I min serie om åttiotalister hade jag planerat att läsa Sarah Howes debutbok Loop of Jade i vecka 6. Hon är utvald tack vare nomineringarna till Forward Prize för bästa debutsamling och till det ansedda TS Eliot Prize. Boken var favorittippad till det förstnämnda priset, medan jag trodde att någon av de rutinerade konkurrenterna skulle tilldelas TS Eliot Prize. Gissa hur det gick?!
Mona Arshi fick Forward Prize bland debutanterna, inte Sarah Howe - som istället skrällde och erhöll det prestigefyllda TS Eliot Prize. Och jag har läst boken den här veckan. Jag måste nog hålla med recensenten i The Guardian, boken har en del svackor - eller ska jag säga överarbetade texter.
***
Pythagoras's curtain (first part), by Sarah Howe (f. 1983)
(from Loop of jade. London : Chatto & Windus, 2015.)
Nightly trapped in the nearly
invisible sweet hibiscus,
cicadas somehow never seen
cadenza the acousmatic dusk.
Concealed strings, their chitinous
glissandi, stir up every treeless
gap. Iambs crisped, adrift from source -
the chanting of a lost Pythagoras.
...
***
Så här beskrivs hon i författarporträttet hos Poetry International:
"Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her poetry is precisely painted and aesthetically striking, often grappling with, and delighting in, problems of cultural identity and representation."
Skillnader i temperament beskrivs i den korta dikten "Frenzied".
Frenzied, by Sarah Howe
(from Loop of jade. London : Chatto & Windus, 2015.)
Maybe holding back
is just another kind
of need. I am a blueplum in the half-light.
You are a tiger who
eats his own paws.
The day we married
all the trees trembled
as if they were mad –
be kind to me, you said.
***
För ovanlighetens skull hade jag nog alltför höga förväntningar på den här omskrivna boken. Visst, jag kan se och förstå att Sarah Howe är en författare med potential men läsningen lämnade körsbärshinken halvfylld. Mest gillade jag den här dikten . . .
Woman in the garden, by Sarah Howe
(from Loop of jade. London : Chatto & Windus, 2015.)
after Bonnard
What you see on entering a room –
the red-checked
blouse, burning
on a chairframe in the attic crook,
will last a lifetime.
She smiles to see her slim form continue
in the sunlit legs
of the stool, the lilac towel fallen across its face,
and she thinks –
wisteria peeling from the house one mid-April –
head cocked
as if marooned on the way to a word.
Mustard flashes
wildly up the wall: the mirror
is a locked garden
and sometimes she visits that country.
Through its keyhole
the stool in miniature
wades a cobalt sea, or some accurate idea of sea –
a greybird
with salmon feet
engaged in telling things new
a song veined
with rust from the throat.
She wants someone who will teach her the names
of trees
their alien natures: the mimosa’s trembling
yellow and the ornate
mainmast of the ash. The only thing she ever
longed for
was an enamel bath, the running water
tinged
with cochineal, a window, somewhere
heightening the tone –
the bay at Cannes,
the mountains of the Esterel.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar