Ravenser Odd (a poem by Michael Daniels)
As Dithering Chaps begins to get to grips with the challenges of publishing our ‘carefully-crafted chapbooks’ - we took delivery of a promotional banner this week and that’s our strapline! - we are always on the look-out for formats and fonts that stand out from the crowd.
A friend passed us a copy of a pamphlet by Michael Daniels called ‘Ravenser Odd’ and we were immediately struck by how tactile it felt in the hand.
(The fact that it was written in terza rima, had clever little marginal subtitles and avian icons to signpost developing themes added to our intrigue and pulled us into the text…)
It’s from Poet’s House Pamphlets, the brainchild of poet Jenny Lewis and designer Frances Kiernan, whose ethos is “to publish the poems of a small selection of poets over the age of 40 whose work has reached, or surpassed, the standard of many other published and prizewinning poets”. Its cover design is by Frances, a perfect choice due to her artistic focus on the intersection between language, text and landscape. Her rendering of the spit of mud called Ravenser Odd is both bird’s bill and intimation of a question-mark. We were hooked.
And that is something for us, as newbie publishers, to aim for. When we say 'carefully crafted' we too are talking about giving each chapbook a look and feel that is tailored to the individual creative content: a work of art, the words marrying the form to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The copy of ‘Ravenser Odd’ that I first handled (I’ve since bought my own) was a palimpsest of scuffings and scratchings into its waxy surface. Form matching content. A wonder.
The poem itself is a parable for our times. Deposition and erosion: how water creates and destroys; how men (and birds) try to plant their feet and tides rip them away; how words are vulnerable too…
In his prefatory note, Daniels tells us that Dante was writing ‘The Divine Comedy’ at the highpoint of settlement on Ravenser Odd. Hence he makes the inspired choice to use terza rima for his own work.
Terza rima is a rhyme scheme that is always looking over its shoulder as it moves forward with its theme: one rhyme faces backwards, one forwards and one sits at the fulcrum between past and present. Terza rima has a tidal heft: building up towards its flood of triplets with two onset rhymes (ABA BCB C…) while its closing lines ebb back towards a doublet of rhymes (…XYX YZY Z). Daniels gives emphasis to the way waters wane by separating the single, last line of each poem in his sequence, so that the print starts to look on the page like mini-Ravenser Odds, tentatively marking the whiteness of the ground, his words on the flood, the ink ready to ebb…
Daniels’ use of iambic tetrameter allows him to play powerfully back and forth between lines where you hear three stresses and, in others, four. Another tide pulling. Listen to the rhythm of lines like:
“His bédclothes swám. His níghtmares fléw.
He drówned insíde a tráp god sét
to drág him thróugh the úndertow
that sánk a bóat where chíldren sát […]”
(I’ve added stress-marks to show where I hear four stresses become three, then return.)
As you read through the poem, the cover image of Ravenser Odd starts to flip from figure to ground, the spit of white recedes and the grey-blue of water projects itself forwards.
Only the poetry remains, at the point of its disappearance, as Daniels himself describes it, in closing:
“[..] where absence crowds the empty air.”