Wyeth's critically acclaimed collection, Silent Music (2011) has been hailed as 'a debut of astonishing assurance.' Ailbhe Darcy
Wyeth's critically acclaimed collection, Silent Music (2011) has been hailed as 'a debut of astonishing assurance.' Ailbhe Darcy
ISBN: 978-1-907056-65-9
Page Count: 72
Publication Date: 01/02/2011
Price: €12.00
Buy here
"The title poem of Adam Wyeth's remarkable debut collection starts with some newsy observation which, with a smooth change of gear, turns into a probing meditation, a moment of almost-illumination. In `Ode to the Globe', we are slyly wrong-footed by the title - it is about globe artichokes. But as the poem unfolds it turns out to be in praise of the earth and its pleasure after all. Such marrying of wit with lyric grace, and the circumspect and patient crafting throughout, make these poems a pleasure to read, and re-read." Maurice Riordan
“The idyll of West Cork, that poetic Arcady beyond Innishannon, the poet becoming embedded and implicated in the Irish landscape; all of this leaving behind a grey trail of anguished suburbia of family tension and jettisoned journeys. From the sexual implications of ‘Ode to the Globe’ to the charged aesthetic of ‘Silent Music,’ from the ‘balsamic scents’ of Zimbabwe to the shared excrement of ‘Life is Shit,’ Wyeth has tested and tasted of life’s anthology of displacement and love in exile.This first book is the complex home-coming of a voyager in many lands, the poems racked neatly like so many recovered umbrellas.’ Thomas McCarthy
“Adam Wyeth’s work is fresh and intriguing, alive with imaginative riffs, grave humour and more besides – it rewards close attention.” Derek Mahon
“Adam Wyeth’s poetry is quirky and full of ideas: humorous, dark, romantic. He achieves a rhythmic musicality by playfully stretching and shaping language, rolling it around the tongue. A rising star.”
Ian Wild
“A strong and moving voice.” The Independent
Adam Wyeth is a poet of ideas exquisitely wrought and swarming, demanding a reader awake to complexity on a subtle scale. Silent Music is a debut of astonishing assurance, perhaps in part because its eye is so well-travelled: born in Sussex, Wyeth lives in Cork and his poems range beyond to New Orleans, Naples and Zimbabwe. It's an eye self-conscious about its ranging, changing focus. The collection opens on Google Earth - "We whizzed out, looking down on our blue planet, / then like gods - zoomed in towards Ireland" - thus providing a kind of frame of distance.
There are times when Wyeth brings an outsider's eye to the rural Irish that seems as much the lens of poetic licence as Synge's once did. 'Rough Music' imagines a community ganging up to shame a wife-beater by non-violent means:
The whole village came out to clamour
and clash, a constant crescendo
of pots and pans outside his house -
Although often about noise, the quiet complexity of Silent Music is reminiscent of Scottish poet Don Paterson, and arguably Wyeth's work, in all its subtlety, ambiguity and quietude, could come straight from Britain's 'New Generation', which is rather infamously not a place to seek any rigorous interrogation of poetry's own language. And yet, Wyeth's 'Life is Shit', like Paterson's 'The Lie', is as unexpected and troubling as any more innovative lyric out there. I won't quote it for fear of ruining the surprise, a surprise earned through the quiet control of the rest of the collection, but which also suggests the danger of that control: that it might too often lull us into comfortable and intellectual appreciation at the expense of feeling, let alone action.
Wyeth's work is full of turning and looking back. Whereas 'Dad' pinpoints elegantly the feeling, when you look back over a short road trip, that everything has been changed by the journey, 'Chimanimani Mountains, Zimbabwe' insists that there is a home, an origin, to be regained if you want it: "She will slip through the gateway - // and see her past rolled out./ knowing each contour as her own cartography."
Silent Music is the debut collection of Adam Wyeth. Born in Sussex in 1978 he has been settled in Co. Cork for a decade now after a few years working abroad in Africa. In marked contrast to the work of both O'Donoghue and McNeillie who focus on the circumscribed and local, Wyeth evokes a digital world where the entire globe is at our fingertips. In 'Google Earth' he takes his hint from Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling / doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.' We then find ourselves swooping in and out on the places of significance that define a lifetime's trajectory: Zimbabwe, Cork, Kinsale, London, Brixton, Streatham: 'till there we were right outside the door; / the lunatic, the lover and the poet - peeping through / the computer screen like a window to our souls.' This clever conceit is then reversed in 'Plane' where it is the poet himself who becomes an object of speculation as he imagines a pilot waving down to him 'wondering what I'm writing.' In 'Chimanimani Mountains, Zimbabwe' Africa is evoked again, but in terms more wistful and elegiac:
Some day she will go back to her home
of the quartz crystal mountains.
She will slip through the gateway -
and see her past rolled out
like some old map of mythical places -
knowing each contour as her own cartography.
In 'Special Place' he captures an idyllic moment in the county of his birth: ' For me it's back in the heart of Sussex / where you and I pick out the white exotic / flesh of steamed langoustine from there pink shells.' Although occasionally Wyeth acknowledges that in Cork he is an outsider one does not feel that he makes heavy weather of this fact. In 'A Million Tanks in Cork' he highlights his 'right angled / accent buffeting against the soft curves / of their rain-washed burrs.' In 'Deoch an Dorais' he refers to himself as a 'tongue-tied blow-in.' Moreover, Wyeth is frequently a playful and experimental poet. 'Sycamore' is a picture poem, while 'Telepathy' follows Don Paterson in presenting us with a blank page and a title masquerading as a poem. More impressively, he seems to have invented his own original form where, in poems such as 'Sunrise', 'May the Road Rise' and' 'Snake Charm', the text has to be read from the bottom to the top of the page, a form of mimesis that seems entirely appropriate to his subject matter. At times, too, Wyeth can be extremely funny as in 'Guru Dave', 'Famous Danish Poets', or 'A Viking Comes to Tea', which is so good it deserves to be widely anthologized.
However, at the heart of Silent Music there are several poems which also impress by their depth and truth to feeling. In 'Dad' he describes how the excitement he feels on weekend excursions with his father soon fades as the reality of parental separation returns: 'Another week of staring into space in classrooms, / waiting for our next outing all together. Save Mum'. 'Pinter's Pause' is a strikingly original love poem, while 'Robin' is a beautifully rendered elegy for a friend, its poignant description of the bird reminding one of Lesbia's sparrow. A varied and highly enjoyable debut, Silent Music is impressive both for its wit and the depth of its emotional impact.
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To ask an American poet about international verse is often a waiting game, wherein one counts how many ticks of the second hand it takes for the responder to sing Neruda's praises, quizzically gaze out the window, and deftly change the subject after a dramatic pause like a Wes Anderson protagonist. With the proliferation of, and plurality within, our many aesthetic cliques, it is lamentable that so few of us (this reviewer included) break out and explore the many emerging voices in the grand chorus of English language poetry. Such were my sentiments as I recently devoured Adam Wyeth's mature and emotionally nuanced debut, Silent Music, as its central themes of divorce, transgression, and identity (in this case, Anglo-Irish) are vital to our Yankee discourse, but more importantly, his is an impressive and rangy collection that sidesteps the plangent gestures that so often mar first books.
Equally skilled in form and free verse, Wyeth displays the variety, zest, and invention one finds in the early work of Heaney and Lowell, since his best poems unfurl with organic pathos, rugged bravado, and rustic charm. Time and again, poems such as "Rough Music," "Dad," and "Blackout" occupy a third space that defies the quaint artificial division between lyric and narrative, whether Wyeth takes domestic violence, divorce, or the loss of innocence as his subject. Indeed, Silent Music is unflinching in both subject and theme, too-just in the first half-dozen poems, both poet and reader confront colonialism, landscape, grief, alcoholism, memory, and belonging.
"Butterfly Daughter," a brief Dickinsonesque vignette from late in the collection, is a fitting representation of Wyeth's strengths, since its ballad meter and gentle understatement capture the duality of a rapturous young girl imprisoned by the world (and perhaps the Holocaust, too, depending on how one interprets its final line). It is worth sharing here in its entirety:
Each morning before school
she prises herself from her cocoon,
a wood nymph - from the depth
of the earth - transforming in her room:
the painted lady, marbled white,
meadow-brown, orange-tip,
hairstreak, every pattern and hue,
then takes off into the Adonis blue -
her peacock wings opening -
weighed down by a festoon of bling.
A new person each day she leaves -
a clouded yellow heart on her sleeve.
Such ache is the foundation of many first books, but Wyeth's bawdy humor keeps Silent Music afloat through its weaker poems, which are few. When the moment calls for wit, Wyeth prefers to play class clown rather than the wry wielder of irony, so it is impossible not to chuckle at the book's coarser moments, such as "Life as Shit" (where two lads actually taste their own scat) and "Telepathy," which is merely a blank page. (It is worth noting that both of the aforementioned poems made this reviewer guffaw aloud on first reading, despite the fact that I read them in the emergency room with a broken bone.)
Silent Music is also commendable for its formal ambition and arrangement, both of which display Wyeth's commitment to Frost's famous commandment that the book itself serve as the ultimate poem. The bottom-up lyric "Sunrise" precedes the witty haiku "Waiting for the Miracle at Ballinspittle Grotto," while the sonorous sonnet "Apples" follows the Oedipal couplets of "Cinema Complex"; these are but two of many instances where Wyeth achieves greater resonance and echo from his meticulous sequencing.
At the heart of Silent Music is Wyeth's double consciousness, as he straddles British and Irish identities and finds neither to be a true encapsulation of the self. Such searching, however, takes on the force of metaphor as the collection progresses-in poems such as "Deoch an Dorais" and "The Long Run"-since the poet repeatedly attempts to reconcile the daily struggles of our material lives with the brief communion we find in the poetic experience. For Wyeth, it is a communion worthy of awe despite our many sufferings, and the candor, craft, and lilt of these poems are a testament to his faith in language. It is a language we share, after all, stretched across these many miles of sea.
-Adam Tavel is a Contributing Editor for Emprise Review
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Silent Music is an impressive début collection which showcases the author's ability across a wide variety of short forms, ranging from the zen brevity of 'Waiting for the Miracle at Ballinspittle Grotto' to the playful and comedic wisdom of 'Finding Rumi' and 'Silent Music'.
The collection opens, daringly enough, with a quote from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, "The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and the book displays the thus signalled restlessness throughout, moving with admirable dexterity and competence across space, time, theme and form.
The quote also alerts us to another central feature of the collection, Wyeth's intelligent and lively critical engagement with literary traditions past and present. His love affair with poetry, and with certain poets, is obvious, and there is a sense of homage throughout, not only in direct paeans to living poets such as Leland Bardwell and Maurice Scully, but also in the formal and thematic references to the post war Avant-garde in the United States, and to more distant but not unrelated figures such as Rumi and Basho.
Wry humour is the distancing effect which keeps all this from slipping into mere imitation, or hero worship, or what David Wheatley has referred to online as 'mysticism light'. It prevents us from giving in to the temptation to ask "well here is John Cage, and there is Pinter, but where is Adam Wyeth?"
As befits a collection with the word "music" in its title, the book is also distinguished by close attention to the sonic possibilities of line and verse. It is obvious that every line has been worked to maximise its internal music, and also to sync with larger harmonies and sound patterns traversing and enlivening the framing verses and poems as a whole. I recommend reading aloud to appreciate fully such lines as these:
Looking up during each pause -
I imagined him creeping beyond our garden
Wriggling under the gap in the fence
Behind the clematis and the convolvulus -
Or whatever it was? The twist of hedgerow
The turn in the lane, the height of the day.
('Pinter's Pause', 13-18)
The terse honesty of the family related poems adds depth and seriousness to the collection. 'Dad' and 'Carry the Torture' fume with patricidal enmity, while 'Life is Shit' proves that a good poet, like a good alchemist, can make the dirt glitter.
To his credit, Wyeth can stretch his empathetic imagination beyond both literary and biological families and out into the continuous catastrophe of human history. 'Chamber Music' is a controlled meditation on the marriage of genocide and high culture in the gas camps. 'Lord of the Mountain' is told, provocatively, in the voice of a Bolivian child miner, a contemporary incarnation of Blake's Chimney Sweep.
© 2011 Dave Lordan
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English-born Wyeth has been living in County Cork for ten years and has submerged himself in the Irish literary scene. While the core of his interests remains poetry, he has been involved in different areas over the years such as working for journals, reading in school sand even putting poetry on film. Besides this his work has appeared in a number of anthologies published in ireland and Britain. Surprisingly this is his first collection of published work. His poems are clever and often deceptive as he sets up an image of one thing, like the globe, only for it to turn out to be something else, like an artichoke. His are poems that you cannot take for granted.
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DISPLACEMENT, TRAUMA AND silence form the central motifs of Adam Wyeth's debut collection, Silent Music. In the strongest poems Wyeth reaches back to childhood memories, sensitively re- creating the trauma and pain of divorce from a child's perspective. "Dad" shows a "blackening silence" that overcomes father and son on their way home and concludes with "the real darkness" and "chill of parting" as they say goodbye for another week.
Wyeth has an honest voice, and he is not afraid to make himself vulnerable. Cinema Complex offers a clever, poignant glimpse of a mother-son relationship, playing with the idea of going back to the past to warn his mother "to turn her back on the future". Displacement and belonging take central stage in poems where Wyeth contemplates his migrant identity, depicting himself as an English "tongue-tied blow-in" in Cork. Silent Music is a clever volume that playfully questions taken-for-granted certainties... a fresh and imaginative voice is evident
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Once upon a time, you could distinguish a learned man from his contemporaries because he most likely carried a book of poetry with him. Women learned to read from poetry books, some of which were considered quite racy, though we would consider them dull today. If you read anything, you read and memorized poetry.
Today (with the exception of middle school girls) very few people read poetry for fun. For the purpose of completing a course of study or preparing to teach a class, yes; but not just for fun. Part of the reason for this is because a lot of the old masters wrote in language that is no longer in use, which makes the text difficult if not impossible to relate back to our everyday lives.
However, there are a number of good modern poets who are breaking that mold, and one of the best of those is Adam Wyeth.
Wyeth, an Irish journalist and freelance writer, is a winner of several prestigious poetry competitions, including The Fish International Poetry Competition in 2009 and The Arvon International Poetry Competition in 2006. He is a columnist for the The Southern Star and a book reviewer for The Irish Times. His poetry has been widely published, but "Silent Music," published in 2011 by Salmon Poetry, is his first complete anthology.
Wyeth's poetry is definitely masculine in nature, more robust than that of the romantic period poets. He examines everything from Google Earth (in a poem by the same name) to contemporary musicians who use silence as their medium (Silent Music).
My favorite poems in this book examine things that are familiar to all of us. The first, "Rough Music," describes a community's condemnation of one of its own:
"The whole village came out to clamour
And clash, a constant crescendo
of pots and pans outside his house --
like somebody crashing down the stairs.
Ransacking cupboards, emptying cutlery
drawers in a calamity of noise.
One neighbor took his wooden spoon
And whipped up a storm in a beer mug."
I'm going to stop there, this one has a surprise in the last stanza that is powerful the first time you read it. My second favorite poem in this book is about two school children who decide to make up a kind of pig-Latin code they think they can use to insult their teacher and she won't understand what they said. From the poem "Idagy":
"Thus we continued. But after school
Mrs. Watson kept us behind and yelled,
Idagy heardagurd whadagot youdagoo saidagaid!
Translated: we were dead."
And my very favorite of all, "Famous Danish Poets":
"Over Danish pastries and tea,
I asked my wife do you know of any
famous Danish poets? She said no
I do not know of any famous Danish poets."
This one will get a chuckle out of you as you read the last stanza. As you can see, this poetry is very easy to read and examines things with which we are all familiar, not some abstract theory about nightingales or some other such thing. I have read this book through several times -- it is only 67 pages long. A couple of the poems were not to my taste, but they may be your favorites.
"Silent Music" is available through Amazon or the Salmon Poetry website, or through your local bookseller. Because of some words used in one or two of the poems, I would not recommend it for anyone under age 13. I give this book 9 out of 10, and recommend it for all readers over the age of 13.
