Dream Into Play, Richard Skinner
Poetry Salzburg, 2022 £8.00
Dazzled
Note: The text that follows is collaged variously, with the author’s permission, from poems in the collection. Quotations are faithfully represented.
I have been swallowing lemons whole. What is this here? A setting? A plot? Struggle on — almost with a sense of disappointment. When we understand, there may not even be a mystery. The sea rolls in —
[ …] all the hurt, unsaid, never
solved, lapping up on some distant shore.
[‘The Real Star’]
But then all that apprehension melts away. Centuries before that, he was about to die. It is not easy. It’s the kind of knowledge no man grasps on his own. A better design hits you full in the face:
While sitting, lift your poem off the ground. Rotate your poem at the
ankles counterclockwise. Repeat ten times, then reverse the direction.
[‘Poems in the Restroom’]
The truth a poem emplaces often lies in its pattern. But who knows? Whichever way I look, what to hold on to? I am not inflexible. It is just that you are dazzled by the angle of entry, all the kinks and knots of us, for all to see: ‘Words […] run in sluices’ (‘The Gift’).
Poems are unloaded as freight. We have walked side by side into spaces where light has spilled in. A door clicks and falls open, the opening door, not the wide-open space, the see-through paper door into this brilliant corner…. Walking is nothing but a controlled way of falling.
I believe I am being conducted to the invisible world. One is thus brought to some strange lessons in reading. Necessity is the tears of invention. The critic is nothing other than a commentator.
When the time comes, feast on words flowing endlessly:
You yourself go underground
dissolving at the bottom
My large blue wife
is holding the wrong hand
[‘Life in a Oncetime’]
I have no delusions — life and work are pure graft, the truth lies elsewhere. I don’t want to say anything like a review of a film or a book. We have all turned into sunflowers.