Polder

Chris McCully's fourth collection of poems, Polder, is most welcome. It is made up of four sections. These are Dust, an extended prose poem, Polder, the poems in which echo the physical reclamation and emotional loss that goes with the changing of the natural landscape for human use that characterizes the Dutch landscape where McCully lives, Masterpieces, which are poems about paintings lodged in the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam, and Torquatus, a series of `invented' poems from Horace to his friend Torquatus.The `dust' of the prose poem is both a destructive and a residual form of life. McCully, who described his struggle with alcohol in Goodbye Mr Wonderful is a master of recovery, a creator of a lot from a little. And what could be less than dust? He is one of our most eloquent recorders of the damage we carry around inside and about us. He is here taking up a theme from his earlier The Country of Perhaps which is both teetering and resolute, as is true of all seriously recovering people.Everything not only begins with dust, but will return to dust - yet the vital point he is making is that:all things will be waiting, since the waiting will have become the movement of dust; and the voices and the radios, the air conditioners, the aspirations, the minor odysseys of the broken heart will become for an instant, and then will have been, and will have all been dust.The lines that make up Dust are so intense that only prose could have held them; dust is both loose and compellingly tight, too much of both to be susceptible to conventional poetic rhythms.This is interesting because McCully's academic field is rhythms, origins and structures in language. Of course closer inspection of Dust reveals quite stunning prose rhythms. Few poets today have the courage, for that must be the word, to pack such dense and fragile material into six pages.The verse poems in Polder offer a dazzling variety, built around the idea of enclosure. The title poem, Polder, speaks of the reclaimed land which nevertheless `dreams of waves' - `A ship was its ambition'. The poem Remembering Indo-European is titled from a lecture on Indo-European language. It sounds like a language lesson, but it is actually about the origins of death. The simplicity of the lines recall Samuel Beckett's early poems.The poem When for Anyone is classic McCully - laconic and often sour:when your bones are chalk and everyone's goneand it's too cold to go out, too dangerousin all the traffic and the grift of ice;Minoan sets the tone for both the rise and the fall of a civilization. It begins:You imagine them speaking in a broken row of exclamation marksWhose purpose was a templeAnd ends:Plug in the lights, the electricity!Night is, and the hunter, and the sea rising.There are so many lines I'd like to quote. For example, the domesticity of the poet's life is reflected in:The dog's in the garden chewing stones.The tax demand lies on the table.The washing-up - a supper for one -Can wait till morning.Just read him!The poems on the masterpiece paintings in the Rijksmusem are magically visual and tangible. It would have been nice to have the paintings included but for that one must go to the web. Carcanet does a great job with its poetry publishing - we can't expect full colour as well.Rob Rollison