Biographical note: John Wilkinson was born in London in 1953 and grew up in Cornwall and Devon. He has spent his working life in mental health, latterly as a strategic planner in the east end of London. He is married to the literary critic Maud Ellmann and lives in Cambridge. During 2003–04 John Wilkinson was attached to the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health, New York, as a Fulbright Scholar.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781876857608 ISBN: 1876857609 Author: John Wilkinson Title: Contrivances Series: Salt Modern
Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt
Publishing Pub date: 1/7/2003 Extent: 192pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 11 mm Weight: 288 gms Supplier:Bertram
Books Supplier:Gardners
Books Supplier:Small
Press Distribution Supplier:Ingram
Book Company Supplier:Baker & Taylor Availability: IP Price: GBP 11.99 Price: USD 18.95 Rights: World
Short
description/annotation: The Contrivances of
this book occupy four sites: ‘Saccades’ gouged out
by sexual pain and loss; ‘Signs of an Intruder’ introduces
the light of Tuscany to a secure unit; ‘The Still-Piercing
Air’ is sited on the banks of the Thames; and ‘Case
in Point’ turns about fetish objects often withheld from
view.
Main description: Contrivances
consists of four constellations of poems. It is characteristic
of John Wilkinson’s writing that each poem can be read either
as self-sufficient or as interdependent with other poems in its
group. Readers of his earlier books will recognise the precise
resolution of these poems at a point just short of the fully-revealed.
In ‘Saccades’ the routines of bureaucracy, commuting
and consumption invade the body and psyche. The poems in this constellation
interlock, engage in small local machineries, and mill unrelentingly,
although spasms of malfunction permit moments of joy before self-righting
functions reinstate the poems’ unnerving synchromesh.
‘Signs of an Intruder’ consists of more informal, open
and sensuously-responsive poems, although even the Tuscan landscape
where several take place is invaded by forms of surveillance. The
poems stretch and play between benign and malign surveillance,
pleasure and regret.
‘The Still-Piercing Air’ is the smallest group and
the most conventional in its poetic procedures. Harmless parks
and
public
amusements, flowers and water features, lines from Shakespeare – turn
malevolent as the occupants of a consciousness forced into reflection
through isolation.
The final group, ‘Case in Point’, was described by
Wilkinson in introducing a reading as ‘neo-baroque flummery’.
This describes an elaborate diction and an element of Hispano-Catholic
grotesquerie acknowledged in one of the poems as ‘after Richard
Crashaw’.
John Wilkinson’s poems are intellectually ambitious, but
this description of Contrivances does not convey how directly involving
they can be. This may be due in part to a unusual cadence which
is at once absolutely urgent and reflexively hanging. Contrivances
may be his most demanding book, but it has much to offer the unfamiliar
reader.
Table of contents:
Saccades
First Run
Second Run
At the Photocopy Machine
Eye Trouble
A Word in Your Shell-like
Obelisk
The Blind of an Eye
Folding a Scarf
Internal Audit
Paint It Black
Ant Barrows
Following the Grain
Third Run
Pause
Signs of an Intruder
From a Terrace in Tuscany
Irrigation
The Evidence Base
In Seclusion
London Fields From Afar
Better the Fence
Time Enough
Answering Back
I Looked Up
Growth Potential
Consequences
Emphatic Caprices
Glory Hole
Out & out
Transpiring
Sideways Looks
Some Marking & Yellow Highlighting
Gate Fever
Restringing
The Still-Piercing Air
Argument
The Line of Resistance
The Line of Definition
The Line of Reinforcement
The Line of Conviction
The Line of Betrayal
Interlinear
The Trail of Scent
The Trail of Evidence
The Trailing Sash Cord
Tracking the Perihelion
The Trail of Withdrawals
Tracks of Cultivation
Lines by the Referee
Gethsemane
Case in Point
Beyond the walls the kine graze, that otherwise
would stray confused & optional.
The different levels skew to each other,
supposed to stop free fall
but click like a wrist or straighten round the
black snaky lance.
The panels fall away like beetle husks, the sign
revealed is what
the wing flaunted
dominance over, the embossed
wound for it became an innocent polyp, they say.
Deep costume gags on the camera like a called–on
stand–by, it was a star–
finder found the palace, oyster–
shell encrusted, gaudy, all evaginated
surface. I understand the rococo flaps & dewlaps,
growths defying function flourish
against the water–tight bulkhead lamps but can’t
get a grip with plastic cutlery
or shift normally in
riveted chairs, break out over the place.
Why can’t you return me to Viet–
namese, Ethiopian cafés, sisters on Mare Street
trinketing the pavement,
you don’t walk on the pavement, you
walk down the thin concrete reservation to avoid
late falls of glass
but deep insignia will not be enclosed, they hatch
&
from their mouths, from mortar scooped
fly the newsbearers
scattering leaves,
smudging that underfoot reproduce mosquito–like.
Or miniature wolves
I’d call them in their ranks, their parallel arrays.
As out of water the imperious came like chain–
drive vehicles & sand shifts organically,
skews one tessera & these are Europe’s
concrete citadels in collars.
God is little.
An ever–tinier arc constrained by self protein.
Unpublished endorsement
: On ‘Effigies Against the Light’: “This
book by one of the most intellectually demanding and politically
engaged of contemporary English poets, suggests that the differences
between some versions of modernism and postmodernism might be
nil. The political content of Wilkinson’s work distinguishes
it from the xenophobic high modernism of the English tradition.
The section “Chalone” at the start of the book begins
with an examination of the continuing legacy of the plantation
system; where some moderns mourn the coming of modernity, Wilkinson
(in “Reserved”) admonishes us to “watch things
spring apart, &/ know with a blank chill/ they ought to.” Yet
Wilkinson also refuses a reactionary postmodernism that simply
spits capital’s fetishes back at it: “Here is amber,
here is pitch to smear your arms, salve lips,/ tallow to stuff
resounding ears. You stand like flypaper./ You hold a trowel & with
it you daub every lost saying.” Though bombarded, linguistically
and otherwise, Wilkinson’s speaker continues to self-construct,
rather than destruct.”
Publishers Weekly
Unpublished endorsement
: On ‘Effigies Against the Light’ “The
speed of this writing, its kinetic movement “like a run-time
virus”, derives from the extraordinary scope of its inclusions.
This is not the low-risk inclusiveness of semiotic playtime, but
the propagation of strings of significance among the resistant
data of moment and location. Difficult of access, but no less difficult
of egress, the poetry in this volume makes unflinching demands
on the reader, demands that repay slowly but in abundance. Reader,
I was crushed and exhilarated.”
Jeremy Green
Chicago Review
Unpublished endorsement
: On ‘Effigies Against the Light’: “Some
of Wilkinson’s poems still seem to me like white noise, like
information rapidly and promiscuously flooding my attention; but
I do not believe that they will necessarily continue to. Others
do offer me precisely that sense of the bearing, the bearable and
the beautiful; and although, for good reasons, that state is almost
untranscribable, and not automatically reproducible in identical
fashion for every reader, it is something one looks for in art,
and is privileged to encounter.”
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