Issue 32: Mae Losasso

Review: Rowland Bagnall, Near Life Experience (Carcanet, 2024)

There is a painting by Walter Sickert, titled The rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris: the entrance to Sargent’s Studio (1906-07), that hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It’s a small, unprepossessing work, depicting a Parisian street at the turn of the century: shop fronts glow under neon signage, slate-grey mansard roofs cap Hausmannian buildings as far as the eye can see – which isn’t very far, thanks to a sharp kink in the road and the settling dusk, which casts its fuzzy light over the scene. And it’s precisely this – the deep, plummy gloaming of it all – that makes the little work so memorable. Standing in front of the painting, you have a sense that you’ve been pulled momentarily out of time. Then again, haven’t you also been thrown into time? The time of Belle Époque Paris, yes, but also that soft crepuscular time, where late afternoon leaks into violet night?

Rowland Bagnall’s Near Life Experience, his second collection with Carcanet, reminds me of that Sickert painting – and not only because Bagnall, like the canvas, resides in Oxford. These are poems that experiment with the ekphrastic tradition, turning their attention to visual art in an attempt to anchor what Bagnall, in ‘Eight Studies of a Hand’, calls ‘the obviously waxy quality of time’ (21). But despite the painters who float in and out of the pages of the book – de Chirico, Bruegel, Chardin, Miró, Matisse, Renoir, Rembrandt, Diebenkorn – the poems refuse to be read as addenda to existing works. These are compositions painted in semantic shades of ‘gold’ (13) and ‘mauve’, 'plum’ and ‘purple’, ‘even the dark blue that Cézanne uses’ (68); poems that meticulously render their own landscapes, opening onto

[…] a clueless sky, a shadow
thickening the walls, an all but empty
street that seems to widen to include you.
And here’s the creak of branches against
other branches. And here’s a well-proportioned
view of the whole town, resting silently
at night, waiting for us (44).

Moments like this one from ‘The Sunlight Falls Partly in a Cup’, capture the impression of doubled time that I see in Sickert’s painting: a sense of the present that is both fleeting and stretched. On the one hand, shadows and streets thickening and widening; on the other, the whole painterly scene ‘resting silently […] waiting for us’. What’s captivating about The rue Notre-Dame des Champs isn’t that the paint stills the moment, but that it renders a sense of quickening brought about by falling light. And this is what Bagnall’s poems do, too: they gift the present, not through the petrification of images, but by registering the shifts that seep, like oil on canvas, from imprecise moment to imprecise moment, the ‘fading light’ (61) of ‘Dusk begin[ning] its strange / descent’ (55).

If Bagnall’s sense of time is painterly, so too is his sense of place. In these twilit poems, we are swept into dreamlike landscapes where ‘mountains are silent […] gold air thin at the top of them’ (13) or to ‘lush meadows and woodlands, / yellow lichen on the stones’ (46). There is a French term, arrière-pays, meaning hinterland, which has lately come to refer to the distant, mountainous landscapes of Italian Quattrocento paintings. Gombrich thought these vistas unsuccessful, a naïve attempt at incorporating new methods of perspective, which wouldn’t begin properly to blend with their foreground subject until the late 15th century. But later writers have been more forgiving of these fantastical landscapes, seeing in them a kind of oneiric possibility. It was the French poet and art historian Yves Bonnefoy who helped reawaken critical interest in those strange Renaissance regions, giving new meaning to the term arrière-pays in his 1972 book of that name. In his memoir-cum-art historical study, Bonnefoy develops a mode of thinking – an arrière-pensée, if you will – about the present, which speaks to the same crepuscularity that characterises Bagnall’s poems:

When a road climbs upwards revealing, in the distance, other paths among the stones and other villages; when the train travels into a narrow valley, at twilight, passing in front of houses where a window happens to light up; when a boat comes in fairly close to the shoreline, where the sun has caught a distant windowpane […] this very specific emotion seizes me […] What are the names of those villages over there? Why is there a light on that terrace, and who is greeting us or calling us, as we come alongside? [1]

Such an attunement to the gloaming structures Near Life Experience. The images of dusk and dawn that pervade the collection aren’t only picturesque, they also get at the nub of poetic thinking, capturing the way a poem splits time, allowing the reader to inhabit parallel paths of the present simultaneously. But if that’s the condition of poetry qua poetry, then by registering those temporal slippages, Bagnall’s poems intensify our experience of doubled time. Like those glimmering landscapes that beckon from the backgrounds of early Renaissance scenes, the poems in Near Life Experience lull the reader into the misty elsewheres that these stanzas so vividly conjure: 

[…] this is what the poem
is like – the shape of a room
and the objects in it
scattering like fish – arriving
into somewhere else, dragooning us
along with it – a pendulum
distributing its weight – like sailing into secret
waters, different when remembered –
and disembarking nimbly
somehow here and now refreshed (18).

The poem appears to be assembling itself on the page before us into the ‘shape of a room’ (or stanza). But before we can inhabit it, the lines start to swing, pendulum-like, each dash marking a turn ‘into somewhere else, dragooning us / along with it’. There’s a gentle surreality to these poems (the room ‘scattering like fish’, waters ‘different when remembered’), gentle in the way that our best dreams are. No nightmarish melting clocks here; the dreams that these poems induce are the ones that leave us longing to return to them after ‘disembarking’ at morning’s harbour. And isn’t that also what dusk grants? In falling light, our vision smudges, perhaps momentarily doubles, as the scene before us appears for an instant as though it must belong to some other time, some other place, some intangible elsewhere. What I’m calling a crepuscular poetic (no relation, incidentally, to Italy’s melancholy poeti crepuscolari) has to do with that doubling, in which to be ‘somehow here and now’ is also, always, to register the possibility of ‘arriving into somewhere else’. Or, as Bagnall puts it in ‘The Sure Season’:

I used to think that every day
the world stayed pretty much the same
but you woke up a little different. For a while, I felt
the opposite: that I was me, all of the time, and seasons
shed the world like skin, proof of their growth […]

Now I think a blend of these – or quickly
change my mind between them so that both appear
true at once, like a nineteenth century illusion
where two separate illustrations can be merged
by twiddling a string: bird and cage, horse and rider (23).

Here, both the thought and the structure of that thought exert what Bagnall elsewhere calls a ‘double consciousness’ (73): the stasis and change of self and world get fused in an ontological fluctuation ‘like a nineteenth century illusion’. But the illustration on the thumbed string is more than a neat simile for the fast-changing mind: capturing the double-sightedness of visual art, Bagnall’s image suggests an analogous way of thinking about the poem. Just as Sickert’s muddy mulberry daubs coalesce to produce a twilit scene, so the arrangement of words on the page (and there’s a concrete visuality to many of the poems in the collection) ‘buil[d] up into something, meaningless or meaningful / As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed’ [2]. That’s a line from John Ashbery’s ‘The Bungalows’ (a poem that appears in The Double Dream of Spring, which takes its aptly dual-vision title from a painting by de Chirico), though you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was one of Bagnall’s. Indeed, Ashbery is an important touchstone for the collection, which shares the art-historical tendencies of the New York School poet’s writing (both Ashbery and Bagnall were/are art critics), as well as the quasi-philosophical voice that characterises much of his mid-career writing.

But perhaps what Bagnall most shares with Ashbery is a fondness for the absurd, which shades not into farce but into beauty. At several moments across the collection, the poem’s speaker ascends to some impossibly omniscient perspective from which he is able to watch himself in a way that feels at once preposterous and profound. In ‘Double Vision at the Sink’ we open on the poem’s speaker shelling shrimp over a ceramic basin. His mind wanders. He is thinking about the Mérode Altarpiece (c.1428), an early Renaissance work with an urban arrière-pays, ‘a street-scene of a European / town, outdating him [Saint Joseph] by something close to / fourteen hundred years […] Everything is foreground’ (19). And now, in a twist of dream logic, the speaker has soared above the altarpiece and its meandering landscape and is travelling in a plane, gazing down on the world below to see – can it really be? – himself shelling shrimp at the sink:

                                         […] I zoom in on the country
then the city we’ve just left, then the apartment,
then the kitchen where I see myself before
the sink, my fingers working neatly on the silvery-grey
shrimp, the sink’s shimmering surface pale,
more or less reflecting me, winking and smiling,
looking out into the room like looking
down into the opaque non-reflection of the sky (20).

It’s a typically Ashberyan POV (another moment from ‘The Bungalows’: ‘only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar / The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption’), fuelled by a kind of ‘winking’, self-conscious absurdism. But isn’t there also something terribly ‘beautiful and / beautifully curious’ (74), to borrow a line from Bagnall’s ‘Animal History’, about the splintering of consciousness that the poem permits? In the image of the self-turned gaze infinitely reflected like ‘looking / down into the opaque non-reflection of the sky’ we see through a painter’s eye (an adjusted sightline; the opacity of pigment), but don’t we also get a philosopher’s perspective? There’s something buried in this simile that has to do with the self and its relation to the infinite, but it’s something we can’t quite grasp (like Bonnefoy’s boat beside the shoreline) because the poem suspends those different meanings like floating puffs of peach-coloured cloud in a Tiepolo fresco.

That capacity to straddle the beautiful and the absurd (another kind of doubling), is what allows these poems to push the illogical thought until it arrives at its own irrefutable logic through faith in the poem’s ability to scaffold that thought. In another poem, ‘The Nature of Arrival’, this gets articulated as a challenge to the very terms of poetic similitude in an image of ‘stone walls [that] split the empty hills like two sides / of a single thought’ (65). Convention would have this the other way around: easily graspable image (stone walls criss-crossing empty fields) providing illustration for hard-to-conceive concept (the splitting of the atomic thought). But by turning this on its head – by upsetting the expected hierarchy of the simile – the poem opens itself up to us. We’re not held at bay by the divided thought; we inhabit it. We dwell in the poem’s arrière-pays, those ‘empty hills’ whose presence is adjacent to our own in the hinterland of the imagination.

In the last line of the final stanza of the collection’s closing poem, ‘The Vast Hour’, Bagnall offers an illusion of finality:

This much I do know: light on the housetops,
alluvial plains, the old heart and its loyalties.
        And the evening disa
-ppearing – first the ending, now
        the end (82).

This is the end – the end of the collection, tied up with a ribbon borrowed from narrative convention – except it also isn’t. The enjambed evening, breaking across the penultimate line as the last rays of the sun dip behind rooftops, may mark the dying day but there’s nothing final about that transition. This much the poems know. In signalling the sense of an ending, the collection – this series of folds and turns, dusks and dawns, departures and arrivals, dreams and in-between-times – merely routes the reader back to its opening page. Because, closing the covers of Near Life Experience, one is left with the bumpy feeling of being ejected from the Edenic elsewheres that these poems make possible. All that remains is to live it over again.

Notes

[1] Yves Bonnefoy, ‘"The Hinterland’ (Chapter 1 translated by Stephen Romer), PN Review 121, Volume 24 Number 5, May - June 1998: p. 40.

[2] John Ashbery, ‘The Bungalows’ in The Mooring of Starting Out (New York: Ecco, 1997), p. 72.

Mae Losasso is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her writing can also be found in PN Review, Chicago Review, and Jacobin.

Copyright © 2024 by Mae Losasso, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author