Poem of the week: Conjuration by Pauline Stainer

Compressing the great myths of resurrection into vignettes, questions of life and death are here reanimated in tangible form
Orpheus and Euridice
Myth comes alive … Italian shadow theatre company Controluce, perform Canto A Orfeo, based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, at the Visions festival in Brighton. Photograph: Roger Bamber

Tiger Facing the Mist, Pauline Stainer's latest Bloodaxe collection, has two epigraphs. The first is by the Suffolk naturalist Mark Cocker: "Margins are best." The second is from the 17th-century Welsh philosopher and writer on Natural Magic, Thomas Vaughan: "But her face, like that of the Annuntiata, expects the Pencill of an Angell." Both quotations are generally apt for a poetry of liminal and transformative states, and they shed light on this week's poem, "Conjuration".

Like a breviary, the poem proceeds by summaries. Big mythic narratives are condensed into vignettes. The first character we meet is Blodeuwedd, from that extraordinary compendium of Welsh legends, The Mabinogion. Her difficult, violent story has fascinated numerous writers, among them the novelist Alan Garner, who, in The Owl Service, turned the tale into a modern parable about the potency of imagination.

In "Conjuration", Blodeuwedd ("flower-face" in English) is unique among the characters. In the original story, she was created by wizards from "the flowers of the oak and the broom and the meadowsweet" to become a human wife for Lleu Llaw Gyffes. As punishment for her subsequent infidelity and the murder of Lleu, she was transformed into an owl. Stainer takes only a single, slim strand of the story, and has Blodeuwedd "conjured" simply from "tapers of meadowsweet". The actual plant has misty-looking white flowers arranged in little pinnacles: they seem more wand-like and candle-lit in the poem's word, "tapers".

Mirroring the syntax of the first couplet ("Men conjured Blodeuwedd…") the second tells us, more cryptically, that "Orpheus evoked Eurydice/ on the body of the lyre." Does Eurydice emerge from the musical instrument itself, or is her existence only within the music conjured there? Since she's merely "evoked", perhaps she's an idea or memory at this point, rather than a real girl.

In the third stanza, the tense shifts to the present. Astronomers still "tracking Pluto", the former ninth planet, are waylaid by the force of imagination or myth, when, instead, they "see Persephone", the Queen of the Underworld, "with mourning jet/ at the opiate of her throat." Extinguishing every other sight, the blackness of the jet and the whiteness of the throat seem to meet in the word "opiate", suggesting both narcotic blackout and deathlike whiteness. Perhaps, too, the rock and ice of a mysterious distant planet or asteroid are being conjured.

It was, of course, Persephone who permitted Eurydice's release from the Underworld, being so moved by Orpheus and his pleas for his wife's restoration. But whereas Persephone herself was reborn each year, for Eurydice the process was stalled. She returned to the Underworld, and to Orpheus's distraught imagination.

In the next stanza, the rustling, crackling sounds ("Alcestis", "cist-grave", "sugars") suggest the strange stirrings of a body in the process of returning to life. The speaker is clear that "Alcestis wakes" and, although a question-mark is hung over Lazarus, it seems a largely rhetorical question-mark.

If a theme of the poem might have been how men imagine women and give life to them or withdraw it, the introduction of Lazarus completes a move away from any hint of gender politics to resurrection. "Voltage" like "sugars" implies energy, the natural forces that are essential to life, an alchemy no longer magical but literal.

The poem ends on a mysterious question: To what voltage// will the five wits lodge/ in their living dead?" Those five wits take a possessive pronoun, "their", as if they were the body's owners. How many volts would be needed to light up the bodily house? Will the voltage finally fall short, and fail to galvanise all the wits needed for life? Would belonging to such an in-between state necessarily be undesirable?

Stainer inflects stock, horror-movie images – the opened grave, the being who is neither alive nor dead – with metaphysical seriousness. The poem's questions reflect those preoccupying the earliest scientists, when boundaries between the exploratory disciplines and religion were porous. Resemblances are traced between different objects and materials, like the lyre with its sound box and the box-shaped cist-grave, like human bodies and heavenly bodies. Robust verbs such as "work" and "tracking" keep the poem firmly anchored in the tangible. The characters' names possess an even tougher, denser quality. But what happens ultimately to these characters is a narrative left in the margins of the poem, and in the spaces between the words, the mostly unpunctuated line-endings and the packed, slender couplets themselves.


Men conjured Blodeuwedd
from tapers of meadowsweet

Orpheus evoked Eurydice
on the body of the lyre

astronomers, tracking Pluto,
see Persephone

with mourning-jet
at the opiate of her throat

Alcestis wakes – such sugars
work the cist-grave

and Lazarus?
To what voltage

will the five wits lodge
in their living dead?

Today's best video