for silver see blue

This is a collection-length sequence which starts within the frame of the medieval alliterative poem Pearl (the first title of the sequence is ‘Pearl-Diving Distractions for Students of Meditation Lost in an Arbour’, and is followed by the quotation ‘Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere’); it passes through upland areas and mountains in Italy, Scotland, Iceland, and Finland; it reaches back to the ancient Minoan civilization and its ‘Linear B’ script; and it is always deeply involved with ships and sea-travel. Its points of thematic focus are equally broad, but it seems to be particularly concerned with colour. Indeed, the title of the collection as a whole refers to colour conventions, as Storhaug’s notes on p. 62 explain:

‘[...] the Minoans may have polished their silver no more than the Ancient Greeks, thus making the colour blue more probable as a ‘code’ for silver on Minoan wall paintings.’

This concern with colour is manifest in moments such as the point in ‘Engine Telegraph: Full Ahead’ when the process of navigation is briefly considered:

towers on tors
cliff-top pyramid beacons
point the pilot ‘s way
-- navigate instead
by sap green, grey or brown [...]

What is significant here is that the second half of the stanza is proposing a mode of orientation that operates through colour: colour, in short, becomes something to steer by. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that, towards the end of the sequence, the way in which colour can function as a cultural mode of representing emotion is recalled (in the phrase ‘Egyptian joy was turquoise’). Indeed, the ‘Storytime’ section makes links between language and colour whilst also echoing the English-language rendition of the Homeric colour convention of the ‘wine-dark sea’ :

the alphabet a silver net
to catch each word
sung out
of the blue
of the wine-black
throat of the sea

Storhaug’s poetic vision, then, is significantly activated by and focused in the perception, rendition, and conventions of colour. However, for silver see blue is not just concerned with colour. It is also an attempt to represent a breadth of cultural and material moments - a breadth which might suggest that this sequence is nothing less than a far-reaching attempt to render a particular vision of European culture and (occasionally) its pan-global consequences and connections. Thus, the poetic scope incorporates recent political events, such as the anti-war protests in London on 28 September 2002 ( ‘Naturopplevelse in Johannesburg & London’) and the destruction of historic artefacts in the ransacking of Baghdad’s main museum that took place in April 2003 (p. 46). Moreover, there is, in such references, a distinct political edge. In ‘Naturopplevelse in Johannesburg & London’, for example, Storhaug considers the 2002 World Summit and suggests that ‘the corporate / shadow still hurls / the world / and all her train’

Set against such recent events is a concern with what seem to be accounting procedures in ancient culture, and the clay tablets on which such accounts were maintained:

accountable tablets
how much honey
tall ships / stories
scratched on clay
( ‘Directions for This Morning’ )

Elsewhere in the sequence, Minoan ‘Linear B’ script is considered, particularly the characters that make up the words for ‘honey’ and what the text calls the ‘accountable man of honey’. Alongside this, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the medieval alliterative Pearl are all woven into the texture — specifically, responses to Chaucerean ideas about love (‘Knossos, Chaucer and You’), Shakespeare’s Pericles story, and the pearl which slips away into the grass. Furthermore, Storhaug’s vision is very much rooted in the European material world. Thus, the excellent ‘Oxygen: First Ascent’, brings the reader ‘face against rock face’, while two pages later (p. 13) the differing heights of various European mountains and fells are considered (culminating in a fine moment of concrete poetics, in which the variousness of the heights involved is depicted). Indeed, ‘Oxygen: First Ascent’ works hard to provide both close-up detail of the physical environment ( ‘wet smell of granite’ ) and a broad perspective on landscape changes ( ‘see from lowland / how it starts to be [...] // "mountain"’), thus suggesting a significant activation of the ‘environmental unconscious’ that Lawrence Buell has proposed. In other words, by including both small and large-scale environmental observation, this particular moment of for silver see blue constitutes a significant attempt to throw off what Buell calls that ‘limiting condition of predictable, chronic perceptual underactivation [...] of all that is to be noticed and expressed’ (Writing for an Endangered World, p. 22).

Overall, then, the Europe of Storhaug’s construction in for silver see blue is a place that is crucially interconnected (typically by sea-travel); it is pan-globally involved (and not necessarily to positive effect); it is broadly an environment of mountains and sea; it is a plural place of many languages (the sequence uses Swedish, Norwegian, French, and the Linear B script alongside English); and it can all be swept up within an erotics of colour and sound (as both ‘Venus in Transit’ and ‘Diesel Recap’ make clear, a ship’s engines make music). Crucially, it is also a historically interrelated space — a culture in which, as ‘Knossos, Chaucer and You’ makes clear, the writings of a medieval English poet may help form an appropriate response, at the start of the third millennium AD, to a three thousand year-old fresco fragment from Knossos.

However, all this is merely scratching the surface: as I indicated earlier, this is a sequence of great depth and breadth and, as such, it simply escapes the small gestures of an initial review. For it to be appreciated more fully, I hope that for silver see blue receives the considerable readerly attention that it emphatically deserves.

© Matthew Jarvis 2003
University of Wales, Aberystwyth