Minsk, by Lavinia Greenlaw

By David Harrolsson

High Summer Weir

Still the day is its own machine and still

you will not speak of it, raise or let fall.

‘All life’s grandeur’ is light on water. So.

Admit now what does not pass and must move on

while we are all still here, under the sun.

This must be one of the most perfect of contemporary English lyrics.

The language is direct: ‘grandeur’ (line3) is the only polysyllabic, ‘literary’ term used, and that is a quote; the imagery is always wholly accessible.

Five lines of two rhyming couplets (consonance), joined together by a middle, a hinge, the ‘tenor’ within the quartet (apologies to Leavis). Each first line of six iambics is a syncopation upon the basic structure of the iambic pentameter, but with the rhythm interrupted: ‘Still…’, ‘…own…’, and extended: ‘… and still’, itself forming a bookending of the line that emphasises denotation as well as time signature.

Note also the ‘raise and let fall’ (line 2) where iambic progression in interrupted in order to embody meaning. There is a masterly use of sound’s relation to syntax also, note how the o of ‘not’, the negative (line2), is ameliorated to allow a mellowing, placatory a of ‘fall’ (ibid). The general reading of the line is affected by this: the subject cannot be dispensed with, but is predicated, and thereby implicated.

The image of the day as a machine is particularly expressive: the grammar a working organism; one gets the feeling of language itself speaking in this lyric.

Note ‘own’ (line1) is particular, how the term asserts the day’s uniqueness, each day is an identification in our experience, they each have their own inter-reacting particulars, as well as being part of a greater whole; each is inter-reacting as well as interacting.

And we have an epiphany; the continual flux of light on water becomes an embodiment of, for example, the play of neurones across synaptic pathways that configure and reconfigure our sense of self, of place, of time.

Is there a sense of permanence detectable within change?

Note, also, the setting here: it ties it in very neatly with the environment of section 1 of the book: the stultifying experience of a specific time and place, in this case rural Essex, for which read Dickens’ Essex fens overlaid with a London street map’s outermost edges. Essex as London’s suburban suburbia; transient, maybe, but for the time being very much a presence.  Maybe, also, embodying some saving grace. It is the landscape of a sense of ‘home’, of ‘family’… not so much asserted, as discovered here. And hence the opening quotation: ‘your homecoming will be my homecoming’: e e cummings.

There is much more to be discovered in the poem, but space is against me.

The tripartite structure of the poem mirrors the book. Both ‘wings’ shimmer with colours from beyond the book: Part 1 draws from the surprisingly good novel, ‘Mary George of Allnorthover’, a greatly fictionalised autobiography: it is a story that grows out of the landscape and its inhabitants. Similarly, Part 3 of ‘Minsk’ draws colour from the following book of writings with the saturated colours of Gary Fabian Miller, in ‘Thoughts of a Night Sea’.

Each ‘wing’ also has two sections. In Part 1’s second part ‘A Strange Barn’, the poems, although occasioned by new buildings/structures at London Zoo, are also points of cultural history. To my mind the poems bring to mind the wonderful exploding sheds of Cornelia Parker. Each ‘Strange Barn’ is structured by suspended clauses, phrases, much as Parker’s structures are; and similarly around an illuminating, but also obscured centre. 

The second section of Part 3 wonderfully evocative explorations of the Baltic experience, of pan-european homelands.

The central section of ‘Minsk’ explores ‘all life’s grandeur’, sometimes pejoratively (‘The Flight of Geryon’), at others mysteriously, but always questioning: assumption, prejudice, historical and cultural legitimacies The theme of home and homecoming is taken apart in the title poem ‘Minsk’, itself a take on an old anecdote; a sudden jolt out of the ordinary: where is home, when blood relatives are scattered worldwide through times and events, and you far from your birthplace? The struggle is to identify with ‘wherever I hang my hat’ without losing relevance, or be lost to the lightness of being. 

I have imposed a winged structure on the book; it would be just as valid to read the book as a progression through three distinct phases, or as symphonic. What is relevant is the sense of change, development, transmutation one discovers in the book.