{"id":10001,"date":"2018-11-27T21:10:03","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T20:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10001"},"modified":"2018-11-27T22:15:12","modified_gmt":"2018-11-27T21:15:12","slug":"mario-chard-land-of-fire-tupelo-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10001","title":{"rendered":"Mario Chard | Land of Fire<\/em> | reviewed by Ian Pople<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mario Chard | Land of Fire<\/em> | Tupelo Press: $17.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mario Chard\u2019s first collection Land of Fire<\/em> inevitably comes contextualized with biography; Chard was born to an Argentinian \u2018immigrant\u2019 mother and an American father. And many of these poems deal directly with the experience of immigration into America; a writing which, in some ways, could not be more timely. But the poems do much, much more than that. The cover of the book is an illustration of William Blake and a number of the poems reference Paradise Lost<\/em>. Thus, the poems reach into a very rich context of religious writing, particularly, that peculiarly English tradition of the eschatological and the apocalyptic. It is in this kind of context which the title, Land of Fire<\/em> fits, although, clearly that is a translation of Tierra del Fuego, the Argentinian territory, at the very tip of South America across from which my own father was born near the Chilean city of Punta Arenas. So, I have to state a personal interest in this collection, from the beginning. <\/p>\n

This meeting of the immigrant experience with the religious is clearly a heady mixture and were Chard a less skilled writer, it is a mixture which would simply topple his control. But, as the blurb writers point out, Chard\u2019s writing has a \u2018muscularity\u2019 about it which means that the material is held and worked with both delicacy and confidence. The \u2018muscularity\u2019 shows itself in a spare, understated style which involves short sentences and a very sparing way with adjectives. But \u2018muscularity\u2019 should not be interpreted as \u2018machismo\u2019. There are a number of poems about men and, for example, father\/son relationships, which are, again, both delicate and deeply emotionally intelligent. These personal poems also fit with the emotional tenor of the collection, which is unusual in its consistency; a measured, calm exploration of how we might be and become empathetic. <\/p>\n

One aspect of Chard\u2019s control is the way in which the poems are organised into an organic flow. An example of this is \u2018Austral\u2019, which is quoted whole here, <\/p>\n

Name for what we never name above:
\nFar South. Farther. Land of Light
\nthat goes out slow. Land of<\/p>\n

prisons without doors. Land of fire.
\nSome say the angels God cast down
\nfell for an age. From here <\/p>\n

we use our palms to blot out the sun.
\nThe prisoners we send south
\nsoon lose their names. The young<\/p>\n

their sight. The sun grows old.
\nStill, when it dies, not even distance
\nwill keep the land of fire cold. <\/p>\n

In some respects, this short poem moves quite quickly. The first line\/sentence elides the main verb and, because it begins with \u2018Name\u2019 almost conflates an imperative and a noun. This elision is followed by the larger gesture of \u2018for what we never name above\u2019. That collusive \u2018we\u2019 is repeated in line eight, where \u2018we\u2019 are equally culpable in the movement of prisoners into this place which effectively exiles as well as imprisons, in this \u2018land of \/ prisons without doors\u2019; similar, then, to the British sending their prisoners to Australia. In part, the trajectory of the poem is both slowed and quickened with the repetitions of \u2018Land of light\/prisons\/fire\u2019; quickened because the parallel repetitions are just that repetitions, and repetition tends to emphasise. Because of the different noun phrases which follow the \u2018land of\u2026\u2019, there is a weight with these phrases. Interpolated here, is the comment on the fall of the angels. One interpretation of this might be that we, too, as the fallen in a post-lapsarian world take out our fall on those around us, as Chard suggests in the second third of the poem. <\/p>\n

Chard\u2019s emphasis on the loss of sight in the second third of the poem operates, again, on a number of levels: firstly, \u2018we\u2019 actively avoid the light in that lovely image of using \u2018our palms to blot the sun\u2019; next, that sense of our \u2018agency\u2019 leads to a further avoidance of viewing the prisoners as having names, and without names we cannot \u2018see\u2019 them as individuals, as humans; and then, \u2018The young [lose] \/ their sight\u2019; the loss held mimetically in the elision on the verse break. And, these treatments of other humans might be the reason why, finally, when the sun dies, the land of fire will not be cold. <\/p>\n

These strategies are, perhaps, Chard\u2019s way of showing anger. Elsewhere, \u2018Once\u2019, for example, begins \u2018They put the terrorist\u2019s face on each urinal cake \/ in the fourteen-screen cineplex \/ men\u2019s room. Someone cross out Men, wrote Target Practice\u2019. And the next poem, \u2018Mar\u2019 begins, \u2018After the way disfigured \/ they gave men effigies of their faces \/ cast by sculptors\u2019. But what then happens is, as in \u2018Austral\u2019, this anger becomes more complex, sometimes turned back on itself. In \u2018Once\u2019 the poem ends as the emotion of the terrorist attack overwhelms those who piss in the urinal cake. In \u2018Mar\u2019, the poem ends \u2018Soldiers they taught first to mar \/effigies of men \/ were given sculptors.\u2019 We are all clearly fallen angels. The iconographies which we create to demonise or to celebrate, simply deepen the ironies of the original situations. <\/p>\n

Matching the complexity of human affairs is the complex place which God and religion also have in the world: this is the whole of the second part of Chard\u2019s poem, \u2018Pilgrimage\u2019 <\/p>\n

When I reached the chapel
\nin a house of God
\nempty of its smoke,<\/p>\n

when I passed the rooms
\naround it, the doors
\nthat opened into<\/p>\n

the rooms,
\nthe dark, the hallways straight,
\nI still recoiled.<\/p>\n

I thought the heart was safe;
\nthat the cages<\/p>\n

meant to keep it safe
\ncould still amaze. <\/p>\n

Here, the trajectory of the poem moves from something relatively straightforward, although Chard is careful to delimit this place as \u2018a house of God\u2019. In line eight, though, we move into a place which is physically darker, but where the language of the poem becomes slightly archaicised with the placing of the adjective \u2018straight\u2019 after the noun \u2018hallways\u2019. Yet, when the narrator has moved through that stage, what then occurs is the inner being, \u2018the heart\u2019, is threatened and not merely threatened but loses, in part, the rationale within which it lives, i.e., the sense that religion not only gives rules but also elevates and, in doing so, may transcend those rules. <\/p>\n

Chard takes immigrant experience, recent history in Argentina, and a heady, but never unalloyed, religious sensibility and forges from those elements an immediate, striking poetry. What he seems to be aiming at is a kind of consolation. This is not consolation simply in an easy sense that in the Christian God, there is a place of rest and warmth, or that the sacramental can be present in the devastating discriminations meted out on the immigrant. But there is a sense that the cage can actually still amaze. That within our experience as fallen and falling, we need to maintain our gaze even when the world seems alien, even when we hold up our palms to shield that gaze from the sun. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mario Chard | Land of Fire | Tupelo Press: $17.95 Mario Chard\u2019s first collection Land of Fire inevitably comes contextualized with biography; Chard was born to an Argentinian \u2018immigrant\u2019 mother and an American father. 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