Introduction

Sheetlight, accompanied by a CD of poetry and music, is not a work of understatement. Instead it is driven by a relentless enthusiasm in the full sense of the word - as Greek entheos, meaning 'God within'. I mean enthusiasm for creativity, for creation and above all for the language. Intrinsically exuberant, it is testing to read. Somewhere between magic spell and outcry, an intellectual landscape (and interior) unfolds through layers of invocation and incantation. The 13 sections flow with an impetus that is musical. The illustrations go with the "enchanted dialectics" and range from the statues of Easter Island to magical theatrical images reminiscent of Chagall. Some could complain that there are too many abstract words in the text, but I believe that the velocity (or current) of the writing carries us along nonetheless.

At times it is almost overwhelming, like a biological dream. As a whole it is what David Jones called 'things built up' ('Anathemata'). The overall effect is one of a 'scattered metaphysical revelation' that is entirely absorbing, as if a prophetic Blake were leading us all into a technological Exodus. It is Langland's dream-poem become psychedelic. One is reminded of Nietzsche's 'excess', and of Pound, Ginsberg and Patti Smith (her wounds), as we are taken through the "shattered coal" into the "interior dreams of crested inlaid / visions". There is great energy here. It has something unaccountable, something visionary, like rage, like rhapsody, or rapture. Tim Fletcher's poem is scored through with power, cosmology. We can feel the anger at the 'bankruptcy' of our times, the 'catastrophe' and the 'cool agony', the 'violation' and the 'acidic distress'. The poem expresses the barbarism of the day and the insanities - moral, chemical and viral. An exciting variety of layout informs the rhythms of the text. The language is sometimes abrasive, challenging, though we are periodically refreshed by a few lines of something more lyrical:

iron body of yucatan sun

melts to waxen white heat

boiling waters of Caribbean blue.

 

The section called 'Numen' has many lines of surprise (and beauty) which linger in the memory:

fabled wolf stalks metallic perimeter

(and)
mist filters over cutting horn

real virtuality of Rousseau's talking leaves.

The whole poem is numinous, prophetic, fused with the alchemical and the magical, and constantly mutating like a biology of vision. I believe it 'achieves its aim' as the work of a contemporary visionary. It is apocalyptic, and shakes us up with its energy, though it is far from being depressing. There are arcane, hermetic passages. But through everything Tim Fletcher draws us into a "piercing" dawn of the world, as 'we pry for signs / under monstrosities inhabiting wondrous grace and ironic core of aesthetic nerve'. It is all an 'extravagant accomplishment' and one that will repay many more readings. The last section is a 'Celebration', 'your body a voluted tornado / wide ravenous umbilical / filled with / eucharist of fired stream / body burnt into wild incense'.

A.A. Marcoff Tears in the Fence No 46