On Camille Ralphs

In the Met Cloisters​ in Manhattan, in a gallery of illuminated manuscripts, are Gothic reliefs of boxwood and bone, some so tiny that magnifying lenses must have been used to carve them. One such boxwood carving, c.1500, is shaped like the letter P. It opens on a hinge, like a locket, and the image inside shows the life of the apostle Philip in six tondos. Apparently it was a talisman of Philip the Handsome (1478-1506), ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands. The identification between the duke and his holy namesake was guaranteed by the magic of a single letter bridging heaven and earth, for which the artist provided ornamental flourishes signifying the glory of creation.

Both the scriptorium and the artisan’s workshop answered to a belief in vocation, from the Latin for ‘calling’. Some poets still take it literally. ‘There is a language green and aeon-deep; Edened,’ Camille Ralphs writes in After You Were, I Am (Faber, £12.99). She wants to take us from ‘Genesis to English’, plumbing the ‘damb grammars of creation’, ‘those dreams of earth fluoressing/from some primal noun’. The book forms a triptych. ‘Book of Common Prayers’ is a reimagining of eighteen sacred texts and prayers from diverse sources: the Bible and the Rig Veda, St Francis of Assisi and George Herbert. ‘Malkin: An Ellegy in 14 Spels’ conjures the voices of the victims of the Pendle witch trials. ‘My Word: From the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’ draws from the writings of the occultist and astrologer to Elizabeth I, who addresses his thoughts to an uncommon lover: ‘In the beginning was you, Word. I new it.’

Like Philip the Handsome, John Dee identified with his biblical counterpart. ‘I am John,’ he says, the John who began his gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ This poetic sequence arose from Ralphs’s ‘mad’ idea to translate the ‘Claves Angelicae’, the prayers that Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley wrote in ‘Enochian’, a so-called angelic language, into English.

For Ralphs, English is the language of the angels. She walks it back to the Tudor era (‘when [it] was finally settling down a bit’), engaging its odd spellings and anachronisms; she walks it forwards, translating old invocations into modern utterances. Her prayers are accessible, exhilarating and funny. ‘After George Herbert’, which opens the collection, takes the poet/priest’s ‘Come, My Way’ – a model of simplicity and sweetness – and updates it:

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.

The old tradition of imitatio depended on transparency, not plagiarism; homage, not parody. Herbert’s ‘way’ becomes Ralphs’s madcap ‘motorway’, the punning ‘higher race’ both the seraphim and orbiting celestial bodies; the ‘cable cars’ both vehicles whisked through the air and the messages sent through occult cablegram. Giddy and short as it is (only three quatrains) the language delivers on the promise of poetry – real exaltation – before we even turn a page.

Another simple prayer, by Mechthild of Magdeburg (‘O burning mountain, O chosen sun,/O perfect moon’), is transformed into:

O gush of bushfire, O quintuple denim sea, sun pressing like a button on us all,
O moon mirabilis, unmirrorable mirrorball, O, you, most bottomless of wholes

Here alliteration – that scourge of children’s verse – is returned to its original incantatory purpose: the anagrammatic ‘mirabilis/unmirrorable/mirrorball’ enacts the mirror as it utters it. And then the pun on ‘bottomless hole’ conjures the Metaphysicals, who loved the verbal gymnastics that made planispheres collapse and compasses grow to cosmic heights. Similarly, in her détournement of Ecclesiastes, Ralphs evokes reading glasses as defamiliarised vanitas: ‘a time to wonder if the thing behind your eyes is what you see with, or the thing in front of them’. There is also ‘a time to look a lobster in the long, stemmed eyes then choose it, this one, to be boiled alive and a time to rhyme “humanity” with “manatee”’. (The rising temperature of the manatees’ waters connects them to the lobsters and, via the rhyme, to us.)

‘Book of Common Prayers’ is the impish sequence; the next two will guide us through the demonic and the angelic modes. Notes are provided. The danger with a notes section as engrossing as Ralphs’s is that it might upstage the poetry. The historical sketches of the characters in the Pendle witch trials, the synopses of Dee’s travels in Poland and Bohemia, correspond to and flesh out the soliloquies – soliloquies that make use of nonce spellings and anachronistic grammar. ‘Spelling’ and ‘grammar’ of course retain their double meanings: to spell a word and to cast a spell; a grammar book and a glamour book. Ralphs even has a separate ‘Note on Spelling’ in which she outlines the advantages of unorthodoxy: ‘semantic bridging’, ‘visual onomatopoeia’, ‘intensification’ and ‘shock’. While defamiliarising, it also individuates the speakers, draws us into their world, their eeriness: ‘Every word for world is singular yet pleural.’ It makes for a series of linguistic charms and seizures, knots of language that raise the hairs on your neck, as in the scene where Dee arrives at the castle of Rudolf II in Prague and is shown a ‘wunder-kabinet –/nouns piled/like Latine paradimes or debt,/as plurall as the dead’:

or an abbacus of all
that fluttred, swam, crawld,

untill the nows came home:
immemoreal coral
from nacreous achres of sea;
dead laurels;
currensies

Nuclear fusions, as that between ‘immemorial’ and ‘real’ and perhaps ‘marmoreal’, release packets of verbal energy. A spelling like ‘currensies’ rouses us from habituation and makes us more receptive to dream associations – the ‘currents’ in the ‘seas’, for instance, and their link with money.

Ralphs’s treatment of English as material evidence of history – not excluding its weirdness, its terrors – is easily traced to the influence of Geoffrey Hill (whom she quotes, in an epigraph, on the mightiness of the OED). But I was also reminded of James Merrill, who devoted decades to writing The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), an epic poem that used the Ouija board to commune with the dead, with gods, archangels and a peacock. (He so idolised the alphabet as cosmic manifold that he wrote the first section of his epic as an abecedarian.) ‘All is translation,’ he wrote. ‘My characters, this motley alphabet.’ In Ralphs’s wordplay, I heard the puns and figura etymologica that Merrill revelled in: ‘Among us devvils, no/infinitiv intails the infinite.’ The repeated Vs manifest the cloven.

After You Were, I Am was at least a decade in the making, and the strength of the poetry is a measure of the crisis it confronts. Given complete freedom, a tabula rasa, how does a poet begin? And even more urgently: from whom or from what does a poet derive their authority? It takes an unusually serious person to ask such questions nowadays. The rules are up for grabs; in fact, no special authority is needed. The favoured word is ‘permission’, and we all de facto have it. Ralphs turned to Auden, who sketched his ideal ‘daydream College for Bards’ in an essay collected in The Dyer’s Hand (1962). There were five directives, including learning ‘at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages’; ‘thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.’

Daydream College for Bards is the title of a collection Ralphs published with Guillemot Press last year, bringing together experiments with imitation and translation that follow Auden’s instructions. Anyone acquainted with the canonical anthologies of English poetry knows that the modern tradition – beginning with Chaucer and Wyatt, and resubscribed by Pound and Eliot – was forged almost entirely from translation of one sort or another; nearly every form we have is a borrowed form. One may or may not know that Milton translated his poems into Latin and back again, or that the first nine poems in Robert Frost’s first book correspond to the first nine cantos of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Rather than consolidate such knowledge and put it into practice, our institutionalised creative writing programmes seem to have buried it as radioactive waste. Mnemosyne wept.

But while the exercises of Daydream College for Bards surely contributed to Ralphs’s fluency, something else must account for the power behind her words. After You Were, I Am builds towards it step by step as the triptych unfolds: first the stylish translations and imitations of canonical prayers, with their inflections of humour and modern living; next the closet drama of the Pendle witch trials, with Ralphs’s empathetic ventriloquism of these isolated, beleaguered souls in agony; and finally the fully imagined monologues of Dee, a figure who is neither victim nor moral exemplar as he navigates the treacherous worlds of Tudor England and the Holy Roman Empire, addressing his constant companion, the holy ‘Word’. Ralphs’s talent for subsuming her ego in her subjects may have something to do with her Catholic upbringing, her theological studies or pure instinct. Whichever it is, it gives her a gravitas few think to look for anymore.

Last spring, flicking through a glossy trade magazine for MFA programmes, I came across an interview with a recent winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize who proclaimed that ‘as a process, writing is like pooping.’ What prestige or authority can this once venerable prize, and its publishing arm, retain in the face of sheer buffoonery? I do know that many of us would welcome instead the wit of Mandelstam, who wrote: ‘They say the cause of revolution is hunger in the interplanetary spaces. One has to sow wheat in the ether.’ Mandelstam also had this to say, which Ralphs has fully absorbed: ‘What is true of a single poet is true of all. There’s no point forming schools of any kind. There’s no point inventing one’s own poetics.’