Lyrics Gillian Allnatt in poetological dimension

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A common perception of the 20th - the beginning of the 21st century poetry among linguists and literary critics is the growing preoccupation with poetological lyrics as one of the defining marks of the period. By this is usually understood the foregrounding in poetry its self-reflexive character: concentration on the fact of its own construction, including questions of canon, normative values, aesthetic criteria, contemplation on the art of predecessors, means of verbal expression, composition of the work and some others.

For instance, describing the poetic experience of German poetry of the 90s - the first decade of the 21st century, Karen Leeder remarks the "self-consciousness of language as one of the clear constants of the contemporary scene" and draws attention to the opposition between "essentially conservative inward-looking poetry, set against a body of self-reflexive poetry, alive to the fact of its own construction" [5, p. 67 ].

Mattew Marr, characterizing postmodern metapoetry in Spain, argues that, in essence, it talks about language and literature "bringing linguistic and literary selfconsciousness to the discursive fore of contemporary Spanish poetry" [6, p. 53].

Similar characteristics can be found in the works devoted to the contemporary metapoetry in the United States of America (see, for example, "Critical Essays on American Self-Reflexive Poetry",1997 [8]) and Italy (Olivia Santovetti "Self-Reflection in Italian Literature" [9]).

Russian and Ukrainian researchers (L. Zubova, V. Fashchenko-Takovitch, N. Fateeva, O. Tishchenko, L. Artemenko et al.) point out one common feature

characteristic of metapoetry in different languages: its rapprochement with philology. L. Zubova conveys this idea in such a way: "Rapprochement of poetry with philology is the main perspective line of poetry development in the XXth century. Of course, nobody can be a poet unless he feels the word, however, today the language with all its inherent potential is becoming more often the object of poet's attention than the means of expression" [1, p. 6].

According to N. Fateeva, "literature breaks up its ties with reality and deepens into selfreflexivity in search for sources of development inside itself. A wide field of metapoetics is being created the result of which is elimination of boundaries between literature and philological theory" [3].

Mikhail Epshtein suggests his interpretation of this fact: "The thing is that contemporary theory is approaching poetry to the same extent as poetry is approaching theory. They have one feature in common - paradigmatic structure of the text, which formulates rules of yet unknown language rather than makes a piece of information in the already known one, creating tables of declension and conjugation of new poetic forms" [4, p.364]. He also thinks that limitation of the role of poetry by the sphere of language lets enhance new life into it.

Modern British poetry, being not as radical as American "New Formalist" and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which the Scottish poet Don Paterson called "very un-British paradigm of artistic progress" [7, p.xxvi], could not but avoid the general trend of concentration on the language as a source of its further development. But in spite of its long tradition the concept of meta-reflexivity in British poetry has not been sufficiently studied and systematized yet, probably because of the lack of detailed analysis of individual practices of British poets in the aspect of forms and functions of meta-elements in their poems. To contribute to the study of this problem we considered a number of poetic texts by Gillian Allnutt (born 1949) with special emphasis on forms of artistic reflexivity in them.

Being very modern in form, Allnutt's poems are deeply rooted in the tradition of British literature. They build on a rich heritage of folk ballad, nursery rhyme and other song forms. Speaking about Allnutt's traditional rhythms and rhymes, the American poet Lisa Williams mentions their "rugged poetic origins - Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Chauser and Hopkins, for example - with alliteration and other striking sound effects" [10]. Among other poets with whom Gillian Allnutt "coordinates" her own poetry (some names figure in the text, others are implied) are Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Irina Ratushinskaya, Elaine Feinstein.

Allnutt's intense philological contemplations on the problem of production of an artistic text do not usually lie on the surface but are thoroughly incorporated in the texture of the work.

In her poem "Scheherazade" Allnutt identifies herself with the legendary heroine and storyteller of the Persian fairytale cycle "One Thousand and One Nights", who night by night told a new exciting story to the king Shahriar stopping halfway through at dawn and continuing it next night, thus sparing the lives of many women. In the poem Scheherazade "is gone / into a wilderness of wind at noon / where the wonderful covered well of tales / is a dry waterhole / or a bell / abandoned".

"The wonderful covered well of tales" and "a bell" are metaphors of potential sources of inspiration which gives birth to a poem of beautiful images and sounding. Alliterations flowing from one line to another remind the ornamental elements of Persian epos or pictorial art: "languid as a fed lion", "She in her salt and sackcloth gown is gone", "into a wilderness of wind", "where the wonderful covered well of tales / is a dry waterhole", "a bell abandoned", "loud elaborated heart", "bagging briefly at the back, / her Bedouin back". On the other hand, they serve as a strong cohesive means in creating a syncretic image of a poet (Scheherasade-Gillian Allnutt) while the poem turns into a meta-poem, "the image of the image".

The world of fairytales, ballads, biblical myths is the constant source of inspiration for Gillian Allnutt (the Bible, the 17th century ballad "Matty Groves", "Hansel and Gretel" by the Brothers Grimm and others). It is the world which helps her cross the border of reality and enter the world created by her artistic imagination. In the poem "Held to" Allnutt describes this transition comparing herself to the character of the old English ballad:

the little tinie page, the page

in Matty Groves, who ran to give the game away on New Year's Day

and now, but for the barest grace of balladry, go I

too hurriedly

beyond

this borderland...

allnatt poetry reflection

Here the part of a sentence "but for the barest grace of balladry", singled out by commas, is obviously a piece of rhetorical reflection which interprets itself in terms of literature (in accordance with the cannon of traditional ballad) and is included in the texture of the poem.

When reviewing Allnuts's collection "How the Bicycle Shone" Sean O'Brien identified "the listening stillness of Allnutt's contemplative notes and meditations, which belong equally to the traditions of religious enquiry and poetry". He also called hers a poetry "of keeping faith, and of remaining open to enlightment" (Sunday Times, 22 July 2007). No wonder that the Bible often figures in Allnutt's poems as a source of religious and poetic meditations.

In the poem "Sarah's Laughter" the author's focus is on the realistic rather than the mythic. Biblical characters Abraham and Sarah are presented through the things around them. The description of Sarah's laughter, "sudden, like a hurdle, like an old loud crow / that comes out of the blue", the objects of everyday life: "tender veal, / the buttermilk, the three small / cakes of meal" make the scene vivid and immediate. However, the precise, even austere, language as well as the unusual lineation of the following lines: the buttermilk, the three small cakes of meal she's made them. For her husband Abraham, she's sifted, shaped them in her old dry hand add them peculiar intensity and "Biblical" importance.

Speaking about this poem, Lisa Wilson draws attention to its rhythms, which derive from both literary and popular traditions: an anapestic rhythm is associated with ballads, nursery rhymes, and the like (in the line: "in the shade of the tree, in the heat of the day, in Bathel"), modulated with largely iambic rhythms [10]. There is the wealth of alliteration, consonance and assonance in the poem also associated with traditional genres.

Thus, the characters, situations, moral seriousness, precise, even austere, aesthetics are taken from the Bible, while rhythms and rhymes as well as repetition, alliteration and other sound effects are derived from literary and popular traditions, and create rich texture of Gillian Allnutt's poems.

Interaction of the fiction and non-fiction discourses is another very productive sphere for the development of resources of poetic speech and which is always in the focus of Allnutt's philological contemplations. The bright example of the author's investigation of such interaction is her poem "The Making of Marmelade", in which she uses the form of a recipe and, at the same time, demonstrates certain poetic techniques to turn the text into a piece of poetry. Here is the poem in its entirety: unripe oranges in silk-lined sacks sow-bristle brushes China jugs of orange-washing water one big bowl

pith-paring knives, one for each woman

a mountain of sugar, poured slowly

a small Sevillian well

songsheets against the tedium, in parts

pine cones for burning

silver spoons for licking up the lost bits

a seven-gallon pot

a waxed circle, a cellophane circle, elastic small pieces of toast

Here such everyday objects as bristle brushes ,big bowl, pith-paring knife, seven-gallon pot, waxed circle are combined with other objects which due to epithets accompanying them are singled out and look like treasured things in the Dutch painting: silk-lined sacks, China jars, small Sevillian well, silver spoon. The eighth line: songsheets against tedium which stands out of the suggested paradigm, adds playful character to the whole poem and is, in fact, a metapoetic element, foregrounding the process of its creation. The play upon the discrepancy between the established form of a recipe and rhythmic form of a poem (a more or less regular alteration of 5 or 6 beat lines with 3 beat lines) supported by the abundant usage of alliteration appears to be another form of author's reflexivity concerning her own speech behavior.

Thus we may conclude that Gillian Allnutt's self-reflexivity is mainly concerned with investigating and establishing ties between her creative work and that of her precursors (both literary and traditional). This reflexivity can be either explicit as in the poem "Held to" where a humorous phrase "but for the barest grace of balladry" is a marker of author's rhetorical reflection on the form of her poem in respect to the traditional ballad, as well as implicit as in the poem "Scheherazade" where the heroine and the episode described become a metaphor of a poet and creative work in general.

In both cases (as in many others) the ties are intertextual which bring to mind I. P. Smirnov who pointed out the intertextual nature of self-reflexivity, which he explained by the fact that the texts connected by the author always tend to establish equivalence between the two functions - referential and self-referential. The intention of one of such texts would be to acquire the status of metatext in order to interpret and explicate the referential meaning of the second text [2, p. 9].

The relationship between written and oral speech, poetic and non-poetic, fiction and non-fiction discourses is another philological aspect which always attracts Allnutt's attention as one of the main resources for the development of poetic speech. Her poems are brightly dotted with the names, places, small scenes and objects of everyday life. Shealso derives characters, situations and episodes from the Bible and other literary sources while the form of her poems (rhythm, rhymes, sound effects) are often associated with oral poetic traditions, those of ballads, other songs, fairy tales, nursery rhymes. This synthesis of different traditions in Jillian Allnutt's poetry is strongly idiosyncratic making her lyric voice unique.

References

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