"Writing Absences"
John Reibetanz (Canada)

How does a writer deal with loss? Under the umbrella of the long elegiac tradition that linked poets as old as Homer or Virgil with those as recent as Yeats, the writer would seek reassurance in the expansive rhythms of a nature infused with spirit, and would find there affirmations on which he could structure his own. Yet, Yeats recognised that he and his generation were the last romantics, the last to find consolation in such sources; and since Yeats’ death on the eve of World War II, both the inscrutability of a dehumanized nature and the enormous losses of a humanity estranged from it have obliterated those channels of reassurance. In a landscape itself too ravaged and threatened to offer the traditional consolations, and in an age that accepts unspeakable human slaughter as commonplace, where is the writer to turn?

Jeremy Harman’s book of poems and photographs, Echoes of Shadow, arrives with answers that are far more significant than the book’s slim spine might indicate. Both the poems and the photographs are spare, tightly focussed arrangements in black and white that have no truck with the hyperbolic sentimentality of nostalgia – no palaver here. Instead, word and camera become clarifying lenses trained on the pared-down elements of a landscape we recognize as simultaneously independent from and inextricable from human experience. And since Harman’s lenses render such images as “garden”, “mountain”, “moon”, and “pond” with such precision, they can also hold and not distort the shapes of those larger and yet less easily definable features of the human landscape – “heart”, “pain”, “love”, and “loss.”

The book begins with poems that pay homage to (and re-envision) the Eastern sources of these means of expression. Short lines and short stanzas (many of them resonantly three-lined) focus on the interplay of dream and journey, mountain and vision, water and hope. The first stanza of the opening poem, “The Bag Poet”, demonstrates Harman’s extraordinary skill at balancing the palpably immediate with the intangibly suggestive:

Just a stick of a man.
Clothes of dust.
A strong staff. And on his back
a satchel filled with verse.

The prosaic, matter-of-fact details in lines one, three, and four support and validate the second line’s brilliant “clothes of dust,” even as it infuses them with broader range and purpose. From this starting point in Eastern environmental and poetic landscapes, the volume moves to more recent times to consider the wartime experiences of such writers as Mandelstam, Celan, and Levi, who developed an analogous vocabulary for loss; then, in a gradual centring, it lights on Harman’s native Ireland to deal with more personal losses and with the local mentors (especially the novelist John McGahern) who have helped Harman confront such matters; and finally it arrives in the author’s contemporary urban Canada where the last poem is set. “Words Without Sound” (the title aptly summing up the volume’s photographic components, as indeed Echoes of Shadow does itself) focuses on a deaf couple at a bus stop and captures both “how their hands feather / as their fingers flit and dart / through hidden streams” and – in answer to the volume’s confrontations with loss – “the curious peace / they spread”.

Throughout, the poems move us towards this curious peace (also infusing the dozen photographs at the centre of the volume) in a style whose increasing complexity reflects the increasing urgency of the losses it depicts. Harman’s deft, meaningful orchestration of the music of line and syntax in “The Writing of Absence” is crucial to, and representative of, this complexity. How can one write absence? Harman does through an unpunctuated syntax that offers and then retracts presences, as lines that seem at first to connect with their antecedents open new possibilities of meaning in conjunction with what comes after them, and these possibilities in turn vanish under the pressure of further ones. Thus, for instance, smells of spring trouble a “candle’s shadows / as they move across / the darkening wall / his absence opens / into those dreams she fears / she’s lost somewhere”. Neither nature nor the poet can offer the kind of grand, ultimate reassurances that Milton did in his elegy “Lycidas”; absences cannot be turned into eternal presences. Yet, here and throughout this deeply accomplished, deeply significant collection, Jeremy Harman offers us a profoundly satisfying conversancy between the movements of nature and those of poetry. His refractive and reflective sharing of human and natural shadows “draws words into light” so that (in a self-fulfilling prophecy) “when readers bring their dark / it will illuminate and hold” (“Memoir: A Listening”). Illuminating our losses and holding us, the poems in Echoes of Shadow are poems to hold onto.