Adrian Buckner

Simple Geometry by Peter Dent.

This is one I'm quite happy to get wrong, because reading and then reading again these eleven tantalising pieces, was in itself an excellent tutorial in the practice of reading that often undervalued genre, the prose poem. After second reading I felt Dent had persuaded me into a particular pace of reading, that I hope enabled me to come closer to an understanding of the spirit of his writing. So, here goes:

Can you grasp very much reality in the perceived world ? seems to loom large here. How much value to attribute to dull quotidian realities that lose meaning with an attempt to formulate into language, either spoken or thought (all thought is afterthought). Dent's writing is sprinkled liberally with beautifully wrought expansions on this theme, like this from his painter companion:

There is a tendency on the part of some to overdo 'the distant' allowing
only the distant access to the infinite whilst the hand with the brush
hovers questioningly at any and every point in view

In the first piece "Compass" we are introduced to a child who found it difficult to 'be with conversation' who'd been 'so often on the wrong end of words' despite 'extended bouts of concentration and practice in the arts of sequence'. This gives rise to the need 'to turn the shift and shimmer of the days to a mathematical precision'. Later in "Heron" we have moved on in this quest to some questioning anxieties which remind us of Eliot and his teacher, the philosopher, Bradley:

Would there be words that lasted? Wreckage to cling to in the aftermath?
And he spoke in ideas Of seeing through the spectrum of things and the
nothing of things to that absolute seeing which was the last accomplishment

This is not a dilettantish search-for-meaning-amid-confusion book. Dent expresses a real need to attach to humanity and those barely recognisable small hints of self. And what finally convinces is the aptness of the prose poem form that he has chosen to formulate these yearnings in. Take as a final taster these shimmeringly beautiful lines from "Location: Inside the Hour", also managing to be pregnant with a taut meaning:

So may it be I've reached a day when intention blossoms into memory Of
strangeness met with perfectly explored Where any value's out of curiosity
that cannot be contained