Review: Autumn Richardson, Ajar To The Night, Scarlet Imprint, London 2020, ISBN: 9781912316397, 8vo (210 × 140 mm), 88 pp

by Peter Mark Adams

Ajar To The Night comprises three poems. It has to be said from the outset that they possess a rare resonance, power and depth; one that affirms this collection as an important contribution to the longstanding tradition of a spiritualised and esoteric poetry. 

The collection consists of one long piece (“You Came To Me”) and two, much shorter, but in their own way, more arcane pieces (“In All Her Names And Forms”); and the title poem, (“Ajar To The Night”).

“You Came To Me” introduces us to the style and source of inspiration underlying the collection:

I drink from arteries

of occult springs – 

waters sheathed

in loam-darkness 

I drink cold infusions

of vatic minerals and roots 

(p. 8) 

The issue raised in attempting to review such compressed, infolded diction with its intensely realised inscape – the poetic expression of the poet’s vision of an underlying metaphysical reality – is, of course, one of translatability; for the fact remains that such writing is simply not “translateable” in a way consistent with the conventional meaning ascribed to that word; the reviewer must therefore circle the work in the hope that his observations en passant will help to illuminate certain of its occulted and multi-layered meanings. 

Upon opening the work, it is immediately evident that the collection’s typography forms an integral part of its impact. Each page contains just a handful of short lines; but this is no casual modernist idiom at work, nor a reflex imagism; for each line contains that elusive and exclusively poetic quality – the power to enrol the reader’s awareness, to transport one’s imagination and lead it along paths of fresh discovery – navigating the intensive but unseen passageways between lives: 

and soon I’ll slip this skin 

 

the yolk of me, broken, will blend 

into the procession of eternally 

circulating, ever-flickering forms 

(p. 26) 

Beyond the immediate, and glaringly apparent, beauty of its lines, the work’s typographical economy has the effect of inducing a sense of informé; of facilitating a deferral or delay in the emergence of meaning – and hence of our understanding – until, after completing an entire piece, its significance finally emerges, projected upon our innermost awareness like the after-image induced from looking upon an intense source of light.

you come to me now, a torch 

that consumes me 

 

I am a wick of bones 

floating in an oil of blood 

I am mineral-smoke 

(p. 22) 

If I were to attempt to encompass the extended meditation that comprises the first piece – “You Came To Me” – it would be to say that in its vertiginous plunge into its subject matter it perfectly enacts an embodied, rather than metaphysical, ‘Orphism’; a constellation of deep connectivity encompassing the eternal life of the spirit, metempsychosis and an all-embracing animism.

Take your hands and mix a colour 

of an unknown hue 

 

and the bones beneath your skin 

will transmute into another orphaned form 

 

and you will walk

the earth, alone, apart, again. 

(p. 47) 

And yet the reality of the sense of crisis, of pain, that underpins human experience and opens the path towards personal transformation is never far away:

you come to me now

as a wind that assails me 

with fury and with salt

 

to purify the wounds of my 

own making 

(p. 12) 

And through the broad gap torn in the persona we are drawn, ineluctably, into the very sinews and viscera of an experience of the formless.

I’ve entered into a place 

without names 

 

here forms are malleable 

without hooks to halt 

their migrations

 

without hands

to impede metamorphoses 

(p. 44) 

Such is the immersiveness induced by the poet’s engagement, the reader is continuously plunged into the rich textures arising from this encounter; though the formlessness beneath the apparently solid surface of reality nevertheless offers the promise – indeed the opportunity – for renewal and hence redemption: 

This is the land where forms are shed. 

Take up this new earth, this air, this sea 

and construct another skin. 

(p. 49) 

The second poem in the collection – “In All Her Names And Forms” – extends the final movement of the previous piece with its descent into and merger with the rich loam of the earth. It describes a burial – perhaps that of a murder victim who may well have also been a sacrificial victim; but who is also, on another level of significance, both the poet herself and Gaia; whose sufferings merge as one: 

You who slew me, who 

disarticulated my forms 

 

As waves recede

you will come hungering

to the hinted arc of my bones 

(p. 60) 

The tides cover and uncover the form in an almost blissful rhythm, age upon age so that a sense of timelessness is induced.

So long buried I have been 

I have absorbed the eternal patience

of stone 

(p. 54) 

The excavation of this lost life also serves as a metaphor for the excavation of all of our ancestral lives, which may also have been the lives that we, ourselves, once lived; and which continue to overshadow and haunt us today – indifferent, as they are, to the passage of time. The recovery of their distant and distinct emotional charges and their resolution through the archaic practice of honouring the ancestors yields a new and profound access to a greatly enhanced inner harmony.

Harmony awaits those who excavate

the memories 

Retrieve the lost words 

Relight the fires in the temples of the dead 

(p. 61) 

The final movement, the collection’s title piece – “Ajar To The Night” – brings the contemplative movement to its natural conclusion. With the fluidity of potentialities introduced in the second piece still fresh in our minds, we experience existence, in Antonin Artaud’s resonant words, as a “body without organs”, 

without bones we are fluid 

entering earth 

 

without skin we are ajar 

to the night 

(p. 76) 

The openness alluded to with these lines – the state of being “ajar to the night” – is resonant of Otto’s re-capitulation of mystical experience as simultaneously a mysterium tremendum et fascinans as much as it is also the mysterium horrendum. Phenomenologically, the entire process of spiritual growth yields a realisation that is also a contemplative and spiritual path.

go within and that is where we are 

go within and there you’ll be.

(p. 79)

I cannot recommend this volume too highly. Like all of Autumn Richardson’s work, this collection is such that you will want to carry it with you and return, again and again, to its rich sources of inspiration; its oblique – and inexhaustible – dictions; to refresh oneself, once more, with its the rich veins of meaning, and enjoy its cool, effusive vision, for

through a conscious awareness 

of the cycles 

 

we make an art of our lives 

(p. 81) 

As we have come to expect from the publishers, Scarlet Imprint, the book design and preparation of both the limited hardback and soft cover editions manifest the highest publishing standards and are a delight to both hold and read.