In her memoir A Look at My Life, the artist Eileen Agar describes collage as ‘a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence’. Agar’s sculpture Marine Object (1939) is the inspiration for several of the poems in my selection – ‘A how though?’, for instance, mimics the balancing and jostling together of the Greek amphora, starfish, ram’s horn, and shells that form what Agar refers to as one of her ‘poetic objects’. Her inner life, she notes, ‘has been fed by the objects I have accumulated around me’, and I am drawn to the spirit of play that fuels Agar’s object-creations. I also feel a strong sense of affinity with Agar’s working methods. While it was ‘short work’ making Marine Object, she notes that ‘it took me and the amphora a long time to attempt such a conjunction!’ Like Agar, I spend lots of time thinking and soaking things up before creating, writing in intensive bursts.
Other poems in this selection are also concerned with objects, holding close David Jones’s statement in the preface to In Parenthesis (1937) that he had ‘only tried to make a shape in words’. ‘Barnacle Oblong’ and other poems here wrestle with shape, and were written during a residency at Underfall Yard, a working boatyard in Bristol. These poems are intended as a close reading of place, and of the objects in that place, drawing theoretically from the French prose poems of Francis Ponge, some of which are translated or ‘versioned’ here with a ‘boatyard’ twist. The crate in ‘Le Cageot’, then, finds itself ‘knuckle-flung’, in an area known to Bristolians as ‘The Knuckle’; other poems borrow from the subtle calligrammatic qualities of Ponge’s poems.
Writing about the patent slip at Underfall Yard led me to think more about ‘slipping’ – slipping between sounds, as in the sound associations of ‘Almost-Heartwood’, and slippages of sound. I try to listen as much as possible, when composing, both to the world around me and to the inner soundscapes of the poem. ‘Slipway’ carries the slipway’s name (and the repetitive falling of rain) into the sibilance of the poem, while another slipway poem provides a sonic blueprint for the noises the patent slip makes as it clanks into the harbour. In ‘Wood cuts’, the close sound chimes are intended to mimic the precision of the cutter or tiller, while in ‘The Crate’, I carry across some of Ponge’s acoustics, transforming the ‘c’s of his ‘chemin’, ‘cage’, ‘cachot’, ‘cageot’, ‘caisette’ into my own ‘Constructed’, ‘crushed’, and ‘contents’.
Several of the poems here draw from a limited palette of vocabulary, with an ear tipped towards Gertrude Stein, and in ‘Creaks and Sighs’, the recurrences and end-stopped lines are intended to evoke the feeling of protection and confinement that comes with being on a boat. Repetition is key to this poetics of listening, and I am interested in how iteration can establish a sense of wonder, preoccupation, play, or even grief.
*
A horn, a shell, a starfish, a terracotta, a yes, a lip, a burnished,
a thinking, a drowning, a crying, a barnacle, a wave, a heap.
Waves once wept over these barnacles that spot you like freckles.
Lips once touched the lip of this jug and hands once handled it.
Terracotta can break as men can break.
Waves break when you pick them up.
A starfish is on the lip, the very lip, of the jug,
the very lip and heart and throat of the jug
where once water poured.
An amphora, an amphora found, an amphora found broken.
An amphora like an ampersand found in the sand and dredged up.
An amphora split in two like a heart, like the rose inside of a clam,
split in two and spliced too with the objects of two years ago.
A crustacean, a flotsam, a lip, a horn, a ram, a bellow, a drinking,
a how though? a follow, an amplifying, a Greek a French a starfish *
after Francis Ponge
Winter, in the end, can be summed up by those white boats,
quiet swans covered with a thin layer of snow.
The boatbuilders work with bowed heads, shifting round the yard
like bright pieces of sunlight, puffing clouds into the sky.
Paperwork is done with mittened hands.
Nature unveils her bareboned self, brittle and branched,
silhouetted in late afternoon light.
She blows cool air into the workshop, hardens paint in tins,
strokes the yard cat with icy fingers until it mewls.
A cormorant dives and emerges in a tree ring of ripples,
a necklace of eels in its mouth.
In the powerhouse, presents are opened with gloved hands.
Faces are shining Christmas baubles.
Nature closes her eyes and dreams snow into the yard, where it falls, quietly,
until even the lemon yellow hull of the boat by the pontoon is obscured.
A how though a why though a balancing though
a salty pointed spiny balancing though
a thing on top of a thing though (on top of a thing)
and many things close and breathing together.
Barnacles balancing though tightly balancing
breathing and balancing and barnacled
brittle blushes all spiny and together and a beginning
beginning to merge the brittle blushing objects, all briny.
A how though, a rose though, a sea though, a brittle, an a.
that’s all I had, a tiny moment, a tiny briny moment
to latch and suck and slickly stick
when I saw it, when I saw it heavy and stuck in the sand
one handle lifted as if to say, take me, hand
I knew that the ambulatory period of my life was over
and that before me was my amphora, amplifying
the motions of the sea and, sessile is as sessile does,
I made my tiny briny home, encrusting myself
cementing myself, gluing myself down
with my tiny briny antennae
forehead up, tiny forehead up.
Five starfish, one for each arm. A symmetry.
The shell so white against the black-struck sand,
almost spotless (only a flicker of sediment near its
jewellery-box hinge: o -----).
Next to it, a sand-coloured starfish: *
Adjacent again, a bright white starfish: *
near a bright white razor shell: <-----------> (or rather, half),
itself next to a larger razor shell (the image too explicit, legs opened)
stretched white, glimmering. A dream of salt.
The pages of a book. Other starfish merge with the sand: ***
arms tangled in an intimacy of seaweed.
And that frond of seaweed: ~- - ~--- ~ ~ --- ~ ~,
laid out by the sea like a bookmark,
like the sea marking its place in the order of things.
Creaks and sighs, the boat, the little boat.
On the water, a little mussel shell, the little boat.
Wind blows the little boat to creaking.
A woman on the boat, sighing, lifting her skirt.
Lifting, the skirt, lifting in the breeze, all blue.
A woman on the boat, dancing a light dance.
All creaks and sighs, the boat, the little boat.
Three napkins on the table, all blown away.
Three seagulls surfing the breeze above the boat.
The boat is blue and rocking like a cradle.
The sea, sighing, full of crabs, rocks the boat.
Creaks and sighs, the boat, the little boat.
A woman on the boat, dancing faster than gulls.
Lovers holding hands on a pier somewhere.
Dancing, always dancing, the woman, the gulls.
Sighs thrown out into the air, blue sighs, boat sighs.
All creaks and sighs, the boat, the little boat.
Your other names are less lovely to me – boat ramp, launch, boat deployer. As the rain slips in, sluicing over silt and sawdust in the harbour, I think of slippages, how your name could slip to skidway, or siltway, or saltway, or softway, or tiltway. I’ve seen you slide into the water, lowering yourself with an easy song, a sweet whining, a slow clanking; I’ve seen your wooden posts sink deeper like slow-swimming fins. There are other lovely things about you: your timber cradle, how you hold the hulls of boats so closely, how you keep your chocking stable, and whistle at the sight of a wooden deck. They call you a Heave-Up Slip, but the only heaving is done by the men around you, who lower poles, wind winches, puff and glance up at the sky. You are serene, slipping into the water with the ease of a seal from a rock, moving your great whale body through the harbour, stretching like a spine, singing your sweet, sweet song.
The rosy almost-heartwood of larch,
which sounds like lark, which sounds like singing,
which sounds like the wood could open its rosy throat
and pour forth the song of boats sighing in the harbour,
swimming onto slipways, knocking against pontoons
The grainy planks of teak,
which sounds like talk, which sounds like the boatbuilders
as they ease about the wooded space, handling compass planes,
talking of cleats and chines and carvels, making tea,
clearing their throats, sculling over boat terms in their heads
Spritsail, butt block, camber, centreboard,
aligned ribs, apron, gaff rigged sloop, breasthook.
The boatbuilders balance by curved pieces of timber
(oak for the keel, pitch pine
for hull planking, larch for masts and spars).
They let language fall from their tongues,
let it shape the movement of their hands.
Chine construction, scantlings, sap wood, rowlock,
topside, capstan, bowsprit, fender, jib, footwell.
I say elbow, and they think of the curved piece
of frame at the turn of the bilge, I say heart,
and they picture the centre of a section of timber.
Pintle, peak up, planking, rabbet, rigging,
oakum, middle futtock, limber hole, lodging knee.
The language is worked into the wood as they move,
mahogany murmuring with the sound of canvas,
carlins, clinker, coaming, cradle, crook,
taking on the shine of seam, scuppering, in place of varnish,
settling down into the hull of the yacht soothed
by the words starboard, spiling batten, shutter plank.
Chocks away, heave-up, nearly there they call out
in their sleep, empty hands grasping rope,
lidded eyes imaging the sight of a red hull inching
onto a slipway – and as the dream fades away,
and the sun eases up over the harbour,
the words brightwork brightwork brightwork
lap at the corners of their rooms.
Having been told by the boatbuilders
that there is no name for the hollowed space
between the keel and the rudder,
for that oblong space that is like the body of a fish,
the space that peeks out behind the white and aqua
hull of the boat that Jasper saved, the little hillyard,
the little 9-metre hillyard named Puffin,
having been told that the space is for a propeller,
but that there is no name for the space,
I cast around and ask the boatyard strollers,
the visiting tourists, the women with pushchairs,
the men with long cameras, the children with caps,
what they might call that space, standing next to
Win’s Clair de Lune, that beautiful white boat
with the peeling hull, the rusting rudder,
and that unnamed space peering out behind,
and they say, laughing at first, looking round,
rudder-hole, prop gap, propeller housing,
and Andy, passing, says wiggle-space, spin space,
and Julie says prop shaft exit, sounding technical,
and then serious men who pass say propeller aperture,
rudder gap, and one wonderful woman says
The Void, and walks off, silently, and I think moon void,
and a laughing man says The No Idea,
the nautical gap, and another man says it looks
just like a bow, an archer’s bow, and then words build
and pour: boat crescent, hull crescent,
The C, The Cake Slice, rusted teardrop,
interrupted moon (I think, as someone says moon,
then moon cut), The Reverse D, The Knotty Question,
spare space, spin spot, Phillip, Knobber,
and one woman who used to be an English teacher
says aerated vista, and one man, scratching his head,
says The Hole & Gap, like the space is a pub,
a beloved space, and a passing French woman says
l’aileron, the word lilting out into the air,
and the German girl pauses, thinks, says das Hörnchen,
and the man she’s with says back wing, and now
the boatyard is alive with words taking wing:
media luna, navigation alcove, pickle moon,
sickle moon, propeller crevice, cor blimey,
The D-Space, thrust capsule, half moon,
and I think griddle, barnacle oblong.
I do wood cuts, I work
with pear and lemon wood
I cut and sculpt with a small tool
and when I print, I print in teal
I made a triptych,
started with the cranes, twisted
against the sky; finished
with the boatyard, furnished
as it is with boats and hulls,
netting, seagulls,
the moving bodies of boatbuilders;
my cutter like their tillers.
After Francis Ponge, ‘Le Cageot’
Slotted in between cabin and dinghy, the boatyard has crate, a simple slatted box devoted to carrying those fruits which bruise as soon as they hold their breath.
Constructed so that once it is no longer needed it can be easily crushed, it is not used twice. In this sense, its lifespan is even shorter than that of its soft contents.
At each corner of the yard and in Pickle café, its bleached wood gleams modestly. Still brand new, and a little astonished to find itself in such an awkward position, knuckle-flung, discarded for good, this object is one of the most amiable – although its destiny isn’t worth reconstructing.
*
SUZANNAH V. EVANS has published poems in PN Review, Eborakon, The London Magazine, The Scotsman, and elsewhere, with others broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol. She has read her work at Keats House, London, where she organised Keats House: New Poets, for York Literature Festival and StAnza Poetry Festival, and at Underfall boatyard in Bristol, where she was poet in residence in 2019. She is the winner of the 2020 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and of a 2020 Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North. Her debut double-pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language was published with Guillemot Press in April 2020; her second pamphlet, Brightwork, is forthcoming with the same press.