"Bearing Witness"
Ann Dooley (Canada/Ireland)

Jeremy Harman’s debut collection, Echoes of Shadow, is extraordinarily moving and extremely accomplished stylistically. The predominant mode works with issues of deep insubstantiality, memory, meditation, presence, and the need to bear witness to the ways that our lives and the lives of others enter into being and slip through it and beyond it again. The work is strong and not at all elitist or obscure in its operations, working in a fairly plain metonymic fashion. Everything is laid out and clear for the reader, and what is required is not esoteric knowledge or huge abilities to decode metaphoric structures, but rather to attend to each poem as it unfolds with something of the same patience and contemplative quietness inherent within each poem.

The collection adheres very well as a unit and some poems stand out as major carriers of association with a company of poets and a certain tradition. Part of the satisfaction of the volume is to notice that what one might at first see as a Eurocentric frame of reference, an association with a group of poets from Mallarmé to Mandelstam, to the Irish McGahern and Heaney, is actually a far wider company. The great Chinese wisdom tradition is also invoked at the beginning and again in the heart of the volume through reference to Zhang Ji and Tu Fu, and the result is to consider presence and the trace of presence in absence and in post-present situations from a global cloud of witnesses.

There are a few times when a phrase is deployed that seems a little too used and previously worn, so to speak, when one might wish the poet had searched further for a more personally keyed and fresh language. Phrases such as the romantic ‘wind-tossed hair’ in “Memoir: A Listening”, or the Biblical ‘bitter bread’ of “Mother Bread”, or the specifically poetic ‘elixir’ from “Reflections on the Edge of Life”, seem too easy. On second and third reading of the poems, however, the willingness to use a more familiar poetic phrase is reassuring and courteous to the reader, and serves to embed this poetry in a sense of communally shared language – a kind of poetic key that precisely because a phrase is familiar makes it all the more significant as a cherished keep-sake that joins this poetry with all that has gone before.

Focusing on specific poems, “Reflections on the Edge of Life” offers a way for the author to make some interesting statements – in a language of both organic natural growth and social consolation – on the import of his own published work, and finally to a fade-out with the implied death of the poet. “Breathlight” is also marked by the Oriental note, fixed by the image of the mountain, the pond and the moon. The poem is rendered complex by the holding back from the literalness of gardening, first in the transformation of gardening to music and finally in the retreat from presence altogether, the person being now just a moon mirage. This is very skillfully done and leaves a certain note of loss behind, a longing for the absented female presence who had brought order and beauty into the poet’s world. The woman of “Lost Wind” is at first reading a persona continuant on the previous poem, but her role vis-à-vis the standard Chinese scenario has changed and it is her aging, her separation from a lost time of engagement with life, that matters. How this process results in the opening of the heart in the last line is ambiguous and makes the need to reread imperative, but the reserve remains.

“White Flower”, dedicated to Osip Mandelstam, exemplifies poetic language as a common and well-loved currency. Mandelstam’s poems, surviving so miraculously through his terrible silencing are now bearing fruit, but that is not where the poem ends; sympathy and attention to the master poet and his tragedy demands that the poet return to the act of witnessing Mandelstam in his flowering in dying. So the tact and exquisite courtesy of Harman continues. “Flight”, which describes the ‘defeated’ Paul Celan who ‘threw himself into the Seine’ is quite simply beautiful and is a great example of what can be done with the tools Harman chooses to use. “Unearthed”, an entirely successful poem, achieves the same beauty as an act of despair is understood, graced – a leap to darkness yet beyond darkness the stars hide yet are there – even as the longing paradoxically remains. Thus an act of suffering and negation become yet an act of willing and keeping faith with presence.

“Confluence” and the three poems after it bring the reader to another state of longing, and bring out again the thematic of the lost mother. They exemplify very well the need to read the poems in the collection as linked sequences. The three poems coming after really do enact a psycho-drama of mother-son understanding and the nature of memory as it moves from active to passive mode and brings the lost mother into presence and out of presence again. The search for parental adumbrations where father and mother operate together on the child’s psyche is not however quite the end of these poems: they become the end but even as they do those other elements – the language of breath, rhythm, voice, air, light – bring us into a zone where our ability to remember and to contemplate in the world becomes equally important. The rich presence of the mother is most clearly seen in a figure who is almost a double for the poet himself, John McGahern, whose work and whose death inspires two exquisite poems, “Memoir: A Listening” and “Too Soon”. “New York Net Weaver” is a poem of crucial balance for the volume as a whole because it is here that the poet abandons his personal and poetic ghost mentors and uses a real person and his life as a guide. There is a warmth to this poem and a fullness of presence to it that makes it one of my favourite in the volume.

“Words without Sound” is a wonderful flourish as the end poem, where the temper of the poet, drawn to soundings, to words, is parried nicely by another kind of communication which is entirely without sound, implying a more direct kind of communication that has a huge attraction for the poet. He longs for voice and yet is comfortable in silence, bearing witness in admiration.

All in all a wonderful reading experience.