review
Draws & Bends, Breaks & Swerves a review of A Short Story of Falling
Metal engraving by Maribel Mas in A Short Story of Falling
A Short Story of Falling was published by Andrew J. Moorhouse in a small run of about a hundred copies smack dab in the middle of our planet’s most recent plague. It’s a squarish book, a bit wider than it is long, about 10-1/2” wide x 10” tall, and satisfyingly tactile—bound in linen, printed on Zerkall paper that feels both rough and soft between your fingers, like the broad, toothed leaf of an avocado plant. You can run your thumb along the deckled edges. It includes eight poems from Alice Oswald’s book, Falling Awake, together with eight line engravings by Maribel Mas. It’s a good book to hold in your hands.
“Let us love actualities,” César Vallejo writes in Trilce, “for we won’t always be as we are.”
It’s been a hard year to love actualities. We’ve been bound to our separate bubbles and infinite scrolls, you and I, locked in endless arguments about fake news even as millions of dead have been shorn suddenly from the living. We find ourselves in a world as at sea in mortal confusion, fear, and misdirection as the oceans Odysseus crossed in his wild, elliptical wanderings.
“Freedom” has become a contentious word in such a year. “Openness” has too. But both are qualities that Alice Oswald has been thinking about and working toward her whole career.
In “Lines,” her third lecture as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, Oswald argues for a reinvigorated notion of the “Epic.” She turns away from Aristotle's definition of Epic as a narrative poem in heroic hexameter and proposes a new reading, something we can put to work in contemporary poetry: “Sometimes Epic is not more than a whiff of darkness, a shiver of not-knowing…. If you miss its movement, you’re left with only a small, personal, sealed-up poetry. Poetry for what has been, rather than what might be.” But how do you move in such a time as this, divided as we’ve been in our small, personal, sealed-up plots?
You might start, as Oswald does, with the line.
We could proceed laterally, as Oswald often does, across disciplines. In the “Lines” lecture, she reveals that she’s been writing poems recently by means of a line drawing exercise from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook. It’s a process that makes explicit the connection between the visual line, as artists like Klee understand it, and the poetic line, as it derives from speech and makes its way to the page.
She is a poet invested in the often neglected and forgotten oral tradition—one she’s dubbed “illiterature” for its position adjacent to but separate from written “literature.” Where the building block of “literature” is the word or sentence, oral “illiterature” builds from the phrase. The phrase is the foundational unit of the Homeric poem as it was composed and learned and passed along for millennia before being written down. It is the unit Ted Hughes employs in his Crow poems (a fact that is the focus of Oswald’s third Oxford lecture). And it is the unit that has informed Oswald’s work from the beginning of her career—thanks in part to Homer and Hughes, and including, notably, her second book, Dart, a long poem composed from snippets of speech she recorded from people who live and work along the river’s length.
The line in this conception is tuned to the spoken phrase. At the end of each, there’s a pause, or break, a moment that allows for a vital shift in thought or feeling. In an essay on Thomas Wyatt, Oswald describes this pause as “a hinge—a twist of the head or a cough or a catch in the verse through which the poet maintains his connexion with silence.” It’s a pause you can hear in what she calls “the simple beauty of blackbird grammar”:
“One quick statement pursued to the point of amazement. Then silence.
Just that. Then it speaks again.... That halting way of speaking phrases
outlined by pauses. That’s what I call poetry. Each new phrase fits itself
to each new moment. That’s what I call contemporary.”
In her first Oxford lecture, “The Art of Erosion,” Oswald begins and ends with Beckett’s instruction—addressed to actors rehearsing “Waiting for Godot”—”to speak lines with moonlight in their voices.” The lit moon is no line, of course. It’s a shape made of curved lines, ranging between a circle and a crescent, the space within it painted in. Moonlight, on the other hand, is a suffusion, more watercolor than engraving, all edgeless atmosphere of being in the midst. “Wherever you draw the line,” Oswald and her co-editor write in the introduction to the anthology Gigantic Cinema, “there is weather on both sides.”
The line is fundamental for Oswald. In an interview with David Naimon for the “Between the Covers” podcast, Oswald says, “I love the line unit. I love to think about human sentences, and human phrases, and how they react with the line, and what you’re visually doing when you break a line.” When Naimon asks about the lack of punctuation in her book Nobody, Oswald says, “I’m using the line ends themselves as punctuation. Sometimes, I think that the only way to get people to notice the end of the line is to take out all other punctuation.”
What she doesn’t say is that for a poet so keenly of the oral tradition—from her classical studies to her renowned performances, reciting entire books from memory—the line is linked intimately to the breath.
Given Oswald’s intense focus on the line and the phrase, it’s notable that her poem “A Short Story of Falling” is rooted in one of the most classic forms in written poetry: rhyming couplets measured in iambic pentameter. It’s the first poem in both the Moorhouse Fine Press book, A Short Story of Falling, and the longer book, Falling Awake, and it is the only poem in those books in regular meter. So it’s worth looking a little more closely at what’s going on with it.
The poem's opening beats with a steady patter: “It is the story of the falling rain / to turn into a leaf and fall again.” The rhythm here is less Wyatt than Surrey and Sidney, “whose regular repetitions of soft and strong stresses,” Oswald writes, “gives the line a sliding, narcotic quality.” The pause is not in the middle of the line, but at its end. You can feel it there, reading aloud, in the breath you have to take after “falling rain.” And you can see it as the turn comes literally in the first two words of the second line, “to turn.” But that turn is not a break. It’s a continuance.
As Ange Mlinko notes in her New York Review of Books essay, “Water Music,” Oswald is an immersive, elemental poet, and as such her medium, her element, is often water. Rivers are a throughline in her work from the books Dart and A Sleepwalk on the Severn to individual poems like “Severed Head Floating Downriver” in Falling Awake. The plane of these poems is mostly, as it is for rivers, horizontal. The motion is swerving, driven like a river’s bends by the forces of erosion and time.
The movement in “A Short Story of Falling,” by contrast, is much more vertical than in the river poems. While gravity and heat are the forces at play, they do not produce a simple line of falling down and evaporating up. There are pauses, interruptions, and deviations in the vertical drive which, like Emily Dickinson’s em-dashes, move briefly but powerfully to slow, shift, and multiply. You can see it in how the rain runs through vegetation: “every flower a tiny tributary / that from the ground flows green and momentary.” And you can see it in the horizontal, mechanical structure that produces the poet’s voice, as the water “leaks along // drawn under gravity towards my tongue / to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song.” Here William Blake’s “piping down the valleys wild” is transformed from the pastoral shepherd’s pipe to something much more utilitarian, the apparatus of the human voice rendered like a landscaper’s drainage system.
This is the one spot where the meter shifts. “DRAWN UNder” interrupts the continuous slide of iambs with two stresses at the same time that it introduces the first and only passive verb in the poem. Throughout the poem, the rain acts directly—it falls, turns, steals, and hides—except for this one moment, where suddenly it is drawn. While the poet’s voice is the instrument here, it is a passive one, like a rock a river noisily tumbles around or a storm drain thrumming after a thunder shower.
In the Moorhouse edition, this turn in the poem is further emphasized by a page break after the couplet that ends with “leaks along.” Then, there’s a further pause on the ensuing verso as you come to the first of Maribel Mas’s images.
Metal engraving by Maribel Mas in A Short Story of Falling
Mas’s metal engraving is composed of several lines that bend out and in and out again, with no apparent beginning or end. The shape looks somehow both organic and industrial. It could be a rendering of acoustic waves created by a drop in a pond in an echoing valley, or it could be the computer-aided design for an enhanced ear form, or the schematic for a new kind of 3D-printed orchid. The color of the lines is the dark and resonant green of grass that’s been mown and left out under trees in great wet mounds. It is an earthly green spooled out in sharp, swooping lines like metal thread.
Mas used “Burmester” or “French” curves to make each engraving. They are complex shapes composed of every kind of curve you might need to connect multiple points in a design. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Burmester curves were used for mechanical drafting, and they’re still used by dressmakers to shape a hip or a collar. Normally one uses only a small segment of the tool to smooth out a slope, but “instead of just using segments of these curves,” Mas writes in her Artist’s Statement, “I used the entire template, rotating it from a single fixed point with intervals of just a few millimeters.” It is a line that billows and yet at the same time has a supple, sculptural formality. It could be the resonant outline of a violin’s body being vigorously played and mapped across several different dimensions. Mas notes that as she worked, the drawing took on its own shape and the lines “seemed to vibrate as they crossed around an empty center.”
The lines of Oswald’s poem also seem to turn around an empty center—the poet, or rather the appliance of the poet’s voice. Organized around this absence, almost without our noticing it, the rain falls on and through grass and flowers, evaporating in an endless, closed cycle: “which is the story of the falling rain / that rises to the light and falls again.”
As much as “A Short Story of Falling” is a keynote for the collection, it is also the ground from which the next poems depart. In her 2008 essay on Wyatt, Oswald observes that “English literature is creased into the iambic system and it’s hard to unfold it.” The poems that follow “A Short Story of Falling” begin the work of that unfolding. Oswald is a poet on the move—always trying out new styles and forms, each poem a next experiment, a fresh stab at openness. The goal is not permanence. Immortality, as Tithonous learned when he was granted eternal life but not eternal youth, is something of a closed system, a locked room where even dawn stops visiting you after a few too many eons have passed. Instead of immortality, Oswald aims for transformation. As Judith Thurman notes in a New Yorker review of Nobody, “transience is Oswald’s muse.” We hear it in “A Rushed Account of the Dew”:
I want to work out what it’s like to descend
out of the dawn’s mind
and find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown
with a liquid cufflink
and then unfasten
to be brief
to be almost actual.
It is not enough for poems to take the materials of the world and transform them line by line. The poems themselves must be transformed. For her collaboration with the painter William Tillyer, Oswald shifted her approach to create work that responded to Tillyer’s watercolors. She was not making a connection with Tillyer’s subject matter, but with his practice. She told David Naimon, “I was very interested in his actual process where he spills or splodges water onto high quality paper and observes the way it moves…. allowing water to reveal to him its own character without him necessarily telling water what it is.” Then, after publishing the poems she made with Tillyer’s work, she remade them for a performance with a pianist. And then she reshaped them again for the collection Nobody, published by Norton in July 2020.
The poem “Dunt”—which appears a little over half-way through both A Short Story of Falling and Falling Awake—appears at first to address the failure of transformation. It’s about the statue of “a Roman water nymph made of bone” who finds herself trapped, like Tithonus, in a closed box, in her instance, a museum’s “sealed glass case.” But the poem has changed from its appearance in Graywolf’s 2007 collection, Spacecraft Voyager I. In the decade between Spacecraft Voyager I and A Short Story of Falling, gaps have opened up inside the lines, making a visual connection to the “pausing” tradition of pre-Chaucer English verse. The standard punctuation evident in the 2007 version has been worn away, too—at Oswald’s hand, or time’s. Phrases such as “Little distant sound as of dry grass. Try again.” have become “little distant sound as of dry grass try again”. As she says in praise of Robert’s Herrick’s notion of “trans-shifting,” “‘you need to see through matter to the durations that are wearing it away.”
In “Dunt,” you can hear the hard Anglo-Saxon consonants, quicksilver assonance, and conjoined words that are the mark of the pausing tradition she identifies in Wyatt. The flow of verse runs over and around—is interrupted by—these sounds like a fast stream pops and glints over a rocky bed:
little stoved-in sucked thin
low-burning glint of stones
rough-sleeping and trembling and clinging to its rights
victim of Swindon
puddle midden
slum of over-greened foot-churn and pats
whose crayfish are cheap tool-kits
made of the mud stirred up when a stone’s lifted
These variable phrases are a good distance from the even flow of “A Short Story of Falling.” The pauses are mostly at the end of each line, but words like “over-greened” and “foot-churn” are small hillocks of sound unto themselves, each demanding its own sharp breath in the middle of the line. It may be “a pitiable likeness of clear running”, as the poem says in the next line, but it’s a deeply resonant sounding of its own kind of running, its own actuality.
“Dunt” is a poem of incantatory repetitions. Its rhythms recall not only Ted Hughes’ “How Water Began to Play” but also the poems inscribed inside Egyptian pyramids and memorials as a means to cross the borders of the living and the dead. As many lines as the poem repeats, however, two words stand out: “try again.” The short phrase appears ten times, each occurring after a discrete unit of description. Mlinko refers to this “try again” as the nymph’s “magical thinking” that if she tries the phrase just one more time, she’ll finally “summon a river out of limestone.” It is surely that. But “try again” is also the poet talking to herself, trying this way and that to find a path (making me think of the way an old Janet Malcolm essay I just read proceeds out of “forty-one false starts”). The writer is also invoking herself with these phrases, telling herself to keep at it. Neither the Roman god nor the poet are looking for a conclusion, but for a continuation. There is a hint of something like success in this magical thinking: the phrase “try again” transforms after the last two units to “go on” and “yes go on.” There are echoes here, too, of Beckett’s two-sentence ode to relentless actuality in The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
In “The Art of Erosion,” Oswald makes the distinction between the livingness and the lastingness of poems. “One of the requirements of living,” she writes, “is dying.” For Oswald that process is directly related to the work of poems and “the trace that poetry leaves in you as it vanishes.”
Metal engraving by Maribel Mas in A Short Story of Falling
Engraving, of course, is an art that literally makes visible the invisible trace of the artist’s absent hand. The process of cutting away the plate resonates with Oswald’s notion of her own process. In a 2016 Guardian interview with Claire Armitstead, Oswald says that she has lately “begun to envisage her work not as poems so much as ‘sound carvings.’” “I like the idea that sound carving suggests there’s something there already.” For Maribel Mas, however, what her own engravings reveal is less an already existing path than something new and outside thought. Mas writes that the Burmester curves allow her engravings to become “more intuitive than rational” as she cuts away the metal to leave open runnels for the ink’s trace: “I can’t control the final outcome, I just keep going, supporting the drawing as it grows…. The decision of when to stop depends on the boundaries of the paper. A drawing only can expand within these physical limits, but it can also grow inside them, into its own depth. I would liken this to the paradox of freedom.”
Freedom that depends on constraint. Materiality that depends on transience. These are essential concepts for Oswald. She is a poet in the manner she ascribes to Homer, who follows in each phrase “the same ecstatic line from nothingness into being and back again.” The line between sound and silence, between vector and void, between the worlds of “what has been” and “what may be,” is not a clean demarcation. It is curved and moving, living not lasting, and there is weather on both sides.
Tom Thompson is the author of Passenger, The Pitch, and Live Feed. He lives in New York City.