While both Turner and Harsent consider war from a historical perspective, only Harsent seems to know there is nothing inevitable about societal change, and only he is ready to let go of specific ideologies to tell a new tale. This can be seen in their uses of history. In “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief,” for example, Turner watches an archeologist pausing over a bone in dirt and imagines a 7th-century poet chiseling the Sumerian epic into stone tablets:
It is an old story now. It was an old story then,
full of gods and beasts and the inevitable
points of no return each age must learn.
…
History is a cloudy mirror made of dirt
and bone and ruin. And love? Loss?
These are the questions we must answer
by war and famine and pestilence, and again
by touch and kiss, because each age must learn
This is the path of the sun’s journey by night.
This is history writ large, and faced with it poetry can do nothing but document the repetitive cycles of love and war that must be lived to be understood. Though it sounds like a grand gesture of defeat, in fact it stubbornly sets in place a narrative of history, the rise and fall of empires, at least as old as the Enlightenment. The individual gets lost in these great historical waves, and that is precisely why in “Ferris Wheel,” the poet vents frustration while trying to account for fallen soldiers. Describing the search for survivors of a helicopter crash, he writes:
The history books will get it wrong.
There will be nothing written
about the island ferris wheel
frozen by rust like a broken clock, or
about the pilot floating unconscious downriver, sparks
fading above as his friend swam toward him
instead of the shore, how both would drown
in this cold unstoppable river.
I sympathize with Turner’s desire to set the record straight, but admire Harsent’s willingness to question the meaning of history itself in the middle section of his collection, “Stelae.” The poems of this section are about (and are printed in the shape of) various tors, kists, and stone circles which dot the countryside of Dartmoor, England. Once assumed to be memorial stones or ritual rocks, tors are in fact nothing but geologic formations caused by weathering. In “Stelae,” Harsent describes eight different sites to sketch out, with impressive playfulness, thoughts on the failure of collective memory and the artificiality of historical imagination. If these stelae are memorials of death, they say very little, except about our refusal to stop making meaning from unmeaning. None are; but even if they once had been, certainly they have lost their status by now, as the poem on Beardown Man admits:
This fine stone
remotely placed
in wild surround-
ings, brings little
back to mind
except, as with all
these, the wind
hanging on gran-
ite edges and
singing its song.
So long as people insist on reading the past for traces of specific truths, we may indeed be doomed to repeat human self-destruction. Harsent’s impulse is not to forget, but to sing a new song for both the past and present by letting go of certain truths phrased in ready-made language. Harsent reminds us that memorials only tell one side of a story. We need not dismiss that side, but we may get along better in the world if we consider others as well.
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