Gravity-Free Poetry

The poems in this beautiful little volume exist in an Ornette Coleman lyrical abstract space in which individual words operate as spheres in an orrery. This is not to suggest that Miles Champion's poems are not multicolored for clarity by dint of randomness, like a piñata from Mexico, Mars.

Each sense of the gift is banished from the total            bottle blondIcing the mainsail on the little side table                      The nests all correctIt was the lightest lemon yellow imaginable                flowers of matchflame

Champion, too, is an architect of synaesthesia, in the sense Joris-Karl Huysmans describes in À Rebours (1884):

Indeed, each liquor corresponded in taste, he fancied, with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curaçao, for example, resembled the clarinet in its shrill, velvety tone; kümmel was like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette were like the flute, both sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then to complete the orchestra come kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh eruptions of cornets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of tubas, while the thundering of cymbals and the big drum, beaten hard, evoked the rakis of Chios and the mastics.

Like Huysmans, he is also something of a decadent, although more in the manner of John Ashbery and James Schuyler—or the Canadian Davies, Alan and Kevin.

Eventually is the follow-up to the fully mature Three Bell Zero (2000). Previously, Champion's books have precociously navigated the straits of hommage. I am thinking here of the influence upon him of Tom Raworth, the Villon-styled elder statesman of avant-garde British poetry with whom Champion has a quasi-filial relationship. I am also thinking of Raworth's contemporary American counterpart Clark Coolidge. Coolidge's early works, in particular, books such as Ing (1968), Space (1970), and Quartz Hearts (1978), have at times caused in Champion a near extraterrestrial frisson. In his defense, I can think of few poets of like mind who have not been awed in one way or another by the writing of Raworth and Coolidge.

The most inescapable subject of writing is time—how could it be otherwise? A young man's best friend is time. With time, the onslaught of age eventually becomes a more immediate issue. And now, Eventually is a gorgeous letterpress chapbook of exactly twenty pages containing six polished poems of the jaunt and joust. We might consider in light of the present volume's title its two most ambitious poems: "Colour in Huysmans" and "In the Air." These serve as bookends, whose first lines both incorporate as their subject time: "Time is an instrument of construction," and "The stop time limits motion." Might the title of Champion's book have anything to do with his turning forty?

Kith and kin, one's emotional attachments, are very much subject to time. Champion's first book, Sore Models (1995), takes its title from a painting by Jane Hammond. Hammond's painting is of two feet, possibly from a sideshow poster, each randomly covered with icons resembling decals from a turn-of-the-century handbook on magic. Both painter and poet distance themselves by way of humor from what could be interpreted by a housewife in Bath as bad parenting or the various aches and pains of an artist's model. Humor is used here as an effective way to avoid pain, emotional or otherwise. But consider this quote from Three Bell Zero:

We got hot past the marker in a cloud ofBeing still, a "gradual" practices        to setOpen to adversity in the jet streamHair cream.

Here humor matures to include a quick laugh of juxtaposition and recognition, taking the reader beyond the moment into a gravity-free atmosphere.

"In the Air" is the poem into which Eventually resolves with an inherent sigh of relief:

    Sequence merely describesthese short lines are "breathers"tumbling into the frame like eelsOne half hangs over    swamps...