Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 2. March 5 1979

Books — A Lung over your head

Books

A Lung over your head

Surrealism according to Edward B. Germain, is dedicated to the total recuperation of man's psychic forces from all asthetic, moral, political and social restraints. Surrealism is apparently socially disruptive because the artist's mental personality is originally determined by a failure in social adaptation. Nevertheless his whole effort is directed towards a reconciliation with society. Herbert Read, a member of the surrealist group in London, states that the classical standard represents the values of the upper classes not the 'standards of mankind'.

However these ideas are not reflected in the poetry itself. Far from the poems effecting some reconciliation with society the poems are often abstruse and pretentious. It appears from this anthology that when poets attempt to recuperate from asthetic, moral, political and social restraints they revert into a banal and thoroughly uninteresting type of verse. The aspirations of a movement are not always well reflected in its instruments, however this book brings together an unfortunately large number of thoroughly forgettable poems.

A few poems escaped from the otherwise intellectual, classical / voyeurism of the rest. 'The Wind Was There' by Bravig Imbs pictures the motion of a scene in a striking way. This poem has a rather transcendental mood the narrator in the poem, portraying a world of motion in a startling and direct manner.

Charles Henri Ford's poem "There's No Place to Sleep in This Bed, Tanguy', projects a powerful tone of uncertainty; the irrational has taken over yet the images are malevolently clear. For example in the first stanza:

The storks like elbows had a fit of falling She beat me over the head with a lung Somewhere a voice is calling Picasso And the lasso of love has the ghost of a chance

Ford's poem is like a dream — fantastic yet credible. It rings with horror and truth like a prophetic nightmare. The third and last stanzas are perfect examples of Ford's tightly wrought technique in this poem.

There's no place to sleep in this bed Tanguy The wires are cut that connect us with slumber And the number of day and the number of night is one!

By repeating the title the poet can affirm the hopelessness of Tanguy's situation. The 'wires' to peace have been cut and the poet inverts size from a grain of sand to a statue.

The last stanza finishes with a plaintive cry that is fascinating and cryptic:

You 've set traps for ancient dreams
Oh tame then and train them before they get caught
There's no place to to sleep in this bed, Tanguy
There are too many monuments of broken hearts

The best poems in this book are clear in that they do not resort to vacuous abstruseness behind a goldfish bowl or bloody torso. The best poems are paradoxical, certianly ambiguous but not nonsensical. They move the reader, they do not blather.

Robert Duncan and Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly) have fine poems in this anthology. Duncan's 'Eyesight!!' and Neruda's 'Walking Around' and 'Nothing but Death' are memborable.

Edward Germain's book fails because most of the anthology consists of indifferent poetry that does little to embellish the grandiose charter that he outlines in his introduction to this book.

Lyall Benjamin

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