This review was first
published in Under the Radar Magazine,
published by Nine Arches Press.
The history of cinema began with an antivivisectionist. The French physiologist E. J. Marey wanted to understand the rudiments of movement without physically tampering with the living creatures he was studying. He invented the chronophotographic gun, an instrument which didn’t hurt flesh but instead captured time and space. The gun itself was actually a camera, capable of taking twelve photos a second - a device which, rather than compromising skin, fur or feather, could only ‘graze the skin of space,’ as Simon Perril puts it in his new collection Nitrate.
Nitrate is a collection born out of Perril’s
interest in the birth of cinema and Marey’s work. Perril himself has described
the collection as ‘idiosyncratic’; he does not write of actors or Hollywood glamour,
but instead deals with the mechanics of early film and the constituents of
which it was made: ‘bladders, putty, collodion.’ He is also interested in the
scientific processes used to keep the image on the frame, what he calls ‘the
chemistry of holding.’ In particular,
Perril is intrigued by the notion of the still, as well as the moments in
between these images that Marey couldn’t capture:
I
reached The Intermission
fallen
through a here-shaped hole.
The
minutes pile up like snowflakes.
‘Here-shaped’
would be a good way of describing Nitrate;
since many of his poems are concerned with the static rather than the mutable.
In ‘Death by Snowflake,’ not only are there more snowflakes, but also inertia
and the relentless nothingness of nothing:
The
minutes cover a man
like
snowflakes
lost
on impact, skin
thinks
nothing
Marey’s
experiments in the 1890s fortuitously collided with the arrival of the moving
image; with his chronophotographic gun he’d inadvertently invented the ‘shot.’ Of
course the term still exists and Perril pays homage to Marey in ‘The End of
Portraiture.’ Here, Perril considers ‘photography’s slow thaw’ from static
freeze to movement. He is concerned with the concept of that ‘thaw,’ when the
still wings of a bird assume movement on the ‘lunar slither’ of photographic
film. No accident perhaps then that the front cover of Nitrate features a collage by the poet himself of a camera being
destroyed - or perhaps vivisected - to show the release of birds from within.
Which
brings us to the title, Nitrate: Cellulose
nitrate was the substance used as a film base in early cinema photography. It
had one significant drawback in that it was highly flammable, so much so that
the US Navy showed trainee film projectionists warning films of nitrate reels
on fire even when they were fully submerged in water. Perril describes ‘the
nitrate symphony / glinting
incandescent / for an age / learning to dissolve. ‘And yet collodion was also
used in early film, a substance which in liquid form was used for dressing
wounds. The irony of early film having healing and destructive properties
emerges as a significant theme, as evinced in ‘Succession’:
Each
time we talk of the ‘shot’
a
glass plate drops: pieces of photo, gun cotton collodion
continually
dressing the wound
leaking
frames.
There
is an implicit appreciation here that the materials used to capture film have
their own inherent life and purpose like the images they depict. The beauty of
this poetry is its immediacy and its ability to crystallise language. The poet’s
skill is in achieving directness and economy, there is nothing superfluous
here: ‘flux-wrapped / wave-swept / pulse thwacked.’ Perril succeeds in
balancing delicacy with punch.
The
collection is divided into three parts: Nitrate,
The Intermission and Forward. The second of these, The Intermission, is Perril’s attempt to
capture ‘lost time,’ the moments in between Marey’s shots, ‘an enforced
intermission in which we’re waiting for our lives to begin’. These poems are
much more personal and have a ‘lived-in’ feel whilst still retaining the
cinematic themes of the collection itself:
The
idea of cinema
in
the mind of a painting,
my
daughter puts small objects to bed
they
dream
the
idea of audience
in
the mind of a poem.
There
is here a more domestic, dreamier outlook on the notion of the still, whereby
inanimate objects somehow conjure themselves into life. In Perril’s hands, the
poem similarly conjures itself into life:
The
radioactive weaponry of the poem
comes
to life; the fructification of nothing
Echoing
Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ Nitrate
could be seen as a comment on the beauty, intricacy and nothingness of art.
About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is
a Leicestershire-based poet. Her debut collection, Melanchrini, was
published by Nine Arches Press in Summer 2012, and was subsequently shortlisted
for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Her writing has been published in The
North, The Guardian, The TLS, Staple and others. She blogs at http://miskinataylor.blogspot.co.uk/
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