Carcanet Press - Review of <i>The Invisible Kings</i> - Jane Yeh, <i>The Times Literary Supplement</i>

Virgin fiction

In a prefatory note, David Morley describes The Invisible Kings as thesecond section of a cycle that began with 2002's Scientific Papers.Readers new to his work, however, will find that The Invisible Kings succeedsas a stand alone volume, offering an introduction to Morley'sspecial themes and concerns. (In fact, some of the poems here are reprintedfrom his earlier collections, with only minor alterations.) Morley's training as a marine researcher andbiologist, which overtly framed Scientific Papers, subtly permeates his newbook, with its many portrayals of the natural world. Snowfinches, redpolls,gall wasps and more populate poems in which Morleymarries precise observation to exquisitely musical language to produce work ofrigorous beauty. The volume's opening poem, "You Were Broken", is abravura performance composed of a single sentence that branches out across fourstanzas like the "amazed, massy shade" of the very tree it depicts.The drama of its slow, centuries long growth amid volcanic rocks, harsh windsand "blights of summer lightning" becomes a narrative of survivalagainst all odds, a "fabulous tale" as compelling as that of anycharacter from myth or legend.Morley's interests, though, range well beyond nature; his inspirationshave included authors from Baudelaire to Brodsky, Montaigneto Milosz, giving his poetry an unusually international, historically informedoutlook. In Mandelstam Variations (1991), a book-length sequence about OsipMandelstam, who was persecuted in Stalinist Russia for his writings, Morley considered the nature of politicaloppression, torture, exile and captivity. These ideas find their way into thenew volume in poems about Paul Celan and Lety u Pisku, a Nazi concentrationcamp in the Czech Republic where countlessRomani were killed. Morley'sfondness for complicated repetitive forms and wordplay (at other times akin toPaul Muldoon's) is turned to a serious purpose in the latter poem. In it, Morley creates a disturbing tension between twovoices, each of which parrots the other's words, slightly changed and in ashifting order, like a pair of distorted echoes. Each of the ghostly,unidentified speakers might be a present-day visitor, a Romani inmate, a Naziguard, or a bystander who did nothing - the poem's power lies in its ambiguity,and in the way its twinned voices are for ever locked together in history andin death.

At the heart of the collection is a longnarrative poem, "Kings", which takes Morley'sprevious explorations of Romani culture in a new direction. Written in amixture of English and Romani, "Kings" is a self-described"fairytale" set in Eastern Europeduring the first third of the twentieth century. Its narrator, a "wisefool", is a Romani man who acts as the go-between for his clan in theirdealings with outsiders. He also doubles as another sort of go between, in hisrole as the clan's seer; the spirits of Romani kings visit him in his dreams,foretelling the future. Movingbackwards and forwards in time,the poem tells the story of his life,his marriage and the tragic slaughter of his wife and tribe.

Freely peppering "Kings" withRomani words and phrases, Morleyinvents a hybrid language that not only mirrors its protagonist's bilingualexistence, but also achieves the level of music in its own right("lilay" is summer, "len" river): "Seven shire horseswade, their tails whish ice-shell. Last lilay on this len // we swam a hundredhorses". Though he provides a comprehensive glossary, his introductorynote suggests the poem should be read "at a canter", not painstakinglytranslated by the reader. Its success is due to the sustained quality of thewriting, which is densely textured and alliterative, formal and incantatory instyle, recalling both Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Geoffrey Hill's MercianHymns: "I invisible, audible, a flume of finches blowing / through thethornfields at your riding". "Kings" has a flavour of Homericepic, as well as of the Divine Comedy (a line of which forms the volume'sepigraph), a manner that grants suitable gravity to its project - the conjuringof a lost world, one now rendered almost extinct.

In a lighter, more colloquial vein, Morley writes elsewhere in The Invisible Kingsabout growing up in Blackpool, the child ofpart-Romani parents. The poems "Finn of the Wiles", "Smoke,Mirror" and "Fiction" are bursting with sharp, pithydescriptions and linguistic energy. "Fiction" is especially forceful,half litany, half confessional. "Fiction was the poached / life history oftravelling folk"; "Fiction took the bus to the store, was allowed /by family law to shoplift". As Morleypiles on the sardonic personifications ("Fiction was a virgin beforemarriage, of course"), the poem develops into a skewed self-indictment, orself-portrait: "It's hard / quarrelling with Fiction. Because Fiction isyou". As an allegory for any writer's life, not just Morley's, this rings true.

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Review of The Invisible Kings - Jane Yeh, The Times Literary Supplement 7 December 2007 Virgin fiction In a prefatory note, David Morley describes The Invisible Kings as thesecond section of a cycle that began with 2002's Scientific Papers.Readers new to his work, however, will find that The Invisible Kings succeedsas a stand alone volume, offering an introduction to Morley'sspecial themes and concerns. (In fact, some of the poems here are reprintedfrom his earlier collections, with only minor alterations.) Morley's training as a marine researcher andbiologist, which overtly framed Scientific Papers, subtly permeates his newbook, with its many portrayals of the natural world. Snowfinches, redpolls,gall wasps and more populate poems in which Morleymarries precise observation to exquisitely musical language to produce work ofrigorous beauty. The volume's opening poem, "You Were Broken", is abravura performance composed of a single sentence that branches out across fourstanzas like the "amazed, massy shade" of the very tree it depicts.The drama of its slow, centuries long growth amid volcanic rocks, harsh windsand "blights of summer lightning" becomes a narrative of survivalagainst all odds, a "fabulous tale" as compelling as that of anycharacter from myth or legend.Morley's interests, though, range well beyond nature; his inspirationshave included authors from Baudelaire to Brodsky, Montaigneto Milosz, giving his poetry an unusually international, historically informedoutlook. In Mandelstam Variations (1991), a book-length sequence about OsipMandelstam, who was persecuted in Stalinist Russia for his writings, Morley considered the nature of politicaloppression, torture, exile and captivity. These ideas find their way into thenew volume in poems about Paul Celan and Lety u Pisku, a Nazi concentrationcamp in the Czech Republic where countlessRomani were killed. Morley'sfondness for complicated repetitive forms and wordplay (at other times akin toPaul Muldoon's) is turned to a serious purpose in the latter poem. In it, Morley creates a disturbing tension between twovoices, each of which parrots the other's words, slightly changed and in ashifting order, like a pair of distorted echoes. Each of the ghostly,unidentified speakers might be a present-day visitor, a Romani inmate, a Naziguard, or a bystander who did nothing - the poem's power lies in its ambiguity,and in the way its twinned voices are for ever locked together in history andin death. At the heart of the collection is a longnarrative poem, "Kings", which takes Morley'sprevious explorations of Romani culture in a new direction. Written in amixture of English and Romani, "Kings" is a self-described"fairytale" set in Eastern Europeduring the first third of the twentieth century. Its narrator, a "wisefool", is a Romani man who acts as the go-between for his clan in theirdealings with outsiders. He also doubles as another sort of go between, in hisrole as the clan's seer; the spirits of Romani kings visit him in his dreams,foretelling the future. Movingbackwards and forwards in time,the poem tells the story of his life,his marriage and the tragic slaughter of his wife and tribe. Freely peppering "Kings" withRomani words and phrases, Morleyinvents a hybrid language that not only mirrors its protagonist's bilingualexistence, but also achieves the level of music in its own right("lilay" is summer, "len" river): "Seven shire horseswade, their tails whish ice-shell. Last lilay on this len // we swam a hundredhorses". Though he provides a comprehensive glossary, his introductorynote suggests the poem should be read "at a canter", not painstakinglytranslated by the reader. Its success is due to the sustained quality of thewriting, which is densely textured and alliterative, formal and incantatory instyle, recalling both Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Geoffrey Hill's MercianHymns: "I invisible, audible, a flume of finches blowing / through thethornfields at your riding". "Kings" has a flavour of Homericepic, as well as of the Divine Comedy (a line of which forms the volume'sepigraph), a manner that grants suitable gravity to its project - the conjuringof a lost world, one now rendered almost extinct. In a lighter, more colloquial vein, Morley writes elsewhere in The Invisible Kingsabout growing up in Blackpool, the child ofpart-Romani parents. The poems "Finn of the Wiles", "Smoke,Mirror" and "Fiction" are bursting with sharp, pithydescriptions and linguistic energy. "Fiction" is especially forceful,half litany, half confessional. "Fiction was the poached / life history oftravelling folk"; "Fiction took the bus to the store, was allowed /by family law to shoplift". As Morleypiles on the sardonic personifications ("Fiction was a virgin beforemarriage, of course"), the poem develops into a skewed self-indictment, orself-portrait: "It's hard / quarrelling with Fiction. Because Fiction isyou". As an allegory for any writer's life, not just Morley's, this rings true. Next review of 'The Invisible Kings'... To the David Morley page... To the 'The Invisible Kings' page...	Share this... 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Review of The Invisible Kings - Jane Yeh, The Times Literary Supplement