"Periplous" by Lesley Saunders

This is a single poem in twelve linked sections. It is poetic recreation of the lost account of the Greek explorer Pytheas from Marseilles who supposedly circumnavigated the British Isles in c325 BCE.

A periplous is a sort of navigational log which lists the landmarks and safe anchorages so that subsequent sailors can find their way.

Each section has five stanzas; each stanza contains six lines of indeterminate syllable count and no discernible rhyming scheme. There is a final single line at the end of the poem which (I think) links with the theme of the next section.

The punctuation is as prose. There are no capitals at the start of the line unless it coincides with the start of a sentence. There is plenty of enjambment, including running the sentence on to the next stanza.

The poet seems to rely on juxtaposing images. One moment we are talking about "a woman washing/ another woman's hair in a pail" and the next "the psychogeography of rapefields/ and scythe-wheeled clearings".  In the section about Slavery we have a list of "POWs from Scythia Phrygia Lydia/ Syria Illyria", slavery in the classical world, and then we jump to "Ghana Guinea Benin" African slavery. In "Imagining Albion" we leap from the Greek philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes to a British twentieth century seaside resort.

She also mixes in sources from here, there and everywhere. Her three wrecked ships are the vessel that perhaps inspired Shakespeare's Tempest to the ship in Moby-Dick to one of Vasco da Gama's ships. So fact and fiction, muddled. She takes snippets of Latin poetry and Greek poetry and Portuguese songs and a Carol King song and Sloop John B and lines from an Anglo-Saxon poem ... If the source is originally written in a foreign language she preserves that. At least she usually gives the translation in the Notes. It reads like an attempt to rewrite The Waste Land. 

Regular readers of this blog know how this infuriates me. I think writing, whether prose or poetry, should be an attempt to communicate with the reader, not a display of the writer's erudition. There were a lot of things I had to look up when I was reading this poem.

Lines I liked:

“... the candle-end

of a soul. I wept then

for the spent match of my life.”

A reference to slaves as "floggable goods”

“Out there alone, I swam alone,

no friends, lovers,

it felt as if I were part of the ocean.” 

“... little despot-god

of rainbows and tsunamis”

“Let’s make a songbook of the drowned”

The last line is

“O did you ever see a wild goose sailin’ o’er the sea” 

Which is, I suppose, the poet teasing us that we have been on a wild goose chase.

Hard work.

March 2018; 29 pages