Haunting lines, with Jeffrey Loffman
Haunting lines, with Jeffrey Loffman
Two poems, with commentary, from our second publication of 2023
It’s time to shine a (slightly overdue) spotlight on Jeffrey Loffman’s The Hauntings, our second book of the year, published back in February. Based in Kent, Jeffrey has been a consistent supporter of Valley Press for nearly ten years, and I was delighted to see him officially become “part of the family” with his second collection. His poetry is deeply intelligent, and achieves a sort of timelessness in its refusal to chase the fashionable; not only would I recommend this book to any living poetry fan, I feel if I could send a box of copies back in time to any date in the last 100 years, they would find enthusiastic readers. That’s not an easy thing to pull off.
As with our other February poet Matt Riker, Jeffrey’s collection was beautifully designed and edited by Peter Barnfather during my absence from Valley Press last year. The cover (visible above) features ‘Fate of the Animals’ by Franz Marc, painted in 1913 – thought to be a sort of pre-commentary on WWI, which would claim the life of its German artist just three years later. Marc’s brightly-coloured animals usually appeared in more peaceful scenes (I particularly like ‘The Foxes’), so this stunning effort was a touch out of character.
The right-hand side of the painting was damaged in a fire shortly after the artist’s death, then restored (in brown, mysteriously) by Paul Klee. Peter and Jeffrey chose to run the divide between the damaged and original sections through the middle of the title, an intriguing decision that really makes this one of our best covers of the year – I never get tired of looking at it. On the subject of the cover, Jeffrey says:
Marc has always been a painter whose work I have loved. That he was killed in the First World War at the same battle as [French poet] Charles Péguy, on the ‘other side’, is significant for me. [WWI] poets, especially Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg made a huge impact on me when I was at school and now, far more, the poetry of [modernist painter and writer] David Jones.
The Hauntings features a poem prompted by ‘Fate of the Animals’, which I’m pleased to bring you below:
Endangered Species
Blue deer fly past swine baying beyond woodlands, Der Blaue Reiter drowns in la terre charnelle. The fox twists in strident scarlet, orange spear-bursts highlight shadow forms. In burnt umber a monumental trunk like Pisa’s tower falls forever. Wolves gather. Around us hooves thunder and we are lost, close to the approaching flames, stabbed by spikes, snared by tendrils. Bone shards buff up each mud-bank, craters multiply pour la patrie by those bloodied at Verdun who scream in Kabul, crushed rubble beneath Mariupol. Different home fires appear with no hearths for comfort. We repeat never to be forgotten refrains, trapped in our own trenches, colour-blind to each new fracas seen through a prism energised in headlines and shrapnel, lost to drones, to rigor mortis.
As you can see, I didn’t mean by my “timeless” comment that Jeffrey shies away from contemporary references – but you don’t need to know what a drone is to appreciate this poem, any more than you need to get every other reference. That being said, since we’re all here: “Der Blaue Reiter” (blue rider) was the name of the artistic group co-founded by Franz Marc, and “La terre charnelle” (carnal earth) and “pour la patrie” (for the homeland) echo phrases used by Geoffrey Hill in his long poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy.
Jeffrey’s book features its own long poem, the eleven-page ‘Trying to Find Charles Olson’s House’, one of two pieces that the author recommended for inclusion in this blog. I think we will need to save it for the future, especially as poet Luigi Marchini said in a review of the collection that it “deserves to be published on its own”, adding:
It is a tour-de-force, a work which rewards many readings [and] reminds me, at times, of ‘The Wasteland’, such is the awe Loffman’s poem has inspired in me. Like Eliot’s masterpiece ‘Olson’ seems to me to go far beyond a concern with modern civilisation and mankind’s place in it. Loffman’s treatment of character is similar to Eliot’s and verbally there are echoes for me. There is extensive use of myth, archetypal patterns, and literary parallels.
Here are Jeffrey’s comments on the same poem:
This metaphorical journey that takes in so many poets is partly an acknowledgement of each of them, but also of poetry within a wider social-historical context and a response to being on this journey. It takes in matters of personal biography and wider aspects of thought and addresses the multiple facets of the journey we all must make. I hope that the book acts as a gate or door ajar that may lead the reader to others who can inspire a better place, and this poem – somewhat ironically and paradoxically choosing Olson, since he evidences both the inspiration of the journey and the danger of its cost – best exposes this aspect.
The author’s other recommendation was ‘On Dungeness Beach’, which has a particular appeal for me as someone who has spent most of their life close to the shore. When asked why, he offered the comment below, which is on its way to being a prose poem in its own right:
The last English Wilderness, the refuge for Huganeot escapees from France, the pecking out of a life in this difficult headland wrapped by wind and hardship and it being an outlier of England somehow […] was also the place my father-in-law was brought up as one of the three key Dungey families and is the place I most cherish in the south-east of England, along with the courage of the Lifeboatmen, a number of whom were members of the family generation after generation. This is more than just an acknowledgement of their doings.
We’ll end this post with that poem, as it’s a tough act to follow. Thank you as always for your time, and I’ll see you next week for the final submissions tally and the usual eye-opening publishing insights. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Loffman’s The Hauntings is available from the Valley Press bookshop and most other places books are sold.
On Dungeness Beach
i.m. Alf Tart (1922–2016)
Sixty or seventy gulls standing still meet in complete silence over me, debris of rubber tubes, crab legs, old net wires, grass specks by the road beyond the shore, shacks to shelter from the wind. Why do they stand so still? The rusted rail-tracks, lumber chewed by insects, a makeshift path for their feet to track to the sea. The water sounds from right to left, you can hear the tide move across with your eyes closed, with the wind sipping the sea. Black wings, the gulls hunt parallel to the surface of the sea, forays every five minutes. Still sixty or seventy gulls, statues over us as the water cover us. A vigil for all the fisher-wives who made fires at four in the morning, lived in the cabins for years, brought up sons and daughters, buried in Lydd down the road, or the men who worked the lifeboat where you’d cling to rigging, to the dead. Two hundred names saved in sixty years – sixty gulls stand still; remember the shrimping, or the lugworms, hauling the nets by the side of the house which would brush us wet-soaked, wooden slats, cuffed by the wind’s shout on a beach with plastic bottles, butt-ends, as water erodes my edges, as the sea makes its motion inward and we are thrown by a passing stranger into the water, into the stone piles, into our past.