The Giving Way, Richard Skelton
Guillemot Press, 2022 £8.00
What is it?
This pamphlet is structured around a repeated question, from the first page:
and what is this
what is it
is it
is
From a lot of googling, and looking at the description on the publisher’s website, I understand that the setting is in ‘those now-silent caves that hold the residues of Palaeolithic human mark-making’. The poet uses specialised language:
is it the cry of the Homotherium in the stadial dawn
is it the retreat of Coelodonta
of Mammuthus
of Megaloceros
of Ursus
of Bos
into extinction
I felt I had to look up those capitalised nouns. (I even had to look up ‘stadial’.) I might have liked some description, perhaps some adjectives, to give me an idea what was going on without Wikipedia.
However, as the pamphlet progresses, there is a bit more description, and once you’ve looked up the places listed and found out they’re famous for their cave paintings, the scene is clearer:
in the lines
cupules
and whorls
of Chauvet
of La Pasiega
of Peche-Merle
is it manganese
is it ochre
is manganese
is ochre
and
line
over
line
over
line
over
line
My favourite fragment makes me feel a little of what it would be like to be in one of those caves:
is it the placing of hands
in the cold narrow vaults of the world
in Gargas in El Castillo in Cosquer
in the deep inner rooms of revenant silence
The scale here is vast:
is it the flattening of tireless millennia
plant and animal and human pushed into enduring
unconscious embrace
and becoming tabula rasa for the next
for century over
century over
century
By the end, my reading of the poet’s repeated question is that it asks what is the point of art: why make cave-paintings, why make poems?
is it seeing
is it bearing witness
is watching
is listening
is
simply is