Blue: Derek Jarman Poems, The

by Keith Garebian

In The Derek Jarman Poems, Keith Garebian, himself an insatiable cineaste, has masterfully spliced together an engaging book-length portrait of a filmmaker, visual artist, poet, sexual rebel, and gardener who double-dared the conventions of art, desire, and filmmaking. Derek Jarman's final film, Blue, is a work without visuals except International Klein Blue, and it provides Garebian with an inspired backdrop against which he explores, in the book's poignant closing section, the filmmaker's descent into illness-induced blindness, charting his physical and emotional decline while also building towards a kind of defiant holy death equal to the passions of Jarman's most sacred Caravaggio, St. Sebastian, and Jesus Christ. In this life-affirming, cinematic, at turns randy and elegiac verse-biography, Keith Garebian celebrates one of the world's truly unforgettable and rebellious spirits.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2008

About the author

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), and the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003).

Reviews

[Charlotte Audifax Gauthier]

ça m'a donné envie de voir le film

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We are all accomplices in the dream world of the soul."

- Derek Jarman, Kicking the Prick

I
This poem scouting a landscape of death
a poem with a silence at its heart
as deep a the cobalt sea or the roots of night.
No more a dream of parks dreaming
of Paradise, elegant Sodoms in the garden of England -
naked guardsmen running through bushes
and middle-aged men rushing to the arms
of vacant'eyed boys.
The shingle going nowhere, the mind at rest,
knocked still with illness.

II
The sea at Dungeness - a map of contours
written on water. Above a carpet of violets
a barren pear tree refusing to die.
Flowers bound your feet in childhood,
Edwardian shrubberies shimmering
in a grandmother's garden. Rabbit-clipped
topiaries. Nature discovered - its seeds
scattered far and wide.

III
Poppies grow in The Last of England,
woven in wreaths
a binding of heroes and sweet forgetfulness.
Geraniums on your London balcony
in true scarlet. A colour for Caravaggio's antique silk,
rare and cause for a lament, a requiem
for film, sex, and disease.

IV
"Don't be such a pansy, Derek," your father laughed,
oblivious to the Saturnine plant, virgin white
till Cupid's arrow made velvet rainbows of it.
Pansy for heart's ease, tickle your fancy,
love-in-idleness of midsummer dreams.
You gardened it, luxuriating in the Amen
beyond Adam's prayer.

V
A trinity of flowers. Pansies for Venus;
violets, the boy's herb for Demeter in Athens;
and wallflowers the scent of clove
singing with troubadours from Rome to Germany

V
A trinity of flowers. Pansies for Venus;
violets, the boy's herb for Demeter in Athens;
and wallflowers the scent of clove
singing with troubadours from Rome to Germany.
They tell me of your life in episodes,
its diggings and plantings of dreams:
long Saturday afternoons on the other side
of the garden, you and your first boy
waist-deep in the sweet earth,
licking each other's feet.

VI
You told of pain - betrayals,
admonitions, millennia of Christian hatred,
a hurtful God to kill childhood
in bells and sermons, threats of hell fire,
the sacred warfare of a weird tribe.
You vowed rebellion - shedding of the veil
of matrimony, fucking of the groom,
and wiping up with the Saviour's shroud.

VII
Apollo stripped blue-eyed Hyacinth,
rubbing their bodies with olive oil.
Caesar played the soldier's moll,
Alexander screwed Hyphaestion.
One emperor was a temple whore,
another's boyfriend drowned in the Nile.
Every time you read ancient history,
you saw the heart of a dangerous love.

VIII
Myths with new celluloid signs:
Wittgenstein's "philosophies of silence"
amid "extreme austerity,"
a Latin martyrdom of Sebastion
flying like an arrow to the sun;
and Caravaggio, the unrepentant sodomite.
All civilization a queer history:
Et in Arcasia ego
as sands run through the fingers

IX
You with a sprig of lavender
can see ghosts, travel to the dead.
Words are memorials echoing
long silences and low wounded moanings.
Words are shadows across the shadows,
partners for the memory.

X
More losses than the Great War
all because you made not love but war.
Paradise perverted by a virus
bringing amnesia, the first signs of madness.

XI
A blizzard of pills -
blinds drawn against the light.
So colours disperse,
the prism shattered,
but blue remains like a hard diamond.
The blue tattoos of boys in Venice,
the blue of sad-eyed lethargy,
indigo night on gypsy faces
and a sapphire sea.
Blue was the colour of your skin
at the end of your garden,
but there was sweetness too.

- The Death of Derek Jarman, pg. 11-13

* * *

Ancient Rome would have married you
to a glamorous boy, bu England,
Cromwell scowling at its heart,
mows you down, thinning
out your kind, forbidding
you to fall in love.
So you are not loved,
reeking of lust and shame
at the abyss of a long descent.

- So You Are Not Loved, pg. 28

* * *

Jarman dreaming Michelangelo Merisi
Morigius Morigi Marisi Moriggia.
Something missing.
A body whose death no one witnesses.
Optics of intimacy. Minute
particulars of being.
Drop of water on a leaf.
Bare skin causing delirium.
Rapier hanging at the hip dangerously.
Tennis on a sultry day.
Horse, froth at the mouth.

You both lived well and badly.
Died badly - as well
and as badly as you
both lived.

- Caravaggio, i. Prologue, pg. 46

* * *

In the morning bed,
imprints of your bodies:
S of HB's curved back
pillows restless with memory.
Dawn whispers kisses knowing
only the body's geography.
When you reach for your lover,
he reaches for horizons
the colour of flesh.
You want the sunlight
on bowls of morning fruit,
its quiet hunger
accompanying his want.
You know the beauty
of the hand turned to him
small gesture of seduction
where love comes from sleeping
waters surging
out of his heart.

- In the Morning Bed, pg. 74

* * *

The moon is white bone floating in black sky
everywhere star-skulls and their secret longings.
You make your way in the dark, squinting at the moon
your ruined eyes learning to read the shadows
pale spills of white spread across the room.
You fear the night going solid
with nothing for you to see
moon and bone, sky and skulls
buried in your brain.
Soon you will fall into a pool of questions
about an inner life as much in pain
as your sight, which once knew colours
vividly before going cold. Your face is old:
photograph of the future in a dark room.

- Photograph of the Future, pg. 90

* * *

You had your way: your room
was blue, a cool chamber
with blue curtains
for summoning the boy
with blue eyes, calling
"O Blue arise, come
for the gems in my blue blood."
You crossed the blue mountains,
the sunlight blinding you
with happiness, fathomed
with bliss.
Blue wrapped around you, from sky
to your body's blue frost.
Your illness was blue,
blue-black with affliction,
cells singing catastrophically
and the blues, your life
a no-man's land of blue
flowers in fading light.

- Blue, pg. 96

[Cobertizo · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Brillante, espléndido, pintado, amanerado,
vívido, ostentoso, temerario,
encendido, refulgente, estridente, estruendoso,
grita, aúlla, marcha, orgullo
delicado, combina, profundo y sombrío,
pastel, sobrio, apagado y sin brillo,
constante, colorido, cromático,
abigarrado y prismático,
caleidoscópico, variegado,
tatuado, teñido, iluminado,
embadurnado y velado, baño y tinte,
color en clave alta, mentira de color."

[Charlotte Kimmel · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Lost in the warmth
Of the blue heat haze
Singing the blues
Quiet and slowly
Blue of my heart
Blue of my dreams
Slow blue love
Of delphinium days“