Quennets

by Philip Terry

In Quennets Philip Terry develops a sonnet-like form invented by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau. Across three sequences, the 'quennet' is reworked and refigured in response to three perimeter landscapes. The first sequence, 'Elementary Estuaries', is inspired by a series of walks along the Essex estuary, the poems' appearance on the page suggesting the landscape's expansive estuarine vistas, its pink sail lofts and windswept gorse, beach huts and distant steeples. In the second sequence, written after a series of walks around the Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, the form changes to reflect the physical, almost bodily tension of the wall as an architectural and social obstruction. The final sequence, 'Waterlog', retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, and here the quennet's newly elongated shape and ragged margin evoke the region's eroding coastline, its deserted piers and power stations, electric fences and waterlogged fields. Terry's project is bold in scope, his poems subtle in effect, a mix of sign and song, concrete and lyric, Oulipo and psychogeography. It is a work about boundaries, political, social, and natural, and about the walk as a critical apparatus through which these fields are shown to connect.

Genres: Poetry

162 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unusual and nimble on the one hand, more than a bit static on the other. The quennet or quenette form is static in nature, except for the refrains which seem, in contrast to the adjective-noun phrases of the other stanzas, positively in flight. Those refrains, in fact, constitute a five-star collection, or very close to one. But the plod of the remaining stanzas becomes almost deadly. Better read in bits than at a swoop. Sharply observed throughout, even in the pile-up of phrases. And admirable for not being yet another solipsistic massage of the author and his id.