I've been reading--and learning from--three new texts published by Peter Hughes's Oystercatcher Press: Kelvin Corcoran's _What Hit Them_ , Peyer Riley's _Best at Night Alone_ , and Hughes's own work _The Sardine Tree_ .They are highly distinct from one another, yet share some important commonalities, such as what Riley calls "the company of song." Specific song titles--"Moon of Alabama," "Take Me Home, Country Roads," "This Little Light of Mine," "Here Comes the Rain Again," and, most tellingly, "Ain't Gonna Study War No More"--act as lamentation more than celebration, for these poetries are political in their antiwar campaigns and consequences. As imaged by children doing what they do (running, laughing, playing), a measure of hope emerges, especially in Riley's perspective ("Hope sleeps there, the quiet place"), less so in Hughes's, where "stars
steer us in sleep" and "we steer the earth with signs," "remembering Bobby Sands" and "the children [who] came a poor third" after "the word society was scorched" and after our gardens " were scorched."
Corcoran's perspective is announced in his title and the preceding implied words that go begging, "they never knew" in a work that ends fiercely:
Euclid head down in a vacuum
black snow falling bitter bread cast
in the actions of men who know
[what hit them.]
all too well.
As Corcoran's Acknowledgments indicate, _What Hit Them_ is a response to an art exhibition called "Geometries of Fear," an angle that even his cover image (a photograph by Hughes of a sunken boat) reflects in its triangularity. Interestingly, Riley's title, _Best at Night Alone_," echoes and inverts the line in his text that reads "Best alone at night," changing the emphasis from darkness to solitude; while _The Sardine Tree_ (Hughes) entitles the context of Miro's art:
_interviewer_:
_The Concise Dictionary of Surrealism_
calls you the "Sardine Tree" why
_Miro_:
I wonder
Just so.
What remains to be said of all three books is their preoccupation with visual art and its relationships to poetry: "The poets / dream of honour but hope / is self-propagating" (Riley); "If this is a poem about the death / of the one the many / there must have been children sleeping / in sweet abandonment" (Corcoran); "I gave the paintings very poetic names / because the only thing left to us / in the world then was poetry" (Hughes).
I hope I've whetted your appetite for Oystercatcher books. This is a press well worth watching.
What are _you_ reading?
Candice
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