Elisabeth Bletsoe's Cormorant

[Image source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/8303580539253368/]

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Admirers of Elisabeth Bletsoe's poetry have grown used to a starvation diet, so it was a wonderful thing when the Fortnightly Review recently published three new poems:

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2018/06/birds-of-the-sherborne-missal/

Given the ever more intense compression of her work, three poems is a treasure-trove.

In this case they all come from her ongoing series Birds of the Sherborne Missal. I'm calling them poems, but they are really haibun, a mixed Japanese form in which a paragraph of prose is followed by a haiku. But these haibun don't aim at the relaxed gait of Basho. They are dense constructions and you need to put on your poetry hard-hat.

Here's the first one, which relates to the cormorant (I managed to source a small image of the Sherborne Missal cormorant):

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XV
Cormerant, Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)
—For Kim B. Ashton

TO KICK OFF one’s shoes and throw them. Slipping between pleated histories at the lake’s surface, brilliant or dazzling, the coup de foudre. Fortunately falling folded amongst these structures of unmaking, these collusions in perceptual paradox. Stunned by the flashover irrupting capillary walls in arborescent erythema; keraunographic markings reveal the pathologies of lightning, a dermal feathering. To covet the silk of your downpourings; calculations in drowning, weighed down by little stones: I have called you by name, you are mine, when you pass through the waters I will be with you. Breathing our stories into each other’s mouths, reaffirming mutual tales of origin. Stuck in the craw. Bloodlines drawn across the lawns; a thumbnail splitting the stems of genealogical daisy-chains, she’s reading for the part of kate in the shrew (o mother); a screwing down of migrainous clouds, spreading stain of strawberry ice. Time’s passage in fond, undigested lumps. A hem of bindweed, woundwort & pendulous sedge, stitched into. Lap of a wave to the hand, and. No less liquid than.


                         black rainbow dive: mercurial
                    bubbles escape the murder-beak, dark
                                        mucoid throat


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The poem takes off from a real cormorant. (For example, it's a fact that birds have mucoid glands in their throats.)






The poem evokes a cormorant diving into water.






But the poem is moving so fast, it handles a multitude of other topics. It's threaded with them. Lightning, blood and food; shoes and shrews and screws; pleats and hems and stems.


Kim B. Ashton: composer and oboist. https://kimbashton.wordpress.com/about/




"erythema": surface capillaries flushed with blood, e.g. around an injury.


"keraunographic": refers to a folk notion that the victims of lightning-strikes sometimes bore markings that were quasi-photographic images of objects lit up by the flash. The idea attracted some scientific and media attention in the 19th century.


I have called you etc, from Isaiah 43: 1-2 .


Craw = crop, where birds store food for later digestion.


"kate in the shrew" : Bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst. Good excuse for a Shakespeare-immersion, but if there's any particular connection to the rest of the poem I haven't seen it yet.


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Elisabeth is the Honorary Curator of Sherborne Museum, but the 15-century Sherborne Missal, with its remarkable naturalistic illustrations of various bird species, is in the British Library.

In some ways these illustrations ask a question comparable to that of sindonology (a word I've just learnt, meaning study of the Turin Shroud) ... How were they made? Were they based on field drawings ? It seems like an anachronistic notion.

It's beyond me to say if the Sherborne Missal contributes anything more to this poem than its cormorant. But there is some resemblance in the kind of art being made.  The poems, like the illuminations, are highly crafted objects, miniaturized and decorative. The poetry risks being arch or precious, maybe. Yet I feel the flamboyant workmanship has a devotional aspect, as it does in the missal -- not necessarily Christian, though; something more immanent and pantheistic maybe...

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The cormorant poem ticks most of the boxes that superficially identify a poem in the alternative tradition: for example, broken syntax (e.g. at the end of the prose section), an absence of time-defining tenses in the verbs, an absence of defined characters in the narrative (the pronouns "our" and "she" remain unidentified).

Nevertheless,  -- and despite, also, her historic connections with such eminently alternative poets as Chris Torrance -- there seems to be some reluctance to categorize Elisabeth's poetry as out-and-out alternative.

I don't know why, really, though I concede she doesn't easily fit into any poetic school. Maybe because her poems also embrace some values associated with the mainstream: e.g. careful evocation, picked terms, craftsmanship....  and each poem is overtly about a stated core of interest, even if it circles it in unexpected ways.