Against the Stream - Hardcover

Rippier, Jo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 086140422X ISBN 13: 9780861404223

Publisher: Colin Smythe Ltd, 2000

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This collection of Jo Rippier's poetry has been stunningly illustrated by Gerhard Elsner, whose work is represented in major art museums through Germany, and for whom a retrospective is being held in Uberlinger, Germany to mark his seventieth birthday. T

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About the Author

Jo Rippier was born in Plymouth in 1935, and educated at King’s School Worcester and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He gained his Ph.D. in English Literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat�t, where he was a lecturer in the English Department until retiring in 1998. His previous publications include 'The Short Stories of Sean O’Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Techniques', and 'Some Postwar English Novelists', a volume of short stories, 'Goodnight, Morning, and collections of poetry', Seasons and Remembrance (1981), Beginnings, Endings (1991), Past Present (1996), Against the Stream (1999, with aquarelles by Gerhard Elsner), Late Motley (2001), Something Old, Something New (2007), Echoes and Reflections (2009), Footsteps (2011), The Silence of Snow (2013), Darkness and Light (2014), Shadows (2015) and Sights and Sounds (2017).

Reviews

Each poem in Rippier's collection, with accompanying aquarelles (in somber hues) by Gerhard Elsner, is fit to hang over the fireplace. Many are singsong evocations of a season or a landscape, replete with cozily archaic diction and a homespun moral to cap things off. In "Brief Encounter," the poet hears a hummingbird trill in the midst of a busy street. After an obligatory nod to Keats, he sums up the adventure: "A bird of passage, passing strange, / its message fading out of range. / I went my way, time to repair, / that song still ringing in the city air." The rhymes and diction are equally insipid, and the facile sentiment that contrasts birdsong with urban life is very hard to swallow. All of the poems show the same tendency to sacralize their subject, to draw out of nature a comfortable and comforting ethic. Rippier is also fond of obvious and childish tricks, such as arranging five stanzas, in a poem about the migration of geese, in the shape of a V. Similarly, in "Echoes," he mimics the sounds of pond weeds swayed by the wind: "Reeds in water, water weeds / light letting, where one reads / patterns shifting in the light / all clear and yet barely bright." Both of these poems show a certain obstinate literalism on the part of the poet, a penchant for finding easy solutions to the problem of how to render a vision into language. The watercolors by Elsner show the precise negative of this penchant: the scene of Rippier's poem is represented in its simplest visual analogue, so that a poem about geese flips over to reveal three of them flying beak to tail.A mediocre technique matched to an earthbound imagination. -- Copyright � 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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