The Poem of another Poetics
[Variation]
After Wallace Stevens

I

Crystal-clear water in a glistening vase.
Yellow and Red roses.
White light in the room, like snow.
Fresh snow (it’s the end of winter)
softly falling on the invented place.
The afternoons are returning without sounds,
without secrets, without impatient faces
Round vase.
Porcelain painted with roses.
Yellow and red.
The water – unruffled emptiness.

II

And still the water,
the snow,
once were enough to compose
a new whiteness --
more necessary than the meaning of flowers
blooming inside the cool memory of happiness.
(Your ecstatic gaze
confirms that imagination
can lay bare the memory again and again).

III

The mind seeks to escape.
This thought
(the possibility of the specific metaphor)
has been exhausted.
The roses, the vase, did not exist.
They do not exist.
The words however
keep falling –
snowflakes of a real life
in the margins of the poem.
*********

In the foreword to this collection, Michael Longley discusses a recurring antithesis between presence and absence, that this collection “generates an obsessive imagery of whiteness and silence: the moon, snow, unmarked paper, bed sheets,” lines such as “ a white paradise / of all possibilities” and “white like snow in the room”. It is in this absence that the poet declares that “loves absence always wears the same face”, whether this refers to a lover, a beautiful women, the muse or poetry itself is not clear. Repeatedly, presence implies absence and vice versa.

Also, within these poems we are constantly aware of the surface of things/objects and, like in Sartre’s Nausea, there’s an existential angst, as he probes the difficulty in describing and explaining them. There is also a repeated reference to reality, based on the dedication, this refers to Wallace Stevens (Adagia) that “ The ultimate value is reality?” or as is stated by Simon Critchley in his book on Wallace Stevens - Things merely are (Philosophy in the poetry of Wallace Stevens) “poetry evokes the "mereness" of things. It is this experience that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality”. Through the lines we find that objects are transubstantiated by the poets inspiration to become possessions of the mind, added to this is an ambience that seems to pervade the poems with an erotic charge, lines such as “ Come let us lower the blinds/ let us lie on the white starched sheets” with the muse/lover either as a presence in the room or their absence creating the dilemma.

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/affirmation-selected-poems-19862006... ( )