"The gannet I found stranded in a car-park, something all wrong with its wings and its head too heavy for the neck to bear, beautiful bird, beautiful ugly bird. * Not the street-parties day and night tomorrow, but the morning after that, and the bin-men redding up shredded pieces of palm-trees like the debris of enormous wings. * The gannet's eyes, the gannet's big clown-face."
"Anabase, by Saint-John Perse, translated from French to English by TS Eliot, has a particular hold on his imagination in this collection. In fact, its epigraph is from Anabase, canto 1: et la mer au matin comme une presomption de l'esprit. Eliot, the endnote reveals, translated this initially as and the sea at morning like a pride of the spirit before revising it to and the sea at morning like a presumption of the mind."
A vivid scene depicts a stranded gannet in a car park, injured and oddly proportioned, its appearance both beautiful and grotesque. Urban aftermath imagery follows: street parties, shredded palm fronds, and bin-men clearing debris that resemble enormous wings. The town appears in close, damp yellow light with an impending storm, open windows and flapping dresses. A single blue sea egg anchors the marine motif. A contemporary practitioner employs paraphrase to transform earlier poetic material into new work, using sea similes and translation choices to reshape imagery, tone, and genre into hybrid poetic-prose sequences.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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