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When Suzy Was: A Book of Answers

2000; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/25304476

2327-5804

Devin Johnston, Kelvin Corcoran,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

Kelvin Corcoran. When Suzy Was: A Book of Answers. Cullompton, UK: Shearsman Books.1999. When we think about language in general, most of us think of as departing from things, or moving on a spatial and temporal trajectory away from them. In this sense, we retain an Emersonian notion that have roots in a fossil language, and extend outward through a process of abstraction. Even if we think we know better, we tend to be surprised when this process is reversed, and drop and settle on the things to which they once referred. In The Pound Era, the critic Hugh Kenner makes much of Heinrich Schliemann's sensational discovery of Troy in the 1870s. According to Kenner, the archeological unearthing of everyday implements restored the vague poeticisms of Homeric translators to novelistic specificity. In this sense, Schliemann's discovery involved a drama of presence-the thingness that can be attributed to or myths or history. A similar drama is operative in Kelvin Corcoran's new book, which largely responds to time spent in Greece. His sense of wonderment at the geographical location of so much myth and literature takes the form of a meditation on presence-in a manner that is both intellectually and emotionally probing. In the opening poem of When Suzy Was, Hotel Byron, Corcoran reflects on his passing glimpses of a landscape familiar from myths: By Monday, at the end of the world, falling in the dizzy air of Cape Matepan, the lighthouse, the cornflowers alight like blue sparks, no birds calling the last step down drowns us into the submarine cave called hell. You can get into hell. It's not literature. (8) Here, a literary concept takes its place in the everyday world. Elsewhere, conversely, what appears to be everyday takes on a fantastic quality. Observe in the following passage how this effect is achieved-paradoxicallythrough the word real: We found a real meadow and breathed in its smell, right out above the sea, a meadow of tall grasses April poppies and daisies lifted up into the sky. Wading out on a promontory of absolute Spring through tall grasses, blue and distant mountains, under the eyes of the serene empire. (11) The empire-whether Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, British, or less mundane-takes on a transcendental quality, an abstraction that is everywhere manifest. In a manner reminiscent of Pound, such moments step outside of a normative sense of time and assume a stasis that is both lovely and a little ominous. Corcoran's concern for presence at times recalls a high modernist ambition to reflect culture as a whole. More often though, it takes the form of poignant glimpses of his own emotional life with his family. It is his easy movement between these two levels that makes this book so engaging. In How Can I Find What I've Lost?, for instance, the poet begins with an prayer to Apollo: Apollo Hylates, Apollo of the laurel, the myrtle, the sea lifts us gently onto the yellow rocks: Apollo Hylates, Apollo of the laurel, the myrtle, the sea lifts us gently. (14) Corcoran elsewhere calls Apollo of words (33), and here he is also god of matter, mediating between the elements of water and earth. A few stanzas down, the poet is himself such a liminal figure: My daughters lolling on me, their weight, their substance against me is heaven; they speak dolphin language in their sleep, awake in the land where names have feelings. (14) These two passages-the traditional invocation of a god and domestic blissgain energy through their proximity. Despite the difference in rhetorical stance, both passages remark on the transitory nature of physical presence. …