See the toymaker at work. She solves for:
“a riddle
flattened out. A knot
bisected down the interaural line.”
The finished construct is still unclear:
“Part instrument, part
clockwork bird – the kind that says ho hum
and clicks and squeaks in all its joints.”
Leavened, the made thing comes alive, articulating, flexing:
“Mortis and tenon Bone onto bone Angles of lift and rotation.”
The creation begins to become, waking from but still encumbered by “the gaunt extravagance…the glib economy of dreams,” which yields a sadness:
“it hurts to think that you think of yourself
in punched-out sequins, mattes and deadeye feathers.”
The toymaker molds, assays, reassures, worried but also sly:
“like a sneaky little poet
might say box but mean a sonnet
and then put a beetle in it.”
Are you the rattling beetle, the knotted thing brought out of dreaming into life? “I am” whispers a reader, mazed, surrendering to “a tensive sort of spell / to all the little protocols involved.”
Such is the art, “the wrought dark work / of consequence,” of toymaker-turned-poet—but what separates the two really, beyond the choice of matter used?—Abigail Parry, whose second collection, I Think We’re Alone Now, was shortlisted for last year’s T.S. Eliot Prize. Parry’s poems are Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s puppets come to life, conversing with the “Genuine England” toy-sculptures made by Sam Smith and the carnivalesque figures of Elie Nadelman. Parry conjures with language as Marianne Moore does; reading Parry (also her first collection, the equally marvelous Jinx) reminds me of getting lost in “The Paper Nautilus,” “The Fish,” “Walking-Sticks and Paper-Weights and Water Marks.” Parry, like Moore, turns our language upside down, pares it with the carver’s blade, expands it with paint and temple inscriptions and a startling array of lacquers, before handing the words back to us, the audience at the magic show, enchanted, but also a bit suspicious, wary of fairy-gold, checking our pockets…then rooted, mouths open, with delight as the new language bursts into flight.
Parry is a dazzling but patient teacher – she knows her audience may need time to adjust to the nuances of the new idiom. Thus, her “Marginal Glosses,” four interludes addressed to “English-speaking learners” (which of course also includes all of us who have English as our birth-tongue). Referring to “free from obligation, from bondage, from care,” she tells us: “Do note the irony / by which the word must name its own constraint.” She tells us elsewhere about the different meanings of rincón in Spanish, even as she admits her explanation may not be complete or wholly relevant. French words crop up, runes, even the parlance of fly fishermen and the language More devised for his Utopians. Echoes here of the etymological excavations of Harryette Mullen and of Dan Beachy-Quick, the boggy reminders of Seamus Heaney, the found poem “The fisherman’s catalogue” by Marge Piercy.
I Think We’re Alone Now takes its play seriously. Parry misdirects as all good magicians do, but not for the sake of gaudy surface effect or for cynical dissection later. Her clever wordings lead to genuine emotional punch. “Speculum” makes me think about intimate spaces in new ways. “The Squint” is both elusive and maddeningly concrete; I learn more about love, joy, memory, and how humans experience emotion in its 183 lines than I might in a novel. I am visualizing Delftware and paintings by Maria Sibylla Merian as I read “All the blues”:
Lift up the lid and count all the blues
icarus, bellargus, corridon, chalk
One like a gas flame one like a spark
one like the lift of the light in the blue jacaranda.
Until Parry continues, and I am in hospital, contemplating mortality to the ticking of the deathwatch beetle and the slowing beat of my blood, feeling the transition of blue to something darker.
Parry draws on the ancient wells of magic without drowning in them. She knows that we have had runic language for millennia – what matters is how we use it for our current purposes. She reminds me of how well Monty Python superimposed medieval tropes on modern concerns; Parry is like Tom Hiddleston playing Loki in the MCU movies, effortlessly moving between hoary Asgard and a cocktail bar. The title poem is a riff on the 1967 hit song, and “Whatever happened to Rosemarie?” refers to the Connie Francis song from 1963. Parry quotes from Radiohead and Pulp, from Thom Gunn. Parry’s poem-world is full of photographs, Formica, passports, neon, plastic bags, chocolate, coffee pots, all the detritus of contemporary living. People have sex, take the M11, get hangovers, have their wallet stolen in a corner shop, endure incompetent follow-up by the police. The diction and syntax are what drops off our tongues in daily life: “But Jesus, Ken, it took a lot of work,” says the narrator in “Audio commentary,” “The thing is, Ken, she didn’t understand / a thing about the world, or how it works.” “Oh Honey, hey, / you know – I used to know your man.”
The skillful mix of old and new distinguishes Parry from poets who can manage one but not both registers. Listen to Parry as she reads her poems on a video shot by Bloodaxe founder & editor Neil Astley, here – I feel as if I am having tea with a colleague, only she’s talking not about the weather or some project deadline, instead she is offering up poetry, because poetry should not be separate from the normal way people speak. Again, Parry’s real magic is her calm insistence on the musicality of everyday speech, the importance of our small but vital daily performances for one another. I am not surprised that she names among her favorite poets (in an interview here) others who likewise emphasize the performative and musical: Michael Donaghy, Fran Lock, Kate Wakeling, Shivanee Ramlochan.
Above all it is this conversational style that most draws me in. Parry is generous: she invites audience members up on stage with her, to help her weave the enchantment together (all true sorcery is communal, or at least performed with the grace and permission of the community). She lets us know she is just plain folks:
no, I’m not a god, I never hung
nine windswept nights upon a sacred tree.
Never howling took them up nor fell back down.
But listen, pal, I’ll take
whatever gets me through today,
so unless you’ve got diazepam, it’s runes.
Yes, I say, I will incise runes with you:
“Seven
keys to the too-tall maze blue
leaves like folded razorblades”
So equipped by Parry’s poetry, I can both toss the runes and succumb to the spell I have created, reading as secondary writing, reader as the willing instrument of the writer’s designs:
“To cast the spell
and then fall hopeless under it. Till all he knows
of joy looks like a bar of beaten light.”
{ end }
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he/his) (www.danielarabuzzi.com) has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Asimov’s, Harvard Review, New Letters, Chicago Review of Books, PRISM, Hopscotch Translation, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. A Pushcart nominee, he earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com).