DUCKS, by Kate Beaton

Ducks, Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton. Published by Jonathan Cape/Penguin Random House, 2022.
ISBN 978 1 787 33013 9

This is a graphic novel, that stands up there with the best of them in this field, and outside.
It is an immersive, hugely impressive exploration, of the experience of a place, a time, and a shifting collection of people.

The book is an impressive 430 pages of content, plus drawn area maps, and an Afterword. The content consists of… I was going to write black and white, drawn pictures, but the grading is very finely done. She uses shading well. Unlike her pervious books, with this one she has given a fuller graphic to capture place, conditions, and more importantly, responses.
This book differs from her earlier work of short and slightly longer sequences, in that the whole book follows through, and is more text heavy than previously. She has honed her style and presentation, and highlights and downplays superbly.

It opens with an important moral dilemma.
Graduation from college gives a widely-recognised, and now widely-expected, qualification.

It also gives a huge student loan debt.

Kate realised straight away that any attempt to start up in work will be stymied from the outset by having to repay the loan. If it ever gets fully paid.
And East coast Canada’s work outlets did not promise much hope, there.
There was, and had been for many generations of Canadians, the promise of making money.
The Alberta Oil Sands,.
And this is nearly a whole continent away from her home ground.

Two years working in the Oil Sands, could well pay off the loan.
Would you do it?
The Oil Sands?
To go do everything you found most repulsive?

Of course, it is not as the media presents it.
For one, you don’t just walk into well-paid jobs, there. For those you need skills, experience, you have to work the most dangerous, dirty, toxic places.
And it all takes time.

The workforce were mostly displaced men. Men en masse, in horrible conditions, doing ugly work, relentlessly.
Work they despise, and despise themselves for doing, and so everything quickly sours.
My wife now has the house she wants, one man said. Was there surpassed blame, there? A twist or two of embitteredness?
How can a man like that return home to that house, his children, and be normal again?
This is another area she experiences, explores.

The huge strength of this book is how the writer fought to retain a sense of balance, understanding, empathy even, under impossible odds, under conditions that relentlessly degrade, and erode.

The isolated, concentrated, grind of the place, the work, the soured people – I remember all the others here who don’t do this, who act somewhere near normal, I paraphrase – seems to us like a time out time, place out of place.
After a year of increasing degradation she took time out, worked in British Columbia.
The money barely covered expenses; the ‘normal’ world and work also carried its continual subtle personality and gender attacks.
Like a leak-out from the Oil Sands separation ponds, into mainstream society?

She is careful not to draw such crass comparisons.
A journalist contacts her about her article on the Sands. She turns her down because she knows she just wants salacious gossip, sensationalism.
Not the human stories.

This is another strength of the book, how nuanced it all is; there are no judgements, denunciations.

Then afterwards, back in Cape Breton, she encounters someone from the Sands, and the banter. (It’s only banter. Where’s you sense of humour! Yep, only banter, except it’s not.) And she charts the subconscious corrosion of this ‘banter’
Why did you let him talk to you like that? her friend demands.

It doesn’t just end when you leave. There is a legacy.
There is an acquired mind-set; it has to be defused before dismantling.

The legacy – is this book.
And the mental breakdowns of some, cancers of others – the daily dirtball she coughs up at the end of each day; the skin rashes…

Kate Beaton is prize-winning cartoonist. She has published in The New York Times, Time, Washington Post, and others. Her publications are: Hark! A Vagrant!, and Step Aside, Pops!

The ducks?
What was it? 300 of them dead, in an Oil Sands overspill.
Just a detail.

‘And we were part of it, just by being there….’

I await the awards the book deserves.

The New Twenty Years’ Crisis, by Phillip Cunliffe

The New Twenty Years’ Crisis, by Phillip Cunliffe. Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020.
ISBN 978 0 2280 0102 7

The subtitle is: A Critique of International Relations


This is not a comfortable read, mostly because of the polemical tone. But also because it calls into question how we are living.
This has been a long time coming – many of us pre-Covid were desperate for our present phase to end/move on – but change is never easy.

As you can see from the title, it references E H Carr’s classic and seminal The Twenty Years’ Crisis, of 1939, covering the interbellum period 1919 to 1939.
This book purports to cover the period 1999 to 2019. I write ‘purports’ since for some, the argument covers the period 1919 to 2019 in reality, because, it is argued, that crisis has remained with us.
It is the crisis of Liberalism.
It is still with us, they argue, because its failings have not been addressed.

It is also a crisis of the discipline of International Relations.
E H Carr was the head of International Relations at its first chair with Aberystwyth University, Wales.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/new-twenty-years-crisis-critique-international-relations-1999-2019

1

Liberalism had never resolved its realism-utopianism fracturing. For Phillip Cuncliffe these transform into Neo-Liberalism – Eutopianism (he likes these coinings of phrases).
Yes, there is a lot of this positioning of argument. And, yes, it is best not to get bogged down in argument-structures, language-images, or games… or generalisations.
I was a little dismayed at the generalising going on: so, ALL Liberalism and Neo-Liberalism has been at fault, and at all times?
The arguments of the book are metonym-heavy, too. There is a lot of bandying-about of propositions and terms, like ‘unipolarity’. Some phrases are even more baroque.

Agreed, Neo-Liberalism carries its weight of colonialism, its Westernisation, its Eurocentrism.
How do we understand the term, now? How was it understood, earlier? And which earlier?
Do we understand it through its effects? On its propositional stance?

Also on this list is Globalisation.
How foreseeable were the tragic outcomes of Globalisation? Is this all hindsight?
And so, by implication, did global traders intentionally only trade with outlets who exploited workers? Where do domestic policies and issues, processing checks, come in, and how do they connect with with global traders and tradees?
I would like to see some breakdown into what and why, rather than this generalised statement.

Is it part of the job of International Relations to make predictions on outcomes? Or is it to analyse current and past relations? To extrapolate from those, though, there has to be strict methodology.
So much depends on predictions: trade especially, and internal security, international cooperation….

There does not seem to be any recognition of process. The long, slow, working out of operations over time, and responding to all the foreseeable and unforeseeable, the ad-hoc, and the planned.

Take the crisis within the discipline.
Take the analogy – and remember it is only an analogy; there are no perfect fits, no patterns, except where imposed – of 19thCentury Physics, where all was considered practically done. Until Einstein.
History was thought almost dead by 1900, until the French Annalles School, Marxist history, Social and Economic history, broke open the stifling towers.

International Relations, as a discipline, is just over 100 year’s old. A youngster, then… and thinking itself finished.

It could well be that this book is part of the process of discipline-growth.

2

In his Conclusion he writes:
How many wars against fascism have been fought since 1945? and then answers himself in true rhetorical fashion:

Soviets refighting Nazis in the Berlin uprising of 1953… crushing Hungarian fascism in 1956… failed British attempt to crush Egyptian fascism in 1956… wars against Serbian fascism in 1995 and again in 1999… permanent war against Islamofacism… Iraqi fascism … Syrian fascism… Georgian fascism… Ukrainian fascism etc etc

Which leads him to conclude:

Anti-fascism has launched more wars than fascism ever did.

Then we get another list of instances, this time of where the term ‘fascism’ was used against others. Followed by:
Such is the intellectual debasement wrought by anti-fascism.

And you think… What?
He bases all this argument on what is basically tabloid-level definitions?
Each of those listed conflicts had its own identity, nature, and operation, that changed, melded, and was effected by all the methods of conflict-management that had developed by that time. Added to this were, or were being tried-out, new methods for future conflicts.
Leaders may have used these ‘fascism’ arguments in order to back up their claims, to fight; but what a Leader may claim, and what actually is, are very different.

No, the intellectual debasement, surely, is this kind of argument,
where historical events are used to score points in academic discipline wrangles, where competition for funding and credibility has become critical, where publication and attention-engendering become the sole end.

There is much of true value here, but the presentation of the arguments, the tone, the academy-centred stance, do not help.

3

Liberalism and its… cousin?… Neo-Liberalism.
What were the workable alternatives on offer at the times? Any form of socialism was too deeply interpenetrated by Stalinism.
Liberalism was re-instated as a response to the authoritarian regimes of WW2, rather than superseded as a model. And re-instated as a vehicle for revival of economies, after WW2, through opening wider markets. Once again, rather than superseded. The market had to be strengthened against the Soviet sphere.

Then it all starts to eat itself, because it is poisoned from within – its wanton destruction of cultures and smaller states. Backlash, and there is always backlash.
And Western perpetrators thought they were untouchable by this? Short-term thinking, always.

Can there be blame when there are no workable alternatives? And there does seem to be blame here, especially in E H Carr’s analysis.

Ok, so what are our alternatives now?
– Western states the new distant end of the telescope (an image he uses) of a new Asian-Pacific market and economic centre?
Would this just be continuation of a bad model by different forces?

Is there a new model?
Is what we are now experiencing, its birth pains?

Let’s hope so. It has to be for something.
Or has it?
Realism as opposed to utopianism, again:
– to build something from the ruins;
– to expect our down-turns to have purpose, future value.

And using the same building blocks for each?
Always?

The Electric State, by Simon Stalenhag

The Electric State, by Simon Stalenhag. Published by Skybound Books, 2019. ISBN-10 : 1501181416

Simon Stalenhag is a Swedish artist and concept creator.
He began his career creating photo-painting images of rural Swedish landscapes, dotted with defunct machinery, but he scaled up the machinery. So what you get are huge derelict machines littering ordinary landscapes.

His work became central to the Netflix TV series, Tales From The Loop. The series is maybe like an updated take on A Town Called Eureka, but without the central actor-characters.
No, perhaps the likeness to that series is so minimal to be inconsequential.
He produced two book works on this central concept. The Loop is an underground particle collider.

The Electric State does not have the saccharine quality of that TV series.
It is a novel, and graphic novel.
We see here again the huge machines littering the landscape, but this time centred on southern California. The concept and story-line is of a post-War 111 setting, where huge drones and android-type machines were the fighting forces.
The destroyed now litter the desert, town, urban and rural landscapes. We see huge destroyed androids slumped in abandoned barns, strangely humanoid. It is very, very eerie.
Through this landscape The Girl, a young woman, travels. She escaped her adoptive parents, rescued her brother, and together travel across to the coast and a supposed safe haven.

The population has been decimated, and the survivors have turned to using neurocasters, virtual reality headsets. Only, these headsets, big, duck-billed things, are fed by transmitters, and feed-back from mental states of other wearers. They create a virtual community. It takes over their lives. Her adoptive mother fell into the pool and drowned wearing her headset; to deal with his grief, her husband turned once again to the headset. It gets to the point when not many live long without their headset.

We later see huge wandering neurotransmitters followed by hoards of devotees; they wander aimlessly, until the people collapse through exhaustion. Dead devotees also litter the landscapes.

For the more nerdy types of readers, Simon also incorporates several actual maps of the areas the book covers, so we can follow the journey. I admit that I did.

The book is a graphic novel.
It does not, though, follow a perzine mode in any way.
The graphics are very high standard, the text spare, and the story-line pieces together cumulatively,
And what is especially enjoyable is that not all the narrative is in the text, there are sequences of graphics that explore aspects of the story that are not narrated. Likewise with the text and graphics do not mirror, but have a more nuanced relationship.
This is a book to return to. Details in the pictures, and connections in the narrrative, reveal themselves slowly.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36836025-the-electric-state

Book Review: Sur(rendering). Poems, by Mario Martin Gijon.

Sur(rendering), by Mario Martin Gijon. Published by Shearsman Books, 2020. Translated from the Spanish by Terence Dooley.
ISBN 978 1 84861 704 9.

Every writer will know the difficulties of their craft, finding the right word, the one with the nuances, cadences, sound, and syntactical relatedness to the whole.
How do you express many variations of an experience in, say, one word? 
The Spanish poet Mario Martin Gijon, in this new dual-language book, Sur(rendering) (originally published in Spanish in 2013), gives an example:

compusimos 

And so, how does a translator then convey just what the writer means? Translation theory attempts the conclusion that there can only ever be a rendering of the work, if you like, a work based on the original. Look at that ‘rendering’ word, with its breakdown into rend, render….

Terence Dooley, renders the Spanish term ‘compusimos’, with its roots similar to English ‘compose’, as in write, as

(w)ri(gh)ting

And so, look at that term, with its wright, write, and also the contextual sense of right-ness of two people together. And that is the ‘write’ of the author’s presence in the work.

The whole poem in Spanish is seven short lines, and this degree of concentration/consideration could only work in short pieces:

Contra viento y marea (recuerdo comun)

siempre unidos

di

   vertidos

del mun

                do

                     loor

compusimos

The translation:
into the wind, against the tide (shared memory)

always one

two

a(muse)d

in(fuse)d

in the hurt

            earth

             we t(w/o)o

(p)raise

            (w)ri(gh)ting

The book, Sur(rendering), consists of four sections of such concentrated poems that respond to the breakdown, loss, rediscovery, celebration and re-establishment of a relationship. The form and meaning-concentration portray the switch-back emotions, momentary doubts, self-doubts, feelings of unworthiness, of regressive anger, in a phrase the whole gamut of the whirlwind emotions that can occur in such an experience.
The form and meaning are one.
This is the aim, and rare success, of poetry to attain this level of reciprocity.

padecir la espera is rendered as hearing the w(a/e)i(gh)t, and it is surprising how the mind tunes into the usages, reads their equivocations and shuttling meanings. They do not encumber but enhance.
Another short poem: five lines –

enardecerme
para enardecirte
en al ard(ol)or
que me (re)ce
tu aus(es)encia

is Englished as:

(h)ard(ou/e)r
to (ki/ca)ndle
in you the cand(i/e)d
fire fanned
by your incandescent
(ab/es)sence

We get a sense of the music of the piece in the Spanish original, the careful rhythm, the silence and space in and around the piece that is full to brimming with potential expression.

So, how does this use of words differ from, say, punning on a word? There is a more elaborate system in use, for one. For two, the intent in use of words yoking together/bringing forward meanings, has far greater semantic range.

The last section poems incorporate lines, phrases from the poems of Paul Celan, in the original German. The translator has kept that, but added A short note on quotes at the end of the book, citing sources.
I had first thought he had used these refererals to Paul Celan because of that author’s technique and skill in ‘coining’ (Terence Dooley’s phrase) new words. In Paul Celan’s case he was purportedly making a usable German language, that is, remaking an oppressor’s and destroyer’s vocabulary into one laden with conscience and responsibility.

One excerpt is from Paul Celan’s early poem Corona, translated as ‘It is time’; it is used because it illustrates his referral-use, though. Corona is from the period of Paul Celan’s full relationship with Ingeborg Bachmann, and the line comes at the end of the poem, that is, the defining emotive stance that the development of Corona achieves: a statement of readiness, stating the need for grounded fulfillment i.e. commitment.
It is apposite and entirely appropriate to the usage by Mario Martin Gijon.

Recent translations by Terence Dooley:
10 Contemporary Spanish Women Poets, translated by Terence Dooley, Shearsman

Review: Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann

Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann. Published by Penguin Modern Classics, 2019.
ISBN 978 0 241 36624 0.

The novel, Malina, published in German in 1971, is considered by many to be a seminal work in the oeuvre of Austrian writer, Ingeborg Bachmann.
She is mostly now known for three volumes of post-War poetry. She has also written radio works, essays, short stories, two operas, a ballet. She was also very close to Paul Celan, and associated with major German post-War writers.

The novel is part one of a projected three-part trilogy, temporarily entitled Ways of Dying. The other two parts were incomplete on her death, but have since been published from notebooks and papers.

Oh yes, she is also known for her death. 
Since 1951 she had mostly listed her residence as Rome. It was here in 1973 that she died, alone, due to an apartment fire. The official cause was given as being due to smoking in bed. 
Readers atuned to her works have long wondered about that given cause.

Malina is not a comfortable read.
It is a novel in three sections – well four, if we accept the Cast prefix. They are:
Happy with Ivan; The Third Man; Last Things.

It is uncomfortable because as the book opens we meet the narrator, who incidentally shares many attributes with the author, in a period of withdrawal, leading to crisis. She refuses all invitations out to address talks, ceremonies, awards. Even the letters she dictates or attempts to write herself are unravellings rather than explanations.

Is the narrator happy with Ivan? It is a toxic relationship, and yet she is fixated on him; her every action and thought is centred on him. And yet he abuses her verbally, is dismissive of her personality, abilities. And she seems quite accepting of this, and dotes on this.
This is a deep exploration of toxic relations.

And it gets worse in Section Two, The Third Man. Here, Malina the character, is cool, objective, says little. The whole section is a deep exploration of the character’s relationship with her father. It is given in a wide and varied series of abusive vignettes. The narrator approaches the term ‘Incest’ early on. Yes, she writes, There was incest. 
And there was also the game of jealousy, of gaming for affection, playing off each other. With Ivan. With Malina. With the sister Melanie, whose father flaunts as his new source of affection. And there are the violent outbursts, breaking furniture, throwing of household objects to hurt by the act, rather than contact.
And yet, as the section works through its nightmare scenarios, we see the narrator gain self mobility again, the strength to fight back. To leave.

But what of Malina?
Published in 1971, we see here the period’s reliance on therapy as cure-all, the psychiatrist as psychopomp walking the therapee through traumas.
Malina has that about him: cool, rational, reasonable; not dismissive but gently easing the narrator back to the centre of the problems. Walking through the battlefields together.

Ivan, in turn, in retrospect, comes to assume something of the mantle of the abusive father: that relationship being played out again. And the narrator is the willing, indeed, even eager, participant.

Did Ivan want that? Did he fall into a toxic hole? Was he also incapable of climbing out? We do not know.
Was it, possibly, a post-war psychic turmoil that wrapped them all in its coils? Was this the fall-out , the further play-out, of the War?

Or is that serpent with all in its coils the Nazism of past experience, or Western post-War capitalism, or, further, patriarchy itself?

There are no discernible big Politics in the novel. The father-figure as authoritarian, and, by extension, as leader, is written out clearly.
And Ivan, the name? The character is married, with children. He is Hungarian. Is he suggestive of Soviet-model authoritarianism? 
As the novel was being written Leonid Brezhnev was Soviet leader. The Hungarian Uprising had been bloodily crushed (as had the Prague Spring).

This Soviet period is what is now known as the Era of Stagnation.

How does this help? Other than as re-emphasising the intial A in authoritarianism?
The Cold War was dropping down further degrees on the thermometer, and any youthful hopes of a glorious turn to the red – in Germany in particular – were becoming ossified. After 1968’s disintegration of hopes and revolutionary fervour, all was played out.
Later, of course, the extreme groups emerged out of the frustrated hopes: The Red Brigade etc.

A static situation, under authoritarian power; loss of hopes of change; and the unresolved foment of psychic horrors from the war. Ingeborg Bachmann’s own father had been an early and willing Nazi Party member.

Why is the second section called ‘The Third Man’? Is there a connection with the Carol Reed film of 1949?
Both book and film are set in Vienna. Ok.
Both have one of the central characters – Harry Lime, The Father – as betrayers, morally repugnant, and who degrade all who they come into contact. And yet, they also have devoted friends/relations who seek them out. The outcome, in each case, is disillusion and broken relationships.

It may be that the setting of Vienna has a meaning I cannot as yet ascertain. The narrator is insistent on this setting; Ungargasse in particular acquires an importance. It maybe the importance of groundedness, that is, of a specific that she clings to for safety, security.

There are two forms of conversation exchanges in the book. One consists of fulsome and developed sentences, and is the ME:, (other): form. The other form is of truncated conversations, fragmented and half said things the reader must fill out.
In light of Ingeborg Bachmann’s great interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s works, I was wondering whether this latter form was an approach to the ‘private language’ that Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested was an impossibility.

If a language was private to oneself, then communication would be impossible. In the novel we see innumerable attempts to communicate inner turmoil, to move from private language/world experiences, to common speech communication with others. Ivan’s responses tend to be evasive, colluding. Malina remains objective, he companions the narrator through her difficulties, but does not judge, control, nor direct her.

Is he the ideal therapist, or philospher? For Ludwig Wittgenstein the philosopher must become a therapist in order to untangle the knots of reasoning that hamper philosophical discourse.
The Ungargasse in Vienna is in part very close to the Wittgenstein family home, between Parkgasse and Kundmanngasse, on the Geusaugasse corner.

The book opens with letters that cannot be written, and ends, in Last Things, with a postman who cannot deliver letters. He stores them up, unread, unopened. Communication, with one self, and with others, as social glue, as life-saving, is paramount here.
The book opens with the narrator fully taken up with Ivan, and by Last Things has turned against men altogether, finding their limited range of romantic and sexual responses ridiculous, a symptom of men’s ‘sickness’. She admits an interest in men, oh yes, and cites examples, but in the telling it becomes a matter of observation, as of another species.

We find in her telling of post-War Vienna Sigmund Freud’s case-studies incorporated into the text; we find direct reference to Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Is there Robert Musil here as well? Does the desultory interest in chess reference Stefan Zweig’s short story? Interestingly Stefan Zweig’s Post Office Girl novel’s title has a different meaning in the German: The Intoxication of Transformation. Is this intoxication what we find played out in Last Things?
Does the change in the narrator, then, play with bildungsroman formats?
It is also possible that the general tone of the book, of enervated and denigrating references the works of Thomas Bernhard.

The narrator’s character has developed in Last Things, she is more outward-looking, out-going, extrovert, even. And so has that of Malina; he is no longer the objective, cool character, but rather limited in response, outlook.
At one point in this last section the narrator makes some rather strong comments.
Ooo-kay.
So she’s provoking, challenging, confronting. But to what purpose?
This is part of the piece where she takes on Freudian case-study.
Shortly after this section Malina slapped her face. Was she furious? No. Was she distressed? No. Was he? No.
Both carried on as normal – she looked for a suitable blusher to hide the marks so she could go to a meeting; he suggested a shade.

The toxic-relationship is still being played out, on another level.

Does Ivan appreciate how difficult to is for a woman to have integrity, autonomy? Does Malina? Each time the answer is No.
How can a woman exist as a whole person in that world? The narrator approaches the dilemma of the options available: to be a ‘part-ner’, or to try to be a whole person. There seems little to possibility of the two being one.

The crack in the plaster – is it an indication of demise/complete collapse? Or a way out of an enclosed space?

*

One other thing struck me – the father-vignettes in Section Two of Malina remind me of the extensive father-vignettes that make up a huge section of Hungarian writer, Peter Esterhazy’s Celestial Harmonies, published in 2000. Here the novel fictionally negotiates the true-life Esterhazy patriarchal family line. In particular, and colouring the vignettes, is the discovery of the author’s own father’s role as secret police agent: betrayer and smiling State accomplice. Or entrapped, caught in the coils of State security machinations?

Why do I find the book so difficult to read? The subject matter, obviously. But there is also that, as readers, we unable to help with the distress. We are held as helpless witnesses to partially seen scenarios, and experience some degrees of the suffering of the narrator.
The writer also had periods of hospitalization due to psychological states.

We become party to degrees of that, and those states of distress. We are unable to help or assist, and so the narrator’s inability to cope becomes ours, by our empathetic reading.

This is part of the power, and responsibility, of a work of fiction.

Publishers Weekly, noted, on the book’s publication:
Part of the problem derives from the veiled yet critical references to Austrian history, which are satisfactorily explained only in the excellent afterword.

We no longer have that ‘excellent afterword.’ A pity.

See also Darkness Spoken: the Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann:
https://wordpress.com/post/michael9murray.wordpress.com/363

Effigies in the Mirror of Time, by Daniel Dragomirescu

This is a dual Romanian/English publication.
Available from:
Colectile Revistei ‘Orizont Literar Contemporani’, Bibliotheca Univeralis

There are so many untold stories.

Early mornings I would be waiting, shivering, for the early bus to go to work. One companion of those mornings was a Romanian man. Once he told me, ‘Boating was my life, then. I would have happily spent my whole life sailing on the Black Sea.’
‘One year,’ he said, ‘everyone was issued with iodine tablets. No exceptions; no explanations. That was thought to be sufficient. I remember it; it was 1986. The year of Chernobyl.’

*

Daniel Dragomrisecu has set himself a very important task, in this book. He is rescuing the memories, the works, the reputations of people lost to the old regime. People who fell out of favour. People lost to time’s relentless tumble.
He gives us eight recollections, and revaluations.

Romania.
The Ceausescu regime, with its grand empty palace and boulevard. Claudio Magris, in his book Danube, writes: “Hiroshima” is the name  bestowed by the people of Bucharest on the quarter of the city  which Ceausescu is gutting, levelling, devastating … building his Centre, the monument to his glory.

But what of the starving villages’  untold stories?

What Daniel Dragomirecu has done here is collect together articles and memoirs he has published in newspapers, magazines, journals, and published them in a dual translation book, called Effigies in the Mirror of Time.

Ok, we started with Romania, but we need to narrow-down, zoom-in. Let’s find Moldavia, and in Moldavia, the region of Vaslui. This is the hub for all the stories, the personalities.
How often do we hear or read news from Moldavia?

We have here writers, intellectuals, philosophers, engineers, and a comedy actor: the exuberant, gifted, Constantin Tanese.
This sketch-song of his could well be a timeless anthem:

Nothing has changed / Everything is the same
/ Everywhere the same lies / So what have we done? /
Revenge is plotted behind the scenes / As it has not
been seen before / The country is full of VIPS / So
what have we done? / Our people leave, our people
come! / This is the famous slogan, / We have been
fools to vote again / So what have we done?

The story was that he was shot whilst on stage – he was doing a satire on Russians, the new power. A Soviet officer in the audience stood, up and shot him dead.
Did it really happen? Was that how we wanted him to go?
Or was the end of the great man more prosaic?
Truth and legend, both are necessary, both are stories from which we gain life and sustenance. But truth must take precedence; always.

When communism was abandoned, many here in the West hoped that the best of that regime – or was it the most durable? – would be combined with the best/most durable in the West, to create a better society. The old Marxist dialectic, with its synthesis: how people love to make patterns.
Now, it seems, many feel what they have instead is another lost possibility. Because what modern capitalism has to offer is repugnant in many ways. And durability does not promise anything, either.

In the West these ideas, the dialectic, were never put into practice; we did not witness its effects on people as with the people Daniel here rehabilitates.

Take, for instance, Cezar Ivanescu (1941 -2004). He was an uncrowned prince among academics: Don Cezar. Writer, philosopher, critic, academic par excellence. He was severely beaten in the 1990 Miner’s Strike, and hovered between life and death for weeks.

As a less violent example, take Nicolae Malaxa (1884 to 1965). Born in humble circumstances he grew up and developed an acute managerial sense combined with a dedicated engineering skills. Train engine maker, car engine manufacturer, heavy-engineering magnate. Only to lose it all when all his great enterprises were nationalised under the new regime.
What the man could have done for Romania.

Many here were academics, writers, poets.
We ask now, what is the worth of such work? We ask that because everything now is monetarised, including health-care, basic necessities. Cultural value differs from monetary value; there is also the value of a persons’ life in itself.

And the irony of free-thought. In the context of the early part of last century when these people were young, free-thought still meant mostly left-wing ideas. And so when left-wing ideas became a (supposed) reality, they found themselves once more on the margins. Why was this?
Left-wing practice had its own very special character. Only those who legislated knew what it was; this is a well-known managerial tactic, to keep everyone off-balance.
What was one of Stalin’s first acts as leader? Get rid of all the old Bolsheviks.
The old and out-of-place ideas and idealists had to go. The last thing they needed was free-thought.

Teodar Rescanu (1887 to 1952) was such a left-wing idealist. And writer: it is heartening to see his books being re-discovered.
He was out-of-step with the new regime. He had been imprisoned for his support of the left, but even that did no good with the new boys. He was black-listed, and the ostracism became increasingly brutal as conditions hardened.  Suicide was always an option, and he chose it.

One of the many virtues that stand out among these exemplars, is their dedication to the people, and to the idea of Romania. It almost becomes as if the whole communist experiment has a hiccup in history, a glitch, that all are quickly working at eradicating.
That is, until you see the human dimension.
The people in this book are ones who lost out to that glitch, and the ones who follow – this is especially illustrated in Daniel Dragomirescu’s relationship with Don Cezar, and in turn with poet Ion Enoche – are left to reconcile this loss, and rescue from it a sense of human value.

V I Catarama – it is very hard to find general information on the man. And yet at one time he was an esteemed man of letters, and teacher – an Apostle of Education, as Daniel Dragomisrecu entitles him.
He fell foul of the system in 1958, and was held until 1964. He was the son of a farm worker, a left-wing supporter. It was not enough.
His reinstatement was marginal; he was allowed to teach. Although the continued scrutiny this entailed must have been oppressive.

Ion Enoche is an interesting case: on the fall of the old regime, he still had no place. He had become such a thorough non-conformist he could no longer adapt to any system. Daniel Dragmirescu implies that the over-riding  atmosphere after the fall of the regime was predominantly political, and busy with rebuilding the new Romania.
Enoche could not adapt to this, he was singular, and one-directional; his sole focus was poetry, a poetry cleansed of any politics, official or otherwise.
How was this possible?
Daniel Dragomirescu gives a moment from one of his works:

a poor, bedraggled, and starving Roma woman was riffling through a garbage can
for ‘a ray of sunshine.’

The set up of contrasting elements, and steering of image out of one circumscribed field of imagery towards another, more open and encompassing one, one of human values, is masterly.
It is, still, we could argue, political.
See also:
https://ion-enache.blogspot.co.uk/

Another online source related to this book is:
Ion Iancu Lefter: https://cumpana.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/pagina-121.pdf

*

This is such an important and necessary project.
It only tells a fraction of the story, of course; he acknowledges this.
It is a work of love, as well as rehabilitation.

May I suggest that he follow it up with a companion book, on the subject of notable women?
I would eagerly look forward to such another book.

Alfred Giraud’s 'Pierrot Lunaire'

Alfred Giraud’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’, translated by Gregory C Richter. Published by Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri, 2001.
ISBN  1931112029

This is the first full translation into English of this seminal book of poems, originally published in France, in 1884.
The translation, ‘renderings’ he terms them, is by Gregory C Richter, professor of linguistics at Truman state University, Missouri.
He presents here a bilingual, at times trilingual publication of the complete book, Pierrot Lunaire.
He gives the original French text with English ‘render’ per poem per page. As a selection of the poems were early-on translated into German, he also publishes the German version of the poems selected. The German translator Otto Erich Hartleben, he points out, did not stick to straight translation but gave ‘versions’ that at times vary from the the originals.
For those readers with German, this is a special for you. There are translations of several poems by other German writers here also.

1

Alfred Giraud was a Belgian writer. Alfred Giraud was the pen name of Alfred Kayenbergh, from Louvain, Belgium. He was born in 1860, and died in 1929.

Originally a law student, literature was his obsession, and he happily embraced the role of Decadent writer, after Baudelaire, and owned influences by contemporary Symbolists such as Paul Verlaine, Stephen Mallarme, Leconte de Lisle.

Pierrot Lunaire was, surprisingly, his first major publication, in 1884, when he was aged 24. It was a success, and continued to attract attention and influence the European art scene for decades.
He continued to write poetry, plays and critical articles throughout his life.

The German writer Otto Erich Hartleben translated a selection from the work not long after publication, in 1893. He translated the whole book eventually, but it was the selection that became the main source for other artists.

And, yes, I am thinking of Arnold Schoenberg, here. He used Otto Hartleben’s translation of twenty one selected verses for his magnificent sprechstimme Pierrot Lunaire Op21, in 1912. 

Alfred Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire is based on characters from the traditional Italian commedia dell’arte. As well as Pierrot himself, we find here also arch-rival Harlequin. Columbine, though, plays a minor role. We find another, unfamiliar character, the elderly Cassander.

The commedia was experiencing one of its periodic returns to popularity: witness Pablo Picasso’s use of the troupe in his Rose period (1904-6) paintings. Of course, connected with this is Rainer Maria Rilke basing one of his Duino Elegies on the painting, circa 1912-22.
Paul Verlaine’s Claire de Lune, after Theodore de Banville (1842), captures some of the essence of the period, and, of course, Claude Debussy made the essence more concrete, so to speak with his Pierrot song (1881) and the Suite bergamesque.

The commedia was a key cultural element throughout the period.

2
The poems were written in a very strict rhyme pattern, adapting the French syllabic basis of a strict syllabic line of seven syllables.
The rhyme scheme with one or two variations only, is as follows:

A
B
b
a

a
b
A
B

a
b
b
a
A

A thirteen-line poem.

Within this scheme, though, there are other disciplines: the first line is repeated in line seven, and line thirteen. Lines one and two of the poem are repeated in lines seven and eight.

The structure is like that of a Rondel. In poem 50, Bohemian Crystal, the poem’s narrator speaks of rhyming in roundelays/rondels.

Le serenade de Pierrot (poem 6)

D’un grotesque archet dissonant
Agacant sa viole plate,
A la heron, sur une patte.
Il pince un air inconvenant.

Soudain Cassandre, intervevant,
Blame ce nocturne acrobate,
D’un grotesque archet dissonant
Agacant sa viole platte.

Pierrot la rejette, et presenant
D’un poigne tres delicate
Le vieux par sa roide cravate.
Zebre le bedon du genant
D’un grotesque archet dissonant.

(I give the repeating lines in bold.)

Gregory C Richter’s ‘rendering’ is as follows:

Tormenting his viol
With grotesque, discordant bow –
Like a heron standing on one claw –
He pinches out a painful air.

Suddenly Cassander intervenes
And scolds the nightly acrobat
Tormenting his viol
With grotesque, discordant bow.

Throwing aside the viol,
With ultradelicate grace
Pierrot now takes him by his tie
And zebra-stripes the oldster’s paunch
With grotesque, discordant bow.

Rhyme scheme nor syllabic count could be saved, but sense and intent have been. Whatever you think of these translations/renderings they do convey theme and line-sense throughout.
It is also interesting to see this Pierrot not averse to taking the upper hand.

The Introduction notes how the book divides into three parts. The opening poems and last poems are more peaceful in mood, whilst the central section, poems 17-30, veer into the grotesque. Think of Belioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Here we find poems on Absinthe, Suicide, Decapitation.
Poem 23, Begging for Heads has some wonderfully grotesque imagery:

A bucket, red and full of sawdust
Lies within your clenched embrace,
O Guillotine, mad escapee,
Wandering before the prison!

Could we say of the form, that the first stanza establishes the scene, the second one examines the scene, and the third one explores it further?

3

I was so looking forward to this book; it has been prohibitively expensive.

You could say the tone, rather than the characters, capture that period when Romanticism blended into Aestheticism. There is also the influence of more classical attitudes here, the Parnassian writing the younger Alfred Girauld admired.
Pierrot, himself, although quite a ‘dandy’, does not have the effete quality that later works delimit for him.

How would you characterise the work?
It is not a psychodrama, except in the most basic sense: the author plays lightly with personal themes, but more robustly with cultural elements and atmospheres of his place and period.
There is no main narrative, or through-line as such; each poem encapsulates the ‘mood’ of the theme. Some veer off into different directions: there are several boat-based poems.
The Ménage à trois of the commedia story: Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, is alluded to (poem 11) but not central to the book.
In its way it is a very Roman Catholic book: Pierrot’s suicide, whether real or emotional appears in poem 18, but this is followed by the increasingly diabolical poems of the central section.
Poem 31 returns to images – decor – of the opening poems, and the chance to begin anew, but not necessarily changed by the experience: we still have Cruel Pierrot, poem 45, a mocking moon, poem 43. In poem 50, Bohemian Crystal the author has done with the character Pierrot, and steps forward; or another narrator does.
The image of the Bohemian crystal – symbol, he calls it – is an interesting re-take on the crystal flagons of poem 3’s Dandy from Bergamo.

There is a suggested circling of structure, but it is unproductive to look for paralleling as in chiasmic structures. Although poem 6, Pierrot’s Serenade (above) where Pierrot thrashes Cassender, does hold a close position in the structure of the book to poem 45, Cruel Pierrot, where once again Cassender is pummelled.

Tacitly acknowledging the classic commedia storylines, Alfred Giraud here produces an original work.

I place the book with Federico Garcia Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, in that they both create their own landscapes out of the known world, and fictionally explore characters and events occurring there. These landscapes are part based on known, ‘real’ times and places, just as, say, Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, was a created place based on a number of Border Ballads, and his real environment, including his time’s current themes and attitudes.

And yet, I find myself disappointed by the book.
I expected, that is, wanted, something harder, something more realised and concrete, like in the Gypsy Ballads, the moon glinting like tin, perhaps.
Pierrot’s moon is of another kind: Moonstruck is translated

The wine we drink with our eyes
Flows from the Moon in green waves…

an absinthe moon perhaps – but there is not the passion of Green, how I want you green of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Somnabular Ballad.

Pierrot The Dandy, poem 3, begins:
A fantastic Moonbeam
Lights up the crystal flagons
Of the sandalwood washstand
Of the pale dandy from Bergamo.

And I have to admit, I love the detail.

But perhaps it is the cumulative effect of the verse form, that it is limiting the emotional and imaginative ranges possible.

There are very welcome footnotes throughout – many references are no longer current. The opening poems refer to Breughel, but it is Jan, Breughel The Younger, known as Paradise Breughel, more famed for his flower and landscape pantings.

Alfred Giraud’s images are literary, whereas Federico Garcia Lorca’s are more tactile, drawn from oral sources and then transposed through surrealist techniques married to his own idiosyncratic responses.

There are many gems to be found in Pierrot Lunaire, make no mistake. It is a book to keep going back to again and again.

4

And now here’s my challenge to readers: have a go at the verse form, see how it works for you.

Here’s mine, one for the present times:

A Man From Wuhan

A man stands at his window
I wave, he does not wave back.
We chatted a day back;
He stands at his window.

The street is quiet down below
only TVs answer back.
The man is at his window,
I wave. He does not wave back.

That lull after they all go;
They cleared our block an hour back.
My wife, he‘d said… bad attack.
None come, one by one they go.
A man stands at his window.

There is a lot to be learned through imitation: compare the effects of my use of static verb-structures and tenses, and Alfred Giraud’s active, moving ones, for example.
Try it.

Keep well, my friends, and stay safe.

Book Review: The Life And Times Of Fishgate Billyboy

The Life And Times Of Fishgate Billyboy, by Fishgate Billyboy. Published by arlecchino press, 2020. £12.00
Copies available from arlecchino press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh EH3 6HN. Scotland, UK

A biography is as much an historical document as biographical. It need not be chronological; indeed some of the best ie most revealing of their time and subject, have been thematic. With a biography we get a slice of time, era, a contexualising that broadens as far as the subject’s interactions with events and peoples demands. 
To impose a narrative on events, for readability, say, is the easy way, of course.

What of autobiography? We have there the added psychological dimensions, in themselves a deepening of one’s interactions with one’s time, responses to events and people, beyond the scope of biography. We also have a narrowing down of viewpoint. What we can know of our moments of life, and how reflection views them, are two very different aspects, and often create tensions seeking resolution.

So, what of a fictionalised autobiography?
Fishgate, surprise-surprise, is a pseudonym. The writer has changed names, rearranged the course of events at times. The main substance is, we can assume, as it stood for the writer. In other words, other aesthetic and psychological factors have come into play in the structuring of the book.

The story begins for the writer in 1944. Other factors and events occurred to lead up to this, and have great impact on events.
How did young people cope with young families, having lost husbands in the War?

In the 1950s and 60s in the UK on the big stage, we saw the implementation of the national Welfare system, the creation of safety nets for inequality in the economic structures then in place. We saw the growth of the National Health Service, of the Social Security and Benefits systems.
There are always those who fall through the gaps, the sink holes, the blind-sides, of systems. Then, as now, they tend to be either the very young, the old, or those who struggle to understand what the majority take for granted.
Fishgate fell through the gaps early on in life.

It makes harrowing reading to witness someone so lost to the world we know. The writer makes no big rumpus about that period of his life; indeed it set the course for some of the more eventful later episodes. To have no home base, was also to be freed from the crippling static lives many were caught up at the time in 1950s, early 60s, UK.

This is a book about the growth into self; about the uncovering of one’s own identity amidst the burgeoning cultures, influences and pressures of one’s time. It is a document of the gay experience. Really? No, it is a document of one man’s growth into his gay self.
This needs noting because the writer takes nothing for granted from the reader; his coming to realise and then acceptance of his nature are played out, not glossed over with cliche.
‘Identity’, also, would seem to suggest an element of choice.
And with this he developed a keen political sense. The political challenges of the 1970s and 80s were sufficiently forceful to create and engage people from all backgrounds.

It is also a chronicle of the growth and development of a writer.

That last point is very important. This book cracks on at a great pace; the writer has honed his skills, and learned techniques, to create a great read. He does not dwell – that is to say, he does not interrupt his book’s pace and become trapped in the emotional landscape he takes us through. He is unsentimental towards his own failings – and maybe a little too humble over his successes.

And there are many successes.
Academically, he grew into himself as an educated person, taking his BA as a mature student at the justly famous Newbattle Abbey Academy, Dalkieth, Edinburgh. The MSc, well, those who know will certainly empathise here. What is an education, unless it has application? So once again he side-stepped the obstacle (– like Peer Gynt with the formless dark on the mountain road – ) and went into the new growth field of EFL teaching.
There begins another huge period of travelling, adventures, friendships.

All this while he was also establishing a position within the writing networks, with readings and publications. Later was to come his wonderful Chanticleer – Ole Chanty – poetry and writing magazine.

If you are at all curious how other people live through their time, then this book could hold you, and leave its mark.

If you enjoyed this book, you may also like:
Incidents in a Crowded Life, by John Howard
https://www.amazon.co.uk/INCIDENTS-CROWDED-LIFE-John-Howard/dp/1910406724/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=jon+howard%2C+incidents&qid=1583065797&s=books&sr=1-1-spell

Review: The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen.

The Great God Pan, was published by Arthur Machen in 1895, London.
Arthur Machen was the son of a Welsh clergyman, and was born in 1863, near Caerleon, in Monmouth, Wales. He died in 1947.

Arthur Machen is one of those interesting people on the sidelines. And yet he had his own moments in the spotlight. In 1895 he published his ground-breaking novella The Great God Pan.
Even today the novella has its admirers – Stephen King reckons it one of the best horror stories in the language.
His roll was brought to a halt in the moral backlash brought about by the Oscar Wilde court case. Arthur Machen’s stories had already raised hackles by his themes of lust, unpleasantness, in fact for being ‘decadent.’ After that court case decadence was to be swept away by moral outrage, the re-imposition of sound Victorian values.

It was only later, about 1899, he was invited to join the Golden Dawn through his friendship with A E Waite. It has to be admitted, for all the themes of his writing: the deciphering of lost texts, diabolism etc, he was not particularly enamoured by the Order, and contributed little to nothing.

What is it about, The Great God Pan, then?
It is a story that is pieced together from fragments, inching its way to a clearer picture. What obscures the picture? It is the outraged morals and also the lack of clues, information, of the observers and narrators.
It is a story whose power and impact are created by the breaking apart of the atoms of Victorian morality.
Ok, I am using metaphors from a later time. But on purpose: Arthur Machen was fully engaged with Darwinian theory, with contemporary medicine, with the dualities of perception of his age.
Without the moral high ground of the detractors to decadence, a stance that all ‘right-thinking’ Victorians were supposed to have some measure of a share in, without that high position, the story’s depiction of a fall to the ‘depths of depravity’ that was the supposed mind-set of savages, the story makes no sense.
Wikki writes:
Historian Harold Perkin wrote:

Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.

 

The story opens with the narration of ‘just a little medical procedure’, recorded by the ‘dry man’ Mr Clarke. The outcome of this operation on the brain of a young and trusting young woman (one of the lower classes, naturally), reverberates throughout the story. We piece together the incidents, connect the dots, while the well-meaning but at times a little too slow, a little too ‘upright’, characters in the story try to make sense of a series of suicides of eminent and honourable young Victorian men.

It is this slow procedure, and also the puzzle-solving, that actively engages the reader, and creates atmosphere, the feeling of impending horror.
It could well be, also, this active engagement of the reader in such a morally deplorable tale, that upset the authorities: to become unwitting participants in immoral activities.

One theme that returns again in another story, The Novel of the White Powder, is that of the human body, through an outside agency, reverting to its protozoan origins before ones eyes.

This may lack impact to us now, we who have seen regularly such ‘special effects.’ But when one’s sole vision-viewer was one’s own imagination, apart from the early cinematograph, and the first picture newspapers  like the Daily Graphic, black and white illustrations pre-Beardsley, then the intent of the author would be more readily apparent. The author is in reality introducing such ideas and scenes into one’s mind.

That, and the Darwinian challenge to the hammered-home Christian view, of the body as sacred, a temple of chastity, to be strictly curbed, disciplined.
You can also see here perhaps, the development through borrowing the concept for corporal discipline, for abuse of the body and soul.

The Great God Pan is described as the experiencing of the world in its original state, when lusts ran free, and keeping to the classical archetypes, bachanites actually tore men to pieces.
The ethical and moral concepts of human progress from savage times to modern man, provide the scaffolding to the story.
It is extremely doubtfull such savagery as was envisioned ever existed. Even as the early hominids emerged they carried with them respect for the dead, disciplines, and rites. Sea pirates had their own codes, honourable behaviour – wooden ships were extremely disciplined communities, they had to be.
The Christian stance created such moral distances as the depth of the fall into depravity. ‘The Old Adam,’ was the phrase used to euphemistically describe unbridled lusts.

The story has many enlivening details. There is described at one point how, walking home in  the early hours of a London morning to Holborn, the streets were silent, empty, but for the occasional horse-drawn Hackney cab over cobbles. And how the  horses’ shoes struck ‘fire’, in the night.
Is a hellish image implied? It is certainly one of surprising clarity, maybe a little unsettling, but also lively because of that.
The suicides are by hanging, mostly from bedposts. It may well be that auto-eroticism is being implied here.
Behind the seeming prosperous and morally upright, ‘advanced civilisation’ of late Empire London, lurk the old terrors waiting their time.

They had their prelude, of course, in the Boer War, shortly to erupt.

The Song Weigher, The Complete Poems of Egill Skallagrimsson. By Ian Crockatt

The Song Weigher, The Complete Poems of Egill Skallagrimsson. By Ian Crockatt, Arc Publications, 2017

Egill Skallagrimsson, writes Ian Crockatt in his Introduction, was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the old Norse skalds.

It is no small feat then, that he has taken on this task of rendering the complete poems of Egill Skallagrimsson, in as close a Norse metric as possible.
The oldest, earliest, of the old Norse sagas is Egil’s Saga. As we have it, it is a wholly prose translation. Egill’s poems, scattered throughout, also have this form.
It was Ian Crockatt’s task to render the prose form into the recorded poetic metrics of this consummate writer. Our English cannot reproduce the old Norse sound, nor syntax, and so Ian Crockatt had to call upon his own great skills and expertise to render accessible and understandable, indeed appreciable, all Egill’s poems, in translation.
He has succeeded brilliantly.

Unlike the skald of Ian Crockatt’s previous book in this field, Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney (Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw), Egill Skallagrimsson is not a very likable man. He is too red in tooth and… well, sword. He is too intent on his warrior trade, and lacks the leavening of Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson’s poems to Ermingerd of Narbonne, his journeys to Jerusalem, his humour, and playfulness.
He does, however, have his own laments for his lost sons, as well as his unstinting praise of friendship, and rare poems of love. The life was not easy for those of more liberal dispositions; these poems chart the ups and downs of the life a warrior led, if he was to survive. And Egill was a survivor.

Egill’s main antagonist in his poems was Erik Bloodaxe (Eirikr Blodox).
He’d actually killed Eirikr’s son at one point, then later, shipwrecked whilst sailing to offer his sword to British Saxon King Adalsteinn, ended up seeking some accommodation in Blodox’s own halls. Understandably, his wife, Gunnhildr, wanted Egill’s head.
He was able to save the day through his reputation.
What reputation?
His reputation as the best, most gifted, inventive, skald of the day.

His ‘accommodation’ was to take the form of suitably outstanding verses for Eirikr’s family. These are the Hofuthlausen – the Head Ransom – of Egill Skallagrimsson.
Such was the value of a skald’s work in-the-day, that it could save a life.
He composed 21 verses for his own head. And obviously lived to tell the tale.
He lived long enough to bemoan the loneliness and neglect of the old warrior’s fate.

His own father was also a highly prized skald.
These verse forms were notoriously complex, involved, tightly controlled, with rules and strictures. But mercifully few were longer than 8 lines in length.
For the Head Ransom he produced a new form, with shorter verses interspersed between the regular length verses, and introducing a greater preponderance of end-rhymed lines. It is suggested that this last embellishment echoed the dominant British form of the period, and so was a gesture towards Eirkir’s British base in England.

For deeper discussion of the verse forms, see my earlier post on Rognvaldr:
https://michael9murray.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/crimsoning-the-eagles-claw/

If, like me, you are a bit of a metre-geek, you’ll love these.

And so, I had a go, using the dominant Drottkvaett form. Eight six-syllable lines, tied in couplets by alliteration, and each even line with two full rhymes. Trochees tend to be the dominant metre.
A recent trip to London gave me these:

Sea-toadstools, slow-flowing
seep of traffic-halted
jet-black, wet, jellyfish’d
jacks. Belligerent
brolly-bargers billow,
hail-stone and sleet harassed:
the City trawling home
to suburban harbours.

Ok.
So what about the use of kennings – you know, the allusions to, but not actually naming of, things known to one’s audience?
I actually state in the piece what the subject is, in the second part.
I tried to keep the sea-theme throughout.
Hmm.

A kenning is a compound word, made from a base word for a thing, and its ‘determinant’ ie what modifies that base word. In Icelandic there is also a highly allusive element, usually to an element in another saga, and/or their world of myths and gods.
Kipling’s ‘old grey widow-maker’ for the North Sea, is fairly easy for a British person.
Ian Crockatt lists and explicates the kennings used in the poems in a very useful appendix. He also has an excellent appendix on Verse-Forms. Invaluable.

So I tried this one, in a similar setting. What do my kennings refer to?

Canyons of steel and concrete
caught blue-red rain. It blew
to yelps under yellow lights –
baffled us battling
back through. Don’t be seduced,
strangeness does that. Estrange
sight’s stranger: blood’s seen there,
someone’s hurt; someone’s own.

Or, grimly, ambiguously –

Hail and sleet half the day –
how the light is slighted.
What we see’s how wishing
works its superstitions.
Outside worsens: our take
on the season. Reason’s
tangled with belief. Truth?
We’ve wrecked the weather?

 

Ok, these are first tries, and I was trying for more subtlety.
There is still so much yet to learn about these verse forms.

I hope I have passed on the spark of these to you.
They are certainly a great way of ‘keeping one’s hand in’ in those times of drought.