Thoughts on ‘Oils,’ by Stephen Sexton

I don’t want this to be a classroom thing. It is difficult to write about poetry sometimes without it turning out that way. Cracking open the highlighters – road-safety yellow, nu-raver pink – and finding key words in each line, mulling over their meaning. Yet, after you’ve maybe learnt how to appreciate poetry, this is often how you’re taught to appreciate it. To break it down, dissect and deconstruct it – climb inside the clockwork and analyse just exactly how each phrase, each pairing, each couplet – rhyming or not – beguiles the time.

Which is fair enough, and certainly has its uses.

But, as Stephen Sexton hints at in ‘An English Teacher Leaves the Room,’ the focus on isolated incidents can also be reductive, can lead either to lost or oversimplified meanings. Can lead, indeed, to a search for a clear or direct conclusion where perhaps there simply isn’t one.

Through the flux, then, as H. Miller once mentioned, is how I’ll come at this instead. The constant ambiguity of a life lived in pursuit.

At its base, this collection is concerned with what a lot of poetry (indeed, a lot of art) seems to be concerned with – mourning and longing, the missed chances of the past and the possibilities of the future. And yet it is about this with a surety, a tactility, which anchors these feelings, for the most part, in the reader’s present, even as they spill out over the sides.

Indeed, the reason I don’t want to resort to academic tactics – and am taking a rather wanky route around it, in fact – is because of the remarkable wholeness and heft of these poems. Is because, despite certain inferences passing over my head, I still felt the presence of what was inferred, the evocative ability of the poet’s craft at work.

I don’t intend for this to sound pretentious – though, again, it can be difficult to discuss poetry, especially at any kind of length, without falling into that trap – and I definitely don’t want to put off prospective readers by giving the impression that this collection is pretentious; though it is full of pretence, allusion and ekphrasis, it doesn’t beat you round the head with it, or exclude, or talk down to you, and nor does it show off for the sake of showing off.

Rather, what I want to convey is this – that Oils is a tremendously academic, intellectual, crafted work, but I don’t believe it requires you to be an intellectual, academic craftsman to take it apart and put it back together. It is not, in other words, poetry that speaks only to other capital P Poets. It exists in uncertainty, in unanswered questions, in the commonplace passivity of life, as much as it exists in communion with old myths and old masters.

There are, of course, many lines that may give you pause, have you reaching for references, but it is a testament to Sexton that the context of each poem in its fullness makes you really want to know, to try and fill the gap, though the poems themselves sometimes choke with a sense of the impossibility of ever quite doing so. He makes you complicit in his longing, in his own, often frustrated, search for meaning, as these poems may become, over time, complicit in yours.

And, of course, there are many lines worth breaking out the highlighters – Ghostbusters green and Breaking Bad blue – for. Such as this, from ‘John’s HiFi’:

The bass thumps like a sperm whale’s heart.

But this needn’t be a classroom thing. I don’t want it to be, is the point, and I don’t want you to think it has to be, to think any good poetry has to be; even poetry so clearly artful as that found in Oils.

I read the first half of this collection instead in Köln-Bonn airport, overlooking the runway. That felt right. These poems root you in the business of reading them, whilst they promise and/or threaten at all times to transport you somewhere else. They are written on the cusp and in the midst and in the aftermath. Moment to moment, just as we live. 

Charcoal

last                   

                                bare                      tree

   of

      spring,               it                 seems

          like,              in             that

           motorway-         adjacent    

              field;  its  scrawny               limbs

                  upreaching,                   in

                    echo   of                  a

                   clutching         bunch

                    of          cave-

                    wall dancers,

                  which    a

                distantly

              ancestral

            twig, perhaps,

           was once employed  to draw. 

From Hay-on-Wye (three poems)

That hill there in

the distance

with its tonsured

top-point

low on trees

maybe once was

home to forts

and war

though now stands

peaceful

people-free.

***

Orchard, like a

host of Van Gogh

peach tree

prints

remaindered

in a warehouse

waiting

for somebody

for some somebodies

to come with practised

hands to pick their

fruit.

***

riding shotgun with

a biro and

a notebook –

making spirographing

seizmographing

lines –

if I could drive

I

might have found

these places

sooner

but riding shotgun

with a biro

suits me fine

To Hay-on-Wye (four poems)

Brecon on a blue day

with greens green

and fields brown and tilled

and tanning

lazily awaiting

later harvest

when benefits of this weather

as with memory

will ripen

into sustenance to

see you through whatever

cold may lie ahead.

***

What if Van Gogh

had been waylaid

by Wales instead

of lingering in

London?

Would he have

found happiness in his

colours in

his art

before the madness

was too strong?

***

The smell of the

concrete, alive in

the rain, the

Brit-summer

soundtrack,

the green, wet

refrain.

***

Maybe this is poets’

country;

the Beacons’ shade,

the borderlands;

blood/brain barrier of

landscape; animal &

scientific both; body’s

inner rivers, & edging

verdance of the mind.   

I don't do much but I do this

People have contained

their tempers well

when confronted

with my stubborn

lazy little dreams of

I don’t know

being renowned

or at least a touch

more widely-read

than currently

of being a poet

is what I guess

you’d call it

and holding like the nearly-

drowned to flotsam

that is believing words

put down in such a

careful way on

paper matter and

whilst I don’t

look as though

I have much to

do with the world

that turns beyond

my bedroom walls and

windows

it is at present

large and teeming

with I guess

you’d say its

soul and all

accoutrements implied

by that small syllable

inside my stubborn lazy

little head

and the people

who contain their tempers

when confronted with

the contradictions I embody

they are what I mean most fully

when that small syllable is

said.

nightingales

No nightingales find me here,

No shadows fall, because,

quite simply,

No light shines

and I sit,

undefined,

and shapeless, even,

but strong and

given to stronger

words and dreams of

the kind they once

built empires over,

and on top of, and,

perhaps - though

I can think of no

examples now -

beneath,

those dreams like some

overhanging marble temple

roof,

Acropolis,

before those marbles

got waylaid or

calmly liberated

someplace else in

which they find

no more praise

than can exist within

the stapled glossy guide

of some museum

or other

and I sit in the

dark and the silence

and smile, and

try to tally the number of

those before me who've done the same

and held the same thoughts and

sought the same

night-bird song,

before I give

that up and

just plain enjoy the

moment, and accept

beyond those further

calculations

that it is mine alone,

and claim it, eagerly,

just by fitting it in

Sunday-night-best words.