Casida of the Dead Sun
the earth reedless, a pure form,
closed to the future
Federico García Lorca: Casida of the Recumbent Woman
The world is in the process of ending.
The insects have dropped from the air.
The last wasp is sinking through
the gloopy green water of a garden pond,
the most melancholy diver.
The sun is on its back at the very top
of the sky, floating bleakly, jelly-eyed.
A toad’s heart is blinking inside
its nobbly body as it contemplates
the infinite civilisations of the world,
the disappointment of having
only ever truly known this one.
From Rebecca Perry’s varied and engaging first collection Beauty/Beauty, this week’s poem, as the epigraph suggests, draws on Casida IV by Federico García Lorca. The Lorca poem, Casida de la Mujer Tendida, with an English translation by Michael Smith, can be read here.
The traditional Arabian qaṣīdah (or casida) was a mono-rhymed, formally-structured panegyric, which embraced a complex of themes besides the admirable qualities of the poet’s patron. (Indeed, the treatment could also be satirical). Verses traditionally included descriptions of camels or horses, the trials of daily nomadic life, battle-victories, and a lament for a lost beloved. Lorca makes the form richly his own.
Rebecca Perry’s Casida of the Dead Sun draws on the Lorca poem, but significantly departs from it. First, the obvious similarities: Perry’s “garden pond” might have been suggested by his image of the world as “reedless”. The immediate source of the terminal scenario, indicated by the title, might be Lorca’s description of the earth as “closed to the future”. And the toad in the fourth stanza has clearly hopped out of the Lorca poem. Perry, however, explores further what the concealed heart of the creature might contain, and also briefly conjures a physical presence in the homely and exact epithet, “nobbly”. Note that “gloopy” shares the same pleasingly tactile and informal register.
I like Perry’s subversive and detached approach. She rejects what would be the easy option of the erotic female body as focus. She avoids any sort of grand manner beyond the title: in fact, the poem seems a kind of put-down of that title. This dead sun may not be the burnt-out star at the end of earth’s history. Both the sun and the small creatures facing extinction may be allegorical, images of loss suffered by a “recumbent woman” we never get to see.
Somehow, the poem resembles a primitivist painting, one of the less exotic landscapes by Henri Rousseau, perhaps, vividly splicing realist and surrealist elements. The images are local, almost rustic: the pond’s stagnant soup contains nothing more symbolically potent than the last wasp (though considerable pathos is hinted in the phrase, “the most melancholy diver”). As for the sun, in Perry’s descriptive transformation it might be another form of pond-life, “floating bleakly, jelly-eyed” as if on the surface of the water. The naive and picturesque imagery is completed and then complicated by the toad. It hides profundity in its humble, and perhaps magical, form, regretting the missed opportunity to have known something more of “the infinite civilisations of the world”. Whatever the status of the light extinguished, the toad represents consciousness of the intellectual dimensions of the loss.
There’s a flicker of humour playing at the edges of this poem and, I suspect, a challenge to the masculine ethos of the qaṣīdah. Lorca’s poem is imbued with an aching awareness of the decay in the erotic. Perry, by entirely different means, miniaturises and controls a drama that is less gendered and anthropocentric, but still projects universality.
Although Perry’s collection marks the accomplishment of her own voice and style, a poem like the Casida of the Dead Sun points to her readiness for wider challenges, including a fruitful exchange with other writers and languages. Beauty/Beauty is an accessible but innovative debut. This review will give you a fuller sense of the originality of the achievement.
- Beauty/Beauty is published by Bloodaxe Books