In the beginning was the Word.

Let us begin then with the word. Start with discrete particles. Look at the bricks.

My house, she says, is made of old newspapers.

But newspapers, like poems are made of words. Let us look at the words.

Epithets are significant in poetry. Here are some of her favourites: odd, curious, brave, bleak, deft, forlorn, fair, desolate, precious, Muscovite, wry. A strange, courtly, almost Spenserian flavour. Remark a few other words: fabrique, old Mutabilitie, remarked, iwis, and the exclamation but soft! and we'd be well into the Wood of Error. Better stop, turn round, look again, and pick another batch—words and phrases these: patch of altitude, ultimate Recipient, administrative wing, winnowed navigators, quilted tumulus, bullshop, moustache-cup, micro-astronomical amaze. Time wobbles, we appreciate, and space is telescoped. The diction is as modern as it is archaic.

Predicates and copulas give us concepts. She stars an unlikely young verb in a difficult part: Daydreams … disk woodenly; Clenches the green-blue Bow; He stood, and gnarled silently. She arranges unexpectedly happy marriages between impossible substantives and unrecommended adjectives: Horning fairness, These packaged us-es; This rabbinical gloss—a working pun.

Wrenched out of context these fall harshly on the understanding. Epithets, of course, make phrases; predicates sentences. They create a harmony, or cry out for one. Put these words and phrases into their place in the jigsaw of the poems and they take on a radiance, or impart one. They lead to image, conceit, and apothegm.

Imagery is physical; conceit is intellectual. Here they often fuse. But let us isolate the sensory perception first. All the senses are pressed into service. Light and sight are so sharp they hurt, hence such painful felicities as pinpoint multiple sunrise. Colours are minutely distinguished, and we have purple-blue, green-blue, old snapshot-blue, slick-paper blues and greens. This last describes the flanks of mountains. In one short poem (Banff) the eye discriminates between pencil-blue, Chalk blue, green-blue, milk-green, white, blazing white, blazing keen, and Anthracite. Shellack orange in one poem is separated in another from the colour of a horse seen as thin-coloured as oranges ripened in freight cars … The tactile senses and the sense of smell are almost as accurate as sight. Things I can't know I smell. She speaks of a mushroom and root-cellar coolness and notes the impingement of an urban culture on the country by observing that The toasted evening spells City to hayrick.

The metaphysical conceit arises when nice distinctions in the realm of sensation are made to imply value judgements on things seen or felt, as they do when these are man-made things, not 'Nature'. Here, for example, is how the coming of darkness at twilight over the shanties on a city's water-front is recorded:

     Lost, like the committing of sins
     crag-shapes are sediment,
     chopped down, minced, poured to pave the shelving
     parade ground for pinioned grotesques
     in the pink shadow-lengthening
     barracks of evening.

Here the way things are seen and communicated is criticism (examination, interrogation, evaluation) as well as perception. The result is to transform perception into vision.

The success with which this is sometimes achieved is seen in such astonishing and difficult though not obscure poems as "Dispersed Titles", "Civility a Bogey", "Intra-Political", or "The Fallen, Fallen World". In these, it seems, she uses experience to illustrate and clarify philosophical ideas, rather than vice versa. And to announce a faith—a faith all the more sure because held with irony. In "The Fallen, Fallen World" she casts an approving eye on Revolutionaries, Idealists, and The Learned who are in snow and sleep's despite Straitly sustained. Each in his way impatient, each nobly wrong, and each exonerated with a tender or gently mocking irony—the Learned perhaps especially:

     They, stubborn, on the frozen mountain cling
     Dreaming of some alternative to spring.

Again: the boldness, originality, and all-inclusiveness of Avison's imagery can be seen in many places, but nowhere more dazzlingly than in the gently punning, critically ironic "Intra-Political", a poem subtitled "An Exercise in Political Astronomy". In the opening lines, World is seen as Supermarket and we, the people, are in turn and all at once the packaged and regimented comestibles, grocer, shopper, warehouse trucker, and child—lion-hearted four-foot haggler with a hot dime.

She uses the pun charged with irony as if with TNT like a critical battering ram. What was it boxed us in to the geometrical prison of our rational and mechanical culture? The answer is brief, quick, and accurate:

     Strait thinking set us down in rows.

But there is hope in energy, humour, light. Fallen man can still dream of emerging from this pre-creation density into the light and space of a new Genesis. Like the phoenix we carry the seed of new birth within ourselves—Humour is a sign of it (Glee dogs our glumness so). And energy—even our own energy will out. We an invited to Look at the platinum moon, and by an act of the will to partake of the Pentecostal feast:

     If, with dainty stepping, we unbox ourselves
     while still Explosion slumbers,
     putting aside mudcakes,
     and buying, selling, trucking, packaging
     of mudcakes,
     sunstormed, daring to gambol,
     might there not be an immense answering
     of human skies?
     a new expectant largeness?

The peculiar virtue of this poetry arises from the intimacy with which the poet invites us to share her improvisational insights and home-made constructs. She writes to herself—as well as for the reader. She has to discover things and the ubiquitous unexpected connections of things for herself. Only after that can she point them out to the rest of us.

This method (and the necessity for it) can be seen in the rather small poem "Chronic" near the beginning of the book. The title is the fraction of a pun, for the theme of the poem is the difficulty (impossibility?) of writing a chronicle that will be a meaningful or comprehensible record of the chronic, habitual, inescapable peculiar reality that each of us lives in. The poet here can only speak for herself. My house, she says—I repeat the quotation—My house is made of old newspapers. House bears a richness of implication, armorial, ancestral, and astrological, that comes down to us from at least Chaucer. But even if we recognize or invent these associations, she addresses us rather sharply and with a directness that is obviously no respecter of persons:

     And don't pretend you recognize it (she says).
     You don't. Because it doesn't look like a house,
     … and I wouldn't know
     Except it's where I live.

The house on the street, the street in the sky, the sky in the head—and at the tip of the senses. This is the 'house' she has set out to blueprint. Will her forms and figures be 'accepted'? She isn't sure. This poem, like all of Avison's poems—even (or especially) the most fanciful—makes a fetish of sincerity. It includes the admission:

     … I become accustomed
     To failing more and more
     In credence of reality as others
     Must know it …

and ends in private allusions, the relevance of which we have to assume. Here on page 8 we are a little doubtful, but by the time we have reached page 89 (the last) we will have become so convinced of the poet's integrity and keenness of scent that we accept with delight the relevance of whatever she is prepared to vouch for.

Even the unexplained references in the most obscure of her poems—"Our Working Day [May] be Menaced" or the ambitious "Agnes Cleves Papers"—serve the purpose of affirming a dignity and revealing a method:

     … The shaft of vision falling on obscurity
     Illumines nothing, yet discovers
     The ways of the obscure …

To sum it all up very briefly: rarely has a poet so compactly and richly identified sensation and thought. If there really has been a dissociation of sensibility, here we return magnificently to the old unity, and join with her among the guests at Bemerton who 'Did sit and eat'.