As someone who has written in the past about nettles, brambles, cow parsley and the like, touching on the almost mystical property of their rather neglected charm, I was delighted to open this book and come across a piece titled “Homage to Weeds”.I had the idea that the author might share with me the appreciation of their reticent appeal, and also perhaps a fellow feeling for the generally disregarded. What I hadn’t reckoned with was a dizzying unfolding of poetic energy chock full of vivid detail, fractured allusion and freshly minted metaphor, leaving in its wake my rather ponderous considerations. Taking in weight loss, love loss and orphaned banjos, a chance encounter with a young mechanic “greasy as a chassis” and reeking of cologne, and a paltry weed “... still graced with glove-white flowers”, it’s a remarkable poem warranting many re-revisits. It sets the standard for poems of bold imagery and tireless invention evident throughout this collection.
Those qualities are employed to good effect in the distinctly quieter, but no less engrossing, “Old Girl”, found in the section labelled Lamentations, which in itself is telling. Witnessing a woman walking down an alley with a smudged face, smoking out of the side of her mouth to keep her lipstick fresh, the narrator urges her to hike up her pink velour pantaloons; to “Bend down to the little bowties, yes, / and check if you are dead.” To:
Run your runway, your fin-de-siecle ballroom
littered with stars.
Atmospheric and nicely illustrative, it’s an intriguing and sympathetic piece, which I learn from the notes is about a homeless prostitute in Paris. It has a vaguely uncanny feel about it which leaves you wondering; leaves you wanting more.
Equally affecting is “The Mourner”, where an anonymous woman stands frozen “like alabaster / in the echo of a vestibule,” shedding a solitary tear. “Was it a lover, or brother, / or impossible friend” under the grey stone? We are not to know. A simple tale related in twenty-one nicely sketched out couplets, it concludes with the quietly grieving woman stepping down to join a stream of other mourners as:
Brittle leaves
of pin oaks
detach like dismayed
hands, land
on her hair and cling.
Which, as a gently dramatic ending, is agreeably effective. But before descending to the tail of the others, we are told that she slaps her face. Why does she do this? As an admonishment for some unspoken betrayal, a sort of pull-yourself-together reaction, or merely to bring colour to her face? Triggering both concern and curiosity, that blow, buried almost as an aside in the narrative, is the sort of device whose ambiguity should perhaps be used only sparingly. But in the hands of this skilled poet, it is entirely justified.
I became aware of the author’s considerable gifts when reviewing his debut collection, The Oculus, noting how he adds an extra dimension to situations and experiences; picking out detail with sometimes extravagant, sometimes slyly subtle distortions or emphases. That particular series of poems seemed to be strongly influenced or inspired by memory, whereas here it’s a sense of organic change that dominates, as the title might suggest. A feeling of transience, of a fragile impermanence, lends these poems a sweetly melancholic air expressed variously throughout.
Lyrically, a couple of poems deserve special mention. In “Eau de Parfum” the poet, or the protagonist, longs for summer; for the sun on his neck like a “scarf of sorrow”. He is stirring a velouté, turning the spoon like an oar, to blend:
the thyme, cream,
and crystals of salt.
I submerge a cloud
and her last perfume,
l’heure bleue, mixed
with hillside laurel
rises over the rim.
That third line is a pleasingly drawn prelude to the conjuring up of a loved one. The power of smell is an apt subject for the author, for as well as being a fine poet and contemporary artist he is also the CEO of a company that specialises in fragrance products.
“Sigh:” introduces an altogether different sense, being a litany of instances echoing that particular whispered expression of wistfulness or disappointment. Beginning a little archaically with “... the slice of the scythe / at the end of its arc”, it takes in the muffled ring of a telephone, an exorbitant bill, an old, curling calendar and, most vividly, mustard asters, “all pinwheels and pom-poms and seeds / floating in a haze”, yielding a collective sigh “like mourners in a congregation / as the casket passes.” Such evocative and perfectly phrased similes abound here.
A prose poem, from which this slim volume takes its name, makes for a fitting and quite beautifully composed finale. Dedicated to the author’s grandfather, an immigrant florist, it comprises fifteen richly detailed quatrains recalling their days together fishing and gardening in the Oyster Bay area of New York. The old man, his eyes as dark as the blue Aegean, drawing in “a dirty wish from his pipe”, urges the boy (unsuccessfully) to sing along to Patsy Cline as they career along the coastal road in his old Ford; he points out the dark squall of silvery birds circling over the harbour; teaches him to cut laurel; to “look deep inside the cavern of an iris” to fully appreciate the form and colour so that he too might peer into the souls of flowers. Such tender images are suffused with love and a rueful, but tempered nostalgia that never crumbles into sentimentality. It’s a poem that very much exemplifies the poet’s particular understanding of the unsettling and brittle nature of things demonstrated throughout these pages; a body of work employing a bold use of language allied to an artful delicacy and supreme technical know-how.
Mormoris is a poet unafraid to face head-on the naked realities all too often nudged into the shadows through fear or complacency; and rather like an artist who will not shy away from painting the corruption bleeding into the petals of a white camellia, he feels compelled to bring to the picture the subdued splendour of imminent loss and decay which, in itself, is the forerunner of renewal. It’s a refreshing truthfulness which, rather ironically, brings energy and life to this most impressive collection.