Oz Hardwick, ed. New Crops from Old Fields: Eight
Medievalist Poets. York, UK: Stairwell Books, 2015.
Reviewed by Julie A. Chappell (chappell@tarleton.edu)
Through their introductions and poetic offerings, the eight
medievalist poets gathered in this volume reflect upon the sacred and the
profane in the physical and spiritual remnants of the medieval world so
important to their lives and work, and, as Jane Chance notes about her own
poetry, the poems they tender uncover “the Naked truth inside” each poet.
Jane Beal captures the essence of the simultaneous
distinction between and union of being a medievalist and a poet: “As a
medievalist, I must translate older forms of English, French, and Latin . . .
into modern English. As a lyric poet, I must translate emotion and the memory
of experience from my heart to my reader. In both cases, translation is a key
that opens new doors” (5). As both medieval scholars and poets, we are
compelled to ‘carry across’ past times, memory, place, emotion, and experience
to others. Beal’s poetry crosses over from the medieval languages and literary
allusions that propel each piece to the more tangible and familiar human
emotions that permeate her poetry and her medieval sources. Beal’s travels in
the holy land are encapsulated in a poem made up entirely of questions—“Where
are you from?” “Are you married?” “Have you been to Bethlehem?” “When will you
return to Israel?”—not only relating her memories of moments of experience but
also the reality of the collision of the ancient, the medieval, and the modern
worlds, of the ordinary and the extraordinary that we encounter as we search
for our truths. In one poem, her Speaker encounters a “far-walking pilgrim” a
“shadow-walker.” This elicits a reflection and a question: “What shape does the
shadow of my life form / when I take my stand in the light of God?” A devout
faith seems to resonate from and to guide her poetry as it did the poets of the
medieval world whose work informs Beal’s own.
Jane Chance’s scholar’s eye not only provides the reader
with the background of her sources of inspiration for each poem but her own
interpretation of the inner workings of her poetry as well. In her poems, we
encounter such medieval and human drama and emotion as the reluctant second
son, newly knighted who must slay the dragon of paternal impatience and
skepticism even as he prays his future hinges on luck in love rather than
prowess in arms. In another piece, we hear voices—the stone of a castle and the
woman “awaiting rescue” becoming one—reminding us of the voices of most, if not
all, of the women of medieval romance (and life) which we have found sometimes
nearly irretrievable from within the books that bind them for all time. One of
the most moving of Chance’s poems juxtaposes a medieval abbey with the modern
cafe that faces it, a posture most medievalists have found themselves in in one
medieval city or another. In Chance’s poem, a woman sits “sipping coffee” but
finds herself not just confronting the abbey but a riot of feelings. Abelard’s
‘calamities’ serve as fodder for the pathos she imagines in the life of the
“laughing woman” she sees. Yet, as the woman in the cafe rushes away, as if
chased by her own dark thoughts, the “she” of the final stanza embodies both
women with their “joy” and “regrets.” Chance’s learned imagination fills every
line of her poems where medieval knights and ladies, magic and marvelous beasts
vie with modern lyric egos, all in the thrall of desire, dreams, regrets, and
the weight of woven texts of symbolic stature.
Pam Clements entices all five of our senses as she entwines
Nature and spirituality effortlessly in her poems. We walk into a forest to
encounter the green man and to hear Hildegarde’s lyrical voice speaking to “the
cosmos.” We discover St. Kevin’s Irish valley as worthy of the contemplation of
God and of watching “a river of foxgloves . . . waking the ruins” of the
monastic churches and tower. As she reflects on a modern painting that, itself,
comingles medieval and modern images of knights and castles, “moat and
portcullis,” a figure holds “a rounded object” / (palette, frisbee, paten,
Grail?),” a postmodern pastiche of “damaged, things / unfinished.” A Norse and
Celtic legend blends the natural world with the human in metamorphosis where
humans transform into seals. The Speaker watches with envy as “one dolphin kick
/ slides past humanity,” and the transformed breaks the constrictions not only
of human form but also of human society. Here, no bathing suits are needed and
“fat becomes warmth,” and we hear a cacophony of “barking” from the lovely
silkies lying “flank to flank ... in noisy caucus.” Clements returns us to
the magical medieval world in “Vivien/Merlin,” eschewing the kind or cruel
judgment of Vivien’s entrapment of Merlin. In this poem, the Speaker wakes in
the roots and vines of an oak tree instead of a stone tower. Nature and spirit
mingle in the consciousness of both medieval characters who seem to become one
“I,” mourning the loss of time and magic in a world now filled with “bent metal
citadels” instead of oak trees, nightjars, and owls. In another poem, the Old
English alliterative line is suffused with white owls swooping like “virtual
Vikings invading our shores” but, ultimately, here only to “bask in winter
sun.” Longing infuses every line as we follow a wanderer out of place and time.
Just at the right moment, a line from the Old English poem which inspired this
modern one jars the ear in conflict with its modern descendant, leaving the
“drifter” of this poem more forlorn and the reader in aching, yet reluctant
empathy with the dissonance of displacement. A visit to a monastic choir stall
explores the collision of the sacred and the profane in the medieval world as
we recognize with the Speaker the physical and spiritual relief of the
misericords, where the “pious perched / atop grotesques” and we, ‘hear’ a fart
and “snicker,” enjoying the tension between the sacred and the profane relief.
Oz Hardwick [pictured] revisits the misericord juxtaposing the medieval
grotesque carvings with another solemn ceremony, but modern this time. A
funeral procession being watched by the Speaker imagines the “sadness” and
“tears” alongside “goats and grimaces,” “naked women mounting naked men.” We
cannot look away from either as, again, “someone farts” inside the sacred
silence of the choir. Hardwick’s life in one of the most medieval of modern
cities, York incites him to conjure up the green man, sensual and seductive as
he “kisses spring / into lithe limbs waking from winter” until the very next
poem where “The Green Man Sleeps” and in his sleeping, is a harbinger of
winter’s death of “barren buds, / a court of worms.” We recall the great
Yorkshire mystic Richard Rolle’s fire of love as a supplicant in another poem
prays for that which is most difficult to achieve in any age, “the heart’s
bright kindling, / the understanding beyond understanding.” York’s Viking
history again appears in a piece that echoes the Old Norse Vestrfararvisur. In
contrast to the warriors who wage bloody battles with “sharp swords,” we hear
the voice of a skald recounting his dependency on his “word-wave,” on “gaining
/grace of place” “proud” that his “one word resolves all riddles.” True Thomas,
a witega, prophesies darkly of a world always in disorder; a doom sealed by our
“chains to market” and imminent “In your time and mine and the time between.”
The legend of Merlin’s Tree comes alive in one poem in dark visions of natural
and human-contrived devastation. Hardwick’s final poem recalls “The Seafarer,”
and his Speaker also experiences “earfoðhwil” and “bitre breostceare” but
gathers humble gifts along the way to vie for God’s grace at the “door.”
M. Wendy Hennequin conjures up Old English laments with
classic kennings as she simultaneously revisits the sorrow of Andromache while
infusing her with power. This Andromache bears the translation of her Greek
name, “Man Battle,” and is now an Amazon warrior, longing for her
“sword-brother” (Hector) and the power of her people as it once was. A
beautifully crafted poem in perfect imitation of Old English riddles produces
three riddles that are smart, modern, and fun to read. Don’t look at the
answers until you’re sure you know what these riddles describe! Another poem
explores the idea of the chivalric code in its extreme as a bard, coming to
Arthur’s court at “Christmastide,” tells the story of the seriously bloody
rescue of a damsel in distress by Gawain, Kay, and Bedivere. The story unknown
to Arthur, he turns for verification to the knights themselves, who stand
nearly mute and will only agree what they did was “just.” Hennequin’s ballad
reveals a scribe, alone but deftly and joyously writing of kings and queens and
reveling in the brilliant colors on the vellum. This piece closes with a very
medieval “envoi to St. Katherine” asking for “grace,” “mercy,” and “might” from
this patroness of scribes. Hennequin returns to explore Andromache’s state of
sorrow, in the pathetic image created by the repeated line, “Andromache beside
the window waits.” This is no Amazon princess but a frail human woman caught in
a vicious downturn of Fortune’s wheel.
A.J. Odasso notes that she is “unable to separate the act of
writing from the act of dreaming.” Consequently, her poems take us into a
dream-world in which we must negotiate the real and imagined in each poem. In
one, we inhabit the mind of an orphan searching and grieving; another takes a
journey through the tragic past and uncertain future of time where the Speaker
seems bereft of hope in the shattering of a cup (set up in an epigraph quoting
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time). We follow an emotionally bankrupt Speaker
into a dream of loss and despair that, yet, is not totally devoid of hope.
Odasso’s ekphrastic poem, responding to a Chagall lithograph of the same title,
creates a dream-like vision of Chagall’s abstractions deftly captured in only
eight lines. Her second meditation on time relies on our reading of the earlier
poem where hope is revived as the cup and time, once shattered, “began to
mend.” Another dream vision of barrenness, then birth, startles us with a dark
but perverse practicality when “Mother” wraps and stores newborn twins in “an
ice-rimed grave” to “keep till we return.” The final poem is true to its title,
“Postscript” to the subject of the Hawking-inspired poems invoking the
shattered life of the past that must be put to rest.
Joe Martyn Ricke brings poetic verve to his poems, and, in a
response to the fifteenth-century “Adam lay ibowndyn,” Ricke applauds Eve’s
inquisitive spirit and Adam’s devotion to her that made them the humans we are,
embracing our “felix culpa,” while the lyric ego sings “with Harry Belafonte.”
Ricke playfully catalogues the three faces of Mary Magdalene as she appears in
medieval interpretations as one or all of the women named Mary appearing in the
Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John with a final brush with her ‘lost gospel’ union
with Christ himself. Ricke’s ekphrastic offering, responding to a
twelfth-century wooden statue of the Virgin and Child (gone missing from this
medieval artifact), evokes the iconoclasm of the reforming zeal of the
sixteenth century as well as the twelfth-century cult of the Virgin. In another
poem, we experience a ritual celebration of Our Lady deep in the heart of
Mexico and the overpowering scents, sounds, and emotions such a spectacle can
still elicit with an “envoy” to a medieval man, a single man, whose ecstatic
vision carried him to sainthood, albeit more than 400 years after his death. In
his final poem, Ricke gives us that which delights him most about the Middle
Ages, the “bloody, grotesque, physical side of late medieval spirituality.” In
his unfettered hands, the images of stigmata and blood ooze from the lines of
this poem.
Hannah Stone’s poetry finishes this volume and returns us to
the idea that “all poetry is a translation of sorts.” Her first poem empathizes
with and honors the early desert hermits whose physical sacrifices, including eschewing
sleep, turned them into “bones already half spirit,” in their quest for the
“holy flame.” An archaeological find displayed in Worcester Cathedral provides
Stone with an ekphrastic contribution in which her Speaker contemplates the
life and death of the remnants of the life of a medieval pilgrim—boots, staff,
and cockleshell badge. Considering scientific musings about his headless
remains (captured in a photograph but not in the glass case), the Speaker
wonders how he must have tortured his body to save his soul. Her found poem
chooses and weaves the words of Richard Rolle, “capturing the flavour” of his
instructive exhortations to stay “unsullied” so as to “fly straight to the love
and contemplation of God” with Nature (the bee) as God’s model of virtue.
Medieval alliterative lines infuse a modern prose poem with poetic vitality
allowing us to feel as well as see the nervous, stuttering flight of a lone
sparrow as it struggles for freedom from manmade spaces. Her poem about
blindness of the losses in Gaza is fraught with the darkness at human frailty
as the sestina forces the images of “Gaza’s murdered” in our face so that we
must bear witness to the “Great deliverer” as the “girls’ and boys’ / last
moments flare in shameful spotlight.” The piety inherent in a medieval Book of
Hours is lithely lifted from a poem in which sensually suggestive language is
counterpoint to our expectations. In another playful poem giving voice to a
medieval “cathedral rodent catcher,” our suspicions about feline omniscience are
confirmed. This cat brings to life the diverse inhabitants and their
diversions—amorous, holy, and mercenary—giving him “barely a minute’s peace
till dusk” when he can return to the mice, those “devious little bastards,”
he’s bound to dispatch. Stone’s final piece and the last of this volume sets
holy men’s physical discomfort from asserting “doctrines” that “don’t sit
comfortably” against the physically freeing observations of “a walker” enjoying
God’s grandeur in the quintessential English landscape.
The “old fields” of medieval literature and history lovingly
ploughed and sown with fresh seeds from modern hands have engendered delightful
and inspiring “new crops” that will refresh any who partake of these evocative,
powerful, and revealing poetic medievalisms.
Julie A. Chappell
Tarleton State University
