Robert Sheppard has written a

Edmund Hardy reviews…

The Lores

Robert Sheppard

Reality Street: 4 Howard Court, Peckham Rye, London SE15 3PH

[88pp. Pub.2003, £7.50, ISBN 1-874400-23-7]

            Robert Sheppard has written a “(k)not-network” of “Twentieth Century Blues”. The recent Salt collection ‘Tin Pan Arcadia’, in which thematic strands unravel and cross, contains the bulk. ‘Empty Diaries’ from Stride sits by itself as Twentieth Century narrated, and this book, ‘The Lores’, is the “knotted core”.

            The book is, in fact, knotted back on itself and with the other texts as each section is titled and is also listed as being a numbered part of several other strands, which are also titled. Part One is also ‘The Flashlight Sonata 3’ and Twentieth Century Blues 30’ and several of its six Books are part of other strands. The whole thing is rather like a DVD box-set of the last century to run in several orders: perhaps it should be published with each section separate within a box. Or perhaps it should always be at least possible to re-sequence, even if the reader usually starts at the beginning of any given volume and reads onwards. Sequencing is clearly important if this is to be ‘a network not a work’, as Sheppard has described it in a Jacket Magazine article ‘Poetic sequencing and the new’ which is itself a poetics for the Blues.

            ‘The Lores’ divides into three parts followed by a kind of envoi titled ‘The Crimson Word We Sang’, a quote from Paul Celan. Part One opens with ‘Book 1: Time Capsule’ which meditates on genetics and populations and the future dreamed by a politics of progress gone wrong:

                      “utopian
            glitter where the
            public stands and
            the people rush
            by eyes like
            drains”

And so the book gets off to an invigorating start. Utopian templates numerically pattern the book as a whole, as Sheppard tells us in a note. The number of lines and indeed the total word count (5040) relate to Plato’s ‘The Laws’ - 5040 citizens of his second republic. I didn’t personally count the words but it’s nice to know that the book one is reading has been so meticulously planned.

            ‘Book 2: Bolt Holes’ consists of three-line stanzas dealing with political extremes, especially the British fascism of Mosley and his blackshirts. The stanzas cut across each other, broken, some voiced, others descriptive, as violence sweeps through the poem.

            “Gives the fascist salute;
            a blood-stain on
            the cleared gymnasium’s floor

            As Joyce drops, his
            street-fighter’s scars burst;
            clocks stop, valves plume

            heart stops) The broken
            promise to follow your
            pregnant decoy (sentence begins:

            I search my mask
            for a face to
            redeem me) Collective guilt”

            The result is a highly charged, almost kinetic work (or network), which didn't falsely dramatise or sink into rhetoric as the following ‘Book 3’ seemed in danger of doing (it doesn’t quite). Here we’re in the eighties “and what could be coal / dust on door frames mime / the state’s gutted investment rust”. With longer lines and seven-line stanzas the poetry seemed to sag a little here although ‘Book 4’ has longer lines but retains forward momentum as a woman opens her legs and the poem circles around sex, porn, business (“Howling for ID gooseflesh across her / back as data offers her Yes”) before the legs close “no longer human” and the final lines tell us “feeling is a shivering coherent mirror / a solid fragment dispersed in wholeness”. Is it? The poem does convince on this point.

            ‘Book 5’ has five parts, each one centrally aligned on the page ( making part v into a human figure whether by accident or design). Meanwhile, it is Capital, news-reality, Russia, observations on poetics and history, that connect and disconnect in these poems:

            “free market
            a vast nervous system which is virtually
            hypothetical families mapping values and virtues mutual
            parasitism heads secretly shaded for Wagnerian endings”
            (‘Book 5, iv’)

            Then it’s back to the clipped syntax and left-hand columns for this part’s final ‘Book 6’ (also ‘Time Capsule 2’ and ‘Torn Elegy 2): by now a little readerly claustrophobia had set in and the intense string of lines such as “corpses / from your mouth / the future of Europe” and “murder hands nervous / talk wings ripped / from the sky / as police bleed / hair from engines” was getting to me. Perhaps I spotted something to do with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan – “men in chicken / coops thank Allah / for Russian stupidity / and machine guns / clatter to hell” – or perhaps it was something else: and so this first part of ‘The Lores’ ends with state repression and media invasion and the final lines “gang raped between / stations you cannot / forget her lips”. As Gertrude Stein might have said, Yes, thank you.

            There is energy in language in Sheppard's work, a desire to flee from particulars, for the poetry to cohabit with a huge amount of material. And so sense is sometimes (mostly) bent out of shape. One of the problems with this kind of poetic strategy is that by allowing a force and a subject into the poem which is so much more powerful than the writing itself, the result is not ‘experiential’ (in that the reader can experience the poem as a primary thing) or revelatory about the world, but simply borders on an incomprehensibility tedious for the reader. Most of the time Sheppard avoids such pitfalls, however, partly with the force of language he employs, and partly through the expansiveness of his huge, mad, inter-connective project as an idea.

            Part Two, which revisits the earlier stanza forms (and their themes), breaks new ground when it reaches ‘Book 12: Free Fists’ which shouts out:

            “STRATEGIC NAVIGATION A
            HISTORY OF OUR
            PLACE INVADED BY
            TWITCHING ARMS IN
            DITCHES STEEL HELMETS
            TACTICAL WHITE COAT”

The very fact of capitals seemed to shout Stop, stop, stop. A feeling of disgust runs through the work, at the world, its politics and forms, and of the places and things the poem is forced to contemplate, although the best lines, I felt, were ones which turn on a clear point: “in times of black maps imagination is / intervention (zero hour malevolence trades in history” or else allow themselves a wry commentary:

            “disseminated fragments WAR ON
            TIME timeless succession of
            foreigners’ boots padlocked intervals”
            (Book 11)

            By now I was feeling harried and uncomfortable. The next part of the book, ‘History or Sleep’, had a beguiling title, and a quote from Anthony Rudolf that suggested reprieve: “And we are allowed to be happy sometimes. Indeed it is our duty.” The single poem here still works its way around horror and violence, but room for play (“a gauze a / gaze”) is found, and this kind of writing is clever and direct enough, surely, for any reader:

            “his face set
            against the axis
            mundi: a self, a
            legionnaire
            stranded on the
            edge of Empire’s
            mosaic dice
            checking identity papers”

            A sort-of envoi follows, ‘The Crimson Word We Sang’, a short poem in which singing voices rise “songs of the / camps death songs / once more”. The book ends. It has been madly ambitious and quietly brilliant with a vein of wit and play to keep the work flowing onward as it negotiates the Spanish civil war, snatches of ‘The drowning years’ (No. 10 Drowning Street, presumably), appearances from Mosley, Woody Guthrie’s guitar (“THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”), reflections on philosophies of various kinds –

            “liminal numbness
            between sleep and
            objective market forces
            stockpiling new stone on the periphery
            around Being’s crumbled Shack”
            (“History or Sleep”)

– and the end of Empire, asides on what power is, glimpses of where happiness might be found. Throughout there are shards of violent language, disgust, anger, violence itself. It is a landscape haunted (in theme and in the possibility of the poetry itself) by Urizen, Blake’s law-making, avenging figure who is both wildly powerful and an embodiment of limitation.