What's in Store - Softcover

Joyce, Trevor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0973587539 ISBN 13: 9780973587531

Publisher: New Writers' Press, 2008

Synopsis

Poetry. WHAT'S IN STORE is Trevor Joyce's first full-length book since the publication of his collected poems, with the first dream of the fire they hunt the cold (2001). For this volume, the author has shaped eight years' worth of work--individual poems, extended sequences, translations from the Irish, Chinese, and other languages--into a continuous booklength structure. These poems find Joyce reaching out towards a jarringly wide range of styles and voices, from the tart lyricism of his workings of European folksongs to the ferociously dense collage/inscription of "STILLSMAN." Brought together as a book, the poems take on further meanings: WHAT'S IN STORE is at once a Borgesian guide to the history, customs and scientific discourse of an unknown country, and an Oulipian textual machine, whose workings by turns terrify and exalt. "This is one of my favorite poets anywhere. His poems have the clear, austere and impersonal ring of great translations. They are archetypal, they are strange"--Fanny Howe.

About this title

About the Author:

Trevor Joyce (born 26 October 1947) is an Irish poet, born in Dublin. He co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin in 1967 and was a founding editor of NWP's The Lace Curtain; A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism in 1968. Early books include Sole Glum Trek (1967), Watches (1968), Pentahedron (1972) and The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976). The last of these is a version of the Middle-Irish Buile Shuibhne, well known from Seamus Heaney's later translation in Sweeney Astray (1983). After a near-total silence for twenty years, he resumed publishing in 1995 with stone floods, followed by Syzygy and Without Asylum (1998).

Review:

"Nate Dorward of The Gig recently sent me a copy of Trevor Joyce's fat collection What's in Store, co-publish'd with New Writers' Press in Dublin. And, reading around in its strange and bold and marvelous pieces, pieces that seemingly sprout out of nowhere, that exhibit incredible variety, that often enough seem spoke by ancient voices up out of the boggy penetrable earth, I think how what one cannot speak of, one calls genius, or quotes too lengthily. . . . What's stunning here is the reach of the registers, the demotic intertwined with the proverbial, a kind of trade school technical up against sudden medical precision, and a sneaky sense (the language cocking an eye-wink at the reader) that some good bit of it is all rather an extended blague, a cheery stand-in for what is (partly, at least) a story about writing itself. One thing that is evident immediately is how "trustworthy" the writing is--in the mirey and exhilaration of "not knowing," one is perfectly happy to follow along. . . . Joyce's range is phenomenal. The book opens with a lovely set of tiny things, the "Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages," work'd up out some rudimentary literal versions. . . . Too, Joyce reworks a series he calls "Love Songs from a Dead Tongue," out of fifteenth (and earlier) Irish originals, and a series of "some of the surviving poems by Juan Chi (pinyin Ruan Ji, 210-263)." The upshot of the threading through of translations and versions is a splendid estrangedness, where the alien flips into customary . . . One final piece of something. A longish (actually only a half-dozen pages or so) impenetrable looking piece call'd "Stillsman" is placed about at the book's center. . . . (Reading it, it seems as if birds, referenced often in the pages, begin to twitter in one's head--though I am almost certain it is an effect of the skittery type . . .) I include it mostly as indication of Joyce's restlessness, or maybe rambunctiousness, that willingness to try anything that is a terrible earth-defying strength, a freedom-granting 'fix.'" - John Latta, Isola di Rifuti

"It's impossible to read Trevor Joyce's poems without being intrigued by their combination of formalism and lyric power....The intense, contrasting rhythms, the individual words and lines create a variety of frictions, moving with a skittering quickness as one reads them. Bartok's transformations of Hungarian folk music come to mind, or Charles Ives' contrary, yet sympathetic re-interpretations of nineteenth-century American marching-band music. Indeed, many of the sequences in What's in Store are counter-foils to snatches of folk tradition and anthropological and archeological lore drawn from the Chinese, Hungarian and Irish. Neither sentimental nor mimetic, Joyce's arsenal of constraints and rhymes becomes a means of penetrating and exploring the suffocating crust of traditional formal devices and cultures....Throughout the book, these forms & re-workings vary from the hauntingly simple to the extremely complex. In some cases, such as the poem "Stillsman," Joyce's pages are thick with language - a relentless masonry wall in which texture is achieved by the correlation of stones of different textures, colors, shapes and implicit histories. At other times, the works fold out into a more relaxed, traditional lyricism. The variety of forms - either stretched or compressed - creates the impression of a poet who is relentless in his drive to explore the ways in which multiple constraints can compel the play of intelligence and imagination....Despite the formal variety, the book achieves a strong consistency of tone. Why do so many of these poems -- including those contemporary in reference -- have a 'one step removed' chill, even a hard-hearted sense of objectivity? Over time, modernism, science, and other utopian practices notwithstanding, the force of the fates appears not to have changed at all. In these poems, phantoms continue to threaten the collective and private psyche; courtships spin out of control, marriages falter, wars spread destruction, children disappear, someone's death is always nearing, while strange, elusive, possibly threatening messages clamor from the edges of the darkness. Beauty - brief appearances of paradisiacal white birds, peacocks and liquid, transparent stone - is never less than transient....The only order in the universe appears to be the order of song. Without song, one remains as vulnerable as ever. With these songs, however, we are given the rhythmic energy and heightened awareness that allow us to be - at least, for the length of the song - liberated from the burdens that inevitably bear down upon us.Yes, there is definitely a kind of blues here. No matter the dexterity of the poems' formal inventiveness, things often turn out badly, or contrary to intentions. Yet, like all good blues, these poems are suffused with the optimism and joy implicit in of the acting of creation or listening (or both). Trevor's lyricism and variety, his formal invention and sheer velocity, not to mention his sharp sense of humor, are a wake-up call, a joyous alarm to the living, a kick in the butt to the sleepers among us....The writing's obligation to arbitrary forms liberates the poem from autobiographical intention, while the poems themselves become a measure of a world ultimately and simultaneously much more personal and universal, tragic or comedic as that may be. That is not to say this book will make Trevor Joyce any more recognizable on the street, or anywhere else. But he has constructed poems that speak much more clearly to a shared condition of human presence.Yes, I highly recommend What's In Store. And would suggest that Trevor Joyce is one of most remarkable contemporary poets among us." Stephen Vincent, Galatea Resurrects

About this edition

• Publisher: New Writers' Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0973587539
• ISBN 13: 9780973587531
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 322