A Song for Autumn Dark: Review of The Violin Forest by Katharine Towers
Katharine Towers' latest publication, The Violin Forest, is a pamphlet of twenty short lyric poems, none longer than 20 lines. Bursting with music, there are references to composers, works and musical techniques, and there is also sonorous language, poems structured by looping reprise.
I read this beautifully produced HappenStance pamphlet, with its emerald green endpapers, cover to cover several times over a few days. It came to remind me of one of those musical greeting cards: opening the pamphlet, music emerges from the pages. I found myself compelled to stop at each poem, to savour sound, image and what each conjured in its small space. As if arriving at a clearing in a forest, we find an entire, distinct world, shaped by the refraction of shadow and sound. Experiencing The Violin Forest awakened me anew to the life in my own small city garden, increasing awareness of the abundance of life in improvisational song-like qualities, ‘A robin tinkers with a few odd notes in the hawthorn.’ (‘Nonchalant’); ‘See how they bump and chink on the garden path like / small clay pots, busy with their urgent nothings.’ (‘Sparrows’). These are small studies of the essence of setting. Katharine encapsulates the robin-ness of robin, the sparrow-ness of a sparrow, but shows their being transformed within a specific moment ‘over minute differences… over conundrums of love’ (‘Sparrows’).
Katharine places us over and over in autumn, with both its darkness and wonder, encouraging readers to ‘... take to heart that busy fragrant dark,’ (‘Sparrows’). In dwindling light, we encounter darkness – expecting death, and death is present but not feared, ‘And autumn is the cling of sadness in the night / and autumn-brown the turnings of the mind’ (‘Harmonium’); ‘like the soldiers in La Chanson de Roland, who don’t mind about dying.’ (‘Nonchalant’); ‘and the blackbird’s singing is a fado, and / the thrushes joining voice is like a homesick child’ (‘Harmonium’). These deaths in the full-throated song of nature are not to be feared – they are in process, continuous: singing, dying, turning. But who will forget ‘Mr Dead Fox’, his bright orange corpse, the abrupt interruption of mankind causing ‘his shame of being suddenly dead.’
This is the place where autumn kisses winter, a liminal space with its sense of mourning, ‘Imagine a real garden where I sit / with my soul in dead November leaves,’ (‘The Good Words’). Yet it is also a place of eternal return and latent potential; though there is silence, it is the quietness of an orchestra as it rests between movements. The images strike a note that resounds in the mind long after reading, ‘A red leaf trickles slowly through the foliage.’ (‘Nonchalant’).