A cheerful guidebook, an idiosyncratic map, and an energetic paean—Nuala O’Connor on A Crumpled Swan, by David Collard (Sagging Meniscus Press)
by Nuala O’Connor
Ostensibly A Crumpled Swan is a book about a year’s worth of intensive, close reading of one poem – Abigail Parry’s ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant’ – but it is also chockful of personal reflection, wide-ranging literary insight, and chewy opinions. That these fifty short essays about a particular poem, as well as poetry in general, are by David Collard only adds joy to the experience.
Collard has the affable, chatty, word-in-your-ear quality of the bright, original friend you most love to talk with, because of their vision, cheerful erudition, and inclusivity; a friend who is rousing in their off-beat, enquiring enthusiasm for every new fascination of theirs. Anyone who has read Collard’s last book, Multiple Joyce – 100 Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy, can testify to this. Collard is not an academic but a savant and a scholar, a man who no doubt approves of Kafka’s dictum that we should follow our ‘most intense obsessions mercilessly’; David Collard is merciless to great effect in this book.
Collard has the affable, chatty, word-in-your-ear quality of the bright, original friend you most love to talk with
It is not altogether clear why the author became obsessed with Parry’s ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant’ – apart, of course, from personal taste – but he did, and his poem-passion brings the reader on an intensely enjoyable, detailed examination of the text and its hinterland. In an early essay the author tells us that poetry gives him ‘a better purchase on a world from which I should otherwise feel detached or excluded.’ In the same essay he also provides some personal background about growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and how, in that rigid sect, poetry became his salvation and downfall.
A wide-sweep book like A Crumpled Swan is never easy to sum-up, except to say it’s a read-with-a-pencil volume – Collard knows things – and if you care for literature, you will find plenty of juicy detail, apt quotes, and other entertainments. The author takes us on a breathtaking wander through the dream origins of poetry, to a meditation on what poetry is for, to an interactive lesson in linguistics. (This reader will never say the words ‘big pig’ without pause again.)
just say ‘big pig’ out loud and feel it
The book provides opportunities to read aloud; to seek out and listen to Alfred Lord Tennyson declaim in British Poet Voice; to fill in the words of Parry’s poem on a handily provided syllable-count chart; and to consider how your lips work (just say ‘big pig’ out loud and feel it). Though footnotes can be off-putting to some, here they are brief and often contain guffaw-worthy asides, alongside scholarly information. All of this adds benefit to the cordial, fresh nature of the deep dive alongside the author.
The reader is not always going to agree with Collard’s readings and interpretations of the Parry poem, but there is certainly a lot to mull over in his judgements and assertions. He is correct when he considers the difference in each reader, saying that when he himself approaches poetry, he ‘disappears as a person and emerges as a reader’, and that he alters, depending on the text. We come to our reading as the many-faceted people we are, so each consumer of Parry’s poem is a different individual, who takes in the poem alongside their own worldview, knowledge, biases, gender etcetera. And the reader is also in a state of flux – the poem stays the same, but the evolving reader brings their own ‘meaning’ to the text, which is why poems beg many re-readings.
The book is, all at once, a cheerful guidebook, an idiosyncratic map, and an energetic paean, and it exudes Collard’s glee and pleasure in the work
Collard is a useful thought-provoker, but every reader is free, of course, to like or dislike ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant’, and make up their own mind about any revelations that exist in it. The lugubrious, surrealist writer-artist Edward Gorey, in his Great Simple Theory About Art, said that art ‘…is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.’ Gorey left most of the connections out of his own work, leaving the reader free to explore ‘other possibilities’. Similarly, Abigail Parry is happy to let the reading public make of her works what they will, without the need for endless explication from her. In conversation, Parry told Collard that she believed the poet shouldn’t be involved in ‘any later consideration of their poems, even tangentially’, but she also gave the author full permission to write these fifty essays.
Still, on reading A Crumpled Swan, this reader couldn’t help thinking what an honour for Parry to have such a rare and marvellous undertaking directed at their poem; to witness one lively mind’s inimitable insights, careful probing, and interesting ideas. The book is, all at once, a cheerful guidebook, an idiosyncratic map, and an energetic paean, and it exudes Collard’s glee and pleasure in the work.
Praise and acknowledgment must also go to the publisher, Sagging Meniscus Press, an outfit which, true to its own rule, ‘publishes books that want to be themselves’. It is thanks to them, and other small presses, that unusual, surprise-laden, singular books like this one meet readers, and make the world a better, brighter place to be in.
Nuala O’Connor is Irish, living in Galway; her fifth novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards and is editor at flash e-journal Splonk. Her latest book is her fifth collection of poetry, Menagerie, published by Arlen House.
