In “A Short
Treatise on Mortality”, the eighth poetry collection by the South African
Douglas Reid Skinner, the reader will discover many interesting, arresting,
enjoyable and also challenging poems. Published by Uhlanga Press in South
Africa, the collection is well presented in attractive covers where front and
back are generously leafed which allows one to easily keep one’s place when
reading through. The cover photo artwork of a peopled coastal scene by Revel J
Fox is appropriate and to me, evocative of a South African shoreline.
44 poems
feature, divided into three sections - Poetry, After and Sunday. Amongst them
are a villanelle, four sonnet length poems and a small number of rhyming ones.
Doug writes mainly in four line verse form, in an iambic voice and his poems
rarely exceed 40 lines: regarding the latter, are modern poets influenced, I
wonder, by current poetry competition line limitations, or a production
acceptability by poetry magazine editors, one of whom is the author himself who
edits Stanzas, a prominent SA poetry mag?
Throughout
Doug writes most coherently and accessibly and is a master, it seems to me, of
poetic techniques - simile, metaphor, alliteration and, as I have noticed in
his earlier books, the effective use of repetition, for example here in Two
Minutes where he repeats the first and last verses –
We tend to
think about things
on the
limited scale of our lives,
which are
not much more than hamlets
in the wide
and dark landscapes of time
which comes
over as an early indication of the book’s tone. He also has a layout technique
of presenting a poem’s last line separately, for emphasis I think, and in this
book uses it eleven times: a fond habit.
Although not
always commented on in poetry reviews, the titles of poems the author uses here
are both effective and challenging; I had to look up Bricolages (def -
something constructed or created from a diverse range of things) but it worked
well for the poem. Also In The Labyrinth (about a medical condition) and Traces
(ostensibly and movingly about ploughing with a horse but possibly something
much deeper) are other examples of his skill in this aspect. Occasionally,
unforced rhymes appear but in this mostly unrhymed verse and from a poet of
Doug’s calibre, I would expect that.
In the first
section, Poetry, Doug presents the reader with his take on how he handles the
poetic impulse, his frustration when it proves elusive, the personal cost
involved in writing; after I had read the poems here more closely, I detected
(hopefully correctly) that “she” appearing from nowhere in the fifth verse of
Two Minutes was/is in fact a Muse; he then refers to her more explicitly in a
later poem, same section, An Epistle to T Voss in Sydney, in the seventh verse
as “... the language queen.” In that poem, which I really admire, Doug compares
the contents of an Australian poetry anthology to “...a great, big busy
beehive,” its “...sweetness inside,”
“...the
words, each ready to sting
whoever is
trying to get at the honey,
each ready
to die for the language queen.”
Which does
include Douglas, I think.
Other poems
in Poetry which I liked were The Placeholder (about a book marker!), again
Traces, beautifully written and as I say, probably on two levels, ie learning
to plough but also learning to write. Other poem titles accurately introduce the
reader to the art of writing - Out of the Blue, Words, Uninvited and Tightrope.
It’s all there, what writers experience.
The second
section, After, I found to be the challenging part where many of the poems are
written to or with reference to particular literary figures - CJ Driver,
Elizabeth Bishop, Eugenio Montale, CP Cavafy, Pliny, Geoffrey Hill. Nothing
wrong with this, of course, since no doubt they are Doug’s own reference
points, but the average reader might not have sufficient knowledge to appreciate
the inferences Doug wishes to make. (So go and look them up, I hear him say!)
But all at
Winchelsea LitSoc members should have no
difficulty recognising Doug’s teasing in A Riposte of Jonty Driver where the
latter’s favoured use of iambics is tellingly portrayed as, I guess, a humorous
joust between old friends. “Challenging” aside, I did enjoy Ovid in the Cape (a
fragment); Ovid, as readers may know, was banished by the Emperor Augustus to
Tomis on the Black Sea; Doug sympathetically explores that exile, and perhaps
knowledgeably too, being like his friend Jonty, a white South African.
Readers may
find the third section, Sunday, the most accessible.
Who Now
Regards...? is a short, delightful, rhyming poem about small and humble things.
The Tool explores archaeological discovery, blunt in its vocabulary -
“...killed by a blow from behind.”
In On a
Conversation Never Had, tears sprang to my eyes as Douglas talks, possibly, to
his mother. Lovely.
Thirty-Four
South, Eighteen East” to me, as an ex-mariner, is an excellent title and as the
poet refers to in his Notes at the end, the geographical location of Cape
Point, SA. VG.
The last
poem of this balanced and thought provoking collection is Sunday. Here, at his
most conversational - there are four, eight line verses each featuring a first
and last line-end rhyme - Doug deploys his considerable skill in the
contemplation of, as in the book’s title and first poem, mortality. Here is his
skill in line repetition, used twice -
“I’d so much
planned for Sunday” and “I’d been before, I knew the way”
and in so
doing, talks to the reader in a quiet and intimate way, in a tone we can all
relate to “...so much planned” but then he finds he “...cannot stir” and
indeed, he recognises that soon he may not at all. The title of the poem is
both understated and astute but Douglas ends, believing
“... I must
rise into the air
towards the
promised recompense,
the
saviour’s hands and heaven’s glow.”
Beautiful
poetry, a good example of this well compiled collection.
To conclude,
it seems to me that Douglas does indeed confront mortality - the condition of
being mortal - not just head on as in his first and last poems, but throughout
in and by his poetic expression. We live our lives, he writes, often on a
tightrope but stuff can indeed come along out of the blue. There will be time
to joke with a friend or again, sadly to contemplate a banishment. If one
failed to talk to someone whom we loved, then a poem perhaps can offer
redemption. If the medium we use to come to terms with mortality is through
verse, then there will still be a cost and a price to pay through effort, but
occasionally the gift of happenstance occurs. Death came, Doug writes, long ago
to early man using a tool, it nods to us in the labyrinth of life, and might
even allow the respite that a drug offers. But if you are prepared as Douglas
observes, and far more adroitly on the page, to pause awhile and stand in the
buffeting wind, then life itself, despite our insignificance, continues and
will allow us to sense what is going on; its deep and musical beat keeps on
playing.
Stephen
Wrigley
Jonty Driver
has some copies for sale. Email him on jontydriver@hotmail.com and he'll tell
you how to pay (£10 for the book, £2 for p&p)
