Violin [A Poem by Sheila Black]

You must use the body - its curves,

its hollows, the spring of the sound, which

brings back what is absent, what has

been and is now gone, fading. Cat-gut,

fret, the busy machinery of longing,

which takes its strength from the

presence of absence, the body's darkness,

the wood carved out, thinned and

made to flex. There is a pain at the

source of it - so easily broken, this tree

without a heart, the sap dried to amber

patina. Only in the sound can you

hear it move, the veins in the blood of

the body that is no more. The bow pulled

along the taut strings, a pitch that

is all but unbearable.

A violin does not itself 'move', but is moved by the player, and it also 'moves' those who listen to it. The poem plays implicitly on several connotations of movement - "Only in the sound can you hear it move"- and makes us indirectly aware of the parallel between playing an instrument and making a poem. There is a craftsman-like feel to the language - "Cat-gut,/ fret, the busy machinery of longing" - and a love of the violin as a physical body, with its "curves" and "hollows". The poet has very exactly caught the feel of mellowed wood - "carved out, thinned and made to flex". Some of the line-endings are a little weak: it is stronger to end on distinctive nouns and adjectives such as "curves", "longing" and "amber" than on conjunctions. Otherwise I like everything here, except "the presence of absence", where the violin as a physical object gets lost in abstract nouns. "A poem should not mean/ But be" said Archibald MacLeish; and for the most part 'Violin' follows that prescription exactly

Review by Lucy Newlyn

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