A Short Treatise on Mortality, by Douglas Reid Skinner: An Appreciation by Stephen Wrigley

 

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)