Vol 1 No 1 2007
Live Coverage Reviewed by Ewan Whyte |
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Pricsila Uppal’s fourth book of poetry Live Coverage is a
gut-wrenching meditation on our times, executed with considerable artistry
and depth of feeling. Military conflicts and economic excesses are discussed
in eloquent lyric-narrative poetry and modern society’s passivity
in the face of violence and cruelty is put on display, then lamented and
satirized. The first notable feature of Live Coverage are
lines from actual news flashes interwoven with passages from Homer’s Odyssey at
the bottom of every page, which forms a lunatic news-crawl that follows
the reader and compliments the poems throughout the book. As the news flashes
continue, they form a poem in and of themselves, unifying its separate
parts into a working whole.
Classical
myth is woven beautifully into the framework of this book, which offers
a delightful reworking of parts of the Odyssey. Although the Odyssey has
been rewritten to the point of bathos, her interaction with Homer’s
epic is done so tastefully it is a pleasure to read her re-imagined world.
There is substantial, if black, humour in many of the passages without
trivializing the significance of the original stories, reflected in the
titles “Arachne’s Children Take it One Day at a Time” and “Jove
on Probation” among others. Or in this example from “Penelope
Asked the Suitors to Leave”:
No means No. She tried to be nice.
Tried to do as her mother taught her:
gentlemen callers ought to be treated
with respect no matter who they are...The prosecutor never recovered
the heads, ushered past the thousand
quilts hanging in the corridor.
Like Homer, Uppal repeatedly explores anger as a theme and how it can become projected inward, hurting or destroying whatever is closest to it, a reverse parallel of the Greek Midas myth, as in “Poseidon as my Father in his Wheelchair”:
Angry. More than any first principles he knows that he is
angry, and circles the room like a magnet at the poles, dirt
on his hinges. He wipes it off and keeps circling, not caring
what sticks, what will never come away…Can you blame him? The goddesses took his legs and ran away.
His children do not know where to find them. Everywhere he turns
there are traps and riddles and strangely familiar faces with one eye…
The accompanying news flash at the foot of the page is: warmed forever
with happiness at the thought of you/Crowd Marks Anniversary of Bosnian
Massacre, tying the madness of the ancient world to the madness of
contemporary events, a function the news-crawl serves throughout. She
also expresses the idea that redemption is found not only in the recognition
that the first casting of stones is in our own hearts but that acceptance
of this, whether conscious or unconscious, is the only way to avoid becoming
a small-minded, stone-throwing Cyclops oneself.
Poetry
of this kind is very demanding, but well worth the effort. This work is
relentless in its outpouring of controlled emotion, almost like a composer
creating wildly with allegro forgetting the existence of the gentler adagio
altogether. However, this aspect is overshadowed by the quality of her
poetry. The strength of utterance in her writing is startling and is telling
of what will come.
Live Coverage