{"id":936,"date":"2010-06-14T20:14:02","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T19:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=936"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:59:20","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:59:20","slug":"michael-haslam-a-cure-for-woodness-arc-publications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=936","title":{"rendered":"Michael Haslam, <em>A Cure for Woodness<\/em>, (Arc Publications)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Haslam\u2019s writing is an eerie combination of late High Modernism of the Bunting and David Jones kind, and an unswerving allegiance to the poetics of the \u2018Cambridge Axis\u2019 of Prynne, Crozier and the Rileys.\u00a0 Like the Bunting and David Jones, Haslam reaches back through Modernism to the alliterative foundations of Early English verse, and then returns to the present day via Manley Hopkins and the wayward surrealism of Dylan Thomas. At the same time, however, Haslam is willing to wrest the signifier away from the signified just sufficiently to see what might be moving in the darkness between.<\/p>\n<p>A Cure for Woodness is the third and final volume in Haslam\u2019s Music Laid her Songs in Language trilogy.\u00a0 The title of the second volume, A Sinner Saved by Grace announces Haslam\u2019s other great divergence from so much contemporary writing;\u00a0 Haslam is deeply religious.\u00a0 This religion is not organised and certainly not Christian.\u00a0 Haslam\u2019s religion also reaches back to the Pantheist paganism that inhabited these islands before and during Christianity\u2019s takeover.\u00a0 He walks the hills around his home in the Calder valley and reports back on what he finds there;\u00a0 the spirits in the trees, rocks and streams.\u00a0 Which suggests that Haslam\u2019s writing is dubious stuff, if you\u2019re not a Druid. But Haslam\u2019s technical achievement is to meld both nature and deconstruction in a heady mixture in which, somehow, one buoys up the other.<\/p>\n<p>This book is not, perhaps, quite so complete as its predecessor;\u00a0 a volume that contained small masterpieces such as \u2018Balladic Idyll of George-a-Green called Bettris and The Vagrant Tinker\u2019 and the wonderful \u2018Arcades in Ruins\u2019.\u00a0 If Haslam claims Wordsworth as his immediate ancestor, it is Keats who seems to dominate this trilogy.\u00a0 In\u2018Old Hall down in the Hollow:\u00a0 Spring up Sunny Bank\u2019, Haslam describes the slow decay of the old hall and its haunting not only by its ghost but by Haslam, himself.\u00a0 Haslam moves from the landscape to the pub bar back to the land and in each situation there is a slightly melancholic presence that is ultimately sustaining.<\/p>\n<p>Recent contemporary poetry has manifested a deep distrust of the word;\u00a0 not only in the minimalism of much mainstream writing, but also the rending post-modernism of much of the language poetry.\u00a0 Haslam has no such distrust;\u00a0 this is clotted, adjectival poetry that forms a very rich diet.\u00a0 It is also intensely musical and his performances of his own writing will set you toe-tapping.\u00a0 A Cure for Woodness is just that a cure for the over-delicate palid music of so much contemporary writing;\u00a0 a real breath of fresh air.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Haslam\u2019s writing is an eerie combination of late High Modernism of the Bunting and David Jones kind, and an unswerving allegiance to the poetics of the \u2018Cambridge Axis\u2019 of Prynne, Crozier and the Rileys.\u00a0 Like the Bunting and David Jones, Haslam reaches back through Modernism to the alliterative foundations of Early English verse, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[178],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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