Book reviews: Get Closer by Ryan Van Winkle | The Silver of Old Mirrors by Roderick Watson
Two poets explore the workings of memory and the significance of old photographs in their latest collections, writes Roger Cox
In his 2016 book Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography, produced in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, the late critic John Berger hits upon an important aspect of the interplay between words and photographs. "In the relationship between a photograph and words," he writes, "the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words."
I was reminded of this passage while reading Get Closer, the new poetry collection from Ryan Van Winkle. Each poem in the book is inspired by a photograph, either taken by the poet or of some personal or family significance, yet the reader never gets to see the images in question. All we have to go on are the poet's often tangential responses to pictures he has seen but we haven't.
As Berger says, we have become conditioned to experience photography in a certain way: first we view the image; then we look for some text to explain or contextualise it; and finally we return to the image, perhaps better able to understand it thanks to whatever it is we've just read.
The fascinating thing about Van Winkle's new collection is the way it interrupts this familiar process. Because there is no visual information available, but because we know each poem is inspired by a specific photograph, while reading the brain automatically starts trying to produce a speculative image using the only information it has - the poet’s words. In effect, then, the brain is trying to do two things at once: engage with the poem as a piece of text, while simultaneously attempting to piece together whatever scraps of visual information it can find to form a coherent image.
This dual process is most effective when (inferred) image and subject matter come together and harmonize. In "Seventies Wallpaper", for example, the image conjured up of "scabs of red paint on weak plaster; / dried polaroids behind mirrors" meshes pleasingly with the following reflection on memory, and the way the past informs the present: "We hang / what we can of ourselves till / cells dry and harden into bone. / Then, it is like being in space / looking back at our work; / everything we have plastered, / painted, covered up / so far behind us."
In some cases, as in "Bucket of Crabs, 1988", these poems are so intensely visual that you feel yourself being transported back to the moment the source image was captured; in others, like "Shoreline, 1999" there is so little to go on that you can feel your mind scrambling to fill in the blanks. What this collection shows, though, is that while Berger is correct to assert that images can be "weak in meaning" when taken out of context, they can also act as powerful windows back into the past, allowing us to access vast stores of half-forgotten emotions and experiences, and therefore, paradoxically, can be very meaningful indeed.
Roderick Watson is also concerned with the past and the workings of memory in his wise, warm and wistful new collection The Silver of Old Mirrors, and photographs are a recurring motif. In "An Ordinary Day", we find the poet "scanning old photographs on the screen. / The family file" and there's a wonderful sense of the way old photos can transport us back to a moment in time while never quite capturing it as it really was: "Porous / curtains filter the light to a special glow / but the colours and contrast have faded to something / like a whisper."
Similarly, in "At the Bridge", the poet seeks to capture a moment of teenage infatuation, building up a vivid snapshot by adding detail after detail: "it was one hundredth of a second / in the year 1960 quick as the click of a shutter opening and / closing on both our lives."
In the final poem in the collection, "Coda", Watson reflects on the human capacity for "making meaning". It's not always a logical process, he accepts, but it's what makes us human - "Otherwise we are just stuff." No doubt John Berger would have agreed.
Get Closer, by Ryan Van Winkle, Polygon, £10.99; The Silver of Old Mirrors, Roderick Watson, The Voyage Out Press, £11.99
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