[Digital Poetics 4.22] On Beauty: Timothy Thornton’s “Shapeshifting” by John Wilkinson

Image by John Wilkinson

This article should be read alongside a review of the same book by Luke Roberts also published on theHythe.

*

Timothy Thornton, Shapeshifting (London: RunAmok, 2024)

Immersed in Timothy Thornton’s sequence of poems Shapeshifting, I cannot think when I last experienced such giddiness in reading poetry by a contemporary, such as I might feel before a great Titian or Joan Mitchell, or even despite myself in some monstrous crescendo of Bruckner. What can beauty avail in times like these? This is a question asked and answered by Thornton’s poems. Answered, that is, for him and for me in their duration and immediate aftermath: nothing could more desperately be needed. For a time. This review is my brief first response (beaten to the post by Luke Roberts’s review here on The Hythe) to a work which I receive as a triumph, and expect will attract, indeed necessitate, far more considered appreciation and commentary. 

Thornton’s poems are set in a specific landscape, of the shingle coast around Dungeness in Kent, characterised by flatness, the interpenetration of water and land, and shingle’s shifting of the coastline’s definition. They also are liminal diurnally, either at dawn or sunset. While the place is named, the nuclear power station at Dungeness is not a specific presence; but it haunts the poems’ transfers and transformations of energy in sun and water, as well as between sexual bodies, and phrasally as though pylons stretched between poems. The opening poem, ‘The Serpent’s Eyes’, is a poem of the dawn’s succeeding the troubled watches of the night, fraught with pain and suffering, chiming with John Wieners’s great poem ‘The Acts of Youth’ in rising ecstatically on churning nocturnal agonies in musical swells until:

Eyes in the hostile sacred early
morning declare silently a vengeful
process underway a vital
centrifugal haunting alive
and out and across. 

In this musical diminuendo after the earlier stanzas’ full-throated ‘trumpet in the air’ the lines abbreviate, as from the confusion of dream tatters and terrible self-reproach, eyes open to a hostile day, on which a countervailing vengeance is exacted through what continues to haunt but spreads out from the self, here in poetry. Beauty as vengeance.

This poetry throughout finds vengeance in the sacred ordinary of the natural and even the polluted world, the little observed things that can steady inner tumult and offer a compass point when physical ecstasy might disintegrate the self and at the same time, through transcendence seduce with a false unity. The rhetorical surges of ‘The Serpent’s Eyes’ are followed immediately by ‘Bolting’ whose title’s significance will gradually appear. This poem’s naked first line ‘By the canal I saw a sycamore leaf’, centres the live centrifugal haunting rippling from a little thing, also a point fixed upon to stay grounded while being fucked. Here in sex’s aftermath, ‘When the weak | Sun rose I was oil in an estuary’, that is I became, ‘alive | and out and across’. The first two poems, so dissimilar formally and rhetorically, share this movement, one orchestral and the other as if in chamber music.

A gay ecstatic poet, Thornton can not only can sound like Wieners, but these poems also are haunted by Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’. The clear distinction from Whitman, comes with Thornton’s struggle out of abjection; far from containing multitudes he strips himself down, seeking a flicker of plenitude at zero, where ‘at last I am everywhere nothing | at last completely nothing’. That ‘completely’ comes at the end of ‘In an Estuary’, a poem too long to quote adequately, which begins:

Ridged out in damp tocking pebbles
Call it a thin lagoon, and creatures

Lashing out under a splashed
Convexity of travelled Moonlight

‘Tocking’ is brilliant, defined by the OED as ‘a short, hollow sound, deeper and more resonant than a tick’ while also suggesting the implacable passage of time. Things are not well: almost at once the fixed point fails, ‘Like a sycamore seed it spins’, gentle haunting comes to attack in the form of a malignant ghost, and soon ‘I want to die’. The poem’s journey from suicidal depth to the possibility of becoming ‘at last completely nothing’, a fully receptive nothing rather than a despairing self, requires facing a ‘fixity of stare’ before ‘we | will know each other in unfreighted future’. I think of ‘oil in an estuary’, a scarcely present skim iridescent in the sun’s rising. Although his poem lacking the buoyancy of O’Hara’s ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’ with its final stumbling into dawn light from ‘the blames | and desperate conclusions of the dark’, nonetheless Thornton shares the conviction upon rising that ‘only darkness lights our lives’ (O’Hara); the watches of the night must be endured, for out of such wounds ‘Declare in the early morning the chrysalis infinite dark’ (Thornton). Needless to say, one should no more wish for oil in an estuary than ‘a raging stream of meaningless glyphs’ (Thornton) or ‘an ignorant horde of thoughts’ (O’Hara), yet the sun makes its beauty undeniable. Is beauty then a diversion, a trick, a cover-up, a selfish indulgence? 

Step back a moment. Who is this ‘we’, sharing the ‘unfreighted future’? The sun tells, and the next poem, ‘Icarus’, tells in its ending recurrent from ‘Bolting’, lines reconfiguring across the sequence:

His name was Icarus he gave me

A look we fucked all night the weak sun rose and we
Were oil in an estuary 

Where I was, is now we. The book’s first poem was sunlit, in the second sun rose, in the third ‘shines the sun’, in the fourth we are ‘together at sunrise’. The poet or his lover or both, figure as Icarus, appearing repeatedly after the second poem in the book, where ‘Under the sunken carriage Icarus | Pinned me’, the ‘sunken carriage’ perhaps the sun’s reflection in water, or (a more fanciful association), uniting Phaeton’s chariot with a supermarket trolley. Icarus in an English landscape is in little danger of his wings being melted by the sun; rather, the risk is that the sun will be obscured by clouds ‘And Icarus flickers in an out’ (‘Permitted Work’) or entirely switch off in the ‘no | longer cloudless sky’ as in ‘Red Sky, Romney Marsh’:

Joyous still though, and holding hands til in the ruinous
We wander really we hover to arrive at this

New evening outlaid like ruddy linen on interdicted land
That a tale is told by the marsh-ghosts encircling

Lassoing themselves the dank woven heaven
All about: a vital centrifugal haunting it is

A marsh-ghost is the will-o’-the-wisp seen over marshes; the passage is of daylight to dusk with a red sunset, to darkness punctuated by dancing will-o’-the-wisps which rather than leading on with false hopes, proverbially, with the present danger of submersion in a bog, lasso the lovers. The poem ends ecstatically, yet the word ‘lasooing’ (rather than, say, garlanded) sustains an apprehensiveness, prevalent throughout, that ecstasy might be a trap, like the giddiness of intoxication, sexual pleasure, or even the giddiness of beauty, whether the natural world’s – and the poems are exquisitely observant of the natural world –, or aesthetic beauty. Again ‘a vital centrifugal haunting’ casts its spell, allowing even English dankness to be celebrated, surely unprecedented.

The coherence ecstasy affords, and by implication the coherence afforded through the poetic lassoing Shapeshifting performs, flickers between the substantial and the illusory at every level, from the recurrent imagery of water droplets forming clouds, polarising light, or uniting as a self or a concept, down to Thornton’s unusual adoption of the initial capital for lines of free verse. Most poignantly, where the poems arrive is at a unity in separation, recognising that distance is a sustained prerequisite for recognition and renewable love and beauty. The final poem, ‘The Enemy Gone’, ends:

What remains is joy: theirs alone in dusk
And seaweed and hiding, each a high Icarus bolting in time.

By now the force of the word ‘bolting’, mysterious in the first appearance, has become evident. It brings together a lightning bolt, a forced unity, and an instinctual flight. This semantic bolting goes some way to explaining how Shapeshifting can be at once immersive and, on reflection, from a distance as mesmerising as a glittering mobile. I shall read it again, in different times.

Shapeshifters is available from RunAmok.

*

John Wilkinson has recently published two books, the poem sequences of Fugue State (Shearsman 2023) and the absentee memoir, Colours Nailed to the Mast (Shearsman 2024).