftings’ of dust rest in oblivion ‘Till change hath broken down / All things save Beauty alone’ and in Presley’s poem Anthony Mellors stands straight near the high sign that shouts out Great Ouse Relief Channel:
. . . The sign itself a relief of dents and pockmarks, still and
straight and hollow props to be resisted by your sentinel, patient and without patience,
the living self, ready to move, perfectly shaped. Nothing cuts through you or with you
because you can allow all these permutations to run out in whatever lines they choose. (page 25)
Also in the Afterword to this new sequence Presley refers to the deep attachment Mellors had for the landscape of the fens and after he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in April 2021 she wrote her ‘non-Markovian missive…in the middle of the night’ to express her concern for him and included an ‘apology’ for taking him to the Black Fens to indulge her ‘black humour’:
He died in March 2023. My partner, Gavin Selerie, was also diagnosed with cancer in July 2022 and died a year later. The darkness came very close to home, but Markov’s rearrangement of words and phrases helped me to find a way beyond the uniform ‘black strip’.
In June 2019 Frances Presley had published an article in Poetry Wales on ‘How She Writes a Poem’ in which she referred to being in a landscape and taking with her what she called ‘a pre-determined poetic’:
See what happens when it is subject to land slips and torrential rain. Abandon conscious control and note what happens around you and inside you.
Now as if in response to her own statement we can read the landscape of Black Fens Viral. In the blurb on the back of this handsomely produced Shearsman Books volume Jeff Hilson suggests that these prose poem paragraphs seem to be one perfect black strip after another, ‘not unlike the fens themselves, but on closer inspection they too have been damaged, infected by a language virus’.
Language may well reveal the world’s failure as Peter Riley had suggested but as he went on to point out the alliance of poetry with song redeems it. Whilst the echoing of both memory and loss haunts many of the pages of Black Fens Viral its concluding section from October 2024 offers a shimmering reminder of that island in North Carolina named after an Algonquian people who had inhabited the area in the 16th century:
stumps by the new riverside walk at Ely remember the totem pole on Roanoke Island
autumn colour to occasionally relieve the black land especially around the lone farm
house where they like their weeping willows a crowd of crows if I could get among them
my field of swans and then four strong flying in formation white and blue growers’
trucks in flooded field slow down I am no longer in a hurry are you? (page 80)
The almost Arthurian tone of legendary entrapment in Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’ and the mathematical and computerised fencing enclosing Ballard’s inescapable city of the future may both suggest a dystopian world of claustrophobia but Frances Presley’s travels across the world of the black fens present us with a world of inescapable continuity where one linguistic sound leads inevitably to the next in Markovian logic. Nor are we out of it!