Year of the Lion Andrew Pidoux, Salt Publishing (Modern Poets Series)
ISBN 978-1–84471-791-0 Paperback: £7.99 76pp
Towards the end of Andrew Pidoux’s interesting and compulsively readable first collection, winner of the Crashaw Prize in 2009, there is a poem which takes its title, The Wounded Deer, from the Mexican artist Frieda Kahlo’s 1946 painting of the same name, a debt acknowledged by the author and one of a number of poems in the collection whose points of origin are paintings. Elsewhere, Pidoux, who is himself art-school educated, derives poems from, among others, Self-Portrait, 1936 by Leonora Carrington, a British-born surrealist painter who lived a lengthy period of her life in Mexico, The Scream, by Edvard Munch, Three Musicians, by Pablo Picasso, Couple In Bed by Philip Guston and The Last Judgement, by Luca Signorelli. Kahlo’s painting, which expresses her disappointment at the failure of an operation on her spine to ease the chronic pain she suffered throughout her life as a consequence of polio myelitis at the age of six and terrible injuries sustained in a tram accident at eighteen, presents her as having the body of a young stag fatally wounded by arrows and her own head crowned with antlers. The image, which is deeply moving, makes clear that there is no escape, no transformation, either for the dying stag or for the artist, that will restore them to freedom and health, a point emphasised by Kahlo’s having added the word “carma”, fate, destiny, to the bottom left-hand corner of her canvas.
In his poem, however, Pidoux speaks of a new breed of magic … that sparks from the soul at the instant in which the artist / poet, observing the brave act of will required of another living creature enduring a moment where everything is as clear as death, is moved to commemorate that moment in either a painting or a poem. Experience, in other words, is transformative. What happens to us, what we observe happening to others, to the world around us, does change us, both in the way we see and the art or poetry we create to record our seeing. It’s the sort of magic, he says, the surrealists courted / when they were at their best between wars / and understood nature by hating it and it clearly is a preoccupation at the heart of Year of the Lion. An Unbelievably Yellow Lion, for example, a poem prefaced with an acknowledgement of the life of Vincent Van Gogh, describes the way in which Van Gogh’s cornfields sway like a lion / combed in conflicting directions … His poplars flame upwards, / like the beards of dangling / philosophers … And his skies leak into his mountains, / as if heaven and earth / were made of the same stuff / and often swapped properties … as if heaven could land / among us any moment / and touch us with its madness.
There are fifty-six poems in this collection, all of them teeming with life and invention, all challengingly transformative in this same way. Pidoux’s world resembles a riotous dreamscape, a hothouse of colour, imagery and wit in which ideas of many shapes and sizes, both complex and accessible, profound and playful at the same time, are developed and worked out. Some of the poems have a childlike simplicity, others only seem to do so. A number are dark and searchingly meditative. In the title poem, for example, a faddish society, too replete with the good things of the world to be intelligent, perhaps, is gripped by a sudden craze for keeping pet lions. Cubs, In the buttercup light of their youth, … / set to work beating the house cats at boxing … While in breakfast bowls small plastic lions / Clung to children’s spoons like castaways. In other poems, a mutant frog baby is born in Kansas, his mother (wearing an Iraqi Freedom tee-shirt!) dips her fingers / Into the baby’s gooey belly, cats, a carnival of them, which seem to have been furred in human fears, … set up stall / Inside a crumbling long-abandoned home … And seemed preoccupied with heightened thoughts, / Philosophies that stroked their silent heads. Very differently, on the other hand, in The Madness of Robert Walser, his sonnet in memory of the Swiss writer, Pidoux broods over a tormented life: The sanest folk cannot account for death, / Regardless of their history of doubt. / You can’t decide to terminate your breath – / It happens by itself when you are out … you melt into the snow, / Become the things your readers cannot know.
This last line and its reference to the things your readers cannot know, is especially interesting, not only because of its compassionate view of Walser struggling with melancholy, taking lonely walks in the depths of winter amid the solitude of bone-headed trees, but also because, despite the kaleidoscopic qualities of the poems, the effect their powerfully imagined imagery and technical expertise has of carrying all before it, in the way, at times, of magic realism, there is, at the heart of each of them, The Garden of Good Ideas and The Cove Dweller, for example, a focused concentration on the mystery all readers and writers of poetry come to know, the space in which, as in Butterfly Effect, we are required to be alone with our thoughts and to imagine
Everything lives in the dream of dust.
It’s the incidental stuff that forms
When supernovae shake out their skirts
Or black holes disappear
Into their own encyclopedic minds.
When giant butterflies the size of stars
Die and fall through space
Like flaps of newspaper through public parks,
Some of their wingprint matter
Reaches us too, though centuries later.
Sadly our eyes are too small to see it.
I, for one, wish Andrew Pidoux well with this collection and shall look forward to reading his next.
©2010: Ken Head