{"id":8558,"date":"2017-10-18T10:30:13","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T09:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8558"},"modified":"2017-10-18T14:13:23","modified_gmt":"2017-10-18T13:13:23","slug":"james-womack-on-trust-a-book-of-lies-carcanet-9-99-reviewed-by-chad-campbell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8558","title":{"rendered":"James Womack, On Trust: A Book of Lies<\/em>, reviewed by Chad Campbell"},"content":{"rendered":"
James Womack, On Trust: A Book of Lies<\/em> (Carcanet, \u00a39.99).<\/h5>\n

On Trust: A Book of Lies<\/em> goes out of its way \u2013 on the jackets, author biography, and notes \u2013 to tell you that none of the book\u2019s contents are true. Or, as the Colonel in the epigraph says, may \u201cnot have happened quite this way, or at quite this time, or even to quite these people. But they\u2019re all true.\u201d The cover art is a painting called The Fortune Teller<\/em>. I braced myself for a term paper set to verse, or meditation on the over-demonstrated lability of truth and identity, and realized, from the first poem, how utterly wrong I was. Don\u2019t be deceived like I was; better, wait to see how.<\/p>\n

Auden wrote in The Cave of Making<\/em> he \u201c…wouldn\u2019t dare speak to anyone \/ in either a prophet\u2019s bellow \/ or a diplomat\u2019s whisper\u201d, and Womack, who wrote his doctorate on Auden\u2019s translations, would seem to have taken that sentiment to heart. On Trust<\/em> is as varied in terms of poems as it is in the tenor of its addresses, and in it you\u2019ll find a series of \u2018Notes to Self\u2019, letters to no one (or stars), short erotic poems, the Marquis de Sade, and translations from Russian poet Marianna Geide and German poet Marie Luise Kashnitz. The interlocking of time, place, figure, and perspective makes for a strange, captivating sense of dislocation. The poems a kind of open-eyed dreaming. So it wouldn\u2019t be fair to say the book is about, real or imagined, an affair. But the book is about an affair. And it is in those poems more than anywhere else that the subject of truth enters the collection.<\/p>\n

If for Eliot night reveals \u201cthe thousand sordid images \/ of which your soul was constituted\u201d, here memories provide the images from which other souls are composed. An affair subdivides the already divided private self in a \u201cprivate\u201d and a \u201csecret\u201d compartments. In Womack\u2019s poems these do not represent aspects of a united self, but selves possessed of their own life that are contained in one body, under one roof \u2013 or as he writes, \u201cThe calls are coming from inside the house\u201d<\/em>. The end of the affair doesn\u2019t mark the end of its memory, any more than the dissolution of the transgressed relationship means the self that was shared can be divided with the pots and pans. Womack\u2019s collection tends to these disparate, dislocated selves through all stages of affair and crumbling of the primary relationship, and his choice to employ \u2018lies\u2019 and to change masks and speakers reads like a natural, and masterful, expression of this state.<\/p>\n

Womack has made a shift as a poet since the publication of his first collection Misprint<\/em>. In a poem like ‘Aisling’ the stanzas, here quatrains, demonstrate a new skill with and attention to poems at the level of the line. If in Misprint<\/em> there were times were I wished Womack had stepped in a little more to curate the content and language of his poems, ‘Aisling’ is not only a stand out poem but emblematic of a movement, and evolution, of Womack\u2019s poetry as a whole \u2013 a new deftness and control.<\/p>\n

Without the use of magic urine, sacred fungus,
\nstrange distilled rainbows,
\nshe came to me, not as I had dreamt,
\nbut as I lay dreaming.
\n…
\nShe was tiny, and vast as a country,
\na ragged comb stuck in her loose hair
\nher legs dusty to the calves
\nher dress, impeccable.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

It is an evolution not only of technique, but of approach. Misprint<\/em> was divided into two sections: one more of play, masks, ekphrasis, and the other, as one reviewer put it, \u201cmore direct\u201d and barer in terms of delivery on matters of love and loss. In \u2018On Trust\u2019 Womack has fused these elements, and reads as if the heart of the latter has been placed in the forms of the former. The result is both a sense of a poet deepening in their craft, and a rich collection of poetry.<\/p>\n

Questions of truth, mistakes, or what the speaker in the poem ‘Dust and Apples’ calls \u201cerror\u201d is, in Womack\u2019s treatment, also the source of the collection\u2019s often profound sense of intimacy and bitter sweetness: that as, for example, memory returns to the present a completeness that might have been lacking once we might get what we wanted, but not the way we wanted it. Further, that who enjoys the sense of fulfilment might not strictly be \u2018us\u2019, but a reflection, copy, or ghost like the one in ‘Oliver and Glass’ who \u201clifts his hand under the showerhead, \/ wanting to catch and hold the warm transparent lines\u201d. In On Trust<\/em>, what the dream of truth is often the more real, and what was not complete completed, if only briefly, in time:<\/p>\n

And although my dream of you
\nis not the same as you
\nit is in fact love, it is love.
\nWrite that often and it will be enough.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

If you loved me we would have apples<\/em> the speaker\u2019s lover in ‘Dust and Apples’ says before he leaves and heads north on the train. There he goes to a grocery store where he finds her favourite (winter-white calvilles) but the broken scale only registers that their \u201cfluorescent vacuum showed a couple of grams\u201d. The soul was once thought to weigh about the same, none was found, which meant either there was nothing or something of a different substance. A mistake? Perhaps. But mistakes, in On Trust: A Book of Lies<\/em> are part of what makes it a beautiful collection. For the speaker of ‘Dust and Apples’ they are, after its loss, a remnant of love:<\/p>\n

Oh happy error<\/em>, I sing for the last few blocks,
\nthe weightless apples floating in my hand.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Chad Campbell<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Womack, On Trust: A Book of Lies (Carcanet, \u00a39.99). On Trust: A Book of Lies goes out of its way \u2013 on the jackets, author biography, and notes \u2013 to tell you that none of the book\u2019s contents are true. Or, as the Colonel in the epigraph says, may \u201cnot have happened quite this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"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":"\nJames Womack, On Trust: A Book of Lies, reviewed by Chad Campbell - 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=8558\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"James Womack, On Trust: A Book of Lies, reviewed by Chad Campbell - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"James Womack, On Trust: A Book of Lies (Carcanet, \u00a39.99). 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