Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

The Age of Saturn is the eighth collection by the UK poet John Gohorry and is published by Shoestring Press. It is a weighty collection, in more ways than one: 245 pages, 17 poetry sequences/the occasional single poem and poems heavy with learned references and academic footnotes.

For a while I allowed the footnotes to put me off. Sequences such as “The Life of Merlin” and “The Age of Saturn” are riddled with footnotes and source references, a practice that is academically robust, but I found the notes on the same pages as the poems to be a distraction. I admit that when I write about about historic individuals or draw on source material, I usually content myself with a single author note or assume the reader will have my knowledge, or, failing that, will be moved /stimulated by the poem as it stands, even if they don’t pick up on all the references I’ve strewn around. Gohorry references his work like the academic he once was, but once I saw beyond the footnotes and kept my focus on the poems, I was entranced.

Gohorry’s eighth collection contains both intellectually and emotionally stimulating poems. The poems are expertly crafted and taken as a whole, the collection has an almost elegiac quality. The focus seems to be on memory and ageing. There is the sequence, “A Lecturing Life”, which contemplates its title matter from the viewpoint of approaching retirement; “A Life of Merlin”, which retells the story of the ageing and bewildered Merlin and of course there is “The Age of Saturn” sequence itself, which sets out an imagined correspondence between the deaf painter Goya in the last nine years of his life and the German poet Holderlin, thirty or so years younger than Goya, but isolated by mental illness. There are also poems that recall Gohorry’s memories of Coventry and childhood.

The poems/ sequences that made the most impression on me were “The Age of Saturn”, despite its scholarly approach, “Bloodwood”, “The Fire Room” and “Keeping The City”, though most of the other poems/sequences have much to commend them, in my opinion. The sequence I was least engaged with was “A Lecturing Life”, possibly because I have spent many years working in British Further and Higher Education and whilst I recognize the subject matter, I do not associate it with a poetic approach.

“Keeping The City” is a sequence of seven poems contemplating Gohorry’s birth city of Coventry through the media of: glass, cloth, stone, wood, steel, text and time. This is an extract from “Wood”, recalling the bombing of Coventry Cathedral during the Second World War:

“In a world of flame
wood must take its chances.

When the bombs fell, pews burned.
The roof of the nave became ash.

But a house is no less
Than its occupants’ spirit”

“Bloodwood” ironically, given my previous comments, is not footnoted, but I read it as a creation myth, not dissimilar to those of the Australian aboriginal peoples:

“A tree was a sapling once
in a land where men’s bodies
were maps of their dreamed world.

They travelled it singing:
They chanted thunder, rock, rain,
The hum of the desert wind.”

“The Fire Room” is an apparently personal recollection of the poet finding his muse at a young age:

“I came to the Fire Room as a young boy;
it was late autumn and I had been walking
beside the canal, watching the coal barges
inching their way through sheet ice
between Hawkesbury, Sowe Common and Ansty.

My mother, next door, was laying the table;
I found pencil and paper, a desk and a chair
and sat down in the Fire Room, which was not
part of the house, building my small fire.”

“The Age of Saturn”, as noted previously, is an imagined correspondence between the deaf painter Goya in the last nine years of his life and the German poet Holderlin, thirty or so years younger than Goya, but isolated by mental illness. These are poems of darkness and despair, which really need reading in their entirety to achieve a cumulative effect and the build up of the two correspondents’ individual voices, but here is a flavor of Holderlin writing to Goya:

“Magnificence, I sit at the piano and improvise minuets
no, no, no, what might once have been, or might at last

become, minuets, for hours at a time on the black keys,
the mind taking fingertips, or the reverse, on journeys

that have no destination but delight or rather despair
in traversing the ebony hills and whitewater ravines,”

In conclusion, I found this to be a contemplative, intellectual and thoughtful collection.

Thanks for sharing. I liked the title poem excerpts the most.

Interesting note about the effect of immediate footnotes. It's also a bit of a vote of no-confidence, both in the reader and the poem. But I do appreciate notes in the back of a book.

I generally feel the same as you two about the use of footnotes in poems. I actually go further than Jen in that I'm also averse to extensive endnotes at the back of a poetry book: it's partly that I'm allergic to the whiff of academicism in poetry, and it's partly that I support the idea that a poem should speak for itself. Additionally, I'm wary of the attitude that poems should adhere to a literal interpretation of historical reality that checks out with nonfiction reference texts: I enjoy poems that embroider -- and even outright lie about -- historical events, as the poet's muse deems fit. (I'm not saying the use of endnotes or footnotes always indicates that a poet buys into this attitude, but it sometimes does.)