Cutting Verse

Abstract

The Unconditional by Simon Jarvis. Barque Press, 2005. £15. ISBN 1–903488–43–5* For a work like The Unconditional – a work comprising 235 pages of unbroken verse that mostly amounts to something like iambic pentameter, often falls into something like heroic couplets, occasionally breaks into something more like free verse, fills itself with neologisms, sometimes pads itself out with nearly unpronounceable collections of letters, and is so constantly cut up by parentheses that one loses count of which have opened and closed – it seems sensible to offer readers something of a road map with which to orientate themselves. One way of doing this would be to provide an account of possible intellectual references and influences in the poem: its very learnedness is one of its most obvious characteristics, and it is indeed full of references and half-references to various philosophical texts, philosophical poems, and philosophical writers. Theodor Adorno, for example, pops up all over the place – and is the source for the title – and pages 57–60 contain what the poem calls an ‘incompetently englished afterbirth’ (p. 61), and is in fact a very competently creative version of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Crise de vers. But this strangely popular approach to difficult contemporary poetry runs the risk of simply displaying its own learnedness rather than attending to the poetry itself. Instead, this review will take a circuitous route through what is admittedly a difficult and long poem, and try to map the ways in which it cuts through any interpretative road one chooses to take.