{"id":300,"date":"2014-03-05T23:20:32","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=300"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:30:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:30:18","slug":"error-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=300","title":{"rendered":"Error: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Geoff Page,\u00a0The Canberra Times<\/em>, June 18 2011:<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Campbell (b.1980) is one of a group of highly talented young female poets associated with John Leonard Press in Melbourne. Her second book, Error, is a significant step forward from her first, Letters to the Tremulous Hand, which itself contained quite a few memorable poems.<\/p>\n

Like her fellow stable member LK Holt, Elizabeth Campbell also has an adventurous approach to language and an enthusiasm for myth. . . much of this new book, despite the presence of the impressive and highly metaphorical sequence \u2018A Mon Seul Desir\u2019, is firmly rooted in the real . . .<\/p>\n

The book concludes with a 15-page sequence. . . highly metaphorical, deeply involved with myth and with a love of pushing language to its limits. \u2018A Mon Seul Desir\u2019 is a meditation on the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestry sequence from the late Middle Ages in France. Where traditional commentaries have insisted on these works being a rejection of the five senses in favour of entering the spiritual realm. Campbell develops a more complex (and more persuasive) interpretation.<\/p>\n

In her hands, \u2018A Mon Seul Desir\u2019 becomes a free-ranging essay examining, albeit impressionistically, the force and the contradictions of love, the way it can simultaneously give and demand. In \u2018canso:vue\u2019, Campbell finishes with the clever enjambment: \u2018how I desire you\/\/ should love me\u2019. The language throughout varies from a sort of faux-medieval through to an almost slangy contemporary. . . In all, \u2018A Mon Seul Desir\u2019 is a well-balanced survey of love\u2019s pros and cons \u2013 and an impressively sustained piece of ekphrasis.<\/p>\n

Its title, Error, may not please Campbell\u2019s publicist but the book is certainly a fulfilment of the promise that many readers, including this reviewer, found in her first.<\/p>\n

From Martin Duwell,\u00a0Australian Poetry Review<\/a>, August 2011.<\/p>\n

Error is Elizabeth Campbell\u2019s second book and has at least this much in common with her first, the excellent Letter to the Tremulous Hand (2008), that each concludes with an extended set of poems devoted to a medieval mystery. In the first book, a ten poem sequence explores a host of issues \u2013 including poetic personality, the matter of copying, the act of entering imaginatively into the life of an historical personage \u2013 revolving around a medieval scribe\/copyist who has escaped the customary anonymity because his handwriting is marked by a distinctive tremor. This new book, Error, concludes with a fifteen poem sequence devoted to the famous sequence of late fifteenth century tapestries, The Lady and the Unicorn. As with the former sequence there is a two-page introduction to establish the context. The sequence (which may, irritatingly, not be complete or in the correct order) is usually seen as being made up of five tapestries devoted to each of the senses and a final one in which the Lady at the centre of each prepares to enter a tent on which is written A Mon Seul Desir (most likely to be taken to mean \u201cto my sole desire\u201d). The sequence is most commonly interpreted to represent the lady\u2019s gradual abandonment of the sensual world for the world of her true desire: philosophical and religious meditation. But it is an interpretation which is highly conjectural, doesn\u2019t seem to fit with anything known of its noveaux-riche sponsors, and, by managing to get the individual tapestries titled after the relevant sense and order them the way it has, it supports itself in a circular way. At any rate, Campbell says, pointedly, at the end of her introduction: \u201cI suspect all of this is more complex\u201d.
\nCampbell\u2019s sequence sees the tapestries as being about love \u2013 a complex phenomenon in any culture and at any time, but particularly elusive in the high medieval heraldic-allegorical tradition. And so she writes a poetic sequence about the different features of love, slotting in personal experience where it fits. The first poem, \u201cCanso: toucher\u201d, demonstrates this, but also the way in which \u201ctrue\u201d or \u201chigh\u201d or \u201ccourtly\u201d love is very much about identity and the way it is not only submerged in the loved-one but also reflected from the loved one:
\nI step off the round blue island
\ninto the red sea and break a leg.
\nSo you tend me
\nand I watch your face for clues
\nto what you stare into
\nso tenderly binding my leg:
\nwhat is this person
\nwho loves you?
\nThe Romance of the Rose of Guillame de Lorris, though two and a half centuries older than these tapestries, is probably the key text to these complicated issues of identity, but there is also the second act of Wagner\u2019s Tristan (based on Gottfried\u2019s poem which is more or less contemporaneous with the Romance), especially in the wonderful La Scala production where Waltraud Meier earnestly puzzles over words like \u201cyou, only, I, we, two\u201d (to quote Campbell\u2019s second poem) during the second act. \u201cLove\u201d, the final poem (in which the lady grows into a unicorn) says, is \u201choly envy\u201d, though the servant who holds the case for the lady\u2019s jewels tells her:
\nlove itself is allegory \u2013 its fever
\nand its lion all costumes
\nof the mythic unicorn: a secret tithe.
\nThese few glossed quotations will give some sense of what a difficult poem it is, and the difficulty of its central allegorical work of art is multiplied by the sequence\u2019s freedom to mix personal experience in with it. But, ultimately, this is not simply an interpretive sequence and it is all the more interesting for that reason. Perhaps its final position is that love desires to become love and searches in the loved-one not for another self but for love. The lady\u2019s tent is her inner self and, as the second poem says:
\nMyth we reject
\nturns inward \u2013 the selfless lover
\nloves no self in his other, loves only love, ends
\nfolding on himself, ceremonial:<\/p>\n

love\u2019s mind loves
\nits own luminous terminology . . .
\nThis technique of inhabiting existing myths isn\u2019t reserved for the longer sequences. You can see it in \u201cIthaka\u201d, one of the best poems in the book. The poem begins with Cavafy\u2019s poem as though it were the embarkation point for its own mysterious voyage. Its first shift is to introduce the poet\u2019s own situation \u2013 awake and mildly paranoid in a house not her own:
\nLying alone unsleeping in this good house
\nthat is not mine, the bright day gone to teeming night,
\nthe thought-bark ground ashore again
\n. . . . .
\nI lie awake and wait
\nfor the batter at the door \u2013 sit up each time and look
\nas headlights crunch through trees,
\nthree in two hours . . .<\/p>\n

And then modulate into a fascinating study of poetic completeness, entirely logical given Cavafy\u2019s theme in \u201cIthaka\u201d, but unexpected nevertheless:
\nSleep the safe journey, Ithaka arrival, waking.
\nAn old, a respectable trick, I\u2019ve done it,
\nthis making a perfectly ended poem
\nthat tells the reader \u201cdon\u2019t waste
\nyour time on endings\u201d:
\nart as round and finished as the lives of the dead,
\nto celebrate the virtue of life\u2019s unfinish.
\n. . . . .
\nI don\u2019t know how critical Campbell wants to be of Cavafy (rather than herself at the moment when she catches herself \u201cpainting fakes\u201d) but there is an inbuilt contradiction between the polish of Cavafy\u2019s poems (not to mention their long gestation and delayed publication) and the theme that it is process not completion that matters. But I emphasise this to give an example of the distinctive way in which Campbell can make other fictions and myths her own: she neither yields to the story nor ruthlessly appropriates it, but makes a new story that seems to oscillate between the original and the private.
\nWhat might be called the \u201cIthaka principle\u201d emerges at different places in other poems. A fine poem, \u201cNew Year\u2019s\u201d, describes the poet with two friends swimming before the \u201cyear\u2019s turning\u201d and meditating on what happiness is, whether it is something we find ourselves momentarily immersed in or whether it comes from a structured \u201cgood life\u201d which is, however, built according to various templates,
\n. . . . .
\none light among those that dot-to-dot
\nthe improbable wilful constellation called
\nThe Good Life, that is traced on other star-maps
\nas The Balance, The Empty Ship, The Maze
\n. . . . .<\/p>\n

and an earlier poem, \u201cFireworks\u201d, describes various people for whom the dream doubles as the fulfilment before, in a way that is very similar to \u201cNew Year\u2019s\u201d, describing three schoolgirls at an end of school fete towards the end of the millennium, walking at the edge of the oval where the fireworks (in a metaphor that anyone would recognise) are being prepared:
\n. . . . .
\nThree girls, sick on sweets
\nand their own secret metaphor \u2013 fireworks –
\nfor the cuspy feeling that could be
\nhope or fear; the violent promises<\/p>\n

beneath their words \u2013 \u201cI will be \u2013\u201c: already
\nembarrassed by their own self-conscious ardour.
\nIn the end they went home<\/p>\n

before the first fuse, saw nothing.
\nThe need was the feast, the promise itself the event.
\nThere are many poems in Error which focus on process rather than abstraction and the chief interest of the small section devoted to Dante seems largely to revolve around the way in which, in Inferno, the souls are permanent, eternal expressions of their sins. Count Ugolino becomes:
\nThe damned dead by hunger
\ngnawing at the nape of the damned tormentor.
\nStuck forever in the ice, in the pattern
\nof its own act like an Escher staircase
\nstubbornly moving going
\nnowhere. Back to yourself is nowhere.
\nAnd, in a way that now seems familiar, Campbell moves on to think about Dante himself and his poem. As the sinners are their sin so Dante is his poem and allegory is not a way of saying something in disguise but of inhabiting two worlds at the same time. This bleak little sequence ends in a warm poem about process in the form of lived life, asking, in its last line not the, \u201cspeak to me of the living\u201d that we might expect but rather the Dantesque, \u201cspeak of me to the living\u201d. Another poem, \u201cDalkey Island\u201d, uses terns diving as a metaphor for thinking and points out that just as terns do not actively \u201cdive\u201d, rather they surrender to the passive force of gravity, so
\nPerhaps all your insights are this obvious –
\nmodest freefalls out of doubt
\nwhen the mind stops beating and the head bows
\nout of the abstraction of the air . . . . .
\nThe first sections of the book are called, respectively, \u201cError\u201d and \u201cFear\u201d. \u201cFear\u201d contains two extraordinary poems, \u201cThe Diving Bell\u201d and \u201cBrain\u201d the first of which recounts its author\u2019s accumulated bodily damage and the second the experience of epilepsy. They belong to what looks like a little anatomy of fear, the central image for which is the idea of a room. The first poems are, similarly, grouped around errors. The opening poem is a wonderful recounting of the experience of involuntarily crying out at the remembrance of childhood cruelty. For this poet it happens in the shower whose waters then become an image of the passage of time \u201cyour hands explore what years have done \/\/ to the self that did that thing\u201d. At least one of these childhood \u201cerrors\u201d is an insensitivity to her mother\u2019s recounting of her own past (and thus the author\u2019s genetic history) contrasted with her own true poet\u2019s sense of autogenesis:
\n. . . . .
\nI circled her
\nin disgust with her hopeless dead: absorbed
\nin the myth of my self-birth:
\ngoddess of wisdom, learning, war \u2013 sprung
\nwhole from my father\u2019s head!
\nLetters to the Tremulous Hand and Error establish Elizabeth Campbell as, consistently, one of the best of Australia\u2019s new poets. It remains to be seen whether the structure they adopt \u2013 especially that part which engages with a medieval (or other) problem with such an intriguing deployment of the self \u2013 is used again. There is an argument (which I\u2019m not entirely committed to) that extended sequences of this sort smell too much of University postgraduate writing courses where they have the right blend of required imaginative research producing a nicely extended (and thus examinable) text. We are such a long way beyond that in the poems of the major sequences of these books that it shouldn\u2019t be an issue, but then no poet can go around inhabiting an endless set of historical\/artistic issues like the Tapestries or the handwriting of the \u201ctremulous\u201d hand. Campbell has shown that she can make her own successful choices in these first two books and so there is no reason to doubt that she won\u2019t make the right decisions in the future books that readers of Australian poetry will be happily anticipating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Geoff Page,\u00a0The Canberra Times, June 18 2011: Elizabeth Campbell (b.1980) is one of a group of highly talented young female poets associated with John Leonard Press in Melbourne. Her second book, Error, is a significant step forward from her first, Letters to the Tremulous Hand, which itself contained quite a few memorable poems. Like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}