Triptychs
There are just too many points of interest in this excellent collection — its varied epigraphs, its juxtaposition of the medieval and the modern. But mostly I found myself thinking about how the form of a triptych is used to such interesting effect.
The publication is structured in three parts. Each poem consists of three sections. Each section consists of three three-line stanzas. But then there’s the middle part, ‘Threshold’, where the text is divided across two pages separated by white space. The poem makes clearest sense if read across the two pages, traversing the quietness at the centre. It’s like a triptych with a blank centre panel. Or, anticipating the Eliot epigraph, something:
heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Many triptychs are altar-pieces and hence religious in subject and message. Often closed for most of the year, they were opened for viewing in all their glory on feast days. Is there a parallel here? The central part is clearly key, but has a halting, almost tentative quality. It is flanked by formal constructs of colourful narrative. The first part draws on early historical sources. The instructional tone of ‘Margery Kempe’s Marriage’ echoes the role of the altar-piece:
she’d rather
eat muck from the gutter
than refresh the delight
she and her husband once took
in each other’s flesh.
The second part is more modern in its settings, but there’s underlying violence, medieval in its barbarity. ‘The Forest’ uses the victim’s resignation to horrific effect:
‘We just chose the losing side,’
one said, as his sometime neighbour
slipped the rope over his head.
The side panels of an altar triptych are often hinged, and there are many doors in this pamphlet. The door on which a resident of Chernobyl laid out his father, the door as a raft for migrants and — in the central ‘Threshold’ — a partly open garden door. Beyond it, we glimpse the garden where ‘come feast day / she’ll be dazzled’. But in order to accept the ‘invitation / to a world / becoming’ we must navigate the quiet of the blank space.