{"id":11927,"date":"2021-04-02T13:57:31","date_gmt":"2021-04-02T12:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11927"},"modified":"2021-04-02T13:59:33","modified_gmt":"2021-04-02T12:59:33","slug":"sarah-feldman-the-half-life-of-oracles-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11927","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Feldman | <em><strong> The Half-Life of Oracles<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Sarah Feldman |\u00a0<em>The Half-Life of Oracles |\u00a0<\/em>Fitzhenry &amp; Whiteside: C$15.00<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/50yMtvNL\/41-FRYEf-Xcw-L-SX326-BO1-204-203-200.jpg\" alt=\"9781556595615-FC-700px-wide-resize-400x601\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The writer who takes on the oracular and the vatic is offering themselves up as a hostage to fortune.\u00a0 The subject matter may well take in the various versions of myth that are parts of certain types of education but not part of the education of many.\u00a0 And the style that couches such a \u2018myth kitty\u2019, to use Larkin\u2019s term, can often likely to be as high flown as the subject matter.\u00a0 A commitment to the myth is often a commitment to the language in which it develops.\u00a0 Sarah Feldman\u2019s debut book does not always successfully surmount these issues.\u00a0 But what the poems in <em>The Half-Life of Oracles<\/em> do achieve is a real sense that Feldman is a poet to whom we should pay attention.\u00a0 This is, in part, because <em>The Half-Life of Oracles<\/em> has a sense of throat clearing, as though Feldman\u2019s education \u2013 and it is clear that she is well-versed in classical, particularly Greek, thought \u2013 has been the subject matter for many of these poems.\u00a0 And yet, when the poems move beyond the search for meanings in that classical world, there is a poetry that actually feels fully grounded in observation and human empathies.\u00a0 It also needs to be said, that Feldman\u2019s use of that myth-kitty, not unlike many who write about the mythological, finds adroit ways of accessing \u2018human\u2019 meanings.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Letters for the River\u2019 is broken into five sections, each named after a river in Greek mythology: Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Acheron and Lethe. Near the beginning of that piece is the following:<\/p>\n<p>Homer\u2019s gods, you know, conversant in mortal<br \/>\nand immortal meanings alike, knew two names<br \/>\nfor ever object and two meanings<br \/>\nfor every name \u2013 both equally true, but the one<br \/>\nperhaps more equal than the other,<br \/>\nThe failure is common.\u00a0 Hands come apart,<br \/>\nbodies come apart, the blood flows together<br \/>\nand flows apart, the separate senses are found<br \/>\nand lost in turn.<\/p>\n<p>There is a largeness and expansion to the sentiments Feldman expresses here;\u00a0 and the longer, flowing sentences are characteristic of her style throughout the book.\u00a0 The use of the present tense, too, places the utterances in a particular kind of certainty.\u00a0 All of which demands an acceptance from the reader.\u00a0 However, inside all of this, the reader can see the human perspectives.\u00a0 We can, perhaps, all see the sense in which language is perspectival, and that we, as humans, think of ourselves, like Homer\u2019s gods, as both within and above the fray.\u00a0 Part of the result of those competing perspectives is that failure occurs in the gaps and slippages between those perspectives.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere, actually, Feldman depicts a vivid sense of the everyday, and of lives lived coping with what mundanity brings.\u00a0 Here, her natural empathy for her protagonists shines through.\u00a0 \u2018Zeroes and Ones\u2019 is a sequence of seven sections spread over seven pages. The second of these begins,<\/p>\n<p>Bad, sure, these slow rooms, but worse the feeling we would soon, with no better reason,<br \/>\nleave them;\u00a0 worse the repeating through that we might choose again \u2013<br \/>\nnot better, maybe, but differently, or if not differently, at least<br \/>\nmore gently, singing the old, choked songs<br \/>\na little longer, because we are leaving each other,<br \/>\nslowly but surely, and the heart must be packed and emptied,<br \/>\nand packed again,\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Actually, piece goes on for another seven lines in the same sentence.\u00a0 There is a nice accuracy about this.\u00a0 Firstly, the use of the first person feels authentic.\u00a0 We can imagine this as the experience of many as they leave relationships, families, student accommodation, for a final time.\u00a0 There is a nice sense of this as an account of ending, which feels certain at the time but always contains the feeling that this could happen again.\u00a0 The \u2018others\u2019 might change but the self at the centre moves from one place to another, both mutable and the same.\u00a0 Feldman\u2019s ability with the long sentence works well here as it mimics that sticky sense of situations never really finished or completely left behind.\u00a0 And the section finishes with a nice metaphor that holds all that tacky emotion, \u2018as the dusk laying still the hulls that scrape \/ all night against the harbour.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Towards the end of this quite substantial collection are a number of strong, short poems.\u00a0 \u2018Bedtime Story\u2019 is a deft narrative of two girls first seen playing \u2018into the deepening \/dark\u2019.\u00a0 Feldman captures that sense of children playing in the liminal sunset, who, \u2018saw themselves \/ off on their own, with houses and hedges \/ and lawns on which their children, in turn, \/displaced their parents in play.\u2019\u00a0 Inside this is a physical attenuation, \u2018their shadows growing long and leaning \/ and going out.\u2019\u00a0 For all the girls belief in their own futures and capabilities, the poem ends with a return to childhood,<\/p>\n<p>But meanwhile it had grown late.<br \/>\nWhy wasn\u2019t their mother calling them to dinner?<br \/>\nWhy wasn\u2019t their father calling them for bed?<br \/>\nWhy hadn\u2019t they come by now?<\/p>\n<p>Feldman\u2019s ability to feel into changing and uncertain lives gives this debut collection a real emotional heft.\u00a0 There is the inevitable variety of a first book, but there is more than enough here to see Sarah Feldman as already accomplished, technically assured and possessed of a potentially arresting voice.<\/p>\n<p><strong>by Ian Pople <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sarah Feldman |\u00a0The Half-Life of Oracles |\u00a0Fitzhenry &amp; Whiteside: C$15.00 The writer who takes on the oracular and the vatic is offering themselves up as a hostage to fortune.\u00a0 The subject matter may well take in the various versions of myth that are parts of certain types of education but not part of the education [&hellip;]<\/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":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sarah Feldman |  The Half-Life of Oracles | 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=11927\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sarah Feldman |  The Half-Life of Oracles | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sarah Feldman |\u00a0The Half-Life of Oracles |\u00a0Fitzhenry &amp; 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