New Zealand Poetry Society Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa
The Blind Singer - September 2009 Review
The Blind Singer Chris Price (AUP, 2009) RRP $25.00 ISBN 978 1 86940 433 8
Harvey Molloy
The Blind Singer opens with a dedication which, on second reading—and this is a book that yields many rewards on a second reading—signposts Price’s concerns: “To Robbie, who hears the sound of the sound.” The Blind Singer offers a sustained series of poems all of which explore music, musical instruments, and composition. Price’s experience as a musician and knowledge of music permeates these poems. The book can be compared to listening to a programme of classical music: there is a full orchestra present and the tone is more formal, intellectual, and serious than much contemporary music.
What do we need to do to hear the sound of the sound? We need to be quiet and our acquiescence and silence forms a contract with the poet as composer. A key argument running through these poems is that we need to work at listening. We need to be patient, in order to appreciate how a particular sound falls into the larger arrangement of the composition. The poem ‘The blind singer’ ends with the need for silence in order for the song to be heard. At times, Price makes demands on our concentration and we may be tempted to fidget, as in longer works such as ‘Black Sun’ which is spoken by the persona of Diogenes.
The Blind Singer has three unnamed parts. The book opens with the single poem ‘The blind singer’ which sets the stage for the entire work. The main sequence rangers over diverse musical themes with poems such as ‘Euphonium ode’ (a musical fantasia), ‘four photographs of a piano’, ‘Fled is that music’ and ends with the more intimate poem ‘irreversible’ which touches on tempus fugit, “a mirror we’d rather cover”. Throughout the book, Price weaves the motif of light, finally addressing the nature of light and its relation to sound (both waves—only light can be both particle and wave) and our words for light. ‘The Angel Question: An Essay’ begins with a quotation from Einstein: “Strenuous intellectual work, and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying, yet relentlessly strict angels that lead me through life’s troubles . . .” Einstein’s angels are akin to Price’s and the poem aims to be a rigorous (if not strenuous) intellectual work devoted to trying to work out the knowledge within poetry, or, to put it another way, to work out what knowledge poetry can claim:
Unreliable
but irresistibly present, a song is a stitch
in time, a knot securing now in the hope
tomorrow might be taken care of.
I took The Blind Singer as being a consciously philosophical work concerned with the value of art and poetry in the modern world. If I were to try to convey the book with a single adjective then I’d pick ‘neoclassical.’ Price gives her imagination and intellect free range and has the technical skill to play a virtuoso performance.
