BRIEF EXCHANGE ON POEM “EMPIRES” BY ANTHONY JOSEPH

 Empires

Anthony Joseph

In Malick, my cousins were clearing a drain.
Silt and vine were tangled in the water. 
Muscle in the water like dregs of an abattoir. 
When the river came down it brought panty-wash,
dialysis swill and original bones 
from mansions hid in the northern hills 
The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss. 
But haven’t we built such beautiful homes
on the hillside coming down. 
Empires of one-one brick and pillar post. 
Empires of galvanise and dirt. 
I stood in my English clothes and watched
my cousins make a river flow again, 
and colour come back to the earth.

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R:

The muted expressiveness means that I have to provide the emotional force.  Which just doesn't happen.  

Why "synonymous with loss?"  Why not just "loss?"  Can "galvinize" be a noun?  It's as if the writer doesn't speak English well. 

I thought the lines about the empires were ironic,  but the last three lines aren't.  

So not  a good poem in my view. 

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Me:

“nounDIALECT•WEST INDIAN

noun: galvanise

1. galvanized steel sheeting, as used for roofing or fencing."the rain was beating hard against Miss Orilie's galvanize"

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R:

That I didn't know.

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Me:

“The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss” goes to collective experience of a people’s history as rooted in dispossession and erosion, which is to say “loss”.

After all, a” rubric" denotes “a guide or framework, often associated with structure or evaluation.” So “loss” here isn’t just an event but is the way their history of loss is understood and judged, as though “loss” is the title of their story.

“Synonymous” reinforces this: “loss” is inseparable from that  history—as though woven into it. 

 And there are tangible losses, like land, resources, or lives via imagery of “silt,” “vine,” and “original bones” washed away by the river, evoking dispossession and erosion.

Also intangible losses—culture, identity, or agency—erased or diluted through that history, colonized history to be sure.

Yet there’s explicit juxtaposition, that of loss with building “beautiful homes” and “empires of galvanise and dirt.” So, despite the burden of historical loss, there’s abiding creativity energy of reclamation. Here “galvanise,” which you pooh-poohed, is stirring as it reverberates with material and enspirited resolve.

So the “rubric of loss” encompasses a history of both destructive loss and hope-laden reconstruction. The act of clearing the drain and making “a river flow again” evokes restoring life and meaning amidst ruin.

The speaker’s “English clothes” fuses a detached, inescapable“post-colonial” lens with his cousins’ reclaimant labor, a literal down-to-earth local job of revivification. 

So then “The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss”, as I began, goes to a loss-laden history rooted in what’s been taken, but is also the ground for the hopeful noting of nothing less than survival and creation.

So it’s a good, evocative and moving poem tight in its abiding conceit but expansive in the sweep of its moving resonance, and no less that in its moving last three lines.

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Me:

Sonnet as poetic shell here is poetic “English clothes.”

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R:

It has lots of implied meaning but lacks any immediate expressive force I don't want to puzzle out meanings.  

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Me:

0 to puzzle out.

Its meanings flow like the river the cousins rehabilitate.