Apr

10

Mirror, Mirror: The Poetry Of Julia Copus.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 10, 2007 |

The poet Julia Copus has, for a young poet, a surprisingly strong, clear, straightforward voice. Her first book, The Shuttered Eye, was published in 1995 by Bloodaxe Books, a publisher known for breaking new ground. Their slogan, after all, is, “Poetry with an edge”, and that does apply to the work of Julia Copus. copus.jpg

It’s clear that Sylvia Plath is one of her influences, and one of her poems, Courage, is in memory of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath’s major second book Ariel the first line of Courage opens with winter, and ends on a hopeful note:

The coal gas sinks

deep in the sump of your gut.

Only the rumble of the waterpipes is audible,

that and the thump, thump, thump of the attainable.

The main theme running through this book is childhood. The book’s epigraph is Istanbul wall graffito, which Copus herself probably saw: “childhood was a meal; we ate it, and now it’s finished.” A profound childhood experience–a child being taken away from her father–is the subject of the book’s most powerful poem, The Back Seat Of My Mother’s Car. This isn’t just a powerful poem. Copus also invents a whole new poetic form: the first sixteen lines are repeated in reverse order, making a poem of thirty-two lines with every line used twice. So the poem begins,

We left before I had time

to comfort you, to tell you we had nearly touched

hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted…

And it ends:

hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted

to comfort you, to tell you we had nearly touched.

We left before I had time.

It sounds strange and yet makes perfect sense. In an explanatory note to the poem on her web site, she explains, “The car window acts as a reflecting device in the middle - as if the poem is looking back into itself through the window, just as the little girl is.” The form also captures the significance of the event of a girl being taken away from her father: there will always be, in her memory, a clear before and after, a moment when everything was turned upside down. Reminiscent of the triolet or rondeau, forms which employ repetition, the form Copus has invented is much harder because it’s total repetition. Yet she manages to pull it off again, employing the form near the end of the book in the poem Bomb.

Since The Shuttered Eye was mainly about childhood, Copus’ second book, In Defence Of Adultery takes on a more mature topic. copus1.jpg

And yet the overall tone of this book is not so much loss, which underlies her revisioning of childhood, but absence. One of the poems, Hymn to All the Men I’ll Never Love, she begins:

My heart, sing praises to the men

I’ll never love; from whom a night

away’s just that–a night–and not

a lifetime in the desert without food

and water.

Speaking as one of those men, and as someone who appreciates the poetry of Julia Copus, it’s nice to be the object of such praise.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. James on April 11, 2007 11:39 am

    The use of the lines in The Back Seat Of My Mother’s Car is clever, and the description you share is is heart renching. I need to go and look up this poem sometime.

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