Lyre is a
collection of poems that attempts to translate more-than-human worlds into
different kinds of poetry. As much as my encounter with each animal, plant and
landform produced differences of syntax and vocabulary across the poems, I also
wanted to allow the subject to unsettle poetic form itself. In other words, it
wasn't enough just to describe the different worlds or unwelten of these
different beings; as non-human lives were being translated into human poetry,
human poetry also needed to undergo some kind of translation into something
else. It was in this indeterminate, interstitial region that human cognition
might break down, and start to encounter what it was not. The aesthetic totem
of the book is the Australian lyrebird, both species of which incorporate
collaged samples of other species' sounds into complex, polyphonic songcycles
of over an hour; similarly, the poems of Lyre include modified samples
from a diverse array of literature from the natural sciences, poetry from
various languages, and my own field notes.
n Stuart Cooke, Brisbane, Australia
More details about the book & publisher can be
found here: https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/lyre
F
Fallen Myrtle Trunk
in the temperate forests, the wet
sclerophyll
forests where tempests
moan in yourm leaves, a storm beating
muffled drums at the entrance
to the underworld, the lands
of Gondwana, motherland of Australia,
South America, the hundreds
of
years creeping, the moss about youm creeping
the growling thunder,
the grim sou’-wester
—by youm all this recedes, falls
like wilting springs
aged into agelessness, less
than age, giant
fullness, monoforest
bulk
of years and patience
hint of snake while touch crumbles
like chocolate flakes, vibration vanishes
in yourm tomb, tombing
yourm slumber rots, beachwards
a giant petrified through exposure
imperceptible scuttle scattered
deeply, cavern hymns at
cave hertz, yourm august
specific music,
cylindrical fugue
of dark russet scales, closed subdued pink
to reddish grain, edified with mountain
ash
memory, guardian of closed passage
pillar of larger sky, of facts like clouds
their sky ways wending
youm know the lullabies of
loneliness
the ways of wind and rain, youm
moan
of fire unless the flames come
slowly
for yourm return to
drowsy droning
the intoning of
the wizard priests
the sough of
the southern seas
youm’re the stage
before the sea
the
ground’s stage, for all sea-yearning
yourm limbed stances form too
gradually for change, beneath such
gestures
the stygian flock shelters, shadowed
in yourm underside, that invisible realm
of canal venom and latticed vein
to the light youm present carpet bridge,
seeds of lives held
by yourm unfolding descent, ink-
plumed monarch, ebony laced
with wing, by the mountain rills
down to the parched saplings
on the shore of a receding lake
youm know too much
of that escarpment
beyond, rest
pray, yourm
beast prepares for rebirth
while everything frizzes,
shifts
brushed and
squeeze, sway
youm remain sound-
like, a solid
gradient an always
line,
travelling
and
unravelling through the same place
yourm skin mimics lake ripple
grooved rivulets criss-cross
like thickened years
stone currents into softer
solids
edging damp, ripples merged
with moss
the land’s dry, soft with moss
a surface of crawling
speckleds, blood legs and
onyx bodies, orange-like
fruiting bodies protruding from
yourm furry, whaled bulk
moss colony, moss scape, the stick shade
of a seedling wobbles on yourm
chest
flecked with sonnet,
leaf voltas
their
jade rhymes, lost brilliance
then fresh blush, pinked to orange
faded
jagged,
triangled teeth
and fruits of three stunted
winged nuts,
subtle flourish
of
lemon-green catkins, now a mouthing
eddy
where a bough broke off
airborne spores of wilt lulled by such knots
have
settled on yourm lesion
one branch, there, pleads help
by reaching, others
arch hardened spines around gravity’s slide
while youm host the epiphytes
while the termites elaborate yourm
runnelled intentions
while moss slowly fingers, surrounds
slowly devours these juts of
twig
slowly devours its
own ground
which youm
perform patiently for it
NB. This poem contains echoes
of phrases from ‘Mountain Myrtle’, by Marie E. J. Pitt, and ‘Out of Sorts and
Looking at Elms’, by Simon West.
editor’s
note
The following comments on the
book may also be of interest:
'Drawing on the
deepest resources of antipodean poetics, Lyre
hymns the created world in all its prodigious diversity. It is funny, reverent,
full of curious facts, and crazily ambitious. A triumph.'
n JM COETZEE
‘Stuart Cooke
invites us to a fabulous, exciting, wonderful experiment: what does it take to
make oneself capable of feeling the poetry of every form of existence? What
does it take to decode the poetry of experimenting, experiencing life? Cooke
actually writes toward beings, and not about them or on them, seeking how to
convey in our writing the way each organic and inorganic being writes (of) its
own existence. Cosmopolitical poetry, or geopoetry: his poetry transforms what
is seen into what is heard (melodic pixels: cries, crunching sand, murmurs,
calls, crashing waves), what is heard into what is tasted (flavours of oceans,
marshes, clouds, bodies, fruits), what is tasted into what is smelled (scents
of seabed salt from sweet oxygen), what is smelled into what is felt, and what
is felt into movement (dances of enduring life, momentum, convergence and
friction, connections, desires and importances, compositions, migrations,
territories, respirations, inspirations, aspirations...), movement into writing
(geopoetry), writing into drawing (graphopoetry: gulf estuaries, waves, rocks,
flickering lights of fireflies, optical epics on the pages), and, finally,
drawing into enacted stories, as nourished by knowledge as they are
undisciplined.’
n VINCIANE DESPRET
‘These
vibrational songs of selection listen in to the metabolic essays of life forms,
imbricated in human exchange, across a wide swath of the southern hemisphere.
Cooke’s Lyre sounds
the depths of alien intelligence, in the nearby abyss between disciplines,
languages, bodies, and in the drift of new yet barely discerned continents.
Shaped poetry was never so planetary, nor as porous to other ways of seeing and
knowing – an astonishing act of attention.’
n JONATHAN SKINNER
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