Desolate Market

Desolate Market by Julian Turner. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2018. 70 pp. £9.99. (paperback)

The literary critic Northrop Frye once referred to William Blake’s The Four Zoas as “the greatest abortive masterpiece in English literature,” not as a reflection on its quality, but because Blake left his planned epic poem unfinished and, perhaps more regrettably, unengraved. Nevertheless, Blake’s attempt to create a totality encompassing humankind’s fall from grace and ongoing struggle to regain it provides the broad framework for Julian Turner’s fourth poetry collection, which takes its title from the second Night of the Zoas:

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

There can be no wisdom without experience and, Blake seems to suggest, no experience without loss and failure. In mythic terms this is the fallen estate of humankind, and given the precarious condition of the real world in 2019 we might imagine a time-traveling Blake shaking his head in disgust at our lack of moral progress. As Turner pessimistically notes, “Everything happens a trillion times / in the huge hangar of the universe; / and nothing ever comes out right.” Though drawing direct parallels between the Zoas and each of Desolate Market’s four sections would risk oversimplifying Blake’s shifting, often maddeningly complex mythos, Turner’s poems evoke the fourfold, anagogic phases of being and consciousness familiar to readers of both the Romantic poet and his interpreters, from haunted wasteland, to fallen human world, to enlightened society, to the divine.

The first section, titled “Place-Time,” takes the reader on a ground-level guided tour of Yorkshire and Scotland or, more accurately, their manifestations within the poet’s own psyche. It’s not a welcoming experience. Our first stop is “Lairig Ghru,” a Scottish mountain pass where the poet finds only alienation, “lowering” mountain peaks with an “agenda none can read.” He invests the surroundings with a fearful malevolence: “the way the rock-teeth pierce the snow, / the drone and sobs of a sore wind / that whines across the moors and drowns / the isolated hums of life.” Human presence is absent, even unwelcome here, a consequence—as the poem “Yorkshire Giant” implies—of industrialized society’s disregard for and abuse of the natural landscape, which has become a “desecrated” place “where people dump empty Budweiser bottles, / black bin-bags spilling yellow Fosters tins, / or building rubble under stained tarpaulins.” And yet, in the midst of this wasteland Turner finds room for a sliver of Blakean mysticism, a connection to the “unseen frequencies that are my guide.” The Jodrell Bank satellite disk (“a metal flower on the Cheshire plain”) “opened up arcane / wavelengths, doors in the dark sky” that instilled intimations of the infinite within the poet at an early age and continue to invest his bleak surroundings with a sense of wonder. In fact, not all mountainous landscapes, shadowed by a “greywackle” of clouds, give rise to feelings of dread and paranoia. In “Local God,” which takes the form of a moving, pagan prayer, Turner locates a protective, nearly divine emanation that is the spirit of Albion itself:

Here, I can feel it everywhere, its quiet
presence felt
in unrelated shapes, the melt
of solifluxion dripping to
a boggy place,
the soil and all that thrives on it,
a shy crag that reveals its face.

This is the earth-god “that supports our graveyards and our homes” and literally underlies the existence of humankind.

If Desolate Market’s first section considers our frayed relation to the land, the second, “Black Box,” offers five poems that cast a wary, cautionary eye on our corruption of the air itself, not in the ecological context of toxic pollutants or carbon emissions, but in the surreptitious way special interests use communications technology to “warp the world into their weave” of misinformation, surveillance, and malevolent persuasion. Turner harkens back to the Air-Loom, the imaginary but frightening mind-influencing machine conjured by the paranoid London tea broker James Mathews in the late 18th century. Matthews was convinced a gang of spies used such a machine to read citizens’ minds, control their thoughts, and induce ghastly physical ailments by emitting rays that manipulated magnetic fields. Though delusional, Matthews was prescient in sensing the dawn of an inscrutable technology, “a nebula of darkness,” that would eventually envelop our everyday lives in a rancid atmosphere of fiction-plagued facts, corrupted social media, and hijacked identities, creating:

A false self camped inside each sleeping brain
Manchurian candidates who dream of power,
fifth columnists inside a conquered self,
Helsinki syndrome separatists who signed
for someone else the future of us all;
the dreams we dream in sleep laboratories,
that great suggestion box, the human mind.

Turner’s illustrations of 21st century life get no rosier in the book’s third section, “Desolate Market,” a group of poems illustrating various forms of abandonment, economic depression, and squandered potential, from the deserted mine where slag “petticoats the hillside” to elementary schools that “smell / of wet cloths, cabbage, custard slopped from cans.” The spirit of Morrigan, Irish goddess of war, is metaphorically alive and well, “vacuuming minds she wants to hypnotise / and filling them with excrement and fear.” Her plots affect not only nations but the minds of individuals who “come unstrung / and ready to possess, stockpiling guns / and searching for lost souls to foist them on.” It’s apparent that many of these poems spring directly from the zeitgeist of the last several years, as most of us helplessly witness the erosion of human dignity and empathy in the face of political polarization, the resurgence of authoritarianism, continual mass shootings, the shameless greed and increasing power of international corporations, the worsening climate, the emotional instabilities of heads of state. In “Smoke and Mirrors,” Turner harshly decries how easily humanity has yielded its fate to “the ones who leave no audit trail, who spent / our cash before it entered our account, / whose cover is so deep they can’t be seen, / the ones the agents of the State protect.”

And yet, just when things couldn’t seem bleaker, the five concluding poems in “Silent Vacuum,” the fourth section, locate glimmers of transcendence in realms that haven’t yet been tarnished or misused by self-centeredness: the staggering power of the planet Jupiter in shaping our solar system, the “the planetismals, / centaurs, asteroids and dwarf planets, / …and thousands more discovered every year.” Awareness of our unimaginably small role in the cosmos makes Turner aware of infinities everywhere, the poet closing his eyes to find a microcosm no less immense:

…a mesh of moving shapes,
irregular and spindly Voyagers
rotating as all bodies do in space,
in that silent vacuum that separates,
the depths in everyone that can’t be read.

Perhaps those unreadable depths, simply by virtue of being unknown, conceal the path toward a new wisdom, discoverable not in the dogmatic senses of traditional religion or scientific method, but as Blake might find it—in the power to imagine that path. Toward the end of the Ninth Night in The Four Zoas, envisioning a re-awakening of human consciousness, Blake exclaims, “The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depth of wondrous worlds!” (Imagine if Blake had Twitter at his disposal.) Although Desolate Market for the most part focuses on the destructive effects our collective neglect has wrought throughout the planet and Western society, Turner remains on the lookout for the possibility that a “flash of meteor might scratch a trace / on the cornea that fades but leaves behind / surprise and something wet wiped from the face.”

While the inclusion of endnotes in contemporary poetry collections is not always warranted, they would have been welcome here. For American readers in particular, Turner’s references to specific localities (Tusky Fields, “a C-Road on the Chevin”) and regional legends (Jack-in-Irons) merit glosses, the internet notwithstanding. They are worth the effort of tracking down because they add a “habitation and a name,” an earthy, personalized immediacy to the poet’s wider, almost vatic vision of the forces that —for better or for worse—mold our futures on this planet. Turner understands that the images likely to endure in our individual memories are those that move us most deeply, making it possible, as his rich poems aptly demonstrate, to move others in turn.

—Reviewer Fred Muratori's poems and short prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, DASH, Italian Americana, Poet Lore, Vinyl, and New Flash Fiction Review. His latest poetry collection is A Civilization, published by Dos Madres Press.