POETRY PROPER

Issue 3

POETRY PROPER
Page

A Prologue Poems by Martin Mooney Christopher Kitson Elizabeth Campbell Eoghan Walls Dominic Connell Richard Epstein Nell Regan Vidyan Ravinthiran Featured Poet: Frances Leviston Poems Essay: Fabulous Appendages: Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season Photographs Paul Maddern, from An Hour in Tate Modern

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Prologue
Written by a Person of Quality

In vain we labour to reform the Stage, Poets have caught too the Disease o' th' Age, That Pest, of not being quiet when they're well, That restless Fever, in the Brethren, Zeal; In publick Spirits call'd, Good o'th' Commonweal. Some for this Faction cry, others for that, The pious Mobile for they know not what: So tho by different ways the Fever seize, In all 'tis one and the same mad Disease. Our Author tool as all new Zealots do, Full of Conceit and Contradiction too, 'Cause the first Project took, is now so vain, T' attempt to play the old Game o'er again: The Scene is only chang'd; for who wou'd lay A Plot, so hopeful, just the same dull way? Poets, like Statesmen, with a little change, Pass off old Politicks for new and strange; Tho the few Men of Sense decry't aloud, The Cheat will pass with the unthinking Croud: The Rabble 'tis we court, those powerful things, Whose Voices can impose even Laws on Kings. A Pox of Sense and Reason, or dull Rules, Give us an Audience that declares for Fools; Our Play will stand fair: we've Monsters too, Which far exceed your City Pope for Show. Almighty Rabble, 'tis to you this Day Our humble Author dedicates the Play, From those who in our lofty Tire sit, Down to the dull Stage-Cullies of the Pit, Who have much Money, and but little Wit: Whose useful Purses, and whose empty Skulls To private Int'rest make ye Publick Tools; To work on Projects which the wiser frame, And of fine Men of Business get the Name. You who have left caballing here of late, Imploy'd in matters of a mightier weight;
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To you we make our humble Application, You'd spare some time from your dear new Vocation, Of drinking deep, then settling the Nation, To countenance us, whom Commonwealths of old Did the most politick Diversion hold. Plays were so useful thought to Government, That Laws were made for their Establishment; Howe'er in Schools differing Opinions jar, Yet all agree i' th' crouded Theatre, Which none forsook in any Change or War. That, like their Gods, unviolated stood, Equally needful to the publick Good. Throw then, Great Sirs, some vacant hours away, And your Petitioners shall humbly pray, &c.

Aphra Behn
from The Rover, or, The Banishd Cavaliers

Bernard Manning in Hell Bernard Manning has discovered hells another round of sentry-go at Spandau. Dressed in Bermudas and Hawaiian shirt, he shares a NAAFI brew with Speer: So, two yids escape from Dachau When his wife died, he moved back with his Mam. You just simmered in your widowers flat looking out for Roma paper-boys until your stroke. Now theres someones leg in bed beside you, sometimes a person lying to your left who keeps so still you think theyre hiding from authority. Manning scans the brimstone for a new arrival: look, a coon. He tells the one about the Klansmen angling for gator. You are so careful not to offend you warn the nurses if a joke will have bad language, but then you tell it anyway, and make the grimace odd part-wink, part sneer thats all the smile youre left with. Martin Mooney

Aubade The forty-four year old in the shower what has he got to sing about? His children. His lover. His work. Doesnt he know he has already lived more than half his life? Hes singing about that too. A regiment of deaths is assembling in his cells. Not singing wont disperse them. Hes lucky he remembers half the words of the song. Yes, he is. In fact, he is making most of them up as he goes along. A bag of sticks. A heap of stones. His children are putting their fingers in their ears. Their ears are lovely. And the girl waking in the next room what does she see in him? He hasnt a clue de-doo de-doo. Martin Mooney

ONeill Road You need your wits about you, coming off the roundabout at Carnmoney cemetery a difficult lane-change and, in winter, the dazzle of your own lights reflected in the frosty headstones of the sculptors yard like an oncoming vehicle on the wrong side of the road. Martin Mooney

The Ambassadors
Hans Holbein (1533)

Sense the tensions in the curtains; Observe the twitches, shifts and furtive Murmurs fanning through the bristled Ermine and the worming silk. Feel The thickness of the fingers as they Hang or fidget, physical as Ingots, blunt and weighed. Now blink: Notice eyelids flutter over Globes rotating in their sockets, Each a fraction out of kilter; Look at how the nerves are shot. Switch, then, to the fulcrum of the Entire scene, to the painter Interfering in the fabric, Scuffling at the oil and oakwood, Harsh as on a night-time doorway. Examine, most of all, the inches, Radians and seconds over on the Equinoctal dials, how they almost seem to speak. Christopher Kitson

On the Flightpaths of Bats I tell my friends to walk the coastal path at dusk: The bats swoop past your head. Its great! Why they do it? Well.... I confess, I just repeat some tale: They catch the microscopic gnats around your skin . Fanciful enough, Im sure, but, lack of evidence aside, Im attracted by this unseen-cloud idea, of us in empty, weighty human-space: it could, as well, be why they dont touch you (as you cant them, by law). Theyre visible just on the turn, like sheen in velvet or the chasing shale of sea-top breeze. The gulls and hoodie-crows below tack and soar, navigating wind, but bats inhabit thinner places, draw their courses on poetic, shivering, charts. Christopher Kitson

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Dalkey Island
for Maria, David and Aingeal

Terns demonstrate the work of flight by stopping in the sky dropping like flintheads to pierce the channel after prey: turning the air-and-water beyond this cliff with sudden decisions, sheering off, thinking better, the way reasons glance in our minds like flicks of sunny fish, though mostly they miss worrying up again, riding another angle, until your reason reasons suddenly: these powerful dives are powered not by birds, but their agreement with passive gravity. Perhaps all your insights are this obvious modest freefalls out of doubt when the mind stops beating and the head bows out of the abstraction of the air, to whack fish like nodding into sleep, terns plummeting silently into the surface of giant seas. Elizabeth Campbell

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Giving
for Emily

Chips to the gulls: best part of the meal, becoming prince, distributing or withholding munificence, largesse, consoling the lame and the ugly, punishing the upstart and the bully here am I! Centrifugal at the core of my giving: Adam's next move after naming the creatures was feeding them. And that crazy old lady, filthy with pigeons in the square, whorl at the centre of her own magnanimity, is this princely human for, despite anomalies of suckling, grooming and studies which show most monkeys choose the lever dispensing fruit to their neighbour too, giving is what animals mostly don't do. Still, children are mad for fauna, from each exemplar of the AaBbCc, through to the naughty beast of the parable. And holding hands to feed the ducks, we teach the child to give. Hours I spent, away from the others, tearing armfuls of sweet spring grass for someone's horse that strained at the fence, then got bored before I did, staring off, accepting kisses with the food. I'd keep it up, herculean, all afternoon, proving something, as when we stayed late in the pool, shaking and blue, on principle (getting it wrong? it wasn't pleasure, but was it freedom?) and scorning sad adult moderation, we became dancers, binge-drinkers there was a thought in this of giving.
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Stale loaves for the gulls, torn bread looping up as grappling hook, caught at the rampart beak. Reeling them closer, you teach them to take it from your hand, eyes on the bread, mind on you. Emily, at the park at two-and-a-half: too young yet to enjoy reflexive pleasures of the gift, she knows more easily what happiness is: stares, says 'duck duck' but prefers stale as it is, it is still good herself to eat the bread. Elizabeth Campbell

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The Dance of Ararat

after W C Williams

If my wife is snoring as softly as a musk-ox, the child purring in the cot, and a distant hum declares the taxis and rain have nearly stopped and my empties are strewn like a planetarium in the aquatic light of my screensaver, as I rise and feel the deck shift under the living room but catch myself in an arabesque, and the line of muscle in my forearm seems a thing of glory and behold, my hard calves, buttocks and thighs and sense the thousands in the darkness, more, a disco of silent limbs around me and each one heaving their breaths, ecstatic, owning the floor then who is to say I am less than Noah, captain waiting for the tide to breach against the top of Ararat, one hand steady on the klaxon? Eoghan Walls

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Revenge of the Crabmonsters after Lawrence Raab; for Colm and Fiona 1. Crabmeat sizzles upon a pockmarked platter, and your tits look cracking. I drain your glass, light cracking the molecules of the water, and chuck a discreet fiver to the waiter just as you tumble heavily on your ass.

2. Like crabmeat sizzling under its pockmarked platter, spongy flesh ran through you. One of the cancers. You took each drink they gave you, and did not ask what light had cracked the molecules in the water.

3. You poke for new growth where the skin is tender. I hear your brain even when your face is downcast like crabmeat sizzling under a pockmarked platter. One day you'll get a bruise and there'll be laughter instead of this slow probing of your crevasse.

4. Lightning cracks the molecules through the water. I scan the waves for the shadow of giant pincers, straining my ears as I get smashed on our terrace, for crabmeat sizzling under pockmarked platters, or a light crackle of molecules beneath the water. Eoghan Walls

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Timesharers They bask in washed-up summer, hosting supper from their perches. Raising toasts. Draining every drop. By day they loll, ignoring any rep. They say they bring enough of their own custom. There is a raft of things they drift on in their small talk. In the small print. Given things between them, told in tongues, hidden among the Ts and Cs. They flock to beachfront balconies immersed in saga, watching suns give out, and write their crabbed dispatches from the concrete edge of ever-after. Dominic Connell

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Petes Granddad is a time machine gone wrong, reduced to furniture. He is an empty box, an echo chamber, blank and mute until some bell is rung. And though a ghost in his own house, a stale long-standing joke played on himself, sometimes his seized machinery still chimes. He is sporadic, striking up a long-forgotten tune when it is least expected. He has amassed small reckonings to ward off shifting sands, reverts when moved to simple repetition, catechising childrens birthdays, planets names, Richard of York. He recollects that stalactites come down. His family is lost when he starts speaking to some long gone friend. They look, despite themselves, at empty space, at his sun-spotted hands that point and sweep two places at once. Dominic Connell

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Winter Leaves Look, have I mentioned how the winter leaves Resemble bronze? That statue of a tree, It is a tree. The art of standing still, Of keeping still till everyone forgets The name you had when swords were haute couture, When bronze was for an age, and dryads slept With bark for blankets, that you still possess. Have I not watered you when it was dry And promised that the birds would love you, too? Some day a god will build his nest from hair He took as trophy. Some day he will kiss Confusion into legs and roots, some day; And men will cut themselves on winter leaves And swear eternal love, day after day. Richard Epstein

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This House No Longer This is a house without chalcedony Or Andamooka opals, and it deems Its seizure insecure. Hawks veer away To overfly somebody else's house. It brooks no flower beds. It dries no bones. This house is what it is, is what it is. You want to meet us? We share a single bath, Not privacy. Our calendar misquotes In scarlet letters, Make your life sublime Use Rapid Sands. We never leave the room For grave emergencies. Our motto is A tramp stamp on the lady of the house, Her fine embroidered sacroiliac, Hunker Down, which seems not to overstate, And understatement is a way of life. Why, there is a bone here after all: a mole Has left his skull, a warrior's helmet toy, For Spike to crunch and play with. This is a house Without a porphyry tub or sisal strings To anchor it, and someday it will leave. Richard Epstein

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On Sunday night at 8pm the batteries on Fort Camden and Carlisle opened fire on a suspicious object in the water believed to have been a German submarine. During the firing two of the shells from the batteries ricocheted off the water passing to the mainland of Crosshaven. One shell burst but the other did not. No harm was done by the shells landing on the mainland and nothing has transpired as to the effect of the engagement with the supposed unwelcome visitor to the harbour.

Southern Star, January 1915 Squealing and keening it entered the sea, seeking each breach of defence, echoing beyond its reach how my soughing and spouting set it off is not known. Ploughing through the sound I thought I was bound for home but when the sky darkened at four I knew I had come too far out of my glutinous, smooth waters. It wheeled past me and air itself splintered; the sea it cracked from side to side. then bubbled and churned pig iron so hearing smelted and fell in great hissing drops to the sea floor. Song stood still. Listening was lifted on the swell and sucked back into its vacuum. It set off a wave that gathered oceans to itself and collapsed as sound.

Nell Regan

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Snow What Im saying is, this isnt the right kind of snow. Sure the anchors call it treacherous but Ive met it down dark alleys all my life. No, snow should always be, as kids have it, a miracle of whiteness at the pane, flakes large enough to plink at the glass like a moth or a fingernail and dry out slow enough to watch drying out on the clothing of the one you love. Forget the ice-box favoured in the emergency room, its snow like this a heart comes bedded in. And forget those now-useless runways; planes in mid-air grow sensitive, the riveted metal of their wings goose pimples as they go swooping through two kinds of white. The difference between snow and water is the difference between dialectic and a kiss, between a birth certificate and spare change. This much you already know. What you dont know is snow, is slanted crystals the halo round a sodium lamp cant bear without shuddering. The tale about the Eskimos hundred words for it may be apocryphal, but the epicanthic fold is real, and may well, within our lifetimes, boss the globe while credit shifts and melts and hardens and is lost, as the great man says, like water in water. Even his words are merely so many thought-bubbles made visible as we breathe in a snowy climate: white shapes of breath that want, like the smoke from a cigarette, or the super-slow-mo ripples of a cube of gelatine bounced off tile, to be the drapes and folds of statuary. The bare ruined choir, the coloured glass is stained to a white radiance and goes without remainder into water, a new beginning; yet the snow we make play weapons of and build into forts well live in, when all grown up wants to change, always, into a white beard.
Vidyan Ravinthiran
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Featured Poet: Frances Leviston 3 Poems Formations Rosy conical fingers of rock erupt from the canyon floors they overshadow, if eruption can be slow, and indicate in perpetuity the blue battlements of heaven and twelve o'clock. Sagebrushes up in arms they dismiss with a calm peaceful gesture, though not exactly pacifists, and army compounds parachuted down within toppling distance remain by their good grace, each uniform suffering a puff of pink dust. Ambitious climbers, who cling to those planes by their sandpapered fingertips, or brace cracked verticals like winter toads inching up cavity walls, plan on savouring the summit. They're wrong dainty for picking sweetmeats off the horizon, it's as hard to pause on those pinnacles as to stand on pivots. Vultures learn vertigo there. Like footless martlets they fall in familiar down-drafted spirals to land on a carrion beacon.

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Bearded Ladies
1. At the library there worked a woman whose trembly underchin bore a nimbus of long grey hairs like the guard-hairs on a rabbit. Much as I deplore stereotypes they often take root in fact. With such hypersensitivities she lived, a creature of the moving air, intermediary of atmosphere and dust, finder of stuff believed to be lost; and every five oclock she completely disappeared.

2. The 15th century Nuremberg Chronicles contains an illustration of a hirsute woman. She sits naked on the ground, her legs outstretched, and her arms seem to conjure a tall plant from the earth. Her body is cloaked in curls of hair repeating the curls of the leaves on the plant. A shocked ruff runs the length of her spine, fanned flames, a dragons crest. Her left breast is visible, also on fire.

3. This flyer from the old American Museum shows Madame Clofullia, circa 1856, neatly trimmed in Napoleonic style, cinched at the waist, a graven locket swinging from a long silver chain about her navel, and she herself the portrait in it, a panel framed by wreaths of roses, cameo or coronation-plate, afloat between the columns and balustrades of Barnums most profitable fairytale castle.

4. Encountering a very tall woman in the womens toilets I cannot help but wonder if the big hands that softly soap themselves under lavender UV light belong in the day to someone else, and soon the words man and woman start to swim through each other the way two slippery hands in a basin swim and swap places under the immediacies of water, separated only by a hairsbreadth of shadow.

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Irisene Shocking pink and plasticky-looking, something that could titivate an antechamber or teach medics nerves, its leaves contuse around their perimeters. When the sunset shines through it, it responds in kind, glowing until the horizon intervenes as if it doesn't belong on land. Picture it undersea, thriving on saline, whining theremin-ethereal where the underwaves wash through its rounded dividends, its tender branches impersonating anemone and coral, parts forever colourful and moist and scared: flinching clitoral architecture, the glans inside its hermit cowl.

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Featured Poet: Frances Leviston Essay

Fabulous Appendages: Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season Language comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is, wrote Steven Pinker at the start of Words and Rules (1999), a book presenting language as not only a tool for communication but also a medium for wordplay and poetry and an heirloom of endless fascination. So far, so inoffensive; but at least one word in that opening gambit, miraculous, signals the controversy in which such arguments often find themselves embroiled. Pinker's most iconic book, The Language Instinct (1994), connected language acquisition to evolutionary science, arguing that the capacity to communicate in words is as genetically definitional of homo sapiens as the spider's capacity to spin a web, and earning a laudatory jacket quotation from Richard Dawkins. Its success was a huge disappointment for those who believe Adam really did name all the animals himself. So why that word, miraculous? Although used here in a secular capacity, simply to marvel at the power of speech, it cannot be divorced from its religious connotations; the same could be said, indeed, of gift, which begs the question, From whom? Pinker's choice of phrasing is perhaps mischievous, or petty, but it is far from pointless when creationism can still be taught in schools. How children learn to speak how they raise themselves, in language, from the babbling of babyhood is an ideologically loaded question. Shoulder Season (Coffee House Press, 2010), the third collection from the American poet Ange Mlinko, writes itself confidently into these debates. Mlinko's first book, Matines (1999), demonstrated a jaunty awareness of language-as-medium that earned her many comparisons to the New York School. Her second, Starred Wire (2006), tackled modes of cultural production and curation. Fascinating as these earlier books were, their excessive verbal dexterity and propulsive, investigative force sometimes lacked focus. Shoulder Season solves this by bringing language into the foreground as the explicit subject of the poems, and, at the same time, reckoning with the challenge of parenting young children, so that the
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linguistic concerns of an adult poet are fused with the concerns of a new mother and the radical economies of language-exchange with young children. Paying particular attention to the poems Squill, This One and That One and This is the Latest, I would like to discuss the perspective Shoulder Season offers on competing models of language acquisition as Mlinko discharges her poet's responsibility not just to demonstrate but also to enlarge the miraculous gift of language. Whilst working on Shoulder Season, Mlinko began to write a regular column on language for The Nation. One piece from April 2010 contrasts a neuroscientific volume on the cognitive impact of literacy (Reading in the Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene) with a book about hunting for rare words (Reading the OED, by Amman Shea), showcasing Mlinko's characteristic impatience with utilitarian approaches to language: There are people, in sum, who read weird things for pleasure. There are people who read, period, for pleasure. This sense of reading as excess, as perversity, or sheer epicureanism is left unaccounted for in Reading in the Brain. Books that merely use language, like a whip or a spoon, or which fail to take into consideration those readers who are motivated by the weird, obsolete or eccentric among us, are of limited interest to Mlinko. It is the surprises in Dehaene's book that really capture her imagination, like the news that the three bones of our middle ear are left over, in evolutionary terms, from reptilian jaws. Shoulder Season often mentions ears zeugmatically in order to remark on the ability / to attend: a quotation from Tree in the Ear regarding children's music lessons, although Mlinko is concerned not only with the ability to attend school but to remain attentive long after graduation. As the column is keen to emphasise, language acquisition is a lifelong process: You probably remember your early schooling in the alphabet song, letters and numbers, and handwriting practice. The process went on much longer than that: your neurons went on building a mental lexicon, compiling statistics about the prosodic and spelling patterns in your language, and coordinating the different networks that recognize meaning and sound so that they could work in close association. The granularity of this knowledge can't be summed up easily: any language consists of untold numbers of
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arbitrary, infinitesimal differences. It calls on one part of the brain to, say, distinguish pair and pear, another to pair pair and couple, and another to suppress the arbitrary difference between pear and PEAR, or "pear" as it is printed here and its cursive version. And that's just ambiguity at the level of the word. These columns were written for a general audience, so in this case Mlinko draws no parallels with literary language; but those of us who are interested in her poetry, too, can see further implications. If meaning and sound work in close relationship for everyone, how does that affect our attitude towards poetry, which then seems to have no special claim on such a close association, but rather to be surfacing a system that already perfectly exists? Where does that system originate? Is Mlinko, or any poet, really invested in what Pinker calls the principle of the arbitrary sign, which would disbar any genuine sense of the miraculous? And how does she square those rather cold and clinical arbitrary, infinitesimal differences with the pleasurable, prodigal excesses of her sheer epicureanism? Taking arbitrary, infinitesimal differences as a starting point, the ability to make hairline distinctions between sounds provides an aesthetic and rhetorical device throughout Shoulder Season. This is at its most conspicuously self-conscious in Squill, a poem about the broken nights of parenthood, which begins, Half-asleep, I heard a pin drop. The line seems to hang itself on a familiar figure of speech, until we remember that the figure is normally you could have heard a pin drop: in Mlinko's poem, that hyperbolic eventuality has come to pass. The pin returns after a few lines, and more pressure is applied to the image: At the far end of the hall, behind a door, I heard a pin drop. In another room on the unpolyurethaned wooden floor where gaps were growing between slats I could distinguish the sound from that of a screw. I knew it from a thumbtack. What was that dream the brain candy cottoned to, the flight
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from a battalion, a mane slipping my grip as my ear divined a button's bakelite from a Lego... The mother is half-consciously trying to decide whether to be alarmed by the noise she hears or not. Different objects are invoked and told apart from one another a pin, a screw, a thumbtack, a bakelite button, a Lego brick and the methods by which the narrator tells them apart are equally various: she heard, distinguish[ed], knew, divined. In this manner, the poem yokes the supercharged sensory experience of the anxious parent to the linguistic facility of the poet, sliding from sound to sound, apprehension to apprehension, picking them apart with hallucinatory precision. It is not coincidental that the poem rhymes: the half-twists and consonant-shifts of the rhyme-words reproduce in us the same absolute alertness to tiny distinctions between sounds that the speaker is experiencing as she listens to the pin and then its successors drop. This is something Mlinko may have learned, in part, from Muldoon; certainly the use of a small noise to unleash a huge amount of imaginative work finds several precedents with him, noticeably in Horse Latitudes (2006), as Tithonus ties the day-old cheep of a smoke detector on the blink to the two-thousand-year-old chirrup / of a grasshopper by way of an improbable family history; or It Is What It Is, where the playthings of a child like the Lego in Squill launch a parent's flight of fancy. Shoulder Season is saturated with parental anxiety, and as a result the poems display an almost hyperactive awareness that sees, hears and feels intimations of danger at every turn. The cheap ubiquity of high-speed travel, for instance, gives rise to poems like Penny Squasher, which shows vulnerable children in the back seat of a car whooshed through the nickelodeon lights // of the turnpike. The violence of the old-fashioned penny squasher (or penny smasher) of the title, a machine which would elongate pennies and emboss them with new designs as souvenirs, is conjured up by the speaker in response to a rather innocent anamorphic octagon of light thrown across the wall at a service station. The poem ends, with relief, Boys asleep, unharmed, in car seat, in carrycot. In Thalassotherapy, Mlinko combines nonsense refrains with what would appear to be a radical updating of Larkin's The Explosion, the result of
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which is entirely her own a strange and moving piece that navigates nimbly between childlike delight in word-play (it begins Envying binges / of unbandaged waves) and the urgency of protecting the fragile brainmatter that makes such enjoyment possible. The poem ends, The life jackets made / of the same foam / as the bicycle helmet / que'est-ce que c'est cracked in two / in your hands. / What remains of the butter-andeggs. This specific anxiety dovetails with the book's more general apprehension of a world dangerously in thrall to the idea of danger. We read of a human being designated the single point of failure / in a system that generates 160 million / thanks to his proprietary algorithms the algorithm being, in a sense, the grammar of computing. In a society obsessed with information security, even domestic chores become occasions for paranoia: Someone's taking the recycling out with frozen hands / when the difficult wind chooses then / to explode its data all over the streets of Peekskill. Post-crunch, bonds and securities are relentlessly ironised, securing nobody but the provider, as Someone uses your mortgage / to leverage / something / far inside the starbursts of a server. A woman sits up sleepless, cocked like a gun in her own bed, as Earth looms like a rock / outside the window threatening fissure / from a petaled 9M133 Kornet. But this feeling of powerlessness in the face of systems and forces so much larger and more inevitable than the individual will also makes for exhilarating poetry, as Mlinko and her reader surrender to the unfathomable complexity, intelligence and redundancy of a language evolving at high speed to keep pace with the world it has to describe. In evolutionary terms, our sense-skills are always ahead of our languageskills. Poetry Mlinko's poetry, at least simply tries harder to keep up. Does the feeling of gorgeous inevitability in Mlinko's work come from its acquiescence to the sublimated patterns of English, or from an active engagement with, and manipulation of, those patterns? This is false dichotomy, we learn: her poems show that intelligent language never simply speaks through us, but demands the application of intelligence in return, in a mutually-invigorating loop. This loop reflects Mlinko's more prosodic views on language, particularly her attitude towards the theories of acquisition proposed by Pinker. In an
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interview with Jordan Davis for Molossus in 2010, she said, I am such a hopeless Byzantine that I almost believe, contra Steven Pinker, that language structures genetically shape the brain. You see the epicanthal folds in my Americanized family, so why not in our language? Epicanthal folds are the heavy eyelids obscuring the inner corner of the eye in peoples of Asiatic descent, including those from the Urals. Mlinko's family came to the United States from Hungary, and here she makes a comparison between their persistently Uralic facial features and the imagined persistence of Uralic predispositions in their speech. Although she presents this position as contra Pinker, insofar as it suggests that the brain's genetic make-up is modified by developments in language, rather than simply producing the language instinct itself, she only almost believes it, leaving us with a residual sense of sympathy for Pinker's work. Nevertheless, it is a mark of her investment in this issue that she cannot simply repeat Pinker's argument, but must add nuances of her own. It is at a similarly qualified idea that Squill eventually arrives, first picturing the squill of the title, the smallest simplest flower in the cold, growing inside the mirroring labyrinths of the speaker's ears where it acts as a sensory organ, and then suggesting that the squill may be both receiver and transmitter: First flower of the year, Easterish / and yet it could be a bold / spy device, an earpiece. Is there something, she asks, embedded in my ear, like that lost reptilian jaw, suggesting certain strategies to me? The poem concludes with a passage that presents the idea of a genetic predisposition to Uralic formulations in the same wishful, uncertain way Mlinko uses in interview, with an added sense of exile: And though you say it is right than no one descended from Uralic language speakers has Uralic language structures pre-determining the cast of thought until badly retrofitted in English, I could not see this Siberian squill, this earpiece, Easterish, and not think of the cells of a language in my sleep, growing out of the frost,
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assembled from history, a burned bridge, as the first division, from which I was lost. The idea of a foreign object embedded in the ear, and its connection both to language and to divine or genetic dictation, inevitably calls to mind Rilke's famous hoher Baum in Ohr. As we may remember, Mlinko herself makes this reference explicit with the title of Tree in the Ear, and the poem's memory of a park Where I had strolled with my son /for the first three years of his life, / but which he no longer remembered, / for that cherub no longer existed. / O hoher Baum in Ohr! Mlinko's review of Edward Snow's new collected translations of Rilke (2009) opens with a discussion of Caedmon's hymn, written by Caedmon in the 7th century after a dream in which an angel commanded him to Sing the beginning of the animals!, as divine dictation; Rilke tackles the same story in his Sonnets to Orpheus, and Mlinko uses the two poets' approaches as staging-posts in poetry's journey from inspiration to orphic radio, of which her own earpiece image is an example. As if to further examine how that first division, and the cherub her son used to be, are lost, Squill is followed and faced in Shoulder Season by a poem called This One and That One, which anatomises the languagerelationship between mother and child at three different stages of development. The deictic title draws attention to how we indicate different objects and their closeness to our own sphere of influence: this is close to me; that is further away. The poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has written, Deixis in linguistics is a particular category of words: the shifters, precisely those that change in reference given the position in time and space of the speaker. They are words that can only be fully understood as particular statement about particular contexts; they point into this situation, Now (Jacket, 2008). Deictic words are intrinsic to language acquisition as a stand-in for missing nouns: children soon learn to ask What's that? as a way of requesting names for what they see, or to tell people what this is as a way of confirming their knowledge. Deixis also enacts the separation of the child from the mother, as the child must account for the this of itself being different to the that of its mother's body. Mlinko constructs her poem in three brief numbered sections. Here is the first:
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She swears she saw, in this one's crib last night, that phosphorescence that portends horns of a kind, fabulous appendages when he proceeded to speak in ancestral gibberish. The poem is playing with tropes of prodigality. One the one hand, the child in the crib, or manger, overhung by a shining light that announces his birth and/or has a kind of halo-presence, puts us in mind of Christ; on the other hand, the horns make us think of the devil incarnate. The ancestral gibberish recalls speaking in tongues, which comes either from possession by the Holy Spirit or possession by a demon. Moses was often depicted with horns in medieval and Renaissance art, a trend widely but not exclusively attributed to the Vulgate's mistranslation of the Hebrew qeren as horns instead of rays of light in the Exodus description of Moses descending from Mount Sinai after his communion with God (see Mellinkoff's The Horned Moses, 1970). Famously, the baby Moses was also floated downstream in a rush-basket, a rudimentary crib, to be adopted by the Egyptian royal family because his mother feared for his life. Mlinko invokes both the horns and the rays of light (as phosphorescence) to suggest the onset of the word: the onset of language. Those fabulous appendages are words, and everything words bring. To append means to attach something after the fact; it is a word associated with words, with writing. Language's arrival lags behind the arrival of the child. At the same time, appendages are physiological limbs, fingers, and so on which returns us to a biological origin for speech, and to the idea of speech resulting in biological changes to the body, in this case the horns Moses acquires. The fabulous nature of these linguistic appendages is another manifestation of the lingering sense of the miraculousness of language that Pinker was unable to resist. Prodigal gives rise to prodigy and prodigious, all but divorced from their biblical root, now, and taken to mean someone who demonstrates, at a young age, exceptional facilities or talents, or to describe the production of exceptional amounts of work. In this sense, we can see prodigal linking back to those ideas of excellence and excess that Mlinko was so
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keen to foreground in The Nation. Her preceding column, in March 2010, offered The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary as an occasion for thinking about the difference between superfluity and bounty. What a prodigy gives us is bountiful; anyone else's virtuosity or overproduction is simply superfluous. This is a huge challenge for any poet, vulnerable as they are to accusations of frivolity or uselessness. Some try to hide this with a semblance of utility; others, like Mlinko, make an open secret of it, and a virtue of their own virtuosity. As she said in the Davis interview, I love shows of brilliance and virtuosity. I dont share the American prejudice for modesty in poems, but I do believe in a sense of proportion and elegance, things which give meaning to the idea of virtuosity, I guess. Mlinko's word-play in This One and That One is one example of how to give meaning to the idea of virtuosity. A crib is not just a child's cot, it is also a literal translation, or a handy guide to something much more complex than itself. The language of children, and the language mothers use with their children, can be seen as a crib rather than a text; and language is a crib for experience, a way of making it more easily understood. If we look at the sound-patterning here, we can how see the ib of crib is picked up by gibberish, and the p and end of portends and the soft g of gibberish by appendages. We can hear phosphorescence recur in ancestral. These patterns give the lines a feeling of inevitability, of portentousness, as we hear a sound occur and recur; but each recurrence is a reformulation, undermining the familiarity even as it appears. Likewise the sophistication of the patterning is undermined by words like gibberish, which alert us to the many nonsensical aspects of poetry, and to language's origin in the gibbering of simian antecedents. This prodigious, paranomasiac virtuosity is openly admitted to the argument of the poem in the second section, where we learn how that one, an older child, has discovered the joys of rhyming things that click: he plays with words, and make nonsensical connections based on sound and satisfaction alone, an obvious parallel to the satisfaction taken by a poet. The nebulous she has now become his mother, and with this separation her anxiety has grown from a wondrous fear of the supernatural
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into a rational fear of her son's potential to damage himself or others, as the uncontrollable rhyming makes her dream of switches on safetys simultaneously flipped. Finally, in the third section, the mother's attention turns to her own speech: She swears she hears, in her own mamanaise, thoniers on a fishing-boat haul in seine nets full of langoustines; cats enceinte in hyacinth; tongues evolved to cleanse them of the telltale smell of meat, the smell of meat on cubs, telltale bas-cuisine. Mamanaise is the simplified language adults use with babies. Thonier means tuna-fisherman. A seine net is a long, flat fishing net used to enclose schools of fish, like a fence. The noun enceinte refers to the enclosed inner wall of a fortification; the adjective means pregnant. Bascuisine is cheap local food, or cheap, tough cuts of meat. Those tongues evolved, then, are literally the rough tongues of cats, but we also use tongue as a synonym for language, as in mother tongue, or a synonym for babble, as in speaking in tongues. Mlinko is reasserting the idea of a buried or nascent linguistic tradition, not Uralic this time, but French: for English speakers, a smattering of French is a sign of linguistic prestige. There is a deictic pun lurking behind all this: who's she, the cat's mother?, we say, when telling children off for a disrespectful address (there is also, I think, a joke about tuna mayonnaise). In this case, the speaker is positively identifying herself with a cat's mother, cleaning her offspring of the telltale smell of meat their primal, speechless animalism with her own developed tongue. In the final line, this comparison slips gears into social commentary, reminding us that language can be developed not only to communicate one's origins but to conceal them. The repeated telltale, here meaning giveaway, but derived from telling a tale, alerts us to the ways in which language allows us to tell tales about ourselves, including biblical tales, which conceal how we too were once l-bas: as Mlinko puts it, again using French to signal her own distance from infantile speech, O because one is never l-bas for long, / holding an infant is like going to Paris (Rocamadour).

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Mlinko's attention to the connective deictic ligaments of language also puts us in mind of Muldoon, This One and That One riffing off Muldoonian titles like the aforementioned It Is What It Is; and we notice, too, in those seine nets full of langoustines a version of Muldoon's a fishing boat / complete with languorous net from Paul Klee: They're Biting, a poem which also contains goitred, / spiny fish-caricatures, and reassures us, At any moment all this should connect. Connection definitively occurs in the subsequent poem from Meeting the British (1987), the well-known Something Else, in which the sight of a lobster being lifted from a tank activates a long chain of associations, from how Nerval / was given to promenade / a lobster on a gossamer thread to Nerval's eventual suicide, as the poem concludes: he hanged himself from a lamp-post with a length of chain, which made me think of something else, then something else again. The final poem of Mlinko's that I would like to consider here, This is the Latest, extends this double-jointed use of the crustacean as a vehicle for exploring the connections between words; and it is in this poem that the loaded tensions between evolution and creation that bubble away under the book are brought most clearly to the surface. This is the Latest takes place on Christmas Eve. In the first section, the speaker settles a sacrificial lobster in the bath tub, where it will remain until it is time for it to be cooked. The poem is again divided into three sections, each spaced into two columns on the page, and this vertical and horizontal segmentation mimics the segmentation of the lobster's shell, which is itself identified with other joints and plates in the poem: Wrapping an oversized box can't find a swathe big enough with tape (ah (coffee maker) of paper Start to cobble bits together chitinous)

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Chitin is the primary material from which the exoskeletons of arthropods are formed. The attention paid to the structure of the exoskeleton (segmented, chitinous, with a gooseflesh appearance) and its mirroring in the structure of the poem reminds us again of the Uralic language structures that Mlinko considers in Squill, the skeleton of a language, if you like, which is innate to speakers of Uralic descent, moving outwards from within. The lobster appeals as an image because of this inverted relationship; and it appeals because its structure is so clearly visible, so publicly apparent. Its tail, its claws, its feelers, are all fabulous appendages. In Mlinko's imagination, this kind of visible and segmented structure is linked not only to language but to language acquisition, as the depiction of kindergarten's disjointed tidbits (Pandas eat bamboo. Koalas eat eucalyptus) against the backdrop of a bamboo screen's living, jointed segments in For All the World makes clear. Increased sophistication means the increased ability to conjoin disjointed facts: to make the words link up. Muldoon himself, an incorrigible joiner-upper, one often given to nomenclative readings, might well make something of Mlinko's name containing the words link as in connection, as in joint, as in the missing link and ange (Fr.) or angel, too. Indeed, Mlinko might do the same: when asked to free-associate on language by Jordan Davis, she replied, It has angle and gauge in it, which are instruments for measuring; it has gag in it for fun; it has egg in it for possibility; angel which means messenger and Ange, for talisman. Wrapping a gift for Christmas brings us full circle back to Pinker's miraculous gift of language: the coffee maker wrapped in paper, the lobster wrapped in chitin, the gifts brought to Christ, and the gift of Christ himself. To make this explicit, This is the Latest navigates from the bathroom to the kitchen, where the lobster's final destination, an extravagant fish soup, is being prepared:

...the broth sings from the pot

of something Provenal a little tomatoey

a little stigma (not stamen) of Crocus Sativus under the Star of Bethlehem
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Sensitised as we are to Mlinko's linking of language and cuisine, her appetite for sheer epicureanism, and the foodie words and concepts that populate not only poems that obviously treat language acquisition (the bascuisine of This One and That One) but other poems whose delight in words is matched by their delight in eating Gourmandizing, about a fancy organic restaurant, or Gallimaufry, about cooking for friends we understand that this bouillabaisse is a way of exploring speech, and in particular a way of drawing together the competing attitudes towards language on display throughout the book. What we might not be prepared for, however, is the cosmic scale of the treatment: after two sections of cosy domesticity, the poem suddenly zooms out into space: If the universe is bouncing and shrinkage pendulum an infant's sobbing have a prosody it has the chemistry or our bouillabaisse, a primal soup contain and nonspeech in the briny speech stream this is the latest between inflation as if on a trillion-year why wouldn't on the exhale as on the inhale of tears and seas indeed, besides babbling and raspberries a scuttling underwriter?

On a literal level, that scuttling underwriter is the lobster, its carapace clicking against the pan, its body giving body to the soup and providing a foundational flavour upon which subtler notes can be built. Metaphorically, however, the scuttling underwriter, underwriting the poem as it does on its own line, returns us once again to the tantalising idea that there may be some kind of definite origin for the primal soup of speech. The fact that the poem takes place on Christmas Eve raises the possibility that this origin may be divine as much as ancestral, even as that image of the lobster scuttling along the base of the pan puts us in mind of aquatic origins, and of the primordial soup theory proposed by J. B. S. Haldane; and we think again of the isolated line underwriting Something
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Else. In This is the Latest, the arguments and counter-arguments of creation and evolution, nature and nurture, exist not as hard antitheticals but as ingredients held in suspension together: that briny speech stream contains them all, the angel and the egg, the gag and the gauge. I would like to conclude with the idea that, as the vertiginous complexity of this poem's final sentence might suggest, navigating the speech stream of Mlinko's work is itself an act of language acquisition. We are regaled with the weird, obsolete or eccentric vocabularies and constructions she so thoroughly enjoys, linguistic resources that are themselves imperilled; we learn to wield the latest additions to the global English lexicon; and we are invited to view language as evolution-in-progress, participating as active readers in her virtuoso displays. If in our ordinary lives, as Dehaene has suggested, we suppress some of the differences between words, does poets ask us to de-suppress, to let ourselves be sensitised to every last distinction, and overload our circuits with a granularity of information they are not quite fit to handle? What does that do to those circuits? Does it perhaps enlarge them? The resounding answer Shoulder Season provides is Yes.

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POETRY PROPER
Editors: Miriam Gamble, Paul Maddern, and Alex Wylie
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