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Memory is always an art, even when it works involuntarily.
—Harold Bloom.
“For Girl at Rubicon,” the title of the chapbook, confirms poetic deception, which is quite an interesting trope in the reading and appreciation of strong poetry to be still in version today. Carl Terver employs the less universal or the less serious, although more personal, theme as a way of consolidating and depicting our collective memory as a nation, as a people. Memory is always the presentness of the past, and cliché, being one of the chief and effective deaths of poetry, figurative and semantic freshness becomes the major intent of Terver as these poems treat us to emotive and figurative uncanniness in lines like these in the first section of “My Country Has No Lover”—
My country has no lover
So she plays with penises anyhow
And bears the woes of erection
—in the end of “Sudanese”:
Abacha was fighting capitalism while my father
Was a bank manager. I ate Cornflakes
Every morning & knew
You were a distant continent that will not happen to me
Even when I hear you die in a Salif Keita song
Screaming to heaven, Eloi eloi eloi eloi lama sabachthani
—through the end of the minimalistic yet interpretatively sophisticated “After Rain in Rwanda”:
Say farewell to the rainbow
It means nothing now
—and the end of “Bombs Keep Going off in the Middle East,” which through its literary allusion re-confirms and re-animates human desperation for peace which ironically is not a given:
I sit in my living room
Watching Netflix on my secondhand Hewlett Packard
Awoonor said “The world is not good for anybody”
A book of our shared memory through the poet’s personal memories, Carl Terver invites us to active contemplation of, and participation in our own history and gone experience. In “Chibok II” of imaginary prequel, as the title ingeniously insinuates, Terver’s theurgical performance becomes a strategy of experiential reformation of the kidnapping of the school girls, a national incident now almost largely forgotten, which as the poet contemplates is tantamount to forgetting our self. In contrast, “This Blood” is a representation of our reality with unsophisticated imaginative execution:
My country has an alternative Stock Exchange
That counts dead bodies,
The more the bodies
The shares bought,
That raised Patience’s Cry:
This blood we are sharing!
In representing our experience as sincerely as possible, Terver comes to the conclusion in “Coming For Your Head” that the only actions we possess against the atrocities that plague our nation are analysis and storytelling:
Moloch’s worshippers make merry while we
Submit research papers to Princeton:
The Beautification of the Countryside with Red Flowers
For Girl at Rubicon understands our memories for us, and objectively so, because the relatability of these poems to our common experience can only be successfully denied only in escapistic engagement, and as the chapbook understands, escapism cannot erase our recurring reality any more than our inactivity can delegate the effect of the same experience, same memories into existential nothingness.
Writing is hard and writing strong poetry is harder. But writing strong poetry as a critic might be one of the most difficult literary engagements, while also being the most rewarding, as long as the critical faculty is not turned off in the process of writing poetry. The best of the poet-critics are of the conviction that imaginative works are primarily for “the common reader,” a phrase popularised by Virginia Woolf in her book of the same title. T. S. Eliot is the fundamental of the bunch, in recent times, Lauren McLean articulates the critic’s utmost mindfulness of details in “Moonrise,” and Carl Terver, in the pages of For Girl at Rubicon, validates the possibility of the coexistence of imaginative versatility with semantic simplicity in the writing and reading of poetry. With visceral bluntness, “Telex from the Past” rhetorically engages in expressive criticism of a mode of Africanism in Africans’ characteristic self-identification with blackness, although without historical validity, which the poem understands to be self-patronising at best:
So I ask again like Obiora,
When did Africans lose their dignity?
Do I want to be African? No. It makes me
A stereotyped genius
No, no, Kendrick. I am not a proud monkey.
In this chapbook, Terver employs what Harold Bloom comprehends of W.B. Yeat’s primary imaginative faculty in his characteristic “simplification through intensity” to escape the fatal attributes of oversimplification of poetic thought, a mode which descends from the poet’s professed precursor in Hitomaro whose “On the Sea at Omi” represents the omnipresence of memory made locally empirical through our visual and auditory relationship with nature. This mode of acute experiential versification is exemplified by the second stanza of “These Leaves”:
Your absence every holiday reminds me
Of the poem you asked me to write;
These leaves heap on each other with my failure to
Zipporah
I think of you when I see them & the baby in my stomach kicks
I turn to my side to tell you this
But can only imagine so
—through the middle of “Sometimes I Need A Catapult to Aim”:
Don’t tell me politician A is deflecting to party B
becos I go crazy I want to lay down my political me
Before I go serial killing
—to the third section of the technically experimental “My Country Has No Lover”:
Her flirting is entertainment
Where dismembering limbs is sport.
Dis—
mem
bered
for sport, for profit, for religion —
Adding pigments daily to blood murals.
I tell this story of her adultery with blood
& if She can be stoned to death
—which marvellously culminates in the riveting ending of the eponymous “For Girl at Rubicon”:
Drizzles of you wet memory:
The way you squinted
As if you fear light running into your eyes
How your face rose to the unsaid in mine
Way you turned face away
To avert my lips’s snail–walk on yours
And how you mimicked Smeagol
Your name becomes an antiphon in my heart
In a language I did not hear you speak,
Sabbaths I took & doubt whales that swallowed me . . .
Mnemosyne is the godmother of both poetry and the poets as exemplified by John Milton’s “On Shakespeare,” where the poet calls the immortal bard “dear son of memory” and “great heir of fame,” hinting that no powerful imagination is conceivable without memory of our self, alive and active, tending to us and our imaginative faculties. Terver continues this poetically necessary tradition in For Girl at Rubicon, while aesthetically amplifying the interpretive power of the memory of these poems through his conscious and quite experimental versification of our national reality:
Erections flog her gait
Giving her a walking stick
as she flirts with baals & Moloch. Anybody dies:
In a police cell,
fall off
storey buildings, or
h
a
n
g
from an Abacha Rope. Infidels,
split open & grilled by Akbar’s single cry.
The first poem in this chapbook begins with active memory and the last ends with the same, and we are not only invited but earnestly welcomed to participate in the poetico-semantic reinvention of the memories, histories and experiences of our self, an engagement which proves impossible without the poet’s aesthetic disregard of his own vulnerability as exemplified by “Of Songs I Sang Here,” which unpredictably, memorably ends:
I know the old songs that breathed here
That inspired pride
That patriarchs sang
If you do good
Are Now fractured—
Long interred in bandages of pain
Here, memory is not only defined but redefined, and we derive pleasure in the poet’s aesthetic redefinition of what was into the present language that stretches our sensibilities beyond the pages to the real. In “Healing Is A Dog Faced God,” “memory is a tombstone,” a metaphorical ingenuity which escapes the implication of ultimate deadness as the major “yawp” of this book, but rather a visual representation of the aliveness of the material deadness of the things versified with these poems in human memory. To praise the poet for his figurative deliberations and completeness of poetic thought is tautological since an active, attentive reading of these poems is self-revealing of the poetic excellences and authority on both personal and collective memory that contribute to the stretching of our consciousness which is the ultimate attribute of the strongest of poetry.◙
This review of Carl Terver’s For Girl at Rubicon appears as an introduction to the second edition of the poetry chapbook set to be republished by Heiress on June 30.
Ancci (pronounced: /əntʃɪ/) is a BA English Language and Literature undergraduate student at University of Ibadan, and was shortlisted for Alpine Fellowship Academic Writing Prize in 2020. His essays have been published in Afapinen, and The Shallow Tales Review.
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