Lesley Sharpe considers the uses of power in poems that address poetic, political and religious authority

Michelle Penn

Paper Crusades

Arachne Press, £9.99

In poems that are as inventive in their forms as in their language, Michelle Penn’s sequence Paper Crusade explores the many uses of power. Inspired in part by an interpretation in dance of The Tempest, Penn’s poems draw on and move beyond the intertextual reverberations of Shakespeare’s play to unfold themselves in voices that are both archetypal and unpredictable, reaching deep into imaginative territories that can also shift their mould – the sea and elements, the nameless father, brother, girl and boy, the spirit and indigenous character C. The place of nature, patriarchy, master and servant, authority and authorship – all will be redefined, and the conceit of paper as mask, as book, will open into a drama where paper itself becomes the materiality of both text and performance. The hermetic book of The Father will ultimately be reclaimed by the sea, and his attitude of mastery deemed by it, even at the opening of the sequence, to be ‘an impertinence’, for ‘~ No one games/ the sea ~’ (‘The Sea, offended’). Penn also ensures that there will be revisions of the colonial appropriations and impositions of language, where, in an early poem, ‘C faces the morning’s burdens’, the unnamed C can observe that he is also

/ the h-horse / / of your best / / intentions /

/s-saddled with your words/ /you t-taught me

glass// but I knew lightning

These mercurial shifts of language are possible in a world where glass is also mirror and shard, the hard glinting sand, the cutting ‘rain’ that disfigures the girl, leaving her both ‘ravaged’ and ‘ravishing’ – a characteristic play of language in which Penn dismantles and reverses expectation to create the sudden electricity of an unexpected image. The girl, though damaged, is now a heroine in her own right, even with

~ a face

shattered ~ in a rain

of glass ~

but The Father will retain her in his imagination as ‘a gem/ formed in the pocket of my intellect’. The relics and images of the civilised world glint and shine with their own brightness in these poems – ‘black leathers strangely pristine’, ‘night silks flaring’, a ‘tiara’ of blond hair – and in ‘The Sea watches The Father at his favourite game’, the magic ‘tomes’ of the Father, though ‘crusted with salt and sand’, are still alive with this kind of lexical potency:

This one ~

sapphires spilling from pages ~

That one ~

emeralds ~ diamonds ~ pearls

For all its apparent brightness, Penn shows the darkness of a power that would make a slave of air, of music, of the natural. She delineates the ways in which this power jangles against a life at home in the elemental world – that other power, other magic, with its own language, unformed, always forming. The girl too, in ‘The Daughter considers the status of monsters’, recognises that C

does not frighten me

…i remember us… diving the black

shallows… stabbing

barehanded and blind… for fish…

Through imaginative experiments in form and punctuation, space and silence, line and stanza break, Penn creates a drama which shifts the central focus from a Prospero-like character, and the attendant questions of justice and redemption, to encompass a consideration of the elements themselves. Moving on from the moral landscapes and brave new worlds of its intertextual histories, her story arrives in the political and ecological landscape of our own moment, ‘the sun/ firing high, not even a shadow to shelter beside’ (The Boy awakens). The enduring backdrop is one of remorseless heat, the sun ‘vicious’, ‘flagrant’, with a pervasive scorch of burning sand, ‘sun, sun, and sun’, and ‘the searing light’.

Penn’s ‘island of perpetual sun’ of the opening poem resonates throughout the sequence, with its suited paper crusaders in ‘banker-suits, gloves, paper masks’ ready to fulfil the high rhetoric of the ‘quest for revenge’, the crusading spirit of The Father. With the righteous call to arms, his is an imperialism redeemed always to itself by the idea of salvation. But what will be saved? For what? Or whom? From what or whom? The Father imagines a return to his ‘empire across the sea’, as if the long arm of space delineated in the words ‘empire’ and ‘across’ could conjure old certainties of authority, but he disregards the sea itself, always a dominant voice in the sequence, and an undercurrent which Penn weaves through the other voices: ‘(the waves)/ […] (the words)’.

These are poems in which words move with the independence of waves and dreams to interrogate what can be governed and by whom, in a world where ‘history only bows to revenge’. Penn’s blank paper masks conjure that ancient sense of theatre, anonymous, essential, which invites opposing archetypes of comedy and tragedy to pull against each other. Will the lovers find happiness? Will the hubris of the wicked brother bring his fall? Will there be forgiveness, reconciliation, an end? As ‘proud leader, Father/ to you all’, the patriarch has appointed to himself an unnatural power, ‘spells only a god/should throw’, so that this can never be the end. As the Japanese proverb has it, ‘even the reverse has a reverse’, and in this sequence, both lyrical and dramatic, Penn ensures that the expectations are constantly shifting. Nothing is reliable, or without consequence. It is not enough to be

suited…masked…

as though intentions unseen…

…simply cease…

(‘The Daughter considers the status of monsters’)

‘The Tempest’, said Victor Hugo, ‘is the supreme denouement, dreamed by Shakespeare, for the bloody drama of Genesis. It is the expiation of the primordial crime.’ Shakespeare’s story has its twelve-year delay, the hoped-for anagnorisis, the very real possibility of a brave new world. Paper Crusade gathers its own ecological and political momentum through the force of poetic innovation. In a world ravaged by heat, where water moves with its own primal power, the ecological as well as the post-colonial consequences reverberate, inseparable, no less powerfully than a primordial crime. Penn skilfully reframes the drama, the questions, the voices and their authority. Rhetoric and lyric give way to silence, and even paper cannot be said to have the last word.