Peaceful Wonderment
A Book of Sounds, by Billy Mills
a book of sounds
Billy Mills
Shearsman Books, 2024 ($18.)
The title of Irish poet Billy Mills’ new volume, a book of sounds, is a paradox. A yoking of opposites, a kind of Metaphysical conceit. A book is, literally, soundless : an archive of mute poetry. The poet underlines this with an end-note, quoting American composer Charles Ives in a preface to his own work : “Some of the songs in this book… cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are : that is ‘in the leaf’; and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.”
The poems in a book of sounds are indeed muted. Brief phrases, preternaturally quiet, simple. Each page enveloped in a wash of marginal white space. This is where they work their miracle. In such quiet, sober seclusion and near-silence, the reader’s mind and heart find rest. Not escape, but a steady, clear-eyed recognition of our human condition : on this planet, in this present time. Two juxtaposed pieces (pp. 58-59) provide a partial example :
burn it all
burn waste rubber plastic
anything burn the air
there’s money in it
burn your neighbors their children
their cats dogs houses
burn water burn food burn
the soil it grows in burn
there’s money in it
burn the grass trees cattle
in the fields burn the very earth
burn the future who needs it
burn it all again burn the money in it
––––––
words fail
under the stress
of silence
silence fails
(wait now)
the song avails
of all this failure
forms suppressed
light endures
all that it can
flaring out
to where we are
The poems are simple on the surface : that is part of their power. Yet the book is carefully composed (in four sequences, and coda) with a light symphonic aura. The first sequence, titled “Four” (vaguely reminiscent of Eliot’s Four Quartets), is in four parts, each with 20 quatrain stanzas, evoking the four seasons of the changing year : but they do so by inhabiting, quite astonishingly, the mind and heart of a bird, a blackbird, within its natural round. In such fashion, I for one hear a distinct echo of ancient Celtic poetry : gnomic and lyrical at the same time; intensely focused on, and perceptive toward, the natural world. Moreover, these four sections are linked to the four basic elements – earth, air, water, and fire – framing the vision of the earliest pre-Socratic poet-philosophers (Parmenides, Empedocles, Philolaus, et al.). Indeed there is something in these poems that might be roughly termed “authentically archaic”. The cumulative effect of these slow, quietly sonorous sound-pieces is the presence of an austere, attentive, and philosophical mind, spirit, and heart – expressing the wintry truth of our wracked, distracted, misguided, deeply foolish, weak, deluded, vain, proud, and (last but not least) mortal human condition.
Mills beholds all this under the sign of disappearance and extinction. His voice is elegiac – yet not quite, not quite hopeless. Because, ironically – as he formulates in a passage near the end of the book (p.85) –
but language
gets us nowhere
the karst
doesn’t care
nor the chert
the fluorspar
endures
no end
only endings
an accretion of
links connections
the weave of things
bluntly
we’re not killing
the earth
among the rest
we’re killing
ourselves
speak now
the lakes provide
& preservere
& there is joy
despite it all
(remember)
The long second section, “Uncertain Songs”, with its reference to Thomas Wyatt’s Certain Psalms of David, is a spectral, sometimes agonized, passage of waiting, ambivalence, and skepticism. It is a very welcome tonic – a dose of reality : a clach air a chur, cast up against this present era of barking dogmatism and deep-frozen certainties.
a robin builds
driven
by need
fragile as steel
worrying at words
the bird
hesitates
or so it seems
wrong again
it is
persistent
sings
Just before the “Coda” – a charming paean to that great American flora-&-fauna-watcher, Marianne Moore – comes the final section, titled “long poem with no name”. Here emerges a kind of return, dancing in counterpart with the first sequence (“Four”). Not a resolution, but a seeping-in of fragile joy : rooted in the very contemplation and affirmation of the brave and tender things that still surround us, persistently, here on Earth. As Wallace Stevens put it : “the end of the poet is fulfillment, since the poet finds a sanction for life in poetry” (Necessary Angel, p.43). I’ll close with this brief passage from “long poem with no name” :
a single robin
singing
defiance
rain &
the water rises
inexorably
everything flows
that is
this fragile world
a quiet grave
in a quiet time
seamounts scarred
& littered
but alive
precariously
alive
I hope many others will discover Billy Mills’ book of sounds, and be refreshed with its peaceful, serious, elegant wonderment (as I have been).
Thank you!
Thank you for this marvelous review of superb book!
John Levy