Buoyed Home
The rolling swell
tolls a sinners' bell
that manifests a shoal.
Green and red
flashing far ahead
will guide me to my goal.
I hope to glide
ghosting with the tide
and moor behind the mole.
A nodding nun
wards my shoreward run
but cannot shrive my soul.
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Well, who is this?
Absolutely no prizes will be awarded for a correct answer.
It's too easy, because the voice is unique to Timothy Murphy. Some skilled ventriloquist might write a close approximation, but before long the act would falter, I am sure.
Read through a collection of Tim's work, and before you are done you will have this distinctive voice firm and clear in your mind, and be able to recognise it in the future.
After writing a few comments on "voice" on Tim's sonnet thread on "Lariat" the other day, I thought this might make an interesting discussion topic. Perhaps it better belongs on the "Mastery" thread, and if deemed so, it may be moved there.
I wanted to lead into the discussion with some more examples from Tim, since he is one of our own unique voices on the 'Sphere, and in fact no one around these parts is "more unique" than our Tim. Here is another of my favourites.
Mortal Stakes
Partridge flee to the headland straw
when combines take their final lap.
A vixen leaves a severed paw
to free her foreleg from a trap.
The kildeer, feigning a fractured wing,
would lure me past the gravel flat
where spotted chicks are cowering
as though I were some feral cat.
No strategy of fight or flight
liberates me from instinct's grip.
I crave the whisky's amber light,
the balm of ice against my lip.
Salmon swimming toward a tarn
fatten a grizzly in the foam.
Racing into its flaming barn,
the white-eyed mare is headed home.
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There is a distinctive tautness and a precision and a rhythmic felicity here which utterly defeats my attempts to re-create the effect. It can't be done, because this style is as individual as a thumb print.
There is also a lapidary effect in Tim's poetry, the like of which I haven't encountered. Words seem to interlock perfectly, like those ancient dry-stone walls you see in Europe, held together for centuries without the aid of any cement - the stones (words) being so perfectly chosen, they naturally nestle together and lock. Listen to this:
Homecoming
I found fierce dogs
guarding my pens
and fattened hogs
behind each fence.
Six hundred sows
fed the swine
who thronged my house
and swilled my wine.
I found a son
too green to draw
my bow of yew,
a queen who saw
her work undone,
her scullions too.
For this I quit
Circe's arms -
a manumit
to stinking farms?
A seer I trust
told me in Hell
how I could quell
my wanderlust:
"Go seek a man
so far inland
from Poseidon's shore
he'll think the oar
you bear in hand
a winnowing fan."
=========
Not only do I love this for its wonderfully pithy Homeric subject matter, but for the rhythms and the sound. The quality of ear this man possesses is phenomenal, and it obviously played a large part in his attainment of a unique voice.
So, who are the voices you hear in poetry (past or present) that you feel you could recognise anywhere?
And what are the factors behind the production of a recognisable voice in poetry?
Can it be produced through training?
How do you get one?
(I am writing a letter to Father Christmas).
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Mark Allinson
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