Paul O’Prey’s beautifully designed chapbook from The Melos Press contains a mapping of the poet’s dealings with the world, though every step taken through the outer topography has a powerful resonance with the life within. The epigraph from Rilke’s Duino Elegies nudges the reader in this direction: ‘The world is nowhere, my love, if not within.’ The original Hereford Mappa Mundi was created around 1290 and is described in the opening poem with its ‘seas of fire, walls of flame,’ basilisks, and griffins. O’Prey takes these mythic elements as psychologically significant, rather than a primitive literalism: ‘More of a mirror than a map.’ These flames and strange creatures lie within.
‘South’ proposes an excellent exercise for poetry writing groups: ‘I take a pen and sketch my own mappa mundi.’ O’Prey’s own sketch straddles London, County Down, an unnamed southerly port of embarkation, tropical-sounding islands, a paradise-sounding garden. This outer journey again sustains, just bubbling underneath, its potential inner equivalent. There are several poems about the poet’s father, who ‘salvaged ships / during the war,’ and who worked and fished along the sea’s edge, absorbing it so much that ‘Last Rites’ images his last days as being subject to a ‘shipwrecked mind.’
These portrayals of English land- and sea-scapes enclose several poems at the centre of the book which look to the Mediterranean, the island of Mallorca in particular. Ramon Llull founded the hermitage of Miramar on the island a mere twenty years before the Mappa Mundi was made. The poem, ‘Miramar,’ vividly captures the island’s terraces, its stony soil, its few remaining hermit monks working the land. The ‘inner’ world here is explored in the poem’s meditation on the nature of prayer: ‘the accuracy of words / is irrelevant – intent is content.’ O’Prey’s mappings encompass the spiritual with the pun here on the content(s) of a prayer and the content(ment) it may bring to the one who prays. This is such a skilfully structured book of just sixteen poems, yet its lightness of touch belies the heights and depths of its journeying.
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has just been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here. You can read more about Between a Drowning Man on Creative Writing at Leicester here.
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