Michael Peverett: forty days and forty nights

Monday, March 16, 2020

forty days and forty nights

Mistakenly or not, I associate the forty poems of Carol Watts' Wrack (2007) with the Flood: "I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made I will destroy from off the face of the earth" (Genesis 7:4)... [and thus with fellow London poet Andrea Brady's insomnia poem "40 Days and 40 Nights" (in The Strong Room, 2016), but that's another story].

The poems are highly interlinked, each one to the next, and also to a centring but obscure historic nexus, the 1772 shipwreck, on Thurlestone Rock (south Devon), of the Chanteloupe, a merchant vessel bound from Grenada with a cargo of sugar, coffee and rum, a crew of 13, and seven passengers of which one was a woman (only the second mate survived).

Poem 27 brings us most shockingly close to the wreck itself, to "the strand's pornography / thirled rock and ship's whalebone... / the heaving of its ribs / on the sweet mania of wrack / its molasses spreading dark ..." But the sequence wanders a very long way from that event, and casts an eye on many other places and things. This posts offers some glimpses; to begin, a tranquil river Thames.

*

13

On the banks of this brown river
there is little thought of catastrophe
save the contemplation of judges

at the Prospect twisting fruit
toasting the fatal tree in its defence
of silver lengths of cloth and bread

On Pelican Stairs Queen Sive
reviews her pocket dragon's teeth
ah it is not a moment for insurgency

the quiet river peace the drift
of bells a change of watch perhaps
or shipman's axe off stroke

meeting iron his eye caught
the white gulls ah
the inexpressible thought of a storm

On a distant ocean ships lie are seals
boarded by a parcel of furies among them
Pelican's child beard pricked out

roaring like a catherine wheel knuckles
tattooed with LOVE and HATE fingers
too few for WONDER and SUFFERING

making his own entertainment a tree
snarled across his back land-locked gibbous
ah but this is not the fate of pirates

bodies racked in the flux and reflux of the tides
and not this gentle morning she says
the seaweed on the Stairs dry to her touch

(Wrack, Poem 13)

The Pelican Stairs are waterman's stairs in Wapping, beside the ancient pub The Prospect of Whitby, once a favourite hostelry of Judge Jeffreys. Before his time, according to Stow, pirates used to be hanged here. The "twisting fruit" and "fatal" tree allude to the gallows. So, surely, does "gibbous" (the shape of the dangling noose -- there is one today on the river shore outside the pub, just for fun). Like a parcel of furies is the description of a pirate assault in A General History of the Pyrates, probably by Daniel Defoe. One of the pirates it describes, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), was said to braid his beard into pigtails and to light slow fuses under his hat.

Jeffreys' major work in the execution line was putting down the Monmouth insurgents in the west country. But "Queen Sive" (who I envisage, for no particular reason, as a small child playing on the beach) alludes to another insurgency that was brutally repressed in 1761-63, the secret agrarian society in SW Ireland that came to be known as the Whiteboys, for whom "Queen Sive" was a rallying call (the legendary Sadhbh, mother of Oisin).

Dragon's teeth are what Cadmus (or Jason) sowed to produce armies of fighting men.

Seaweed-covered Pelican Stairs, Wapping

[Image source: http://thelostbyway.com/2014/03/old-stairs-of-the-thames-at-wapping-and-shadwell.html . Photo by the writer and film-maker John Rogers, from his London blog the lost byway.]

22

it was not until a planetary curve
sent me spinning across the black earth
of Dakota its tectonics

a patchwork of plains and light
stitched in the line of a child's horizon
from winds and grasses

and understood I was crossing the bed
of an ancient sea there to find
a truth in erosion

beyond the complexities of rain
its subsistencies and the deluge
of the Red River ....

(Wrack, beginning of Poem 22)

North Dakota's oil and coal bearing sedimentary rocks, formed in shallow primeval seas....

The "Red River of the North", the river that divides North Dakota from Minnesota, flowing northward into Canada. It regularly floods.

There's also "a journey across North Dakota between the minimal lines of When Blue Light Falls", CW said in Jacket2, in an interesting article about her US influences. Some of the word-play in Wrack, she said, arose from President Bush's pronunciation of Iraq.

*

I remembered the jointure of Géricault
his trust in black as a principle
of connection

where the use of bitumen
set in motion his painting
and its slow immeasurable decay

(Wrack, from Poem 24)

One of the colours used by Géricault for his enormous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) was bitumen. This is at first a glossy and lustrous black, but over time it discolours and wrinkles, so the painting today is rather hard to make out in places.

and then the crowd declared 'I will not serve
as a mouthpiece for such barbarity'
preferring to observe

the unrolling of ten thousand feet
of canvas a Novel Marine
Perispheric Panorama

with accompanying strings and tubas
to ride the drama of the Fatal Raft
and weep at the rescue

(Wrack, from Poem 25)

When Géricault's masterpiece was shown in Dublin in February 1821, it was overshadowed by a rival exhibition, a "moving panorama" (unrolling canvas with commentary) described in a Dublin newsletter as "an entirely novel Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft". The poem suggests that this popular attraction was sentimental and tub-thumpingly patriotic (it was a British ship, the Argus, that rescued the few survivors of the Méduse). But these considerations might also have played a part in the general enthusiasm that greeted Géricault's painting in London. Very unlike its divided reception among Parisians, who saw the political implications.