Stray arts, the title of a new poetry collection from Anthony Etherin, is a wee bow, the daintiest of fastenings, that we untie simply by running our eyes backwards and… yes, it’s a palindrome. Stray arts, whichever way you look at it. A taste of what is to come, of the mind-boggling complexities of form within the covers of this book. “Literary constraints”, as Etherin describes them, start with palindromes and anagrams, and then we have palindromes-by-word, palindromes-by-pairs, and the even more fiendish “aelindromes” that reverse letter-units of variable, pre-determined numerical value… And these conventions play counterpoint with the further constraints of traditional poetic forms, the sonnets and triads that Etherin constructs of them, displaying all the deftness and patience of a watchmaker.
If it sounds like an unmitigated labour of love, the results are something else. I open the book at a pair of sonnets in a section called Mirror, Image. The first (“We fall, as I demand glass end-locks”), addresses the camera obscura in its octave and the infinity mirror in the sestet, while its pair (“Robust rays, imitating streams afar”) is concerned with reflecting telescopes and reflections in water. These optical events, these diffractions and refractions and reflections, serve as metaphor for the reversals and obliques, the measured wavelengths, of the poems themselves. We can read their lines:
Again, do
tainted rivers move below –
identified and radiated well.
Seas mirror phases, aided in waves, so
stars sparkle – novae, radiating, swell…
plain, for what they are; or we can refer to our programme notes from the appendix, to discover that the two poems are not only sonnets, but one is a palindrome, letter by letter, one word by word, and the two, just because the poet’s life was not complicated enough, are anagrams of each other.
Elsewhere, I’m drawn to the Eureka Sonnets, one each for Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Jorge Luis Borges. Some of these are anagrams, others palindromes. Take the Anagram-Sonnet for Charles Darwin, which embraces quite ingeniously the life and work, from the opening line of “Slow Beagle, untouched variants afar…” through “O, vague ruts saw an atoll breed a finch” to the tour-de-force final couplet:
What brief?
A causal avenue’s long trod…
Life carves a law, but nature has no god.
The Borges poem, meanwhile, sets out from “The library, and the boundless forking paths”, threading its way via “the sharply blurred banditos’ sneak of night” and the “flared, sprung Labyrinth” to a close where “by half-sound, Borges’ thread, paths interlink”.
At this point I begin to realise that compiling this must have been not just a lot of fun, but immensely satisfying.
Within the limits (self-imposed, naturally) of this blog there is less than enough space to do justice to the width of what is on show here, to the sacred numbers and weapons of war, the agriculture, observatory, museum and laboratory. Interspersed are visual works where typography, complex geometries and pagan symbols are patterned in visual and concrete poetry. Throughout, invention is the crucible, and what rolls out is prototype machinery of ambitious, far-sighted linguistic adventure.
One of the briefest of the poems, each line anagrammatic, is this:
Permutations
Atoms erupt
in
mutant prose. I
turn a poem – its
matter is upon
me, to trap us in
utopian terms…
At
resumption,
I must open art,
or input a stem
torn up as time –
use important
permutations.
Permutations of the word ‘permutations’ could be a coda for the hermetic worlds within worlds of this collection. But there remain, unhidden, a number of ways this works. The sense of what the poem is actually saying, what it is about, dips in and out of enigma perhaps, but carries a posy in its hand when it surfaces. “Atoms erupt in mutant prose” is perfect for this blitzkrieg, this Belfast Confetti as the late Ciaran Carson wrote, that dislocates and resettles words and alphabets. I like too the unforced, accidental almost, musicality that comes of the reshuffling of the same vowels and consonants, line upon line. And what the poem does – which is not perhaps the same thing as what it sets out to do – is to carry its own drama: the word “Permutations” of the title is the wooden hut that is dismantled and reassembled as a boat, floated downriver, beached and rebuilt as a hut, as the words “permutations” in the last line. It is not the same hut, not the same word, that started out: the “permutations” of the final line has travelled and transmogrified. It cannot be the same again.
*
Anthony Etherin: Stray Arts (and Other Inventions). 148pp hbk. Penteract Press, 2019