{"id":11245,"date":"2020-04-16T11:23:51","date_gmt":"2020-04-16T10:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11245"},"modified":"2020-04-16T11:33:41","modified_gmt":"2020-04-16T10:33:41","slug":"john-gurney-meister-eckhart-and-the-predicate-of-light-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11245","title":{"rendered":"John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light<\/em> | Poetry Salzburg: \u00a36.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

John Gurney was one of those writers, present in any culture, who become rather niche figures, rack up a small, focused succ\u00e9s d\u2019estime, and then quietly disappear. So it\u2019s greatly to the credit of Poetry Salzburg who\u2019ve published much else of Gurney\u2019s poetry that they have published Gurney\u2019s sonnet sequence, Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light<\/em>, some nineteen years after the writer\u2019s death. <\/p>\n

Gurney\u2019s first full-length publication was Wheal Zion<\/em>, published by Harry Chamber\u2019s Peterloo Press in 1979. Wheal Zion<\/em> introduced its readers to a poet who was a considerable formalist. Not only did Gurney favour the sonnet, but he was also a practitioner of the iambic pentameter; a practice which reached its apotheosis in Gurney\u2019s 16,000 line epic, War<\/em>. An ambition like that can come back to haunt a writer, and the appearance in middle of it of William Blake as the narrator\u2019s spirit guide, can hint at something closer to hubris than ambition. <\/p>\n

Wheal Zion<\/em>, as its title might suggest, revealed Gurney\u2019s interest in the mines of Cornwall. Its title poem depicts its narrator entering the eponymous mine to \u2018experience\u2019 \u2018dripping naked\u2019 the inner nature of the mine. The narrator also remembers \u2018the law-suits and the writs, \/ the quarrels and dissention, formal lies \/ accompanying its history.\u2019 Here, Gurney, as he suggests in Meister Eckhart<\/em> wants the \u2018ordinary experiences of life to return.\u2019 At the end of \u2018Wheal Zion\u2019, the narrator emerges as a \u2018transparent man, surrender[ed] to myself.\u2019 <\/p>\n

That kind of quasi-mystical introspection is likely to get short shrift in our sometimes rather fragmented and febrile contemporary poetic world. Particularly, perhaps, when the poetry comes from an Oxbridge educated, ex RAF fighter pilot and college lecturer who died twenty years ago. On the one hand, the experiences that Gurney sought to depict, the kinds of romanticism which he and a few others, such as Kathleen Raine, Peter Redgrove, and Gurney espoused, are located in an undoubtedly privileged world, a kind of middle-class, couple-of-skins-too-few-ness. On the other hand, those poets and John Gurney here worked at their themes with a technical skill and commitment which seems increasingly side-lined. <\/p>\n

John Gurney\u2019s distinctive voice seems to have emerged early on, and the music in his writing does not change markedly over his career. The words of \u2018Wheal Zion\u2019 were as carefully disposed then as are the lines from Meister Eckhart<\/em>. There is a quiet song in the lines and their rhythm, though held in a general iambic pulse, is usually calm and subtle. If anything, over the years, Gurney gains a confidence in a plainer utterance which does not diminish the states it seems to depict. The sonnet, \u2018Frozen Vixen\u2019 from Meister Eckhart<\/em>, begins \u2018Who spoke your form? What grammar fashioned you? \/ What alphabet exposed you on the snow \/ for slow interpretation.\u2019 Gurney deftly holds onto the metaphor of language to describe the body of the fox in the snow. In the language, the persona of Eckhart seeks to articulate the form of the fox\u2019s ending. Then at the end of the poem, \u2018Your design \/ is terrible. I suffer, for I know \/ your cubs are slowly dying in the snow.\u2019 There is a slight clang in the rhyme of \u2018know \/ snow\u2019, but it\u2019s a risk which finishes the poem on the note the narrator needs, and there is something fine about that \u2018Your design is terrible.\u2019 <\/p>\n

The impulse of the whole sequence is one of profound empathy with the natural world, animate and inanimate. In the poem, \u2018Stress\u2019, a tree is \u2018a paradigm of stress, \/ long gored by cows, tormented by the sheep, \/ it still persists, as stunted as a child \/ that\u2019s exiled from samhadi, grins or weeps \/ according to its impulse.\u2019 The writing is plain when describing the effects of the cows and sheep on the tree; then quite typically for Gurney, reaches out to \u2018samhadi\u2019[sic]. \u2018Samadhi\u2019 is a state of meditative consciousness. That Gurney will use such a word and associate it with a child is not unusual in his poetic process. The early mining poems illustrated above are never afraid to use the specialized language of mining. However, whether any but the most unusual child has access to \u2018samadhi\u2019 is a moot point. But Gurney\u2019s use of the term is not just a self-conscious tic, it is his unabashed focus on the right word. Gurney will pull us into his world and we have, to some extent, to buy into the language which is necessary to create that world. Earlier in the poem, the narrator stops by the tree, \u2018deconstructed\u2019 by it. Elsewhere, he writes in the poem \u2018Duality\u2019, \u2018Yes, Eckhart, that is true. Only a \/ sensual spirituality is \/ non-dualistic. To be moved by the \/ disaster of the mist, its loss of bliss \/ is good.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Such writing with its theological references and odd line breaks may simply be off-putting; although Auden pointed out that Marianne Moore\u2019s breaking of the line on unstressed articles actually creates emphasis on the first word of the next line. But that move into the beautiful commentary on the mist is, perhaps, a finesse worth waiting for. The whole of this very moving sequence is studded with precise and evocative writing, such as this from the poem, \u2018Cobwebs\u2019<\/p>\n

The cobwebs, trembling, stretch between the beams
\nlike a fine fan. They seem to levitate
\non the faint breeze. They\u2019re stretched out like a dream
\nof flying. <\/p>\n

Gurney possibly wrote too much and developed a fluency which, however enviable, produced an occasional slightness and surface facility. But inside that fluency was a profound empathy for the world and all its \u2018things being various\u2019 that should be attended to. There\u2019s much to return to in John Gurney\u2019s work and Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light<\/em> is a lovely addition to the poetry of a writer who is neglected too easily. <\/p>\n

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

John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | Poetry Salzburg: \u00a36.00 John Gurney was one of those writers, present in any culture, who become rather niche figures, rack up a small, focused succ\u00e9s d\u2019estime, and then quietly disappear. So it\u2019s greatly to the credit of Poetry Salzburg who\u2019ve published much else of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11245\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | Poetry Salzburg: \u00a36.00 John Gurney was one of those writers, present in any culture, who become rather niche figures, rack up a small, focused succ\u00e9s d\u2019estime, and then quietly disappear. 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