Paul Brookes
Paul Brookes
As we have shrunk the universe through the reach of our knowledge and technology, what was once strange is now commonplace, while what was once common - an awed or fearful mystery of what lies underground, beyond the horizon, or just around the corner - has all but vanished.
A key task for the poet is to restore our sense of mystery, our feeling for the world’s essential peculiarity. His or her job is, we might say, to expose the illusion of familiarity. For in truth, familiarity is a veneer - a superficial appearance of orderliness that deceives us into thinking all is explained and understood, that we need not look further or deeper. This is both a convenience and a defence: a convenience because we must function effectively in our environment despite limited information; and a defence because the unknown threatens us precisely with a loss of functioning, an incapacity to control the immensity of the world that lies beyond our grasp.
And yet there is a thrill to be had from peering now and again into the teeming and unmanageable weirdness of the universe. This thrill is in large part what we seek from poetry. The poet may help us find it in various ways, whether by disrupting the way language normally attaches to things, or by disrupting the world itself through surreal flights of fancy. Arguably, however, the most effective and most direct method is the one used in this collection to great effect: that is, simply to look intently and unblinkingly at things until they reveal themselves in their own particularity and otherness.
What an interesting choice, therefore, to capture this otherness exclusively using the Shakespearean sonnet, a form both pleasingly familiar and carefully ordered, as well as one linked inseparably to a writer renowned for his acute understanding of the human character.
At first blush this might look like an attempt to tame the otherness of the poetic object, to domesticate it by constraining it to live within our own rules and boundaries. But the intent is evidently the opposite: the poet is bringing the object into an artificial, man-made space precisely to facilitate a close encounter with its oddity. Or perhaps we might think equally of the sonnet as a craft or vehicle fitted out to transport the reader comfortably into unfamiliar territory, the better to observe the bizarre creatures that live there. A literary glass-bottomed boat, if you will.
Crucially, the author asserts with the title that his subject matter is othernesses, plural. This seems right: to talk in the singular would risk reducing ‘otherness’ to a feeling; something inside us, a common response to a manifold set of objects. What these poems give us are the things themselves, irreducibly multifarious and often quite alien. Nothing here is romanticised or presented in soft-focus: the poet uses his words in high-definition to show us the world in all its myriad strangeness.
Appropriate then to find the collection bookended by insects and arachnids, those inside-out creatures with their external skeletons, their obscure and complex behaviours, and their improbable metamorphoses.
What could be more familiar than a housefly or an aphid (and more rarely immortalised in poetry)? Yet these poems show us how little thought we give to the intricacies of the tiny lives going on around us.
What of our own lives? Amongst all that invertebrate oddity, right in the heart of the work, the poet reveals to us the othernesses of the human world. Trying to navigate the twists and turns of society and family, we can at times be strangers to each other and to ourselves. This can manifest as a sense of alienation or estrangement, but the poet shows us how we might use it to re-examine ourselves, our relationships with the world and each other.
As he says in Is Night, “We need strangeness, newness to be alive.”
A key task for the poet is to restore our sense of mystery, our feeling for the world’s essential peculiarity. His or her job is, we might say, to expose the illusion of familiarity. For in truth, familiarity is a veneer - a superficial appearance of orderliness that deceives us into thinking all is explained and understood, that we need not look further or deeper. This is both a convenience and a defence: a convenience because we must function effectively in our environment despite limited information; and a defence because the unknown threatens us precisely with a loss of functioning, an incapacity to control the immensity of the world that lies beyond our grasp.
And yet there is a thrill to be had from peering now and again into the teeming and unmanageable weirdness of the universe. This thrill is in large part what we seek from poetry. The poet may help us find it in various ways, whether by disrupting the way language normally attaches to things, or by disrupting the world itself through surreal flights of fancy. Arguably, however, the most effective and most direct method is the one used in this collection to great effect: that is, simply to look intently and unblinkingly at things until they reveal themselves in their own particularity and otherness.
What an interesting choice, therefore, to capture this otherness exclusively using the Shakespearean sonnet, a form both pleasingly familiar and carefully ordered, as well as one linked inseparably to a writer renowned for his acute understanding of the human character.
At first blush this might look like an attempt to tame the otherness of the poetic object, to domesticate it by constraining it to live within our own rules and boundaries. But the intent is evidently the opposite: the poet is bringing the object into an artificial, man-made space precisely to facilitate a close encounter with its oddity. Or perhaps we might think equally of the sonnet as a craft or vehicle fitted out to transport the reader comfortably into unfamiliar territory, the better to observe the bizarre creatures that live there. A literary glass-bottomed boat, if you will.
Crucially, the author asserts with the title that his subject matter is othernesses, plural. This seems right: to talk in the singular would risk reducing ‘otherness’ to a feeling; something inside us, a common response to a manifold set of objects. What these poems give us are the things themselves, irreducibly multifarious and often quite alien. Nothing here is romanticised or presented in soft-focus: the poet uses his words in high-definition to show us the world in all its myriad strangeness.
Appropriate then to find the collection bookended by insects and arachnids, those inside-out creatures with their external skeletons, their obscure and complex behaviours, and their improbable metamorphoses.
What could be more familiar than a housefly or an aphid (and more rarely immortalised in poetry)? Yet these poems show us how little thought we give to the intricacies of the tiny lives going on around us.
What of our own lives? Amongst all that invertebrate oddity, right in the heart of the work, the poet reveals to us the othernesses of the human world. Trying to navigate the twists and turns of society and family, we can at times be strangers to each other and to ourselves. This can manifest as a sense of alienation or estrangement, but the poet shows us how we might use it to re-examine ourselves, our relationships with the world and each other.
As he says in Is Night, “We need strangeness, newness to be alive.”
