From: Devin Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 24 April 2005 21:08:54 IST
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Pickard in Chicago Tribune

Dear All:

Just in time for May, there is a terrific review of Tom Pickard's The
Dark Months of May in today's Chicago Tribune (Sunday, April 24) by
Maureen McLane. See below.

If you are interested, the book is available through Small Press
Distribution or directly from Flood Editions:
http://www.floodeditions.com/new/pickard2.html

Best Wishes, Devin

------------------
POETRY
Tom Pickard navigates withering love, cultural history and an 18th
Century legend

By Maureen N. McLane. Maureen N. McLane teaches history and literature
at Harvard University and is the author of Romanticism and the Human
Sciences."

Published April 24, 2005

  The Dark Months of May
  By Tom Pickard
Flood Editions, 68 pages, $12.95 paper
As an anonymous 16th Century lyric attests, even early modern folk got
the blues:
Western wind, when will thou blow?
  The small rain down can rain.
  Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Tom Pickard, the roust-about English poet, writer and
documentary-maker, has his own blues: "marriage bust up/love's all
trussed up." Drawing on Anglo-Scottish balladry, with its songs of bad
love and anti-heroic exploits, his collection "The Dark Months of May"
links its lyric project to a long, rich vernacular tradition.
The book is divided into three parts: The first chronicles the
aftermath of an erotic smashup; the second consists of a series of
prose poems, titled "Fragments From an Archaeological Dig in
Gallowgate," set in the Gallowgate bus station in Newcastle, England;
and the third offers an appealing sequence of outlaw balladeering, an
excerpt from Pickard's libretto "The Ballad of Jamie Allan."

Hot sex, cruel love, barroom escapades, tender laments and horse
thievery fuel Pickard's lyrics. Yet if he is a troubadour charting
intense emotion and lives gone awry, he also possesses a probing
historical imagination, showing us in the Gallowgate poems the medieval
orchard lying many layers below the 20th Century bus stop.

In the first section of the book, the poet anchors his calls, cries and
ruminations in the landscape, the fierce, windblown area called Fiend's
Fell in the North Pennine Hills on the English-Scottish border. In
deft, delicate lines he charts the bleakness of inner and outer
weather. Pickard is a wizard of wind, invoking his ex's
"icy/inquisitorial winds," wondering where to go/where the wind/blow,"
noting how "a breeze of rowan lifts/pale curtains of cloud/where hawks
stake a claim/to a drifter's sky." Pickard's work bespeaks a
watercolorist's and a naturalist's eye as much as it does a bawdy heart
and a preternaturally sensitive ear. This windswept terrain abounds in
creaturely life. Crab apple, hawthorn and gorse appear, as does virtual
aviary: finches, pheasants, swallows, herons, larks, eagles, hawks and
other "feathered predators."
Calling, cursing, singing, naming: Pickard takes up the oldest lyric
tasks. In this he resembles his admired elder (whom he helped to bring
out of retirement in the 1960s), the great, cranky Northumbrian poet
Basil Bunting, whose explosive poems also married high lyric artistry
with earthy sensuality and a percussive sonic power. Pickard is also
known for his affinity with American poets devoted to colloquially
vibrant work: Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, other members of the Black
Mountain School. Pickard's erotic lyrics have a terrific economy,
swiftness and obscene (and alas unquotable) directness, conjuring
remembered sex, shared blankets, beds, knives and regret:

go to her swallow,
  say I'm full of remorse
  when I see cloud stacks hawthorn
cushets in a Scots pine
  I see them for her

This is in many ways an emotionally naked and stark poetry; yet it is
also highly musical, patterned if not posed. The title poem, an
extended lyric sequence, ends in the following three-line coda: "I hate
that dawn thrush/frothing bitter lullabies/in hawthorn blossom." The
beauty of such lines contends with and complicates the feeling. A
ferocious hostility appears, countered by the doleful, unanswered
appeal of the abandoned: "do you think of me?" The poems come close at
times to wounds; in a very few cases they veer perilously close to
banal sad-sackery. A funny, dopey, sad, harsh clumsiness emerges in "I
Spit on My Need When I Need You": "dawn, break on her head/like a
rotten egg."

Pickard's emotion is extreme but his means usually delicate (the broad
comedy of some poems and titles notwithstanding). The rawness of
feeling is everywhere tempered by his carefully sounding ear: "where
larks lie low/other hunters hang/the last/lit air." An intricate
musical minimalism governs the bawdy, regulates bathos, breathes
freshness into most every line:
a tift rattles grass,
  tuft after tuft,
  and writhes on--
  a wind within a wind
Maybe it's an indication of the other things I've been reading, but I
found such spiky but unarmored compressed poems a tremendous shot in
the arm: They pack the punch the best pop songs do. This is no
accident, since Pickard is a radical democrat, with a long record of
writing political as well as erotic verse; here he draws artfully on
popular song tradition and its motifs (thus balladry).
For an American reader, part of the pleasure here arises from Pickard's
forays into northern dialect, and occasionally into Scots (as with
"cushets" above, referring to a wood pigeon or ringdove). This lexical
range and various slangy turns transform his snazzy vernacular into
something richly vulgar and strange: "god I'm easy, a pushover/for
anyone with wine, a spliff/a condom in her bag."

The Gallowgate sequence shows another aspect of Pickard, a keen and
sympathetic social analyst of the urban waystation, a recorder of a
battered material and cultural history, a chronicler of the many
travelers who have passed through Newcastle and by extension, Britain.
Pickard sets the scene thus:

"A derelict World War II air-raid shelter where a homeless man sleeps.
Early twentieth-century bus station. Nineteenth-century tannery and
lead works, medieval foundations. Travellers with heavy luggage. Some
are getting out or passing through."
Enacting his own city archeology, Pickard takes us "[d]own to the
medieval site" to the time when "it was just a green field, allotments,
gardens, orchards." He crosscuts such visions with "one lone African
guy with a suitcase sitting in the shelter," a view of the Victorian
leadworks and the 12th Century city wall, fragments of conversation and
leave-taking in the bus station, a shared cigarette break. If the first
part of the book offers a kind of erotic retracking, this sequence of
"sondages," or archeological surveys, suggests another kind of poetic
tracking, a closely observed, imaginative investigation into local
urban history, its ruins, remnants and contemporary resonances.

Together with the excerpts from "The Ballad of Jamie Allan," Pickard
pursues in several registers the implications of his epigraph from
Henry David Thoreau: "My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find
the path again." Whether charting the course of blighted love, digging
into Newcastle, or following the tracks of Jamie Allan, an 18th Century
gypsy musician and horse thief, Pickard lays down new routes and finds
a path even as he commemorates the wayward, the unheralded, the
untrackable:
a writing is a trail of evidence
  tailor made for trial . . .
  His poems are beautiful contraptions:
  making maps
  between synapses
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune


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