The Scream: Sean Bonney’s Our death

Photo: Sean Bonney. Collage: C Altgård / Opulens.

POETRY. Sean Bonney’s poems do, in the end, express a great belief in poetry. In one poem, Bonney contemplates ‘loneliness’, an effect that grows in power to encompass ‘Syria’ and ‘Templehof’, an effect that ‘destroys private property’, says Johannes Göransson in this essay.

The scream. It’s a motif I keep coming back to when reading UK poet Sean Bonney’s brilliant final collection, Our Death. Throughout the book, a scream pierces the text, the city, the capitalism. This might seem paradoxical because the book is not very shouty. It’s often reflective, pared-down – austere, even. Yet it keeps coming back to the act of the scream: ‘I think of my friends as blackbirds/screeching from rooftops/murdered by rising rents.’ Or: ‘My coffee cups and typewriter I leave to, I dunno, whoever can scream the loudest.’ Or, more importantly: ‘I take that scream to contain all that is meaningful in the word communism.’ Or perhaps most hauntingly, when he recollects an early dream – probably his first – about a quarry where there’s a mouth in the wall, and that mouth begins to ‘make a low moan’, a moan which continues to build in intensity until it becomes ‘a siren’s shriek’.

This scream makes me think of a classic quote from 20-century modernism: Theodor Adorno’s assertion that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Our Death is a ‘barbaric’ collection of poetry. To begin with, it constantly interrupts itself with vulgarity and violence, as if both to literalise the violence of capitalism and to destroy the beauty of the poems. We repeatedly get lines like ‘I boot your face in over and over’ and ‘pack up your roses, asshole, get out’. Swedish readers may think of Johan Jönson’s 1000-page opuses to the obscenity of having a body in late capitalism.

Like Jönson, Bonney’s poems do, in the end, express a great belief in poetry. In one poem, Bonney contemplates ‘loneliness’, an effect that grows in power to encompass ‘Syria’ and ‘Templehof’, an effect that ‘destroys private property’. And in the end, it too ‘is screaming is smashing your windows with boots and chains/its ruined hands’ loneliness a sharpened axe.’ The book seems to stage a struggle for the very existence of poetry. In essence, it becomes violence, a scream, to overthrow. But then it becomes poetry again. There is a sense of a tug of war between violence and poetry. Poetry is a loneliness, but it is also a scream, communism and an almost messianic violence.

But the scream is barbaric in another, more specific sense: barbaric originally means foreign. And the scream in Bonney’s book has much to do with the sense of a foreign language. Over and over, Bonney’s speaker contemplates foreign sounds in his mouth: ‘A kind of high metallic screech. Unpronounceable. Inaudible.’ Or:

“For lack of anything better to do, I sit here and try to conjure up some kind of meaning from the scars that have been left there. I sit there in the dark and read your poetry. Or rather, I reconstruct from memory what translations of it exist. I stare at the traces of an alphabet I don’t understand. I think that in the gulf that separates your poetry from mine I might be able to find the beginnings of a counterlight to see by, or a way of pronouncing the language needed to help undermine the fascist tinnitus that all of our sensory networks have become.”

In this poem, addressed to Greek poet Katerina Gogou becomes a ‘scream’ not so much in loudness but in its foreignness, a foreignness that is also equated with a ‘scar.’ He takes a foreign, ‘unpronounceable’ entity into his mouth. And that is the scream of poetry. Almost a reverse scream, reverse exclamation, a language that goes back in the mouth, becomes unpronounceable.

I am here reminded of a very different writer, Anne Carson. In her essay ‘Cassandra Float Can’, Carson discusses the art of ‘prophecy’ as an art that creates a ‘rip in spacetime’. ‘What is it like to be a prophet?’ Carson asks. ‘Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there.’

Bonney the prophet: throughout Our Death, wherever he goes, he’s already there.

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