{"id":7411,"date":"2014-09-29T08:00:44","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T08:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=7411"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","slug":"david-cooke-reviews-maitreyabandhu-the-crumb-road-and-terry-cree-fruit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/david-cooke-reviews-maitreyabandhu-the-crumb-road-and-terry-cree-fruit\/","title":{"rendered":"David Cooke reviews Maitreyabandhu ‘The Crumb Road’ and Terry Cree ‘Fruit’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Crumb Road<\/em> is a debut collection from Maitreyabandhu, a Buddhist priest who was born Ian Johnson in 1961. The contemplative tone of his prefatory lyric, \u2018This\u2019, hints at the journey he has made:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no law against my listening<\/p>\n

to this thrush behind the barn,<\/p>\n

the song so loud it echoes like a bell,<\/p>\n

then it\u2019s further off beyond the lawn.<\/p>\n

Whatever there is, there\u2019s this as well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a poem which, in its more modest way, \u00a0might usefully be compared with the opening movement of Eliot\u2019s Burnt Norton<\/em> and one in which Maitreyabandhu seems to be reaching towards transcendence, \u2018even though we build a common hell\u2019. The collection proper is then divided into three sections. In the first of which he evokes family memories and, in particular, creates a memorable portrait of his father.\u00a0 \u2018Burial\u2019 is the first of several poems in which we find the poet\u2019s father digging objects out of the earth. Elsewhere we see him digging up old bottles or copper wire, but here he accidentally turns up some human remains. Written in couplets, the poem is concise and effective, but finds room for some humour:\u2019 He brought \/ the second skull indoors with clods of earth \/\/ still hanging from its jowl and stood it on \/ the Stratford Herald<\/em> while my mother protested.\u2019 The father\u2019s obsession with digging becomes, as in Heaney\u2019s signature poem, emblematic of the son\u2019s later, and more complex, attempt to unearth the past:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t right,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve made it up or rather I\u2019ve mistaken<\/p>\n

my father\u2019s story for the thing itself:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the smell, the wormy skull, the policeman<\/p>\n

tall, bright-buttoned, standing by the Aga.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is then followed by a dozen poems that focus on various childhood memories. The accumulation of detail in \u2018The Coat Cupboard\u2019 re-invents and goes beyond a small child\u2019s perspective on a place that seemed strange, if not quite magical: \u2018You don\u2019t push your way through to discover a landscape\u00a0 \/ where beavers can talk.\u2019\u00a0 As in \u2018Burial\u2019, this is a poem about a specific memory, but then comes to symbolize the actual process of trying to remember: \u2018You find a set of keys \/ without their brightness or warmth of handling.\u2019 The poem concludes on a note of Proustian recognition, when the poet discovers that his grandmother\u2019s pink lipstick \u2018is still shaped to the curve of her lip.\u2019 \u2019Bottle Digging\u2019 and \u2018Shark Fishing\u2019 are further character studies of the poet\u2019s father. In the former one senses the adult\u2019s wisdom as he stands back to let his son to learn from experience. In the latter, appalled by a fisherman\u2019s cruelty, \u2018my father paid the thirty pounds \/ we owed but wouldn\u2019t shake the skipper\u2019s hand\u2019. In \u2018Hammers\u2019 he conveys the obsessiveness of a man forever on the lookout for bargain tools and the subsequent grief of those tasked with having to dispose of them.<\/p>\n

The work collected in the second section is less circumstantially autobiographical and more stylistically varied. With its twenty eight poems it might well have been advisable to hold some of them back for a subsequent collection and thus give more prominence to this volume\u2019s two autobiographical sections. \u2018Still Life with Geranium\u2019 is the first of several poems that strive to create an abstract space: \u2018The quiet \/ inside myself \/ is of a room inside a room.\u2019 In \u2018Place\u2019 the poet\u2019s goal seems just beyond him: \u2018You\u2019re in a room \/ with one high window \/\/ your step ladder doesn\u2019t reach.\u2019 Throughout these poems the images tend to be more elemental and the landscapes more visionary than in those that precede them. \u00a0In \u2018Pine Branch\u2019 the poet evokes Cezanne and suggests that the painter and the contemplative share a common approach<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cezanne would have understood the problem<\/p>\n

of a pine branch, its relation to the sky<\/p>\n

in the early morning with just a sickle moon<\/p>\n

and the sun not yet up among the rocks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This section has four effective prose poems and a mesmerizing narrative poem, \u2018Rangiatea\u2019, which, somewhat in the manner of a classical epyllion, describes a voyage between dream and reality. Further highlights are \u2018Visitation\u2019, \u2018The Man\u2019, in which contemplation is undermined by a longing for community, and \u2019At the Station\u2019, a description of two gay men:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One wraps his arms around the other<\/p>\n

from behind. He can feel his belly\u2019s breath<\/p>\n

against his back. They stay like this<\/p>\n

for quite some time, like figures made of clay<\/p>\n

still warm from the hand that fashioned them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Finally, the collection is brought to a close with STEPHEN, a sequence of twenty one \u00a0poems exploring the troubled relationship between two adolescent boys and its tragic conclusion. The candour, tact and poignancy of this sequence are quite remarkable. Shot through with moments of guilt, awkwardness and lyrical intensity, its fragmentary, non-linear, handling of events creates a brooding sense of obsession, as the two boys try to make sense of their feelings. Set in the 1970s, Maitreyabandhu\u2019s re-creation of that less than tolerant era is utterly convincing, as is the mythologized landscape of Crockett\u2019s Lane, Fletcher\u2019s Hole and Lodder\u2019s Field. From the outset there is an atmosphere of secrecy and denial: \u2018Two boys once walked across an iron bridge\u2026 \/ They didn\u2019t speak \/ or catch each other\u2019s eye.\u2019 There is also an authentic sense of the mundane, as the two boys explore their feeling towards each other, and how they feel about themselves, across a landscape of allotments, dens, and railway tracks. It\u2019s an ordinariness that helps to bring into sharp focus their drama of gaucheness and desire. The tension is well conveyed in \u2018The Cutting\u2019 where, after some twenty lines of leisurely description, there is a sudden change of key:<\/p>\n

I managed to lift his shirt and touch his side,<\/p>\n

but he was scared and so was I. And anyway<\/p>\n

the train didn\u2019t stop; we just stood there<\/p>\n

on the platform while she thundered past.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u2018The Brook\u2019 water becomes a symbol for repressed sexuality: \u2018I was looking \/\/ to where the silted leaves might show \/ a trout or stickleback, a sluggish \/ weight of water.\u2019 In \u2018The Garden\u2019, racked by guilt, the poet creates a poisoned paradise in which he finds room for potato drills, piles of scrap and a wrecked Austin Princess; while \u2018The Mop\u2019 is a brilliant evocation of a travelling fair as detailed as any of Larkin\u2019s set pieces. It finishes on a note of matter of fact tragedy:<\/p>\n

He\u2019d been waiting to do something with his life<\/p>\n

when someone screamed as a woman we both knew<\/p>\n

turned right and knocked him off his bike.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Taking his title from the tale of Hansel and Gretel, Maitreyabandhu uses the image of \u2018the crumb road\u2019 to symbolize the vulnerable trail he has followed back in time. \u2018It didn\u2019t matter now. It was long ago\u2019, the poet says in \u2018Two Boys. The reader, however, will be inclined to disagree as he travels back with the poet to share each shimmering \u2018spot of time\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Terry Cree is a writer and artist based in Hampshire. Fruit, <\/em>his first collection of poetry, contains a sixteen page \u2018triptych\u2019 inspired by the work of the American photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard alongside another dozen poems that vary in length from brief lyrics to lengthier meditations. Cree has supplied the artwork for the cover and a sequence of pencil drawings to accompany his poems. At a time when poetry collections are frequently too long and seem careless of their overall structure, it is a relief to fine a volume that is so meticulously assembled. A similar concern with \u2018composition\u2019 also informs the individual poems. In \u2018The Consolation of Walls\u2019 Cree works through existential uncertainties with the elegance of a geometrical paradigm and with an ironic nod, perhaps, toward the imprisoned philosopher Boethius:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is a wall inside me against which<\/p>\n

I have been kicking a small rubber ball<\/p>\n

For years<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sometimes it rolls back along the ground.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it bounces back like feelings plotted<\/p>\n

On a graph,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That old oscillation of up and down\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That ball can rest inside me like a stone,<\/p>\n

As hard and rubbery as death, unkicked,<\/p>\n

Unknown.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

However, to start at the beginning with \u2018Josephine Jones\u2019, Cree\u2019s enigmatic opening poem, we will see that the metaphysical obsessions that shape Cree\u2019s work do not lead to predictability of approach or any narrowing of range. In this poem we seem at first to be on familiar territory: \u2018In a tent of clouds \/ I am six years old \/ in Mercer\u2019s Field\u2026\u2019 Soon, however, as the opening sentence slowly unwinds, details merge and the narrative becomes dreamlike. Swept along by the poem\u2019s riddling and incantatory rhythms, we learn little beyond the fact that Jennifer Jones was five years old and may have died: \u2018Josephine had flowers on her heart.\u2019\u00a0 More certain, is the fact that the poem\u2019s protagonist is haunted by his memory of her: \u2018She was the dark cleft \/ I will carry with me\/ till the raging sun \/ falls out of the sky.\u2019 What is so impressive about this piece is that it manages to achieve both depth and resonance from what, on the face of it, is very simple language.<\/p>\n

Absorbing too are \u2018Weir Gate\u2019 and \u2018Sea Song\u2019. The former is an unflinching narrative about an act of childhood violence: \u2018There were three kids \/ and two were friends \/ and one was no friend \/ to either but, abject in \/ his hope, just tagged along;\u2019 while the latter is a study of isolation in which a protagonist stares out to sea and contemplates the nature of waves: \u2018he wonders \/ if a wave can have identity \/\/ whether one wave is entity \/ unto itself or whether waves \/\/ are merely gestures of the sea.\u2019 Observation, however, does not make sense of the world, so that the waves can only reinforce our sense of the man\u2019s emptiness: \u2018their sighing \/ signals nothing to our lonely \/ man except the limits of love, \/\/\u00a0 his own heartfelt perimeter.\u2019<\/p>\n

Transience, separation, and the limits of what is knowable: these are also themes explored in Cree\u2019s meditation up the \u2018family albums\u2019 of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. In this poem, Cree\u2019s technical skill is again much in evidence, as he adapts a form put to brilliant use by Thom Gunn in the 1960s. \u2018Meatyard Triptych\u2019 is composed in rhyming quatrains, each line of which is based on a count of eight syllables, rather than four metrical feet. It\u2019s a form that gives both backbone and flexibility. In the first panel of his \u2018triptych\u2019 Cree concentrates upon the photographer\u2019s studies of his own children. Attempting to get some kind of purchase upon the mind of a child, he explores the distance between the artist and his subject: \u2018What does it mean \/ When a child by its yawn or lean \/ into another seems to know \/\/ More than we imagine they do?\u2019 In the second panel the photographer\u2019s wife, Madelyn comes to the fore and the poet homes in on the concept of \u2018the couple\u2019 with side glances toward The Arnolfini Portrait<\/em> and Grant Wood\u2019s American Gothic. <\/em>In the final section poet and subject seem to merge:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Meatyard looks down on us,<\/p>\n

And, in doing so, looks by chance<\/p>\n

Like me. Only the circumstance<\/p>\n

Of death, it seems to me, sets us<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Apart. He has that doubtful look<\/p>\n

I cast upon my own image<\/p>\n

Whenever I\u2019m stopped on a ridge<\/p>\n

On my own, knowing what it took<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To get there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cree\u2019s \u2018Meatyard Triptych\u2019 is beautifully sustained but challenging. It is the most interesting consideration of the nature of \u2018art and reality\u2019 that I have read since the early work of Charles Tomlinson.<\/p>\n

Alongside poems that highlight Cree\u2019s ability to write at length, Fruit<\/em>\u00a0 also contains a selection of shorter poems, each of which seems sui generis<\/em>, as if the poet were determined to constantly renew his practice. In \u2018Flat Calm\u2019 he reinvents the traditional \u2018ubi sunt\u2019 theme: \u2018The haberdashers, milliners and mercers \/ are vanished like the nap beneath their hands\u2019. \u2018Wardrobes\u2019 captures the actuality of an object and illustrates the proposition that sometimes we have to adapt our lives to our furniture. \u2018Blind Man\u2019s Buff\u2019 is a short but moving poem about some young people who are \u2018attractive, bright, and utterly broken\u2019. Terry Cree\u2019s Fruit <\/em>is a stunning debut from a poet who knows that, ultimately, there are no answers to the big questions and that words are all we have: \u2018Words that meant nothing \/ Then and nothing much \/ now.\u2018 However, in this poet\u2019s hands they have a music of their own and point towards depths beyond their burnished clarity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Order your copy of Maitreyabandhu: The Crumb Road from <\/em>Bloodaxe Books<\/a> here<\/a><\/p>\n

Order your copy of Terry Cree: Fruit: <\/em>Two Rivers here<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Crumb Road is a debut collection from Maitreyabandhu, a Buddhist priest who was born Ian Johnson in 1961. The contemplative tone of his prefatory lyric, \u2018This\u2019, hints at the journey he has made: There\u2019s no law against my listening to this thrush behind the barn, the song so loud it echoes like a bell, […]<\/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-7411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7411","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=7411"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23702,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7411\/revisions\/23702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}