Repeat This
You have lost it was my fault but there’s more
I live close to the tramlines the phrases heat up.
Too late in the journey a torch endues me with
shadows I have made up nothing all day
nothing has been changed
choosing between ferry ports at the last moment
not to mention this tonguing
which takes the bit between the teeth.
I am just going to put my head round the door
nothing like a change of thrills. There could be no doubt
this part was played by a separate instrument.
I await my turn which approaches fast
that’s what life used to be like
kneeling down to receive everything
in the first few seconds. Asleep under the horse chestnut
it is always a question of layers
there is a ravine I am waving
all at once you retract your claws
where the blood has turned. I love you systematically
but time is against me
write everything you know I am not coming back
From Mengham’s 2015 collection, Chance of a Storm, Repeat This is like a musical score, carefully notated but resistant to immediate translation into sound. The verbal notation, while evocative, is not prescriptive: it’s not denotation. We can sometimes follow a melody or glimpse how the harmony is layered, but there is no extended continuity of connection. This suits the theme of hasty exits, time running out.
From the outset, Repeat This plays with grammatical shifts and ambiguity. “You have lost it was my fault” could be read as two statements, separate despite the lack of separating punctuation, but the embedded colloquialism for getting in a rage, “lost it”, registers before the mind can adjust the syntax to read “you have lost” (intransitive) and “it was my fault”. Again, in the second line, the question is – connection or separation or both? In the statement “I live close to the tramlines the phrases heat up” we can imagine a speaker contemplating escape while the row goes on getting more and more heated: but “the phrases heat up” could be an adjectival clause, with “heat up” transitively describing the tramlines rather than the phrases. The shift here is not so much of meaning as in mode of expression. Tramlines heated by angry phrases belong to a vividly symbolic poetic register; the description of words as “heated” belongs, like the expression “time is against me”, to the tired or buried metaphors of prose.
The blurb for Mengham’s earlier collection, Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt), quotes the artist Katarzyna Kobro: “Sculpture is a part of the space around it.” This statement, I find, sharpens in reversal: “The space around it is part of a sculpture.” Perhaps it’s a clue to Mengham’s ars poetica in Repeat This, suggesting that not all the phrases or lines are necessarily in symbolic or narrative connection. Some may have infiltrated from outside the poem. The result, because the poem is structured by the first-person point of view, is an exchange between a central consciousness and a flow of images shapeshifting around it – whether these are from the speaker’s psyche or from an exterior verbal source.
Another interestingly absorbed disjunction may be between un-thought-out “stream-of-consciousness” and verbal self-consciousness, as in the quick movement from “choosing between ferry ports at the last moment”, and the self-reflexive trope of “this tonguing / which takes the bit between the teeth.” Furthermore, the horse/bit metaphor is divided and the “tonguing”, which sets the will free – as a horse is set free from its rider’s will when it takes control of the bit – may be poetic or erotic, argumentative or merely conversational. “I am just going to put my head round the door” is a colloquialism sardonically rebuffed by “nothing like a change of thrills”. On the other hand, “that’s what life used to be like” is taken up a pitch by a comparison that suggests a eucharistic flow of instant blessings. The images/metaphors sometimes clash logically: the fleeing warhorse is replaced by the view from beneath the horse chestnut tree, a vision of “layers” as the lay-er (lover) gazes upwards. The dramatic episodes become more consistently connected in the last two stanzas, featuring a ravine, blood, and retracted claws as the fight ends in the speaker’s irrevocable departure.
The poem’s mood and style seem at times eastern European, a reminder that Mengham co-edited and translated some of the poems in, the anthology Altered State: The New Polish Poetry. Repeat This shares with some of those Polish poems a subverted realism, where some ordinary image – rain, a tree or a fence – acts as an immediate instance of symbolic power without ceding any of its realist connotations. Mengham’s poem rushes like a train through glimpses of tramlines, ferry ports, embattled lovers, comings and goings, nothings and somethings, and a wild hinterland where the city peters out in wilderness, and where the torch of the opening stanza brings more shadow than light.
All poems read slightly differently at different historical moments, of course, but I also wonder if some are specifically designed for the reflection of changing circumstance (meaning, in effect, “you can’t Repeat This”). My reading of Chance of a Storm straddled the EU referendum. Repeat This initially felt like a poem firmly located in Europe, while fully at ease in its sometimes playful possession of the English language. Then, after last Thursday’s vote, the tone seemed less jaunty, more wounded and valedictory. In allowing disjunctions and opening questions, it seems to be the kind of poem that, by doing interesting things with linguistic space, also lends itself to a flight through time.
