The Alchemical Island

A new book of strange and marvellous poems from Ananda / Stephen Parr

The Alchemical Island: Poems 2106 – 2017 pb, 250 pp, £12 – to order email the poet on moon@wolfatthedoor.org

Ananda (Stephen Parr) has brought out another poetry collection, his first since the 2015 collection The Paths Between. The Alchemical Island says on the cover that it covers the years 2016 and 2017. Given the great variety and high quality of the work in this volume one can  only wonder and anticipate what richess the poet has up his sleaves from subsequent years. Years, by the way, during which he moved from Bristol back up to his beloved North (Sheffield in fact) so it will be interesting to see what that move has brought to his work.

There is an uncompromising pared-down quality to much of the work in this volume. Ananda I believe has been immersing himself in poets (such as Tranströmer) from northern Europe and this influence shows itself:

Truth

We think we want truth
but to be handed it whole
would kill us.

Only by wanting and
befriending it patiently,
unswervingly, through

the unmaking years,
with more and more
of ourselves, can we hope
to live in it. 

Only when there’s 
nothing left of the one
who wanted it
can it live in us. 

However, with that clarity there is much beauty and richness on display as well:

Sunrise byond dark houses,
like magma
like a sacred fountain
revealed.

Quiet serpents of snow still stretched
on the high ridge, as though

the hills were star-lit from inside, as if they
were rooms in a colossal museum.

I meet my fear, it follows me
out from the cave of my first thought.
The black walls know it in their secret chambers. 

from ‘Dawn, smoke drift’

As this extract shows there are deeply existential / spiritual concerns in many of these poems, concerns with aging and approaching death and searching all the more for wonder and mystery in life as it presents itself moment by moment. In many also there is a humorous vernacular quality to the questing, which is very appealing:

See there? Eight snails crammed inside one brick.
That’s overcrowding in anybody’s book.
It’s not hygienic, so they’ll simply have to go.

You wouldn’t think a brick would be thought
a select multi-occupancy residence would you?
Yet in the snail world it’s clearly the height of chic.

from ‘The Hound of the Villanelles’

Overall, however,  it is the authentic, uncompromising contemplative quality that stands out in this rich collection, a sense of a man confronting mortality with puzzlement and a nose for wonder as the curtains gradually fall. Going his own way with no regard for poetic fashions or the fashioning of identity:

Islands

In the afernoon, the deep-
throated bells sound at intervals

across the silky rocking water, as though

things mattered. We’re free
to make rich meaning of it,
or not, as we wish.
Sometimes heaven’s hurled
across the sky like birdsong.
Sometimes the moon’s a finger
pointing to the moon.

But meaning’s unfashionable.
Already there are islands of rust crackling
in the abundant canopies where
something in the stem has snapped.

Perhaps we are finished.
Perhaps the action has lit out
to somewhere more promising.

Up there, maybe, in that faint swirl
of coral just below Alpha Lyrae,

a deep bell sound, never ending.