Maurice Scully is not a poet for whom experience is shrouded in words.
He doesn't begin with complicated patterns of sound that disentangle into conventional forms, or a neat trope that encapsulates a truth that oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.
He begins outside the job, the task ahead of him and the Tipp-Ex on the table.
The poem, as it writes itself before our eyes, is not a particularly desirable consumable; it is not a hoarded memory or a discovered analogy worked up into universal truth.
Objects and events are left alone to retain their ordinariness.
This is not high-octane performance; the poet is not a magus overwhelming us with rich metaphor and heavy consonants, tricksy rhymes and deft analogies.
It's instead more like the work of a verbal mime artist: nothing permanent is involved except what's conjured up; making poems is work as play.
While poems that seek to impress their skill can lose touch with that aim - be overtaken by ambition, rivalry or simply the need to put bread on the table with a new USP -, differently, here, the self-deprecating humour undercuts pretension.
The formula is low-energy and sustainable, a manner of proceeding that doesn't exhaust the available means, that leaves its readers a decent breathing space.
(from the Introduction by J.
Mays).
| Artist | Nothing permanent is involved except whats conjured up |
|---|
Shearsman Books A line of tiny zeros in the fabric: essays on the poetry of maurice scully, paperback/kenneth keating
