Dear Alison and Randolph
May I suggest that the following comment by Martin J. Walker (itself a prose
poem) on my snapshot "Diableries" be placed after the poem. Its marvelous
wit is a beautiful fun enhancement of what is a mere short lyric.
H. Zinnes's latest poem is marked by her usual attention to an ease
and
gently insistent quality of phrase bordering on the laconically
vernacular,
bearing simultaneously the clear signs of what an earlier age might
have
denoted sibylline insight. In its lst momentous appearance in an
email,
Zinnes characterized it as "a little verse, nothing more"; this is a
chartacteristic evasion, of course: our text is rich in sibilant
echoes,
premonitions, and surrealistic conflations, such as the charming one
that
has "coyotes wail" or "no rifle in the house" in a distinctly
Arthurian or
Brythonic context, a touch of humour redolent of this writer's wry
perspective
on her material (see also "wobble" in the first line!). To meet a
Steinian
pioneer, as it were, in such a haunted elfin world -- but one
frequented by
the mythical wild boar -- is to sense with the shock of recognition
the
bloody traces of "nature red in tooth and claw." Brythonic or
Arthurian
it is, however, to the wonderment of the poem's alleged recipient,
learned as
he is rumoured to be in the "matere of Britayne": with
considerable aplomb
this epic cum lyric jewel adumbrates the story of Yvain, the
"chevalier au
lion" of Chretien's tale who ends up mating with the "mistress of
the beasts"
(as Marija Gimbutas would have it). Most striking points of
resemblance
are the lines indicating the presence of birdsong while "the wind
does not
blow" and "the rain does not fall," reminiscent of the moment after
the
thunderstorm at the Lady Laudine's fountain provoked by the hero's
sprinkling of boiling spring water onto a miraculous stone, when the
most
marvellously sweet chorus of infinitely varied birdsong bursts forth.
No
wonder that for a later piously Christianized age this might have
appeared as "diableries", in another touch of Zinnes's inimitably
puckish humour, though she typically disclaims responsibility for this
term by attributing it to the author of the mail to which hers is said
to have been a response -- (this
personage's existence is left by the author [?] of these lines to
the gentle
reader's judgment, if such be forthcoming.) The following reference
to
"thunder" and "lightning" that "passes" confirms this impression.
It does
indeed pass. The next lines refer in a mischievously "western"
manner to
"happenstance" before seguing into walking deer and wailing coyotes
and,
after the apt query, "What will you do when the boars come" (bridging
times and cultures) the mocking "There is no rifle in the house."
Here we
are back in the present-day US, and the poet continues with her
trade-mark
"Ah" (no other poet manipulates this expostulation more cunningly) to
conclude with the timeless yearning of "you will listen to the birds'
song"
near " a river at my garden's end," a phrase that pregnantly recalls
both "where the rainbow ends" and "journey''s end," the river being
both
illusory (thus the quotes) and that stream which is ferried o'er by
Charon or
crossed by means of a bridge in Celtic folklore and "at the end" of
our
Paradise Garden. This poet's amertume is always tempered by the
douceur of nostalgia.
Best
Harriet
