Silver Branch Series:
Mark Antony Owen's
Subruria: Release Three
Our Silver Branch feature for Christmas 2024 is super special. A review of Mark Antony Owen's poetry by Lesley Curwen (with interview and poems). We're long admirers of the English poet's distilled, syllabic poetry, with its subtle, suggestive social commentary and bittersweet moments.
Over to Lesley...
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Subruria is not like any other body of poetic work.
You enter it online, free of charge, via a grey page that shows silhouettes of birds flying to the sombre sounds of rooks cawing, other birdsong and the far-off murmur of cars. The red title of the poetry project emerges, with a quotation: ‘It begins in the rooks, in their rasping’, and with that you are inducted into the world of Subruria, an edgeland where suburbia meets the rural, a treasure-trove of pithy, often devastating syllabic poems on the subjects of love, loss and absence.
There are three sections, or Releases, so far. A Release of poems happens every three years. Numbers play a big part in the shape and content of Subruria. I was lucky enough to get full and intriguing answers from Mark Antony Owen himself, about how he works. First question – what was the original vision for the project, and how has it evolved?
‘I knew fairly early on in my 'serious poetry' writing revival that I was (and still am) a miniaturist. A Grieg, not a Rachmaninoff – as if my work could ever hold a candle to that of either of these great composers.
I'd originally conceived not of a single, multipart body of work, but a more traditional approach: eBooks, maybe also printed books, each coming out a few years apart.
What upended this notion was realising it would be somewhat dishonest of me to publish a series of separate collections when, in fact, my focus across all of them would've been the same: the subrural world in which I've lived most of my life.
So yes, in one sense, an evolution of sorts. I worked out a system for how I'd publish releases, how many poems would appear in each, the publishing cadence and a few other things besides. The planning that goes into all this is more structured than it may appear.
For example, each trio of releases (1-3, 4-6 and 7-9) kicks off with a 'major' release and ends with a 'minor' one. In the middle, there's always a sort of bridging release. So the major releases contain a variable (increasing) number of poems: R1 = 45, R4 = 54, R7 = 63. These correspond to the age I'll be at the time of those releases ... which makes sense, given that new releases are always published on my birthday.
If I live long enough to complete the 'canon' of Subruria, which is the three trios of releases (1-9), then at age 72, I'll publish the 'apocrypha': 72 poems which didn't make the cut elsewhere. As for the bridging and 'minor' releases, these always contain a fixed number of poems – 36 and 27 in each, respectively.
I'm sure something has leapt out at you by now: my obsession with the number 9. Much of what I do in Subruria is governed by multiples of 9 (which, of course, reduce down to 9 in numerology). As I said, the structure is there, but you have to know about it to look for it.
So that’s the structure of this growing canon of work. I visualise it as an intricate ziggurat, where possibly only the architect understands the significance of different layers.
Of course, it’s pretty extraordinary for a poet to plan his or her output, many years ahead. And that deliberation, that laser-like intent, runs through the whole work.
Before I go into a close reading of Release Three let me tell you about some of the earlier poems that stay with me. Some are deeply disturbing. ‘Her Too,’ deals with abuse covered up within the family. ‘My mother’s mother, keeping mum for decades’. The language is sparse, simple but potent: ‘dying /brings out the worst in us, surfaces poisons /corrosive to the armour of denial.’ The poet asks in wonder, ‘Who’d have guessed she’d erupt into confession?’
The mood reminded me of ‘Deception’, a Larkin poem which deals with the rape of a Victorian girl, where ‘light, unanswerable and tall and wide/ forbids the scar to heal.’
I asked Mark who has influenced him most:
A difficult question to answer in some ways. Not because I'd ever claim to have had no influences, but because naming poets whose work I read most while I was finding my feet doesn't really tell you much about why I became the poet I am today.
If it's a simple list you want, that's easy: Robin Robertson (king of the legato line); Philip Larkin (because who wants poetry free from pain?); Connie Bensley (for her humour, though I rarely use it in my own work); Hugo Williams (work so laid back you start to wonder if it's poetry or chopped-up prose; then, having realised it's the former, love it all the more); and pretty much any poet who understands why, no matter how brilliant many longer poems are, brevity is the true soul – the true art – of poetry.
Not only can he effortlessly handle painful subjects in short poems, he is adept at creating tiny pastoral and lyrical gems, as a counterbalance. In Release Two’s ‘Visiting Times’ he describes ‘a cemetery sentried/ by firs’. Despite its dark associations, the poet feels and sees something quite different. ‘The air, one long, ecstatic cipher:/ the untranslatable rapture of birds.’
Those lines have lodged in my mind. Their transcendent effect reminds me of John McCullough’s poem ‘Quantum’, an elegy for his science teacher Avril, who ‘is both particle/and wave, past and future, her grin wide/as she accelerates, decade after decade’.
It has been very difficult to pick out just a few poems from the collection. All hold surprises, and sometimes they wield a hard punch in the gut.
The very first poem of Release Three, ‘6:25am’ hits me like that. This is no ordinary aubade.
Dawn is ‘bruised as clouds on a child’s legs’. You begin to see the night as a place where terrible things take place. The horror emanates from stark, uncompromising images. ‘The light, wiping the night’s dirt / from each home’s bloodied face.’ The poem enables us to see suburban homes, supposedly safe as houses, as places of intimate danger.
This undercurrent of hidden threat in ordinary settings, recurs throughout Subruria. There are thematic patterns at work here that perhaps only the poet sees. As Mark told me:
What mattered most to me? Writing individual poems that could stand on their own, yet when viewed 'zoomed out' (i.e. as part of the wider project) would feel less incongruous and more cohesive as parts of an integrated whole. The best way to think of Subruria is as a large canvas littered with small details that only really hang together properly once you step back and take in the work in its entirety.
There are moving personal poems across this large canvas, a marvel of writerly control and power. One of my favourites from Release Three is ‘Keep counting’. It is an elegy for a best friend. It is also, according to Mark, an apology for not supporting that troubled friend, for avoiding contact with him at times of crisis. In the poem, he mourns the man who found ‘the best hiding place of all: under shingle,/marble, your dates in gold; under sun, rain, snow.’
The poet, in bluff language, declares:’ I can still see you mate, with my eyes shut’. There is no schmaltz here, just a distillation of grief. He concludes he will keep counting, ‘till it’s my turn to hide’.
I should say something here about Mark’s strict poetic forms. They all count individual syllables, and up to now, they have been something of a mystery to all but the poet himself. Here then, is a true scoop, from Mark.
I've guarded with great secrecy the names of my nine forms (there's the number 9 again), so maybe now's the time to unveil them. Others might want to use them.
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AUGMENTED SEVENTHS = min 2, max 5 quatrains, each line having 6 syllables except line three, which has 7.
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DUOS = min 2, max 5 couplets, each line containing 11 syllables, with no end-stopping on the first line of each couplet
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NONETS = Always 3 tercets, each with 10 syllables in the first line, 8 in the second, 9 in the third
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QUARTETS = 2-4 quatrains max, every line having 9 syllables
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QUINTETS = 1-3 quatrains max, every line having 11 syllables
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SEPTETS = 7 lines only, 7 syllables in each line
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TREBLES = min 2, max 5 tercets, each with 6 syllables in the first line, 9 in the second, 8 in the third
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TRIOS = Always 3 tercets, each with 11 syllables in the first line, 8 in the second and 5 in the third
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TRIPLETS = min 2, max 5 tercets, every line having 7 syllables
What you'll notice at this point is that it's here that the numerological connection to the number 9 breaks down. The reason? As I've said in several interviews, the creation of these forms was laughably arbitrary. Going back through some earlier non-syllabic poems, I looked for ways to pattern syllabically those which I felt were worth salvaging. Once I'd hit on nine forms I was happy with, I stopped – then made a commitment to myself to use ONLY these nine forms forever!
I suspect you'll also have noted that the titles for my forms are all themed around classical music (a passion of mine). I'm always careful to say that I'm comfortable allowing variations on these forms, just so long as those variations maintain an internal logic in terms of syllabic patterning.
Oh, one final thing, about my poems' titles: I never use titles containing more than six words. Just looks messy on screen.
I suspect we may see more of Mark’s work in other online publications and in print, too. In my opinion, his jewel-like, bittersweet poems deserve wider acclaim.
As you probably know, Mark is a generous publisher and curator of other poets’ work, through his online journals https://www.iambapoet.com/ and https://www.afterpoetry.com/. His skill in editing is apparent in his own work. His poems may be short, but they have been polished to an intense shine, sometimes over years, to be savoured through eye and ear. The imagery can be quite extraordinary.
Take another example from Release Three, the poem called ‘Gliders’. When I was young, I was lucky enough to do some gliding, towed and released by noisy light aircraft. So I am in awe of this precise rendering of the towing operation: ‘Cessnas gargling and spitting/ you into columns of rising air’. Who knew a plane could gargle, or spit a glider? They can, in Subruria.
From the ground, the gliders look like symbols of hope, ‘charms tin-snipped from a rainbow braceletting/ the sun’. The ‘tin-snipped’ reminds me of 1950s model airplanes, and these glittering images still revolve in my mind.
For me, sound is a key part of the magic in Subruria, the sound of the poet reading his own work. Wherever you start, in the hundred-plus poems (so far) in the collection, the key thing in my humble opinion, is to press the start button, to hear Mark’s powerful, sardonic voice. I say that as someone who has spent a lifetime working in broadcast radio and wants to hear the poet’s words vibrate in my own air. I asked Mark, how important it is to him, that people listen to his voice?
This may surprise you, but not at all. The reason for including the recordings of me reading each poem was firstly to make better use of the digital medium I've chosen as my primary means of publication and distribution, and secondly, to give readers and listeners an insight into how my poetry works.
Many have laid at my door the charge that you can't 'hear' the structure in syllabic poetry. Which is correct, and precisely the effect I was going for. My poems work in two ways, and in neither of these do the line and stanza breaks matter. I set my poems as I do on the screen to convey quickly and clearly that Here Is A Poem. Beyond that, I make no other demand on the reader. They can place inflection wherever the hell they want while reading my work. But by listening to me read my own words, what they should take away is the fact that my poems, for all their structure, are actually meant to be treated like free verse. As I often say, ignore my line and stanza breaks and instead pay close attention to how and where I punctuate. That's the secret to getting the most from my poetry.
I hear what Mark says. But it takes concentration to ‘ignore the line and stanza breaks’ when most readers’ instincts are to take note of them, as a key part of the craft.
If the forms are new, the subject matter sometimes looks back to the past, to the Britain of forty or more years ago. ‘Freemans’ is about the 1970s catalogue, a cheap way for people to pay for goods in instalments. My own mum (single, working three jobs) used it. The poem starts with the concept of boys looking at the underwear models, ogling them, as they do cast-off porn mags, ‘the women pulled from bushes, curly and wet’.
But it is ‘the lady/ we hid from, all lights off’, who makes hearts beat harder, the woman who came to collect the catalogue debts. The poet reflects that in time, the same excitement will come from ‘the pages before the shoes’, in other words, models in undies.
Poems about everyday suburban life, disturbing, painful or comic, are interspersed by precisely observed nature poems. Even these offer beguiling twists. In ‘Pieridae’ a butterfly is ‘living confetti’ buoyed on the breeze, but the poet addresses it, imagining it has ‘no thought of how you’re using your time … how fast you’re going’.
Language is usually spare and crisp, sometimes conversational but always loaded and succinct, seasoned with dry pessimism or mordant wit.
One example is ‘Father and son talk’. The poem uses extended metaphors about alcohol (‘neat distillations’) and furnaces (‘bright, molten splashes’) to describe the father’s exaggerated drunken stories, and concludes darkly, ‘we’ll remain misshapen,/despite all these straighteners.’
Some of the most memorable poems riff on the theme of ‘Subruria’ itself. ‘All fields’is a short poem where the poet deftly illustrates how the suburban inevitably bleeds into rural landscapes.
He looks back to the 1960s, ‘before this hill wore its necklace/ of charmless semis’, (yes, another breath-taking metaphor) when fields were still ‘ungrazed by herds of houses’. Buildings have become herds, permanently replacing livestock.
I really like the fact that this large body of work is a free-to-read digital collection, with the poet’s own voice at its heart. I asked Mark, if digital-only poetry collections like his are the future of poetry publication, more lasting than paper books?
If you'd asked me this 5-10 years ago, I'd have said with greater confidence that I believed (or at least hoped) this would become the case eventually. But with the world – and the web – the way it is today, I'm less certain ... less hopeful, too.
The accessibility, media richness and ease of sharing all go in the favour of publishing digitally (plus the fact that corrections can be made near enough instantly; no need to wait till the next print run of a title).
But books have endured the ravages of time and war and so much more. So I think it much more likely now that we'll have a world of poetry books (and works in other genres) published digitally for folk like me who love the convenience and couldn't really care less about form, and printed in traditional and innovative new ways for those who need that tactile connection to literature.
Thanks to Mark for answering my questions.
This is a unique body of work. Please do yourself a favour, go to https://www.subruria.com/ and dip into it. It is highly original and quite addictive.
At Pagham
You leave the waves like a long-legged wader;
leave the froth and fizz of a sun-struck sea’s sighs.
Butterscotched patches of sand made butter pats,
flattened and pebble-pressed by high tides and toes.
Your mother’s shutter, enclosing like weather –
up by our clothes, closing in on our ocean.
She’s shooting the shoreline, freezing us in frame:
a silver lip lapping, blown beach in our teeth.
Keep counting
We found a way to play this game, then you found
the best hiding place of all: under shingle,
marble, your dates in gold; under sun, rain, snow.
I covered my eyes as you were closing yours,
as you made yourself invisible at last –
made it so your finding was all we had left.
But I can still see you mate, with my eyes shut.
And when I close them for good, ready or not,
I’ll look for you. I just have to keep counting,
don’t I? Keep counting till it’s my turn to hide.
Gliders
A gnats’ ghost beneath accumulative
greys – Cessnas gargling and spitting
you into columns of rising air –
you look, down here, from this city of weeds
and wildflowers, like a mobile,
strung above a nursery of calves:
charms tin-snipped from a rainbow braceletting
the sun; symbols of hope, mirrored
by the hairstreaks escaping our feet.
Dies irae
We go into a squall of starlings,
into sky jaundiced by thunderstorms;
hail applauding its way towards us,
the distance blurring in its white noise.
August is normally terrible
with wasps – with a heat that hangs on you
like wet wool, like a child’s dressing-up.
A month of dry, taunting afternoons:
tea-stained fields, golden once with the sun
they drank in spring. Not this granite froth,
these glaucous cataracts, weighing on
exhausted air, dead as a judgement.
A map of their world
Overnight, the appearance of an atlas:
a silvered, sluggish cartography.
Strange navigations
through oceans of lichen; passages of light
unchartable till torched by the dawn.
Snail-like, filigreed
journeys to places already discovered.
A shimmer of routes, a tracery.
A map of their world.
Conkers
Ten thousand or more on the wood’s stained carpet:
polished eyes, too young yet for the rings they wear.
Staring down a heaven through puzzles of twigs;
up at a star, shattered to many by leaves.
These foolish playthings, spellbound as mediums,
don’t foresee the games to come, fights to survive.
We will root for them, pigs bewitched by truffles –
gouge them out of sockets, get away unseen.
Our pockets will bulge with smooth, cyclopic orbs,
as we work this wood together … rob it blind.
Pieridae
Kite tassels slipped from your string,
you buoy on the breeze, living
confetti, celebrating
the simple fact of being
here at all – a bow of wing –
no thought of how you’re using
your time … how fast you’re going.
Menfolk
Out they come in concert,
one man then another –
their orchestra of shovels
tuning up on the ice.
Backs bent to lemon-white
in February’s thin
afternoon, they’re heating grunts
that cool to clouds with each
scooped payload heaved to lawns;
scraping snow from black hoofs:
their cattle of cars, docile,
cut off by this weather.
Women appear with fists
of mugs. Scarved children shriek.
The menfolk lean on their tools,
like all labour were theirs.
Bloom
Every petal on their skin a mouth
for the light, digesting the sun
to make it sweet, make it edible.
Alchemy at work in the slender bones
slipping from dresses, print by print;
lawns showered by the tattering silks,
the scatter of magnolia feathers.
The trial of the bloom begins.
Reward us for the rains, for the heat.
