{"id":3544,"date":"2012-11-19T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=3544"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:36:57","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:36:57","slug":"ken-head-reviews-ross-cogans-the-book-i-never-wrote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-ross-cogans-the-book-i-never-wrote\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews Ross Cogan’s ‘The Book I Never Wrote’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Book I Never Wrote<\/em> is Ross Cogan\u2019s second collection and as fascinating as his first, Stalin\u2019s Desk<\/em>, (Oversteps Books, 2005), in the title poem of which Cogan\u2019s narrator speaks about his recent purchase of the former Soviet leader\u2019s desk:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I knew what it was at once.
\nHe had been pictured at it with his uncle
\nJoe moustache and portrait smile. It must
\nbe it, I thought. I would have paid far more.
\nThe leather top was stained and slightly torn,
\nthe keys were lost and there were scratches on<\/em><\/p>\n

some of the edges, but it cleaned up well.
\nAges of dirt flaked off in leaves until
\nthe oak beamed through. I looked for bullet holes
\nand searched for secret drawers but there were none.
\nNor could I find state papers hidden in
\nthe lid, or stuck under the drawers. No one<\/em><\/p>\n

had scored a death warrant into its hide.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The humour in the portrayal of the collector who has achieved a coup is self-evident, we can see him chuckling and rubbing his hands with glee, but set in sharp contrast are graphic images (bullet holes, death warrants) not only suggestive of the horrors uncle Joe<\/em> unleashed upon his people, but also of the obsessional care with which he attempted to conceal them behind secrecy, subtefuge and the portrait smile<\/em> of his public facade.\u00a0 The poem is a micro-narrative managed with great skill.\u00a0 It is very readable, the narrator\u2019s voice is chatty, conversational, bubbling over with pleasure at his smartness and totally lacking any sense of his absurdity.\u00a0 At the same time, though, the perspective of the poem is historical, its concerns political, moral, preoccupied with mortality and the passing of time.\u00a0 Nothing lasts.\u00a0 Even Great Dictators die and no amount of savvy, wealth or power saves us.<\/p>\n

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These are ideas, in particular the concern with time, developed powerfully and with great seriousness, throughout The Book I Never Wrote<\/em> also.\u00a0 In the opening poem, The books he never wrote<\/em>, for example, Cogan speaks of a haunting sense of potential unfulfilled, of the brevity of life and the folly of wasting time:\u00a0 The books he never wrote … pursued him through Oxford to the smart job, \/ the parties where he danced, long-limbed and young \/ to the black jazz band … Lastly clustered around the grave, \/ their paper thin bodies crumbling to dust<\/em>.\u00a0 Likewise, in The things<\/em>, the point is made that, Things trail their histories like streamers. \/ All the past uses of a tool cling \/ to it like cloth wrapped round its handles<\/em> … We understood all this once, \/ buried jewels and swords with their owners<\/em>.\u00a0 Life, as we\u2019re told in Lines<\/em>, is a trip through time<\/em> that ferries us smoothly<\/em> from moment to moment, age to age, birth to the grave.\u00a0 Hence, from the death long ago of a Roman centurion in Death in the Teutoburg Forest<\/em>, where Weak green light sinks through the trees like a corpse settling in water<\/em> and The jawbone of a mule juts from a bank<\/em>, Cogan fast forwards us to The fallacy of unified field theory<\/em> and a world in which randomness rules if anything does and it\u2019s crystal clear that Einstein got it wrong, <\/em>that all \/ law is local law, all measurement \/ relative<\/em> … and the universe itself is cut \/ and drawn into a gaming board<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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These poems, it seems to me, are acts of resistance against superficiality and momentariness, against the human tendency to prefer being preoccupied with easy pleasures, bread and circuses, trivia, to thinking about and sometimes visiting the dark places of the heart and mind to which thought may require us to travel.\u00a0 They are nourished, with great directness and clarity of purpose, not by transitory flickers of emotional reaction, but by systematic philosophical questioning, the understanding, as is made clear in The silences between<\/em>, that whether or not we realise it, We can\u2019t help telling stories, need to see \/\u00a0 our lives as scripts and measure out our days<\/em> \/ in acts and stage directions.\u00a0 And when we \/ look back it feels like studying a play\u2019s \/ relentless logic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Among many others, Ordering the execution<\/em> and The sadness of aborted assassinations<\/em>, for example, two poems in particular provide excellent instances of this use of apparently straightforward narrative, simple storytelling, \u00a0to raise far-reaching and complex questions.\u00a0 In the first, Incident in a market town<\/em>, set in an unnamed country, Pawel is taken into the street to be shot, apparently as an example to others of the wisdom of obedience.\u00a0 Soldiers use forceful persuasion to gather an audience of witnesses, ill-advisedly perhaps, because in the moments before his death, as if fear had tugged his tongue into nonsense<\/em>, Pawel begins to speak Latin, fragments from the writings of St. Augustine and St. Jerome.\u00a0 I know this was a miracle<\/em>, the narrator tells us, because \/ Pawel spoke no German and almost \/ no Russian.\u00a0 He was not a learned man … \u201cWe make ourselves a ladder of our vice,\u201d \/ he said as the bolts were slipping into their sleeves, \u201cif we trample the vices underfoot.\u201d His blood \/ on the grey slabs, as rich and luscious as \/ the cardinal\u2019s robes, that was a wonder too<\/em>.\u00a0 The second, Tin planes<\/em>, ends the collection;\u00a0 it is very short, but as with so much in these skilful and interesting poems, amounts to far more than the sum of its parts and is well worth quoting in full:<\/p>\n

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Each time a green tin plane, slick in its air<\/em><\/p>\n

shell like a bee in glass.\u00a0 The card backs tore<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

open for us to heft their cold war weight.<\/em><\/p>\n

Russian, American, transferred stars bright<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

red and blue on wings and fuselage;<\/em><\/p>\n

we\u2019d chip the camouflage in wild backyard<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

dogfights.\u00a0 Each stiff visit brought a new tin<\/em><\/p>\n

plane swelling my bedroom\u2019s metal squadron.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing else.\u00a0 A pinched face fading like<\/em><\/p>\n

a figure in a cockpit waving goodbye.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Order your copy of The Book I Never Wrote<\/em> <\/a>by Ross Cogan from Oversteps Books<\/a>. ISBN:\u00a0 978-1-906856-26-7, \u00a38.00\u00a0 52pp<\/p>\n

\u00a92011:\u00a0 Ken Head <\/a><\/p>\n


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          \u00a0                           The Book I Never Wrote is Ross Cogan\u2019s second collection and as fascinating as his first, Stalin\u2019s Desk, (Oversteps Books, 2005), in the title poem of which Cogan\u2019s narrator speaks about his recent purchase of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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-3544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3544","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=3544"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23740,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3544\/revisions\/23740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}