Between magic and miracle

In the first full-length collection by Camille Ralphs, the poetry editor of the TLS, the care with which individual poems are crafted is balanced by a sensitivity to overall structure. After You Were, I Am contains three sequences: “Book of Common Prayers”; “Malkin: an Ellegy in 14 Spels”; and “My Word: From the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee”. Thematically the book is pitched somewhere between the worlds of magic and miracle. In “My Word” and “Malkin” the emphasis is on the occult and witchcraft; in “Book of Common Prayers” it is daily life made wonderful by refined networks of language.

The result is a contemporary approach to metaphysical poetry that is serious without being lofty. The opening sequence responds to prayers and Biblical passages. Its first poem, “after George Herbert”, a reworking of Herbert’s “The Call”, might be seen as a key to Ralphs’s project. The poem takes a canonical text and reshapes it by replacing the abstract nouns with sometimes demotic concrete ones: “Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength” becomes “Come, my Bedside Light, my Takeaway, my Calloused Hand”. It’s a playful, irreverent approach that could also be seen as a continuation of the Protestant, arguably socialistic momentum on which the Bible was translated from Latin into English. Poems such as “Wessobrunn Prayer” or “after John Baillie” are similarly about the way creation or the voice of God might come to us, urgently, “in the life of life”.

“Malkin” remembers the women who died in the Pendle Witch Trials in Lancashire in 1612, and is drawn from the not always reliable record of the court clerk. The poems are monologues spoken by those on trial. It is in the details of language that the poems find their energy, and the spelling here is often deliberately and characterfully unconventional: “went out beggin / whyle th pluggin of my breth, / whyle I had nothing, nd nothing made sense” (“Alizon Device”). The final sequence, “My Word”, revisits the spiritual diary kept by the Elizabethan polymath John Dee during his travels across Europe in search of divine knowledge. Again, the historical or religious significance of this sequence’s subject is undercut by Ralphs’s playfulness: “My house, like yours, has many rooms, all overrunning”.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of After You Were, I Am is its bookishness. In writing poems that grow out of pre-existing documents, Ralphs accentuates her own poems’ textuality. If it can’t be in their subject matter that these poems have their newness, then it must be in the various ways – translating, retelling, riffing, rearranging – by which they transform their foundational texts.

And where that newness occurs is often in the attention given to the smallest linguistic details – the way sound, sense and syntax are intricately bound together. The opening line of “Job 3:11-26”, for example, offers a version of the biblical passage which reads (in the New International Version): “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?” Ralphs gives this as “So why did my umbilicus, umbrella of the belly, not asphyxiate and fix me at my birth, and make my due my expiration date?” The patterning of sounds – the assonances and consonances of “umbilicus” and “umbrella”, “umbrella” and “belly”, “asphyxiate” and “fix” – is significant, but so too is the decision to use that word “fix”, made with an awareness that, as much as it means “settle” or “solve”, it could also be slang for “kill”. Similarly, “due” here means both “due date” and what’s deserved, what we’ve all got coming.

It is rare to come across a book of poems in which a forensic approach to phrasemaking sits on the same seesaw as an ambitious exploration of history and religious belief. At this early stage Camille Ralphs offers herself a range of signposts: it will be intriguing to see which of them she follows next.

Matthew Welton is a poet whose books include Squid Squad: A novel and a selection of Thomas A. Clark’s poems, The Threadbare Coat, both 2020

The post Between magic and miracle appeared first on TLS.