Kevin Gardner

Divided into three discrete units, Camille Ralph’s After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024) transports the reader into a warped revisioning of the seventeenth century. The first section recasts poems, prayers and scripture into a ‘Book of Common Prayers’. The second section, ‘Malkin: An Ellegy in 14 Spels’, comprises a set of dramatic monologues on the 1612 Pendle witch trials. The final section revivifies the memories of an Elizabethan occultist in ‘My Word: From the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’. I must confess to a native appreciation for poems that overlay past and present – as, for instance, in the work of Robert Selby and the late Peter Scupham. Like them, Ralphs creates a sort of reversible palimpsest, not in the sense of the poet reading the past through the lens of the present but rather the present articulating its own clarities through the poet’s vocalisations of the past.

Ralph’s focus on historic religious tensions highlights a great collision between early modern religious commitments and the irreligion of our own age. The metaphysical poets are a smart point of entrance to this vision of modern godlessness, and Herbert and Donne are naturally among those who make their appearance in these ‘common prayers’. Indeed, the opening poem brilliantly parodies ‘The Call’:

Come, my Motorway, my Equals Sign, my Higher Race,
such a Motorway as wheels with stars,
such an Equals Sign as time plus space,
such a Higher Race as cable cars.

As fascinating and enjoyable as Ralphs’ ‘common prayers’ are, they sometimes fail to transcend the parodic. In their sensibility, wit, and formal inventiveness, one senses the presence of the lesser metaphysicals, Francis Quarles and Richard Crashaw, and perhaps even the flash of Margaret Cavendish. At the same time, her ‘common prayers’ embrace and expand a spiritual dimension well beyond the borders of the British seventeenth century; indeed, they take their inspiration from the Old Testament, from Persian theological poetry and Hindu mysticism, from early Church fathers and medieval theologians, from a twentieth-century Scottish minister, a thirteenth-century German mystic, and the magnificent but sadly overlooked Margaret Cropper, whose poetic prayer, ‘Father, behold thy child’, is transformed out of its simple act of worship of the mysterious divine – ‘So I come to thee, / O infinite and unimaginable’ – into the godless worship of modern finance: ‘and here I come / O deathless mortgage, O unmanageable manifesto’.

Such transformations achieve a cumulative satirical effect, exposing the emptiness of contemporary culture. Ralphs’ ‘Kyrie Eleison’ asks the world, not the Lord, for mercy: ‘True plutocrat and understrapper, / sugar daddy, spirit rapper, / organ donor, entity.’ Her ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’ adopts the flaccidness of pop culture: ‘Come, pop -ology of psych, / beam yourself into us like / headlights through light-headedness. / Come, nanny of nanny states’. Perhaps the most affecting of these ‘common prayers’ is her rendering of ‘Ecclesiastes 3:1-8’, which finds ‘a time to cry in unhinged public bathrooms’, ‘a time to helplessly perform the lesser genders’, and ‘a time to hold a thought as you would hold a line, appreciating the choice of please hold music emanating from the world’. If such options seem irreverent next to the Preacher’s original, magisterial summation of life, it’s because contemporary life is cheap, our perspective lacking reverence. Besides, Ralphs returns us to holiness at the end of her poem: ‘a time for someday, and a time for never […]; a time to see what some call God; and a time to wonder if the thing behind your eyes is what you see with, or the thing in front of them.’ This is a powerful reminder that behind the satirist’s public anger there is often a private sense of spiritual humility, and if you find yourself sceptical of this, then you should read Swift’s sermons and Johnson’s devotions.

The second section of After You Were, I Am brings an abrupt shift in form and sensibility. Here are the poetic confessions of the accused Pendle witches, poems full of nervous energy. These are not the imagined confessions of the innocent (or guilty); rather, Ralphs works with material preserved in court records which, she notes, is notoriously unreliable. Thus some of her speakers are recorded as insisting on their innocence while others as having confessed to all manner of heinous activity. (Ralphs’ thorough endnotes are essential reading, particularly regarding this second section.) As fascinating as these monologues are, some will surely find Ralphs’ orthographic creativity very distracting. She explains in an endnote that her toolkit includes ‘semantic bridging’, ‘visual onomatopoeia’, and ‘dissident spelling’ – but I’m unconvinced that these accomplish what she wants them to, in part because she applies her tools unsystematically – for instance in the jarring combination of ‘tchillld thurible’. Where her linguistic dissonance does succeed, it’s within polysemous neologisms, such as ‘presciously’ and ‘senessence’, which can be effective in layering multiple meanings with verbal economy. As is the nature of experiment, sometimes there is failure, as when she attempts a baffling mélange of higher and lower registers, with colloquialisms abutting Latinate diction:

frakking for a numb spot
where the devvil plumbd
his tongue – for any lacuna
of sensitiviti, and bludless
sump.

Such linguistic collisions are fine if they make sense, but the insertion of ‘lacuna’ into an otherwise colloquial passage does not work simply by intentionally misspelling the noun that follows. Is Ralphs aiming to reproduce semi-literacy, as when she renders between as ‘b twe n’ or river as ‘rivvvr’? Perhaps, since her explanatory note attempts to justify her ‘dissident spelling’ as ‘an expression of identity and humanity’. In the end, however, her choices are less indicative of a linguistic community than individual idiosyncrasy.

From common prayer to witch trials to the occult: Ralphs’ third section poetically renders the diary of John Dee, court astronomer/astrologer and political advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. In John Dee, Ralphs has found an historical figure whose quest to know the Word resonates with her own. The poem begins, echoing the Gospel of St John, ‘In the beginning was you, Word. I new it’. Apostrophizing the Logos, Ralphs affirms the creative impulse as a divine gift while asserting that the Word’s existence predates time. Each artist aims for a unique, affirmative resistance to the forces of erasure – e.g., the Dulness that Pope characterised as the ‘Uncreating Word’. Ralphs’ opening claim – ‘I new it’ – appropriates a sort of divine foreknowledge (this is the astrologer’s voice, after all) but also implies (if ‘new’ is a verb) the act and art of making something new. In this context, creativity is renewal and regeneration, as if to say, ‘I renew it, I make it new’.

All this Ralphs accomplishes with an unleashed Joycean linguistic creativity. It’s been lurking there since the outset: the book’s opening Herbert parody quotes the final words of Ulysses, ‘I Will Yes’, which itself is a playful reaffirmation of life and light. Ralphs’ Joycean proclivities have been in check until the final section, but now she releases them in a great, gaudy fountain of wordplay.

Groand out Gravesend at noon. Shoo, land and clapboard! London
     traffick
ebbs, solvn’t, to weevill dark. We craft this way
to you, Word – you who have no Meta Incognita and no metaphor,
who drafted all the corsairs North-West rootes to Cathay.

At times, Ralph’s unconstraint can border on the nonsensical, as when she describes the newly created world as ‘an abbacus of all / that fluttred, swam, crawld, / until the nows came home’:

immemoreal coral
from nacreous achres of sea;
dead laurels;
currensies
with empyre’s erstwhile faces;
rounde red tix
electriffied in necklaces;
an excommuniccated tome:
a vulgate shutt to all;
a scrying glass;
a mandrake’s crucificks

Perhaps But what does it mean? is a pointless question. This is creativity itself, the very beginnings of life; surely it is arrogance to think we can understand and express everything embodied by the Word (though that was Dee’s apparent aim). To embrace nonsense is therefore an act of spiritual humility. Near the end, Ralphs provides a vertical line set in the right margin of her text as a gloss on her poetic rendering of Dee’s diary: ‘Urge us to see, in nonsense, sense’. This marginalia seems itself a prayer, a psalm chanting in its paler ink; its essence is a spiritual surrender to divine mystery: ‘sense our accord. O my Word, is yes no? Yes’.

I don’t like everything about this collection, yet it resonates with me, and I can admire its vision. It’s a book whose whole is singularly greater than the sum of its parts. Individually, the poems may be brittle, cold and hard, but they showcase a technical wizardry. I think of Roman Kim on the violin, performing such feats as double-stop harmonic trills with a left-thumb pizzicato thrown in for good measure. One marvels at the impressive virtuosity while wondering if the highest artistry might be reached with a bit less showmanship. Take, for instance, these lines from ‘Wessobrunn Prayer’:

Yet there was something sizing up that endlessness, some agency
which advertised the heavens’ opening: our ice floes’ flow, our
     black and smeary snow above the alps of steel production
          plants, our rivers’ scalp of fat;
and which said, ‘Before you were, I am.’

The passage from ‘our ice floes’ flow’ to ‘our rivers’ scalp of fat’ has a satisfying aural thrust with its impressive iambics, yet it is inessential.

This book has earned its plaudits: Ralphs is a highly original poet, a technically brilliant prosodist given to flights of dextrous wordplay, with a disorientating gonzo theological focus that renders her nothing short of a ‘modern metaphysical’, as her Faber blurb aptly puts it. It is just that one can’t help feeling After You Were, I Am is at times diminished – rather than enhanced – by its dazzling displays and excess of wit.