Swimming Pool

"This is a wonderful, extraordinary poem in so many ways, not quite like anything I know, though reminding me to go back, perhaps, to the Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in its embrace of contraries, in its repeated transformation of either/or into both/and, of polarity as requiring both poles, of binaries as always inseparably fused into generous – and generative – singularities, of affirmation as inseparable from negation and vice versa, of interiority as always ambivalently yoked to exteriority, of literalness as layered into metaphor, memory, even allegory, of I as always superimposed on I, of person and voice as moving around in the fluidity of language and social exchange. No wonder that the poem here makes such recourse to layering, folding, piling, refraining, riffing on instabilities in grammatical class (often reaching for a verb from the interior of a noun, for example), concatenating the resulting variations in a singing continuity rather than a stumbling uncertainty between them. Nothing here is ever as simple as an unambiguous noun. What on earth, in the name of currency, is a pool? Occasionally a simple, and for that reason seductive, image is glimpsed: for a moment there is the clarity of a single swimmer’s body cutting a line through water, and then that clarity is not so much lost – it never is – but disallowed the status of whole, as ungenerous within these shifting overlays. The literal is thus inseparable from metaphor, perhaps also from allegory, since all is set in motion by a cumulative aggregation – though always already in motion –, moving in and through the long poem-paragraphs, which themselves pile up in breath-defying sentences that themselves keep accumulating on the principle of echo, inclusiveness, alternation, always refusing to settle, even into a narrative possibility that at times beckons. Is this a richness, a playfulness between different potentials that surround one, that is only fully available to a true polyglot (Nabokov is explicitly there in the text, though as lepidopterist; Caroline Bergvall isn’t, but was in my mind). I do think the poem – for I think of it as single poem, with poems inside it and beside it, – is very special."—John Hall