This is a resend, since I'm told the first version wasn't sufficiently house-trained,
and transgressed the bounds of email legibility . . .

(If you got it legibly already, consider me grovelling.)

As a matter of interest, the author of the review, Alex Davis, has taken over the
organization of the Cork Conference for New and Experimental Poetry, which is
approaching it's third occurrence. Next April is the likely date, I gather, but anyone
interested should contact Alex directly for details. (Email: [log in to unmask])


***

Apologies for blaring my own trumpet a bit loudly but, for anyone who might be
interested, here's a review of my chapbook Syzygy which just appeared in The
Irish Review (once more published by Cork University Press).

There's an added satisfaction in this, since the redoubtable Edna Longley has long
been bouncer at this particular door, admitting only those wearing a button
reading "War Poet of Northern Ireland", or genuflecting to the Heaney shrine
tastefully placed just at the entrance. She's still on the editorial board, but it seems
her veto's gone.

(For her deeply pondered and astonishingly subtle view of "traditions of Irish
modernisms other than the Yeats line" see Keith Tuma's note at http://
wings.buffalo.edu/epc/documents/anglo.html)

Incidentally, I believe the book is also available through Peter Riley's distribution
service in England. (Email: [log in to unmask])

***

Purity and Dirt

Alex Davis


Trevor Joyce, Syzygy. Bray: Wild Honey Press, 1998, distributed by Hardpressed
Poetry, 37 Grosvenor Court, Templeville Rd., Templeogue, Dublin 6W, (Phone
(353) 21 456 3112). Ir £3.50.

One useful point of entry into Trevor Joyce¹s challenging new sequence, Syzygy, is
"Chimera," from his 1995 collection stone floods. The polyphonic "Chimaera"
conjoins dialogically Richard Lovelace¹s self-satisfied, urbane wit, Aloysius
Bertrand¹s apocalyptic forebodings of the levelling of all bounds, and the Book of
Lieh Tze¹s acceptance of the provisionality of limits in nature, the fragility of the
ego and the interconnected diversity of the phenomenal world. While Lovelace¹s
verbal ingenuity and Bertrand¹s nausea are aspects of Joyce¹s writing from
Pentahedron (1972) on, it is the concerns of the Book of Lieh Tze which chime
most fully with those of his recent poetry, including Syzygy. Furthermore, the
complex structure of the two interlaced parts of Syzygy recalls even as it excels the
earlier poem¹s utilisation of the Japanese renga form, the latter employing, in the
words of Joyce¹s note to the poem, "systematic ambiguity to chain together a series
of brief stanzas every one of which hinges both forward and backward." In the
case of Syzygy, systematic ambiguity derives, not from a literary precedent, but
from the method of composition described in Joyce¹s annotations to the sequence.
In brief, the "palindromic net," as Joyce felicitously terms it, is achieved by means
of a base text, now fossilised in the second part of the sequence, that dictates the
opening and closing segments of each of the twelve units or "cells" of part I. Once
those cells are complete, their material, mediated through the controlling
procedures, determines the remainder of part II. Space prevents a more elaborate
exposition of the text¹s structure: the interested reader can consult Joyce¹s notes for
a detailed commentary. Of greater importance, I feel, are the implications of this
method of composition for our response to and evaluation of this text. Its formal
discipline lies in the manner in which the originating lines prescribe, to an extent,
the remainder of the text.

This approach, of course, is not unique to Joyce: John Cage¹s famous mesostic texts,
his "writing through" of others¹ works, are generated in a not unrelated
fashion to Syzygy. Even in the context of recent Irish poetry such avant-gardism
finds a few--though only a few--parallels: Randolph Healy¹s Flame (1997), also
published by Wild Honey Press, is likewise constructed using chance procedures.
In Joyce¹s case, the partially prescripted nature of the sequence is at one with
Joyce¹s recurrent preoccupation, from Pentahedron to stone floods, with bounds,
order and, crucially, with their breakdown and transgression. For, as Joyce¹s notes
confess, the symmetry of the sequence is not absolute, there is a tiny flaw in the
crystalline structure; and it is precisely this alloyment that brings the formal
qualities of Syzygy into alignment with its thematic concern: the relationship
between conceptual order and the particularity of the phenomenal world. In a
manner reminiscent of Adorno, the text views the former as necessary and
inescapable, but stifling and ineluctably involved with other, harsher kinds of
domination:

when the thieving
that was well advanced faltered
the imperial presence surveyed
the ordered territories
and declared in measured words
nothing there is savage any more
intelligence and griefs are tamed
rage is reduced in parks
only perhaps along the furthest bounds
may be some dirt a little ghost
and these are even as we speak contained
in three quart jugs

In these lines, Joyce brings together, with strikingly evocative concision, colonial
subjugation of land (in China and Ireland) through force and cartography; a
suppressive coercion that is closely bound up with human discourse, the
"measured words" "we speak." Such subjection involves rejection, of the "dirt"
or debris that refuses to conform to the purifying new order. As Joyce
acknowledges, this dimension of the poem draws on the ideas of Mary Douglas,
whose Purity and Danger atomises the need purity has to reduce that which it
spurns to the non-threatening condition of rubbish, whether that be conceptual or
human detritus.

Along related lines, a chief preoccupation of the poem is the manner in which
lived experiential time is abstracted to clock time, the latter marshalling the
former into "garrisons brief zones / of time and influence":

until the fixed mesh abstracts
unerringly each hour
with all its clamouring brood
jerking routinely to the tune

Yet the "clamouring" of reality resists the taxonomic mesh due to its messy
particularity, just as one¹s lifeworld defies total systematisation. Joyce conveys the
resistance of dirt, in Douglas¹s extended sense, to purification through densely
punning lines, the ambiguities of which themselves emphasise the fluidity of a
supposedly classified, demarcated and regimented world:

noise of concerns sequestered
ultimately will get out
states sundered bleed
surely each to each
by breaking bounds ghosts
traffic through the empty squares

Indeed, the very title word of Joyce¹s text is ambivalent, trafficking between two
senses. Among its meanings, syzygy, in astronomy, can signify either the
conjunction or opposition of two heavenly bodies. The strength of this
remarkable poem lies in its syzygetic nature; its close correlation of form to a
content preoccupied with the opposition that matter, of various kinds, puts up to
structuration. (That the word, in prosody, further denotes the admixture of two
feet in one metre is also of relevance to the intertwined patterning of the poem¹s
two parts.) In these respects, while Syzygy clearly grows out of Joyce¹s last
collection, stone floods, it breaks new ground in the compelling intricacy and
moving urgency of its formalism.



**************************************************************************
Trevor Joyce
Apple Cork IS&T
Phone : +353-21-284405
EMail : [log in to unmask]
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**************************************************************************
Trevor Joyce
Apple Cork IS&T
Phone : +353-21-284405
EMail : [log in to unmask]
**************************************************************************



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