50 contemporary poetry
to things’ (p. 25 ). This poem can be read as an intersection of dis-
courses, a kind of ‘unthreading’ of the lyric ‘I’. The complexity of
subjectivity for Palmer is prevalent in the fi nal lines: ‘Don’t look
through an eye / thinking to be seen / Take nothing as yours’ (p.
25 ). These lines read as a commentary on the Orpheus and Eurydice
myth; Orpheus of course does look back desiring recognition. But
perhaps most alluring is reading the poem as an active process
of negotiating memories as opposed to directly expressing them.
The poem’s linguistic instability foregrounds the complex balanc-
ing act between recovery and enquiry which the poem depends
upon.
Palmer’s volume The Promises of Glass ( 2000 ) features a series
of eighteen autobiographical ‘portraits’.^48 The earlier quest for a
narrative is orchestrated strategically in this opening sequence as
a theatricalisation of carnivalesque and philosophical fi gures. On
one level we can read this volume in tandem with the prose journal
The Danish Notebook ( 1999 ), which was written from a request
‘to connect the dots’ in his work.^49 Initially the poem reads as a
stand-up routine commenting on a body of work, even twisting the
rhetoric of the journal interview. The speaker prepares for the per-
formance: ‘as I was putting on my face: / base, blusher, mascara,
ultra high-gloss lip enamel’ (p. 17 ). In a mock confessional we are
also told ‘Dear Phil, What a hellish season it’s been. For a time
I thought I was another’ (p. 18 ). Read as a ludic chronology of
Palmer’s work, the opening presents the poet as celebrity, the
modulation of the extract is camp but not darkly ironic.
In ‘If Not, Not’, one of the more intensely ‘lyrical’ poems in
The Promises of Glass, an anxious dialogue is enacted and rewritten
within other possible stories, intentions and sensations. The poem
circles its subject, a departure or romantic loss, in order to recre-
ate the idealised narrative which perhaps never existed: ‘They tell
each other stories, / lies composed of dreams’ (p. 61 ). In attempt-
ing to recover a past that was never present intervening sensations
- an infl ection of colour or lighting – ‘rust, chrome, yellow, coral
/ chemical green’ (p. 61 ) become compositional methods that
momentarily frame and even divert the reminiscence. ‘If Not, Not’
is wonderfully self-cancelling, erasing an emergent conversation
through a further unravelling of the story at each temporal plateau