Dan Wylie
TESTING THE EDGE by Mark Swift (Snailpress, R35)
MANY of the poems in Mark Swift’s muscular fourth collection “home in on exile”. Divided between the landscapes of the Eastern Cape and the British Isles, Swift struggles to find a “home where the heart is”, within himself, within the process of travelling itself: “We carry our journeys within us,” are “privateers” who “run before a fickle wind”.
For Swift’s vision is of a violent, unstable “chaos behind our shutters of lace”. He writes like a much older man, victim of some irresistible metaphysic, lamenting the deaths of too many friends. History is an “ambush”; one foot’s always “in the grave”. Not much celebration here: “The door to wonder/ swings closed.” Part of the irascible cynicism explains Swift’s exile: a coruscating revulsion at the role of South Africa’s whites – “hair-trigger men/ on the make”.
The poems are crammed with imageries both dense and elusive, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to riddle the real subject from the metaphors. But then an underlying theme is precisely the struggle to give language purchase on unpredictability, so that the wrestle between the characteristically staggered lines, and Swift’s natural musicality, seems altogether appropriate.
I revelled in uncountable excellent moments: “a throaty saw’s catarrh”; “Her clock continues/ its countdown; her petals clamber/ softly to the floor”; “the creaking stanzas of a bed/ versed in love”. For all this undeniable power, though, the poems seem on some level uncomfortable with themselves – a symptom, perhaps, of Swift’s intriguing self-characterisation: “A horse/ Too brutally bred/ I have weak knees/ A hardened jaw/ Some fatal flaw.”