{"id":15453,"date":"2018-01-17T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T09:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=15453"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:29:15","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:29:15","slug":"claire-booker-reviews-mahlers-hut-other-accommodations-by-alan-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/claire-booker-reviews-mahlers-hut-other-accommodations-by-alan-price\/","title":{"rendered":"Claire Booker reviews \u2018Mahler\u2019s Hut & Other Accommodations\u2019 by Alan Price"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Which of us hasn\u2019t yearned for an artist\u2019s hut \u2013 that womb like space in which to delve for truths? Gustav Mahler\u2019s little chalet in the Vienna Woods peeps out from between fir trees on the cover of Alan Price\u2019s newest pamphlet. Mahler himself emerges from this sequence of poems as a wounded creator, an \u00e9pateur of the Viennese bourgeoisie, a man of clay (and hemorrhoids), a traveller into the land of the dead. <\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cYou foolishly entered the summer hut\/ to write music you imagined was pure.\/ Such discipline working the long musical line.\u201d <\/span><\/div>\n
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Price understands how, for the creative artist, life is a struggle between vision and execution. His finely worked poems attempt to fathom the creative impulse. In \u2018By the Forest\u2019s Eye\u2019, he depicts the uneasy symbiosis of nature and art through the medium of the great god Pan, who observes Mahler at work on his 3rd<\/sup> Symphony: <\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cI\u2019ve listened to your tones. Now hear what nature\/ tells me. Bird, animal, insect, flower, tree march\/ to my soul, ascend the ladder. You were created\/ in the last hatch of my brain. You\u2019ve seen the origin of the chain. If you climb up I\u2019ll count the parts.\/ Sometimes a limb, petal, wing is broken. All flaws\/ hurt my generative eye.\u201d <\/span><\/div>\n
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There is a touching poem about infant mortality (Mahler lost five brothers) containing the exquisite lines: “The pips of those lost hearts\/ planted in music of tempting fruit.\/ God\u2019s bells chiming for the falling apples.\/ The voice of the orchard angel praising\/ your orchestration.”<\/span><\/div>\n
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Each of the Mahler sequence of poems relates to an individual symphony. In \u2018Felling of the Tree\u2019, Price brings life and musical composition into powerful resonance. Mahler\u2019s triple loss of his young daughter, his position at the Opera House and his health found their way into his Symphony no 6:\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cA propulsion of every right note to the right disaster.\/ A \u2018love of fate\u2019 imagining five hammer blows.\/ An ear for structure and sanity reducing them to three. . . .\/ Falling like an axe with a Mahler cry.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
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Price makes connections seemingly effortlessly:\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe black sky pours down\/ its hoard of grotesquery\u201d on the lake \u201cas Mahler insanely rows.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 \u201cGoethe keeps shouting\/ the eternal feminine.\u201d \u201cThe darkness falling when abandoned\/ The giddy way you waltz to the ditch.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0He is like an artist applying layer after layer of brush work to build up tone and texture. He is not averse to sly wit either. In \u2018Requiem for an Atheist\u2019, the profligate Berlioz demands twenty cymbals for his orchestra:<\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cFar too expensive for a requiem,\/cried The Ministry for the Interior.\/ At its premiere only six were used,\/ the minister counted them.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
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The second, shorter section, of Mahler\u2019s Hut<\/i>, is an eclectic mix of stand-alone poems. The three most affecting are prose poems. In \u2018The Work\u2019, a female librarian\u2019s life has been fragile:\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe nose-bleeds, the ridiculed red hair, mutterings of shame\/ about her size, the school attacks and her hard-won pride.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0The Cure\u2019 cleverly fits form to content in a thumb-nail sketch of a stutterer. Most powerful of all, \u2018The Dignity\u2019 visits the territory of social class and aspiration, where the poet remembers a friend who has died of asbestosis:<\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cYou are gone\/ my beautiful maker of doors. Sometimes I can see you walking\/ with that shoulder bag, your eyes alive to unconditional honour.\u201d <\/span><\/div>\n
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Price\u2019s poetry is erudite, but he wears his research lightly. His technical skills, which are impressive, only augment the humanity at the core of his search for truth. Price\u2019s deft juxtaposition of the demotic and the mythic, the musical and the prosaic makes for a thrilling read. Mahler\u2019s Hut<\/i> will appeal to anyone who finds interesting questions more satisfying than easy answers. <\/span><\/div>\n
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Claire Booker<\/strong>\u2019s debut poetry pamphlet Later there will be Postcards<\/i> is published by Green Bottle Press (<\/span>www.greenbottlepress.com\/our-books<\/span><\/a>). Her poems have appeared in Ambit, Magma, Poetry News, The Rialto and the Spectator among others. More information at <\/span>www.bookerplays.co.uk<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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You can order your copy of\u00a0 Mahler\u2019s Hut & Other Accommodations<\/em> by Alan Price (<\/span> Original Plus) \u2013 price \u00a33.60 here: http:\/\/thesamsmith.webs.com\/originalpluschapbooks.htm#971222028<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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  \u00a0 Which of us hasn\u2019t yearned for an artist\u2019s hut \u2013 that womb like space in which to delve for truths? Gustav Mahler\u2019s little chalet in the Vienna Woods peeps out from between fir trees on the cover of Alan Price\u2019s newest pamphlet. Mahler himself emerges from this sequence of poems as a wounded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15453"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15460,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15453\/revisions\/15460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}