For the good of liars
by Rufo Quintavalle
[ bookreviews ]
One way into this at times highly difficult book is to follow the Alice in Wonderland policy of beginning at the beginning, going on until you reach the end, and then stopping. Begin at the beginning because the first poem, an eight-line gem called 'For the first part of this moment', provides a useful introduction to some of the ideas - splits, doubling, mirrors, the oscillation between the personal and the abstract - that will resurface later in the book. And keep going until you get to the end because a read-through without worrying too much about what is being said will allow you (at any rate, it allowed me) to focus on the virtuosic lyricism of many of these poems. Even after several readings of a poem like 'Gray squirrel', I am no closer to understanding what "cell foam is closing its suction dump" or "a lettrist innerspace Ribbentrop pact" mean, still less what their relationship to the poem's title is, but they sure do sound good. At times this music is married to a more discernible meaning as in the closing lines of 'Widows and orphans': "Colour of body in this, what fat does, cooling/lips evict yeast-breath, the tongue clicks, rising to tap". It is still not totally clear what is going on here (who wants their poetry to be totally clear anyway?) but there is boozy breath, a smacking mouth, and some congealing fat that conjure up a meal of sorts. My money's on lamb.
Some of these poems do very little for me - the dialogue 'Sarin canasta', for instance, or the multi-sectioned poem 'The liver'. The latter poem is dedicated to Arshile Gorky and in a little over 100 lines manages to refer to Cage, Berio, Ligeti, Feldman, Cezanne, Gorky (again), Marconi, de Kooning and Burroughs, an intimidating assortment of musicians, artists, writer and inventors who cannot be adequately treated in such a short space. Manson is better when he limits himself to one canonical figure from the Modernist pantheon as in the poems after Mallarmé (whom he has translated) or Apollinaire, or those written using his own Glaswegian version of Schönberg's serial music, where the 12 notes of the Western musical scale are replaced with the 12 vowel sounds used in Glasgow English. In these poems, Manson allows himself enough space to engage with difficult and stimulating aesthetic ideas and allows the reader enough time to appreciate his engagement. And given the deliberate eschewal of anything difficult/Continental that plagues British poetry, appreciate it I do.
The accusation sometimes thrown at this kind of poetry is that it is overly cerebral or afraid of its emotions, that it is all brain. At times Manson does seem to be making a concious effort to distance himself from emotional engagement - the Valerie Solanis style acronym in the title of 'Campaign for Really Authentic Poetry' tells us what his author thinks of such "authentic" writing - but all in all I do not think such an argument can be applied to Manson. Firstly there are the physical references; the beery burp referred to above is just one of the many exhalations, ingestions and secretions in this collection. Secondly, there are passages, and indeed entire poems, which are clearly emotional. Take 'Between cup and lip', one of Manson's Mallarmean poems, where a translation of 'Salut' is spread out over the page and then the white spaces are filled in to create an alternative poem which descibes "[m]y diverse means of alienating friends", and ends:
Solitude kills real people, a reefer is just for now, a star
turns on to any trick that validates self, my image, cast down on
your canvas, my motive, seamlessly opaque.
Manson starts with Mallarmé but ends with something closer to John Berryman.
The confessional is certainly not the only voice in For the good of liars, nor is it even the dominant one, but it is nearly always there to question and be questioned by the apersonal tenets of 20th century Modernism. Indeed for me some of the best poems in this book come directly out of a meeting between these two modes. Such is the case in the Schönbergian poems where Schönberg's absolutist rules are softened to something far more personal (and potentially much bigger) when the predetermined and immutable notes of the chromatic scale are replaced by Manson's own voice and vocabulary. Likewise in the poem 'Thurh crafte', which ends a beautiful sequence of tiny poems and which I quote in full:
hope in the constancy
of rebuttal which is not
in the external subject
but set up
with care
it does come
Here it is the other, apersonal side of the argument which wins out (the poem's title is a quotation from one of the great 20th Century enemies of personal subjectivity, Ezra Pound) as the poet gives up on the hope of finding an external response - read in context, this renunciation may have had a woman as its cause - and finds solace in crafting his poems to achieve this effect. But again it is the give and take between human subjectivity and crafted objectivity that animates this poem.
For the good of liars gathers together poems that have appeared in magazines and pamphlets over the last decade - despite its size it's more of a Collected Poems than a collection - and is available from London publishers Barque Press. Should you buy it? If you've read this far, you've probably made up your own mind. There's those who like this stuff and there's those who don't, and I don't imagine the twain will meet overly often. That's a shame, though, as much of what is intriguing and stimulating in this book comes from the juxtaposition of normally polarised positions. If you're undecided then visit Manson's website, where you can find poems, prose and visual works and have a browse around. Or you can listen to a recording of Manson reading 'Between cup and lip'.
If you still need help making up your mind then yes, buy it. There are plenty of good poems in here - apart from those already mentioned I'd recommend 'Hymn to light', 'In vitro', 'Nosebleed' and 'Hats' - and Manson's lyrical prowess and intellectual inquisitiveness mean that even the less successful pieces have something going for them.
