“It’s H and I’ve O.D.’d”, Oliver Reynolds writes at the beginning of “The Gap”. Indeed he has, not on heroin, but heroine: “H”, in this context, is Helen, Reynolds’s lost lover, sometimes compared to her classical namesake, sometimes mythologized in other ways, sometimes placed beyond metaphor or myth (“You are where the metaphors stop. / You are you”). She appears, one way or another, in most of the poems in Almost, Reynolds’s fourth collection, but the volume is much more than mere therapy or memorial or griefwork; it is also a commentary on the nature of such memorializing.
The word “almost” keeps two ideas in tension; proximity to success, and failure. In the space, the gap, between “almost” and its object, Reynolds busies himself: “Hefting hodfuls of air, / We have walled ourselves up. // Echoes walk the bare homes / Built stanza by stanza”. The gap between a monument and its absent inspiration, between myth and history, metaphor and subject, possession and loss, and form and material, is rendered like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. “The word and what it denotes meet each other on the pavement: which one steps into the gutter?”, he asks rhetorically in “Notes”; and, indeed, Reynolds is nimble enough to consider whether the monument becomes more important than its dedicatee.
There are a number of poems that consider this question: “Lapidary”, with its delicately suffocated epitaph, and “Gautier’s Art”, a translation, or perhaps version, of Gautier’s “L’Art”, which mimics in the wilfully effortful and exhaustive meditations of its stanza forms the processes which it is discussing:
True form’s refractory
And waits in stone or word
Glory
In subduing what’s hard….
Form is what’s overcome.
Stone speaks clearer than clay.
A thumb
Marks the potter’s off-day.
With wit and style, Reynolds sculpts his versions of Helen, rendering pain or paean; but this is also a creative triumph over hard facts, which are at least as “refractory” as the structures and games he insists on working with.
Similar themes and motifs also occur in the outstanding prose poem “Brandenberg Variations”, a series of gnomic captions tracing the history of the edifice and its iconography: the quadriga (a chariot drawn by four horses) and Nike, based on an engraving on an ancient Greek coin. Each paragraph begins “You are…” before allocating another of the roles (“You are Euainetos, the die-engraver, coining it”; “You are Sharkov holding a hacksaw. Lose the eagle and cross”). The poem roams through the redesign of the gate; its move to Paris (under Napoleon); the luminaries who walk through it, in French, Prussian, German and Nazi history; the Berlin Wall; Spandau; the end of the Cold War. The four Nazis given long prison sentences at Nuremberg, Dönitz, Albert Speer (famously pacing the Great Wall of China in his head), von Schirach and von Neurath, become a quadriga of their own, and the poem ends, chillingly,
You are the last of the four to be unharnessed.
The guards say your muttering keeps them
awake at night. Heh heh heh.
That sinister “heh” adds to the already obsessive repetition of “H”; not only Helen, but others, from Homer to Hitler to Hamlet. (The Hamlet story, in fact, is “Welshed” and rendered as a contemporary pub conversation, which manages to be both funny and disconcertingly elegiac.) The initials are ornaments in his larger architecture; earlier, he does the same thing with his own, “O”. But whereas in his previous collection, The Oslo Tram, Reynolds could proudly vaunt his “Full Circle” (“the only letter / common to all sixty-six / alphabets of the world”), here it is reduced to the self-loathing view from the bottom of a well: “Like Cyclops, dying, his one eye / its own obol, everything I saw / was nothing: this bone-meal moon, / small and meaningless as an o.”
“Notes”, another entertaining prose poem, tying up loose ends even as it creates fresh ones, continues the game, enjoying coincidences of love and letters. During a zestful play on the number fourteen, there is a meeting “again by chance (‘O’ stalls in the Royal Albert Hall)”. O is the fifteenth letter, of course, but it is Reynolds’s initial. A few lines later, Reynolds envisages three vast trenches being bulldozed across London, demolishing, among other places, the Royal Albert Hall, and forming an enormous H, of which each “leg” is 14 miles long, with the gouged letter then being set on fire: a blazingly memorable alternative to carving initials into bark. “A poem is a random number of coincidences”, Reynolds points out; though he also says that “Fate is a random number of coincidences”; and, indeed, that “Fate is a necessary number of coincidences”. Almost, appropriately, has as many near-misses as palpable hits; Reynolds undermines his artifice as skilfully as he employs it.
Among these playful diversions are some beautiful, confessional lyrics; self-abasement, idolization and grief are rendered simply and affectingly (“the ribs hug a gap / The size of a fist, and inside that fist / Random stars wait, infinite and unlit”). Every detail of this thoroughly crafted collection offers a chime or link to another piece; this review can only begin to suggest the pleasures of reading, rereading and freshly recognizing. It has been eight years since Reynolds published The Oslo Tram, but the time has been well spent; this is as good a volume as any of the 1990s.