There are two poems with this title. One ends the first section of the poems and the other ends the last section. Pentimenti means regrets. In art terms, they’re the things the artist draws and then thinks better of and so covers up and they are what are revealed by raking light. The poems are lonely, desperate and horrible (in a good way). The first poem seems to me to be about a past relationship that is now regretted, lost but not forgotten, covered over but not invisible. As well as stuff about art, we have a lot about communications and words to do with telephony.

The poem starts with the speaker being like a painting, or like a hidden part of a painting, “behind flat glass”. Reading these poems in sequence, you really get a good sense of the themes crossing between them. So the word “glance” obviously picks up on the first poem and all the connotations that word built up there. The flat glass might make us think of Jeremy Bentham in Argus Panoptes.

“Facture” means the artist’s handling of paint. I really like the stuff about “gummy wooze”, that the speaker or the relationship or the memory is stuck and hidden in this yucky goo that is the paint. Again, this develops all the paint stuff from Glanced and Albada. I get a picture of a tiny Eric stuck in a painting, thrashing about as it dries around and over him, trying to get us to notice him.

“Thrum” – this can mean a sound (hum) or a fringe of a loom. So maybe the canvas.

“Starkly” – this word means completely but often makes us think of “stark naked”. Also, etymologically it means “unyielding”, so it fits with something that won’t go away.

“underdrawn” – sketched lines that the artist paints over but also suggests “underwear” and “drawers”.

The second section on the next page moves to lots of words to do with communication and telephony. I won’t list them all but you’ve got obviously “dials” “hooks” “exchange”. The word “ringdown” in section 4 is also a technical telephony word. The poem is increasingly about the difficulties of communication. Do you think that the speaker is the regretted lover of the “you”, who cannot be forgotten but also cannot be reached? Or is it that the relationship itself is the regret with its failed communication? The increasing repetitions and puns (“wrung out rung” and “bad bad”) are all part of the struggle to communicate, to make oneself understood.

“Starkstruck” – This is a nice combo that makes me think as well of naked / unyielding and glanced by Cupid’s arrow, but also starstruck and stuck. It’s lucky I double checked this because I was about to say that Romeo and Juliet are starstruck, but of course they’re star-crossed. Google suggests that Eric is alluding to the Disney film about an obsessive fan meeting her celebrity idol. In that film they meet because he accidentally knocks her out – she is literally star struck! See also Game of Thrones.

“Crambo” – a game in which a player gives a word or a line of verse to which other players must find a rhyme. Can’t believe I haven’t played it.

I think in Section Three we’re hearing about breakup sex. Or maybe it’s a memory of shags. Or both. I like “that mattered” – meaning both bodies that are matter / things or that matter (are important). And there’s a similar double meaning of “raw” – uncooked flesh and sore / still fresh.

“cinch” – both means something easy or certain but also possible a belt or girdle. So the beloved steps out of it.

“cool-blue booty” – booty call. Blue because they’re sad? Maybe cold ha ha. They’ll be chilly if they’ve been starkers since section 1.

“tenderhooks” – a favourite pedant point that it’s actually tenterhooks. So Eric is playing on the love hurts kind of oxymoron at the same time as drawing attention to difficulties and confusion of language and communication.

“peaky” – sickly or pointed. Would you say that “peak” is an auto-antonym like “cleave”? It’s either something hitting the top or heading to the bottom. Another example of tricksy language.

“tentation” – this is another of Eric’s favourite “ten-“ words. So it looks like it has the root of stretching out or touching but it also means “temptation”.

Moving straight on to the second Pentimenti. Look at the clever thing he’s done! So he’s got the first poem but with crossings-outs and extra things in fainter fonts. So it’s like the poem itself has had a raking light cast over it and we can see the pentimenti of pentimenti. You sort of get a sense of different voices intruding. Or the poet asking himself what he’s doing? I’m particularly struck by “Is this unclear enough?” Like – just in case we weren’t sure that Eric was trying purposefully to make it hard enough for the reader to understand. Perhaps also we get a sense that the poem is about something very personal and secret (hidden things that he regrets) and as a poet he is trying to disguise what he’s saying so that his secrets aren’t revealed. We also have crossed phone lines (“your number, caller, please”).

“O PBX” looks to me like he’s addressing his beloved’s initials. But it actually stands for Private Branch Exchange. Another telephony term but the word “private” seems fitting.

At the bottom of page 122 there seems to be a different speaker’s voice that rather than wanting things to be “unclear”, wishes for “simple truths”. In this verse the repeated “home from home” I think is drawing attention to how the same word means different things. Unlike Brexit which just means one thing. “rote rives” means I think repetition (rote learning) tears apart. So the repeating of words somehow removes their meaning from them. “rive” sounds like it is the root of the word “derives” in the line before. So Eric is spelling out the derivation of the word derives. I think, however, that actually they have two different etymology – rive comes from Old Norse and derive comes from “rivus” which is Latin for river. So even here the “etymologies… slip and slide”.

“with no puns intended there” of course this is again about the difficulty in saying what you mean. I don’t know if there’s a specific point about the word “plastic” having a lot of different and changing meanings.

Notice how the “tender/tenterhook” pun is visible now.

Section 9. Right! Now you need to know about Arshile Gorky. The poem stops being a rewrite of the first pentamenti and we move into a new story. Arshile Gorky is a painter who survived the Armenian Genocide but whose mum died of starvation giving him her food rations. She died in his arms in 1919 when he was about 15. He moved to America and took this fake name pretending to be a Georgian nobleman. Arshile is apparently a version of Achilles so he’s pretending to be a great warrior. And he actually told some people that he was a relative of Maxim Gorky the writer. This is to hide his origins. With a nice extra detail, Gorky means “bitter”. In the 1920s he found a photo of him and his mum in his dad’s jacket. Gorky paints this picture. Eric told me that he repainted it every year and moved his mum further away from him in each version. I can’t see this detail on the internet but you can see anyway that in the painting the two are further apart than in the photo. And raking light of the portrait reveals that the two figures were originally painted closer together. He hanged himself in Connecticut in 1936.

Notice the fake footnotes which imply knowledge you need but don’t have. Lucky you’ve got me!

“Every tree was hung” – yup.

“Momento mori” – great. The mom merges with the memento.

“You won’t stop sliding” – the image of the mum gradually but unstoppably moving away from her son.

“Attenuated” means made thinner (same root (ten-) as stretch out words such as “tensive”.

“Hung up in Connecticut”. I think this is so clever. “hung up” both means hanged himself but also “hung up” in the sense of obsessed with. And of course “hung up” brings back the telephony language. That death equates to the end of communication. And the font darkness of the “I” in Connecticut makes the word look like “Connect I cut”. As in, he cut the connection. They were connecting but his suicide cut them off. And that is a just a lovely bit of serendipity because he really did die in Connecticut. Oh, now I feel a bit ghoulish taking delight in this bit.

 

Taken together these poems are dark and nasty and what a bleak ending! I think it’s clever that the poems suggest we should be terrified that things are never fully erased or forgotten. Yet at the same time we should be terrified that things are never clear or stay still. Maybe a provocative question I would ask is whether we are meant to find an equivalence between the story of Gorky with its suicide, genocide, starvation horror and the story of a messy breakup that isn’t properly forgotten. Perhaps even in that point is a characterisation of the speaker as one stuck in a solipsistic personal torment.

According to Greek Myth, Zeus fell in love with Io and raped her. And then “to protect her” from his jealous wife, Hera, he turns her into a cow. A beautiful cow. Hera suspected the trick and asked Zeus to give her the cow as a present. And then set Argus a giant with a hundred eyes to guard her. Panoptes means “all-seeing”. So with 100 eyes, he could close a few of them to sleep, but always have some open. Zeus sent Hermes to lull all of Argus’s asleep which he did and then killed him with a stone. Hera took Argus’s eyes and put them on her special bird: the peacock. After this, Io was free, but Hera sent a gadfly to torment her, and she had to wander the earth with a gadfly bothering her. In this poem, the speaker is Io but she seems to be in love with Argus and upset when Hermes kills him. A sort of mythological Stockholm Syndrome. Eric also seems to conflate Hermes with the gadfly.

Jeremy Bentham is another figure in this poem. Bentham is a philosopher who came up with the idea of a panopticon, a prison that was designed so that the prisoners were constantly observed. This idea was taken up by modern thinkers like Foucault. Bentham’s dead body is “preserved” and on display in UCL (the university where Eric works). His skeleton is stuffed with straw but his head is a wax model.

I think we can see how this poem follows on nicely from “Divided-Back”. This is a poem about a relationship being looked on by another. Whether Argus or Mercury is the intervener.

In all honesty, I don’t feel like I’ve got a firm grip on this poem and how the Bentham stuff links to the Argus stuff (beyond the idea of the panopticon). I’m also not really sure what the change to make Io in love with Argus does. I feel about this poem that there are maybe some secret things in it as appropriate for a poem about being guarded and trying to keep secrets.

On the first page the speaker is excited about their imprisonment. The “rod” and “cone” of course are cells in the eye. With the words “enthralled” and “captivated”, there’s a play on being excited and being imprisoned. Prisons have “wings” and “gyms” but also they suggest frolicking and nudity (gym comes from the Greek for naked).

“laylock, lilaz, nilak” are words that lilac is directed from. And lilacs are “little violent rhomboids”. There’s a flower reference coming but I’m not sure why lilacs specifically are relevant.

“Uptorn olive tree”. Here’s another phrase that is hard to piece out. If you type it into google, you get two links: this poem and an anonymous poem in the style of Milton called “Il Gaudioso”. It’s the kind of thing Eric might know about so I feel like this might be a purposeful allusion. That poem is about a happy man (see the title) and he tells a story about an explorer called Carlos in love with a lady called Zelia and there’s a storm and he thinks she’s dead, but then he sees her in an “uptorn olive tree”.

“Forward to the future…” This took me a while, but I think I’ve got at least part of this reference. Jeremy Bentham recalls in his memoirs aged 80 that a young woman he was in love with “presented him with a flower in the green lane” and he has thought of it ever since and thinks regretfully of her. And his memory of this past time is so painful that he said “Do not let me go back to the past”.

M Cells P Cells K Cells Saccadic. More eye stuff. Those are types of cells in the eye (note the word brings a nice eye / prison link) and saccades are rapid eye movements we’re all making.

“Mangin mirrors” – type of lens used in search lights.

“Leigh lights” – searchlight used by British navy in WW2 against submarines.

In this section the speaker seems to be really enjoying themselves in the light, in section four particularly, there’s some sexy time under a light bulb which I think I don’t need to adumbrate.

“All eyes no sight”. This is a line used in Troilus and Cressida about Ajax. He is a “purblind Argus, all eyes no sight”.

“So slender & white, so solide & strong”. What is this? What is this? It really looks like a quote, doesn’t it? If you type “so slender & white” into google, you get this poem and a description of the stalagmites of the caves of Campanet in Majorca. If you type “solide and strong” into google you do get a description of an oracular tree of the Sun by Marco Polo. Which is pretty cool. But I don’t really see what the relevance is. Maybe it’s like when tabloids have things in quote marks in their headlines and you think it means they’re quoting someone but actually it means “we just made this up”.

“Wax-faced, hay-stuffed” – this is where the Bentham bit comes in. The bit about chess and foreplay is from a description of him as a youth visiting his patron’s house and “falling unsuccessfully in love with all the ladies in the house whom he courted with clumsy jocularity, while playing chess with them or teaching them the harpsichord”.

“doing the gaoler” – this means, right, shagging Argus, right?

Section 6 brings in Hermes. Cattle-rustlers refers to a myth where he steals some cows. Hermes is known as the god of the crossroads, and quicksilver is another word for the element with Hermes’ Roman name, Mercury. He is also known as “bringer of luck” and “guide and guardian”.

“Wings buzzing gadding from his arras” – Eric seems to conflate Hermes with the gadfly in the myth. They were on different sides but in his new version where Io and Argus are lovers, they are both the enemy. There’s also a Hamlet reference with Polonius being the annoying busybody spying on Hamlet and Gertrude from behind the arras (curtains).

“Resigned, resealed and undelivered.” Wonder.

Buss buss – buss is archaic for kiss. The interrupting buzzing becomes the secret kissing.

Sessho-seki – this is a Japanese myth, a killing stone that kills anyone who comes into contact with it. In Ovid’s version, I think Mercury uses a sword, but in earlier versions Hermes kills him with a stone, David and Goliath style.

As Eric’s excellent epigraph explains, this is the light that is shone over a painting to reveal earlier attempts.  So the poem makes this into a metaphor for hidden secrets and memories resurfacing.

Pentimental – pentimento is the visible trace of an earlier painting beneath the paint on a canvas. It originates from the same root as repentance – e.g. it’s something the artist did and then regretted so changed or covered over. Apparently the most famous example is from a Da Vinci painting of Christ where he changed his mind about which way Jesus’ finger shoudl

Surge-lines – paintbrush dragged over the surface.

Underdrawn in emergency – playing on the root of the word to suggest emerge, something that is submerged appearing. Etymology is important in this poem because it reveals earlier, now hidden, meanings of words a bit like the light reveals earlier hidden meanings of paintings.

Yoked – bound up, but perhaps playing on the homonym “yolk” which is used in paint.

Slaked lime – when mixed with chalk this becomes whitewash – itself a metaphor for things being covered up.

me pinxit – latin for: he painted me. This is how artists sometimes put their signature on things. e.g. me pinxit Eric. (Eric painted me).

Body-colour – opaque pigment used in painting.

Rippling up from the patio – Eric shifts from alluding to renaissance painting to alluding to Brookside. The dead body is under the patio!

Tenting – pierce through / bulge. Eric looked shocked when I suggested this was also a word for how an erect penis shows through trousers. But he can’t hide it. It is.

Facture – mix of paint.

Verdaccio – mix of black, white, yellow to make green for a fresco.

Ocra rossa – red pigment.

Prime – underpaint.

Sinopia – dark red colour.

Gravid – pregnant

Unrepentant – as in no longer a pentimento!

all clocks stop – Auden reference?

Lithopone – surface gloss

Whorl – a fingerprint – another metaphor for guilt.

Fat-and-lean – a principle in oil painting is that you paint the fat over the lean.

Ultraviolence – from Clockwork Orange. (Which itself has stuff about how you can’t shut your eyes to things – literally in Alex’s case – and is about how much you can suppress.)

Neon Josephine – Napoleon can’t ignore this request for sex because she is shining out.

Mice in the columbines – Eric says this is a reference to something in his dad’s poetry about how the etymology of columbine isn’t about doves, it’s from mice. I can’t find anything like this anywhere.

Section 7 moves to elusive memories resounding, so the lines break up a bit.

Tithonic – relating to rays of light that produce a chemical effect. Also, Tithonus is the lover of Aurora, who in Greek mythology is granted immortality but not youth. A nice reference for things never disappearing/dying.

Gilt – covered in gold, but also sounds like guilty. Lady Macbeth makes this pun when she’s off to cover the grooms with Duncan’s blood.

Eric says that this is the poem that people have told him is their favourite. You know why I think this is? It’s because it’s the poem that you have to look up the least stuff and you can get a pretty good idea of what it’s on about without knowing a load of extraneous information. I’m starting to get a sense that Eric starts off his book of poems with his most obscure ones. If I was hoping to increase  his book sales, I’d be advising him to put those ones somewhere near the back and start with this one. So I will type up a few things but you probably don’t need them. Also, if you’re wondering which poem to read first, read this one.

So it’s just patronising of me to tell you that Eurydice was Orpheus’ beloved who died and Orpheus with his beautiful music went down to the Underworld and was allowed to take her back with him so long as he didn’t look round before they got out, but he did look round so she went back to the underworld.

Euston Square is an underground station. You knew that.

“Perhaps you heard of how we left them” Orpheus leaves his fans and heads to the underworld. Notice the pronouns – who is the we?

“they cede a reweave” – Eric’s interested in the link with these words so weave and textile and text. Weaving might also bring up other Greek myths: the Fates who Orpheus is trying to overcome; Arachne who stood up to the Gods like Orpheus; Penelope caught out trying to stay faithful to her husband by reweaving her shroud.

Proserpina – Latin for Persephone – queen of the underworld, also allowed to leave the underworld annually for spring (when the wheat is “gold”)

“Requickning” – quick also means alive.

“Faintly you complain, that you were loved”. Twelfth night reference – Aguecheek reminisces that he was “adored once too”.

“string.. spandrel… riser… trim… tack” bits of stairs.

“Paternoster” – an old fashioned lift (also “our father” e.g. say your prayers!)

“spindrift” – spray blown from crests of waves by the wind.

“600 surgence” – this bit gets into some erotic memories – the electric charge of the underground.

“in the residue” – Eric looked disgusted when I suggested it was semen. Given he’s just told us about his “tough touch and urgent”, I’m sticking to my sticky reading.

“alphabet spent on your inner thing” – oh, it’s disgusting when I suggest that residue means semen but…

“static” – meaning standing still, stuck. The opposite of “ecstatic” which we get later. Also white noise from a radio. We get stuff about electronic communications. Alexander Graham Bell thought that his telephone might be used to communicate with the dead. I also think of Godard’s Orpheé where the radio communicates mysterious messages to Orpheus.

“whistling Dixie” – a song about wishing you were somewhere else and back in the past.

“clinker stair” type of stair.

“mine eyes’ dazzle”  What Ferdinand says after looking at the dead body of his sister in the Duchess of Malfi.

“preposterous” – etymologically means the before coming after.

“portland stair” Eric says that Euston Square station was the first underground station to use this type of stone for its stairs.

It is a common cry among my GCSE students that they wish they could just ask the poet what the hell they meant. I always roll my eyes at this and tell them that it doesn’t matter, that it wouldn’t help, that their own interpretation is the most important thing. Well obviously that’s a load of nonsense. And so I come to this entry fully armed from a night in the pub with Langley himself. The author is dead? Long live the author!

There are two main keys to this poem. One is the Edgar Allen Poe short story the Purloined Letter. In that story a detective, Dupin, finds a stolen letter (containing compromising information about a lady). The police search everywhere including sticking needles into the cushions of the man’s house. Dupin finds it “hidden in plain sight” on a card rack in the room. Dupin went in covering his eyes in green spectacles pretending he had weak eyes. He then comes back the next day to retrieve a snuff box he had purposefully left behind. He arranges for someone to fire a gun on the street outside. The robber is distracted and Dupin retrieves the letter.

There’s an interesting extra detail which is that Dupin swaps the letter for a duplicate he has written. This ties up nicely with the set of poems “Of those from the ships”.

The second key to the poem is that Divided-Back is a term for a postcard and this poem is, and I know you’ll all be very excited to hear this, Eric’s most Derrida-influenced poem. Having no intention of ever reading a word Derrida has written, I’m just going to make some stuff up about what I think Derrida might have said. And my understanding is that this is very much in keeping with Derrida’s ideas. (Ha ha, just a little post-structuralist joke). Derrida writes a book called “La carte-postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà”. You can never have a private language because language itself implies a third party. Words get their meaning from how others use them. The postcard is symbol for the lack of privacy. There’s also some stuff about how it’s really the reader who writes the postcard. In this book, he writes an analysis of the Poe short story (The Purloined Letter) critiquing Lacan’s reading of the story. Last night in the pub I wrote down: “Lacan you never arrive at the other. Derrida: the letter has always already arrived.” So that clears that up!

Eric was saying that the first three poems are about the couple. In the next three, there’s a third party involved.

Here’s a very simplified summary of the four sections: 1, Eric writes a postcard where he tries to genuinely say a loving message. 2, things and people get in the way of us understanding the meaning. 3, the loved one sees through all this and “gets” the postcard. 4, unbothered by intermediaries, Eric declares his love.

Ok. Into the poem:

You’ll notice the layout of the poem apes the way the back of a postcard is divided into two. We might perhaps also think of the separation of the couple that the postcard is hoping to bridge.

“I shall be under the clock”. The titles of the sections comes from a Victorian manual on how to write postcards.

“We meet in white frame”. In a postcard you’re constrained, restrained, can’t think (write) outside the box.

“Block out” – either layout print in blocks or cover up / censor.

“Victorian lilac or green issue” types of early postcard printing.

“two pints of stout… donkey ride” – classic seaside postcard image.

“I do wish you were here” – the writer struggles for authenticity, stuck using clichés and other people’s words (Derrida), but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t “mean” it. Sometimes the truth is staring you in the face (Poe).

“held up to her light” – as if looking for invisible ink.

“no secrets” – a postman can read it.

“empty places” – description of a postcard or many other things.

“write-aways” – original name for postcard

“post-haste” – the origin of this phrase is that it “haste, post, haste” was an instruction that used to be written on letters.

“double-impress” – the letter writer who makes a carbon copy before sending it (eg Kafka). When thinking about the third person added to this couple, we might think about us, the readers. These “secret” poems or letters or cards are being written with an eye to a broader readership. Like a Shakespeare sonnet, or any published love poem, they’re not really being written to be read by a single private loved one, are they? And in that way they’re like postcards.

“drop-sink… fugitive ink” – technical printing terms.

“Impossible synchronicities” – you don’t write a postcard and have someone read it at the same time.

“in plain view… sticks the wall” – Now we’re into the Poe allusions.

“passes show… overseer… orisons” – we also get some Hamlet allusions. Although Hamlet is, according to Ophelia, “the observed of all observers”, he still says he has stuff that isn’t in plain sight (“passes show”). It is Polonius who reads through Hamlet’s love letters to Ophelia. He is the third observing party. But does the “overseer” have a good look or overlook the crucial detail?

“dead letter” – unclaimed or undelivered piece of mail.

“ghosts that spook the posts” – Ghosts makes us think of Hamlet. His father’s ghost is a message for him to read. But also Kafka described his love letters as ghosts.

“tea leaves… apple peel” – this is the idea again that unlike the straightforward message of “wish you were here” which means what it says, these are messages that people have to interpret in complex mystical ways.

“turn and turn again” this is a Iago reference. Again a messenger that you cannot trust.

“grus aus” – a misrendering of “greetings from” in German. A “gruss aus postcard” is a type of old postcard.

“foxed” – as well as meaning tricked, this describes a corner of a piece of paper that’s turned up.

“that would scan” – Hamlet says this when considering killing Claudius while he’s praying. It sounds OK but it isn’t enough.

“each cushion is needled” – now we’re back with Poe.

“you sit behind green glasses” – after the incompetent police officers, the third party, the loved one comes in who sees what is in plain sight.

“gently take what they mistake” – Theseus says this about Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream. So although Eric’s writing is all bumbling and full of mistakes, a wise and noble reader is able to see what he means. (Wordsworth speaks of “gentle reader”).

“I didn’t hide it, so you couldn’t find it”  – the Poe character escapes detection at first precisely because he didn’t hide the letter.

“I didn’t hide it so you couldn’t find it” – I hid it so you could find it!

“Come round for your snuffbox” etc – this is what Dupin does in the Poe story.

“Poins… Turpin”. Poins is a character in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 who gives misleading messages. Turpin is of course the highwayman who got in the way of the post.

“I love you” x3 – hoping for authenticity from the ultimate cliché?

“If looking liking moves” this is what Juliet says when her mum tells her that she should like Paris at the party. There’s a suggestion that the reader has to want to like what they read. Eric has written his declaration of love, the loved one has to want to read it. Or it could just mean, sometimes what you see is what you get / love. This scene is concerned with surface reading – Lady Capulet tells Juliet to “read the volume of young Paris’ face”. Of course Juliet doesn’t fall in love with Paris, but she does fall in love at first sight at the party. So looking does liking move. It’s interesting that the poem ends on a conditional clause. I guess maybe it’s open to the reader’s interpretation and my Year 10 students were wrong after all.

Those of us who went to Eric’s book launch have a head start on this one. Because here he told us that this was written for his girlfriend and the title refers to walnut gambling in China. Identical walnuts (or as similar as possible) are very valuable. They are used, I think, for playing with in your hand to relax you like those balls. I just typed in “relaxing hand balls” into google and apparently those metal ones are Chinese and they’re actually called “baotang balls”. So the more similar the two walnuts are, the more valuable. There is a practice of paying a set price before the walnuts’ green coverings are removed as a kind of gambling on whether you’ll get a matching pair which would be worth more than you’ve paid. We can see that there’s a nice metaphor for dating or starting to go out with someone and taking a chance on whether you’ll fit together. It’s interesting that it comes straight after “Tact” which is kind of about how you shouldn’t be too similar.

Eric runs through an amazing array of metaphors linked to this. So we have sciencey/atomic, DIY, bomb-disposal, safe-cracking, bird-pecking, gambling, computer-language, biological/medical sort of, but not strictly, section by section.

“When I’m all hulled up” – Eric draws out a nice metaphor for the single man being confined in his walnut or way of life or bachelor pad and love makes its way in.

“Husky” – having an outer shell, or having a sexy voice. I hope Anne-Laure doesn’t mind it if I suggest that this may refer to her sexy French voice.

“the heartnut aches” – heart nut is the seed of a Japanese walnut. Also an allusion to the opening of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale “My heart aches”.

“You ground around it lick” – In China, apparently, experts have a better chance of spotting identical pairs. However, I saw nothing about them licking them. I’ve been quite taken aback by how surprised everyone seems to be about my sexual readings of the first two poems. So I’m just going to leave you with the image of the buyer putting their lips around the two walnuts. And say nothing more.

“Give lip… flushed over… quite tight”. Nothing more to say. Nothing at all.

“Fetch Felix… Radical Squad, Trojans.. long walk” – This is about bomb disposal. The first bomb squad (in New York in the earlier 20th Century dealing with mafia since you ask) were called the Radical Squad. Felix means lucky in Latin and is the name of the unofficial mascot of bomb disposal. Trojan is a mine-clearing vehicle. And the long walk is a phrase used about bomb disposal. And we see this metaphor in the verse with “hair-triggers… trip-wire”.

“With ink from crushed walnuts” this is what Da Vinci used in his notebooks.

“a foetus in utero” – Da Vinci did draw one of these. But also in keeping with the walnut image.

“If there is no love, what then?” a quote from Da Vinci in prison (enclosed) for sodomy.

“Ectoderm” – outer skin.

“brain-pan” – skull.

“Passerine” an order of birds. Passer is the latin for sparrow. This section moves more to the image of a bird pecking at a nut.

“A man’s house is his castle and each man’s home, his safest refuge”. This is a quote from Edward Coke, an Elizabethan Lawyer, so right up Eric’s street. I was wondering where the second bit came from, but that’s the whole quote. I think now we move into the idea of your girlfriend moving in with you. If you let someone into your house, they’re going to change things.

T5 to T8 – I’m not sure this can be right, but this seems to refer to a type of lighting strength. Certainly I still have energy efficient lightbulbs in my flat that date back to when I had a more-ecologically minded boyfriend move in with me. So, you know, this bit really spoke to me.

“Pericardium” membrane enclosing the heart.

“Epicardium” – membrane which forms the innermost layer of the pericardium.

“Myocardium” – muscular tissue of heart.

“Endocardium” membrane which lines the chambers of the heart.

“Ventricle” – cavity of the heart. (I think we get what kind of stuff is going on in this section).

“seventy-two times per minute” – heart beat? But why 21,000? STOP PRESS. I cheated and asked Eric. It’s the number of nerve receptors in the human epiderm (he thinks)?

Vena Cava – the name of the vein that runs from the heart.

Chordae – tendons in your heart, known as the “Heartstrings”. I’d never really thought that would be an actual thing that was your heartstring. Huh.

“O, O, O” – what is this? I can only think of the Wasteland (O O O O that Shakespeherian rag).

“Peterman” – slang for safe cracker.  We get a heist theme in this section like Eric’s walnut is a safe waiting to be cracked.

“Bertha’s Gift and Home Furnishings”. The Hole in the Wall gang were caught breaking into here, it’s a store in Las Vegas, in 1981. They were called the Hole in the Wall gang because… yup.

“Tete de Femme” – Picasso painting stolen from San Francisco Art Gallery in 1965.

“Bourne-shell” – this bit is all about computing. These are different “shells” which are how you access your operating system on your computer. “Korn-shell” is a development of the “Bourne-shell”. And C-shell and Bash are the same kind of thing.

“-sh” is the name of an executable file for Bourne shell (or something like that).

| – this punctuation (?) is used in computing language.

“Heartstone” – is this something to do with Dungeons and Dragons and the kind of person who’s into computers?

“shortcut” – computing.

“Platforms” – more internet speak.

“relational” – a relational operator is a programming language.

“Give me that man and I will wear him at heart’s core in my heart of heart”. – Hamlet says this. It misses out the phrase “that’s not passion’s slave” – so Eric shifts the meaning to make it romantic.

“hus” – this is icelandic for house. (It’s also hungarian for meat!)

“the hot crowd of thermal swarmed electron of eased atomic orbital in gradient still and radiating” – I asked a wise and lovely Science teacher at my school about this and he replied: “It doesn’t seem to mean a specific thing. If it’s meant to be metaphorical” LOL, let’s hope so, “electrons move quicker when heated and can jump up an orbital (they orbit atoms like planets). When they cool, they slide back down (an energy gradient), radiating light energy. Each atom releases a specific colour of light, like an optical fingerprint. Not sure if that metaphor works with my explanation, but that’s the closest thing it could be. Or he’s just bunged some atom based words together.” <crying with laughter emoji>

“Au coeur du corps” – to the heart of the body. Did I mention that Eric’s girlfriend is French?

“red electric” – we’ve done some DIY and got down to the live wire.

“Lin Changzhu” is a walnut farmer with whom there is an interview in some online paper about the exact thing of walnut betting. He makes 2 million yuan a year from his walnuts.

“betting on skin” this is how the thing where buyers pay a fixed price before the green outer covering is removed. It feels to me like there’s a tension here between the fact that the buyers aren’t interested in the actual kernel of the walnut but the shell despite the fact that a lot of this poem is about drilling into the inner part.

“Cupule” – cup shaped.

“English walnut or nux Gallica” – Eric mentioned this at the launch. He’s English, his girlfriend is French. English walnut is a type of walnut. Nux Gallica is Latin for walnut. Gallica means from Gaul (France).

“Mopan-mopan” I wish I could nail this exactly. mopan walnut is I think a type of walnut you use for massage; mopan is the chinese for disc; mopan-mopang are grinding stones found in prehistoric China used for grinding nuts.

“dog-throw” – there are a number of references to the Ancient Roman knucklebone betting game. The dog was the lowest number on the knucklebone. “Vulture” was the lowest roll of all the bones, and the “Venus throw” (appropriately for the Goddess of Love in a love poem) was the highest roll.

“ratscrew” – Egyptian ratscrew is the name of card game like snap.

“slapjack” – I can’t remember what we used call this, but I played it loads, it’s like snap but there’s that thing where you race to slap the pile. Anyway, once again trying to get by luck a match. (Although incidentally if you wanted to score high in knucklebones, apparently, you wanted the bones to all be different, not matching. I’m not sure if we’re meant to worry about that).

“government official’s hat, a chicken’s heart, a lantern” – these are, delightfully, names the Chinese give to different shapes of walnuts.

“front-run vigorish” I almost didn’t bother looking these up, which is kudos to Eric, because it just sounds like in a rush and kind of vigorous. But I did. And so I discovered that “front-running” is when you buy stock because you have some secret knowledge that it’s going to go up and “vigorish” is the percentage deducted from a gambler’s winnings.

“nutshell” – Has it really taken this long for our Hamlet-loving poet to use this word in a poem about nuts? And is this all he’s going to give us? Is it too obvious? Do you think Ian McEwan has ruined it for him?

“acupoint” – acupuncture point – obviously Chinese link.

“kerf” – slit made by cutting with a saw.

“swarf” – filings produced by machining.

“surfy cream curls and open out” – when Eric read this poem aloud, it sounded like it was totally filthy. And I swear I wasn’t the only one to say that. You’ll notice how restrained I’ve been typing here. But aside from the testicles, the whole thing really is about getting into someone’s vagina, right? I guess those of us who know Eric and Anne-Laure can be pleased that it seems to be a poem about Anne-Laure getting into Eric’s vagina.

“sat with a crimped copy of Homer and a lucky cricket”. This is lovely, isn’t it? Little Eric squashed in his nutshell. It feels like this is an actual allusion to something. For example, why Homer? Maybe it’s a personal allusion between him and Anne-Laure. If not, the best I can do is it made me think a bit of Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” with that sense of sudden new discovery etc.

“rolled round, palmed around” – now that someone’s got into Eric’s vagina, they seem to be giving him a good “palming around”. This goes back to the purpose of these walnuts which is to rotate them in your hand and it’s meant to be good for the “circulation”.

“I type up slow happenstance on keywater brightboarding” – This give me an image of the two of them in bed, Eric typing up his poem, but quietly and slowly so as not to wake her, and the glow of the keys being the “brightboarding” as well as a little sense of sailing away, stretching out, freed from the shell.

After the first two, this seems much much more straightforward. Tact means skill or sensitivity but from its Latin origin means touched or sense of touch.

The epigraph is from Stephen Gosson “The School of Abuse” written in 1579. He is an anti-theatre pro-clergy guy and he’s complaining about the bodily vulnerability that comes from going to the theatre, hearing their words and it seems to work as a kind of: don’t let other people in. The subtitle is “containing a pleasant invective against poets…” This is something Eric is big into when it comes to Shakespeare: fear of infection, vulnerability, linking with others. The image of words seeping into your ear might make us think of Hamlet’s dad being poisoned through his ear or Lady Macbeth wanting to pour her spirits into Macbeth’s ear.

First Repetition. This feels like it’s something specific but I can’t place it. Is there a post-structuralist thing about whether something is repetition or whether it’s difference? Are you trying to be the same as your beloved or be different from them? Repetition might make us think of rehearsal (where you might have a repetiteur) which would link to the theatrical epigraph. The prefix “re” is important in this poem. Without the “re”, petition originally means seeking or aiming for. The speaker repeatedly seeks out the beloved.

Palm to palm. This is alluding to Romeo and Juliet. This is from their first meeting when they speak in a perfect sonnet to each other. Later we’ll get mention of Friar Lawrence and the Nurse. In R&J, intermediaries get in the way or cause problems e.g. the letter to Romeo doesn’t reach him so he thinks Juliet really is dead so he kills himself.

Contracts kiss. In R&J it’s “tender kiss”. Is this a play on “tender” having a contractual meaning e.g. put out to tender? This may seem a stretch (tendentious even?!), but Eric is really into his “ten…” words.

Intergraft: gardening: unite by grating, inserting a graft into another tree.

Haptic: sense of touch.

Unmediated: nothing in the middle. This is really the same word as “immediately” which is repeated and repeated in this verse.

There’s a lot about the same thing “tact to tact… hap to hap”.

“Lap” – groin, overtake, lick. What would Eric do if he could “lap himself”? We can only wonder. You can see how there’s a move from loving another to loving the same as you (yourself?)

“You and I could crush out and”. Taking to the syntactical level the desire to get rid of anything in-between speaker and beloved.

Parcel force: ha ha. Now we’re taking further the desire for nothing to get in the way. “riposte” is a fencing term and means reply. But sounds like it means “post again”.

Seriously, get a load of the linguistic fireworks in the second half of the “third repetition”. Read it as it is. Then read it putting the “re-prefix” in front of every word that isn’t “to” or “it”. I just think this bit is bloody clever. Without the “re”, it’s like he’s not even repeating his lover, he is his lover.

Fourth Repetition: all synonyms for touch. He’s just repeatedly touching.

Fifth repetition. Now we get a load of words that mean the space between.

“Without the gap, perhaps we can’t get intimate”. Intimate sounds like it’s linked to touching and in, but actually derives from intimus which means inmost.

“Stare” I suspect this isn’t intentional but this is the Latin for “to stand”. So etymologically it’s nice that Eric stands back in order to stare.

“Intently” – stretching towards – note the “ten” stem.

“To you as you”. The person he’s addressing gets their identity back.

I think Eric might hate me for saying this, but is this the poetic version of the idea that it’s important that you and your partner have your own separate interests? It seems like a very heterosexual poem in the truest sense of loving difference. Is Eric reacting to Shakespeare’s Sonnets which perhaps are more homosexual (Let not the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds…) Whatever, I really think the removing “re” trick in the Third Repetition is worth the price of admission alone.

To understand this poem I think you need to know two things.

Firstly Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco was the father of Pablo Picasso. He was himself an artist and taught art. He painted lots of pictures of pigeons. So much that he was known as “El palomero” (the pigeon fancier). Legend has it that he saw young Picasso drawing some pigeons and they were so much better than anything he ever did that he gave Pablo all his painting materials and never painted again.

Eric’s dad, the poet R F Langley, (I was going to say famous, but maybe admired is the better word), wrote a poem called Jack’s Pigeon. In that poem, a coffee bowl breaks and a pigeon “thuds to the gutter in convulsions”. Jack, who is, I’m bit nervous of defining what Jack is, I think he might be a kind of alter ego for R F, and maybe like a Jack the Lad or man of mischief. Jack sees the probably dead pigeon and checks his “scratchcard”. There are lots of Hamlet references in the poem. I’m thinking there’s a link to the line about “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. Is God keeping an eye on even the smallest things?

Eric must have been pretty pleased with himself when he made this connection. He’s starting out as a poet, under his father’s shadow. His father wrote a poem about a pigeon. Picasso’s father painted pigeons until Picasso made a better version. Will Eric be Pablo to his father’s Don Jose? I think also, Don Jose’s pigeons look rather lovely. Eric seems to have specifically in mind the one that google throws up which is five pigeons on a pink background. You won’t be surprised that in the end, Eric/Pablo sees that his father’s stuff was better than his.

The Hamlet allusions also work brilliantly with this theme because of course Hamlet is all about a son and the ghost of his father.

Albada means a morning love song in Spanish. I didn’t know the word. But I do recognise Aubade, the French version. Eric says he’s riffing on a number of aubades / albadas in this poem but I can’t help you there. The only Aubade I know in any detail is the Philip Larkin poem. I wonder if there may be an allusion in the description of the blurry outlines in section 2, that become sharply defined in the last section, which remind me a bit of Larkin seeing the blurry outlines in his bedroom becoming sharper at the end. If so, there’s a hint about mortality and fears of death which would fit. Wikipedia tells me that Albada Finder is something in optics, which seems a nice link to themes of the collection.

Orpiment, masticot, Oker de Luce, lac of carmine are all painting materials. Don Jose in the morning is planning some painting.

“Rayleigh… Mei” this is something to do with scientific theories of how light scatters. Like me, you’ll presumably be cringing at the obvious error that the scientist Eric meant is Mie.

“Scumbles” – give a soft effect

“Envious” foreshadows how he’s going to feel about his son.

“civil” – this word sticks out to me. Does it mean polite, ordinary, from the city?

“Dimly” – keeping to the light.

“tender… extension” – Eric is obsessed with words with this root. It’s all to do with reaching out, connecting with another, making yourself vulnerable.

I think we can see that the dawn of the new day is mirroring the coming talent of his son.

“Maria” – is the name of Jose’s wife and Picasso’s mum.

“Jill” – this is the first inkling, I think, that the poem is alluding to Jack’s pigeon. Jill is Jack’s lady (of course).

“Croodling” isn’t this a great word! It means cooing.

“El Palomero” – the pigeon fancier. Apparently Spanish doesn’t have a different word for pigeon or dove. But Jose paints pigeons. However, Picasso as well as drawing pigeons has a famous painting much later in life of a dove of peace. And he called his daughter La Paloma which people seem to translate as “The Dove”. You can imagine she might have preferred it that way. I feel like there’s a lot going on with the idea that the workaday pigeon of the father becomes transformed into the symbolic, beautiful dove of the son.

“Spink” – brilliantly this word means “the cry of a finch”. I wonder how many other birds have a word just for their cry. Did Eric have a moment of serendipitous excitement when he found out it rhymed (hell, contained!) pink? Or did he know this all along?

Senna bush – my botany and the internet lets me down on the connotations of a senna bush, but there is one in “Jack’s Pigeon” by Langley senior, so we’re starting to get more references to that.

“Booby” – idiot, breasts, type of bird. (Also, tit!)

“Jug jug” is the noise a nightingale makes. Also, means breasts! Even I recognise this as a line in the Wasteland. But I’m not sure if it helps specifically to think of that poem, or just that both Eric and Eliot are referring to an earlier tradition of writing about nightingales going jug jug. Apparently it was big in the renaissance.

“full-throated.. god! o god!… shoot.. plum” Something something sex. Perhaps also a little Keats nod. In “Ode to a Nightingale” the bird sings with “full-throated ease”.

“Pomegranate tree” – this introduces, I think, a reference to the Song of Solomon. There’s something about Solomon and pomegranates. “My love, my dove, my fair…” is a quote from that.

“Ignition spark… apples’ pips”. Sex… babies.

“Piz piz” Apparently Picasso’s first words – short for “lapiz” – calling for a pencil. I hope you’re ready for some Freudian penis stuff. Father and son are going to be engaging in some willy waving.

“Pipion” – pigeon.
“Master at the Bellas Artes” – Jose’s job teaching art.

“Kids” childish / jokes.

“Plucks his nib” – masturbation / makes art. Who can tell the difference?

“Squab” – a young pigeon. The word is used in “Jack’s Pigeon”.

“real these really real pigeons” – it seems like we’re back to Zeuxis here. Picasso rivals Zeuxis’ achievement.

I’m not sure at what point we shift from Dad to Son. As of Section 5 we get first person not third. But this seems to be from the dad’s point of view. While I think by Section 7 we’re from the son’s. But I could be wrong.

“the shock that shook” – so this is the dad seeing his son is a better artist.

“Mummed me” – acted as me (mummer) / became my mum / shut me up.

“Barbels” – little beard hairs (on fish? – I got a bit confused by wikipedia here, do fish have beards? and I thought we were talking about pigeons). Anyway, appropriate for the developing youth.

“Crappers” – not sure about this. Is this just because pigeons do a lot of pooing?

“Jacobines” – Jacobins of course are the ruthless revolutionaries – is that the role the son takes? I’m not sure if there’s a reason it’s feminine plural. Obviously links us to Jack.

“gall-free” – I wondered if this removal of gall from the pigeons, suggested the transformation of pigeon to dove (symbolising peace)?

“cheaply” – what sound do birds make?

“blackjacked” – knocked out / gambled away / Jack is now Black.

“here come have them then” – this is when the dad gives away all his painting materials to his son.

“throbbing vanes” – “vane” is the flat part of a feather. It’s nice how the paint brush becomes like a wing – so that the young boy can take flight like the pigeons. This feels like an Icarus allusion. I’m not sure if it’s a direct quote from Ovid, but it sounds like the kind of thing you’d get in translations of Ovid. That’s another model for Father / Son relationships we’re presented with. Let’s hope Eric doesn’t get too carried away with his wings of poetry unlike his wise and crafty dad Daedalus. Also, masturbating.

“Big head” – the arrogance of Eric comparing himself to Picasso. And also, penis.

“Rachis” – stem of grass.

“Filoplume” – hair like feathers.

“Barbs” – suggesting insults / stings. Poor old dad.

“Erleben” – experience (German for having lived).

“Avitrol” a bird deterrent.

Section 6 describes favourably the early pigeon sketch by Picasso.

“Gutter” – this word crops up a couple of times. And strikingly near the end of the poem. A candle gutters meaning it goes out or is about to go out. Is Pablo a “gutter” because his dad is now “gutted”? And remember the pigeon in “Jack’s Pigeon” “thuds to the gutter”.

“This one’s for remembrance”. We’re now entering Hamlet rich territory. This line is from Ophelia. I feel like this marks the moment when the son/Eric/Pablo speaks. He’s remembering his dad. Who, like him, knew his Hamlet! (Ophelia’s the name of the pigeon who dies in “Jack’s Pigeon”).

“Old mole” is what Hamlet calls his father’s ghost.

“Sweet Lady” – “Sweet Lady Street” is where the pigeon dies in Jack’s Pigeon.

“Pau Gargallo” – sculpture friend of Picasso, art school in Barcelona.

“Wash Lane” – not sure of the relevance of this – it is a street in Birmingham sort of in the same part of Britain as where Eric grew up. But I’m probably missing something.

“Penfold” – I really really hope this is an allusion to Dangermouse’s helper. A keeper of pens, the tool the poet needs.

“where the two thousand sad souls go” – this is from Hamlet as he sees the army heading off for war – and Jack’s Pigeon has the bowl breaking like “twenty thousand souls”.

“Over-rounds” – this is something to do with gambling – and so I think is linking to Jack going to the betting shop.

“Polish day trip” – Hamlet reference – “Polack”. And in Jack’s Pigeon the coffee bowl called “Part of Poland”.

“eggshells” – Hamlet: “all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an eggshell”.

“Rosemary” – Ophelia gives this “for remembrance”.

“pyggion” – If you google this word, you get Eric’s poem and an academic book called “Bare Ruined Choirs” talking about the moat at Crowle. This seems like a cool coincidence. Shakespeare Sonnet talking about growing old. I think there’s something to do with language changing and in the next couplet we get squib instead of squab.

“An old man of Daulis”. Daulis is where Oedipus didn’t go to when he ended up killing Laius. So I think this is a reference to a key father / son rivalry. (Daulis is also where Tereus lived as in the Philomela, cutting out tongue, eating his own child, turning into a bird, Tereus, so maybe there’s a bird link too). But I think Eric is saying: I’m not killing my dad “this time”. It feels like we’ve got a long way into a poem about father/son rivalry without an Oedipus reference.

Pichon – Spanish for little pigeon

Pijon – French for pigeon.

Paloma – spanish dove / pigeon. I think again there’s something here about language changes, transitions between language like the transitions between generations.

“Haunts” – ghosts.

“How pale they glare” – Hamlet says of his dad’s ghost: “How pale he glares”.

“between the lines” – Looking for his father in his writings.

“street lamps, gas lamps” – again thinking of time passing.

“Clayton’s spirits” – I’ve come up a bit of a blank on what this means. Wikipedia has something about Clayton’s being Australian for fake.

Madeleine – think of Proust having his memory brought back.

“Reverbere” – French for streetlight. But also the idea of the memory reverberating.

“How strong is stillness?” – this quotes from RF Langley’s journal entry of April 1977. He talks about going to a church and the children playing, naming Ruth, Eric’s older sister. The line before is “Gestures of children must stay.”

“Conning” deceive or study carefully.

“Hundred good hellos” – this is a phrase from RF Langley’s poem “Il Redentore” which is a church Venice. I got excited by the thought that it sounds like the returner / reviens. But actually it’s Italian for Redeemer. But something about giving back, right? Giving back the paint brushes?

“Frame that”. Guilt. Painting. Setting.

“Attention… tentif” more of the ten…

“Complex feet” – is this a reference to Oedipus whose name means swollen foot? And has his own complex.

Towlines – a nautical rope.

“Pigeon-toed, dove-tailed”. This is clever, isn’t it!

“Da!” – dad, ta da! and maybe also Russian for Yes!

“Fetch” – bring back, grasp, trick, jerk off, resurrect.

“Mirrors… rage” – I can’t help but think of the rage of Caliban seeing himself in the mirror but that doesn’t seem very relevant here. Hamlet holds up a mirror. Eric reflects his dad. As a “compound compliment”.

“Bearded” – old men have beard, but also means “confronted”.

“Bound about” – jumping / tied up.

“Charged” – attacked, energised, accused.

“screwed in your bedclothes” – are we thinking of sex and Gertrude (Hamlet’s mum)?

“swipe” – rushing stroke / steal.

Here is where Eric / Pablo acknowledges the greater ability of his dad. “It’s all still yours, still yours to say”.

“Passing” – going by or pretending.

“Cyclist” – Eric rides a bike / he recycles poetry.

“Pillar” – a symbol of tradition? (Also penis).

“Well outlined” compare the blurred figure of the dad in the early dawn.

“plastic guttering” – see above. Dad becomes different parts of a building: chantlate- piece of wood holding rafters, in other words a protector. But also chant = sing and late = dead. “Flash line” – part of building or a fancy poem. “eavestrough” gutter.

“Bowl” now the broken bowl of Jack’s pigeon seems to be mended.

“Rings” – sounds out and comes round again.