Ned Denny was born in London in 1975 and has worked as a postman, art critic, book reviewer, music journalist and gardener. His poems and remakes have appeared in publications including PN Review, Poetry Review, The White Review, Oxford Poetry, the TLS and Modern Poetry in Translation. His first collection Unearthly Toys will published by Carcanet in February 2018.
The poems gathered here span approximately thirteen years, the earliest (Tree) written in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas whilst my then-partner and I awaited the birth of our son. Almost half of them were written over a decade later in another cedared idyll – the Dukes of Bedford’s former estate on the banks of the Tamar, where Devon ends; both troubadour adaptations date from this latter period, Who’s She having been entered for the 2015 Spender Prize along with the following commentary:
I didn’t set out to translate Arnaut Daniel, being somewhat awed by Ezra Pound’s versions of his robust and adroitly patterned songs. Master of the elaborate, allusive style known as the trobar clus and inventor of the sestina, Daniel is the poet referred to in Dante’s Purgatorio as “il miglior fabbro” (“the better craftsman”, the term later used by Eliot – dedicating The Waste Land – of Pound himself). My unintended remake of “Doutz braitz e critz” began with the gift of the first line, a lucid four-syllable seed and slight departure from the Old Occitan which is usually rendered as something like “sweet trills and cries”. This then grew in line two to declare the apparent paradox of something both highly ordered and numinous, condensed yet expansive, Apollo and Dionysus in one (“mind-manifesting” being the literal meaning of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond’s 1950s neologism psychedelic).
After the minor liberties of this opening my concern was to echo and renew, in a language less rich in rhymes, the shape and light of Daniel’s original: the stanzas consisting of 75 syllables in regular array, and chiming with or calling out to each other like island universes or groups of birds in different trees. It felt like an affirmation of my initial instinct to read, several weeks later, Pound’s contention that “precision of statement” is what Daniel can teach. As for the unnamed “she” of my title, the proverbial cat’s mother, it will perhaps suffice to say that the troubadours were her wise and foolish warrior-devotees. Now as then, it is at the same time a question you might ask in a noisy, crowded room and one that lets us approach the mystery and radiance of our origin.
I like to think that my own sestina Drones, despite being set in a modern-day UFO conference, wouldn’t be entirely alien to Daniel and his kind. Long live the trobar clus!
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Who’s She
(after Arnaut Daniel)
Sweet precision
of the mind-manifesting
voice of the birds, the luminous argot
blown from tree to tree just as we implore
those whom love makes us see more and less clearly,
you inspire me – whose perverted soul sways true,
straight in its windings – to conceive the finest
call, a chirp with no bum note or word astray.
Indecision,
that luxury! No dithering
could touch me when I first breached the snow
of her smooth ramparts, the girl I thirst for
with a wild intensity that is nearly
unendurable, the shining one, she who
has hands whose omniscience exceeds the rest
as surely as love’s gentlest caress bests a
circumcision.
She clocked me, my discerning
between the real deal and the fake – we know
how true gold’s hidden by the lead uproar
of our toys – and as our tongues moved sincerely
she drew her dark cloak of constellated blue
so the boys that speak in the snake’s interest
couldn’t leer at what all babble fails to say.
No spring vision
(birds interpret as they sing)
of flowers limning the unguarded flow
of heaven is fresher; without her, L’Or
gives skin no glow nor JPMorgan’s yearly
profits; within her high castle’s living pew
our seeming leaders might be less possessed,
all who exchange her presence for the Devil’s pay.
God’s elision
in life’s book of our killing –
that only sin – our joy with our sorrow
surely bodes well for his setting some store
by holy communion, wherein we’ll merely
look and kiss and laugh along each bared sinew
as I measure the lovely weight of a breast
where the light, the embodied light, swells its ray.
Ah, derision
for my own solemn honking
bites once more – sound in which we think we go
about the gardens of an emperor,
dreamt court in which we whisper cavalierly
as his money man – and I’d be a fool to
mouth her name and put love to the test:
no saint protects those whose chatter keeps the dawn at bay.***
New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018. Ned's first full-length collection, Unearthly Toys, will also be published by Carcanet in February 2018. You can pre-order it here.
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