The following review was printed in Issue 4 of The New Cambridge Chapbook Review, available in full here.
Theses on Robin’s Book
Sperm Coffin, by Robin Purves (ピンクの髪の庭 chickenshit パンツプレス, 2025)
1. In circles of poetical production with which I take it we’re all familiar, we have lived for a long time under the sign of what Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves characterised, way back in 2007, as ‘complicity’, namely, a lyric practice that maintains our ‘identities are dependent for their making and sustenance on the catastrophic exploitation of the unfortunate inhabitants of other places’. We are used, by now, to the exhaustion of atrocity at home and abroad and to the limits of complicit unfolding of our selves as sovereign subjects, as gendered pronouns, as racialised entities, as national identities, as corpses in waiting, as buckets of blood and desiring fuckwits, and we are used to these things because for the last quarter of a century we have felt compelled to make gifts of our loneliness and our despair and our feelings of appalling futility, and these gifts have been terribly and beautifully sustaining, and made us better for each other and worse for the world that continues to spiral down its putrid wormhole, and so in turn all the better for each other again. We are familiar with these things. We are as familiar with the general wormhole as we are with the worms of our own doubt and indecision, our anxiety and our depression, our mental and physical pain and our indescribable losses, which we nevertheless continue balefully to describe, to invent, and to circumvent, through the practice of lyric gifts that make utopia look like Epping, and redemption like a cop’s fist. Here we are: we are ready to begin.
2. The lowest common denominator of broadcast moral outrage, which nevertheless fades as quickly as the rotation of the news cycle, is the dead baby. The dead baby is absolute: it brooks no contextualisation or historicization, which is why it is such potent fuel for atrocity propaganda. In the dead baby the world is folded into a seething null point of moral depravity: there is nothing to see here except evil itself, the end of life as the practice of inherent nihilism, a practice that is sinful because it destroys the sacred innocence of futurity itself, of the reproduction of life, the family, its property and inheritance — all the elements of state building that the state must protect ideologically, inversely proportional to the extent to which the state protects actual lives, whether infant or upsettingly grown-up. Israel’s sublime piece of atrocity propaganda known as the forty beheaded babies was intended to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Palestinian ‘resistance’ is a murderous campaign of antisemitic terror that seeks to eradicate the possibility of a future for the Israeli state, even as Israel continues to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank through a campaign of targeted destruction specifically formulated to eradicate the reproduction of resistance to genocide by killing babies. Western observers, meanwhile, are allocated a modicum of acceptable sympathy for the Palestinians when Palestinian babies are killed (says the Hamas-run health ministry), a sympathy safe in the knowledge that such babies have not yet grown up into resistance fighters.
3. The dead baby is life hypostatised in the figure of its universal reproduction at the expense of its actual flourishing.
4. Poetry about the current round of Israeli genocidal violence tends to fall into one of two camps. The first is pious lamentation for the dead coupled with excoriation of the occupation and its enablers in Europe and the US. The second is a fury that borders on the nihilistic but ensures that a residuum of optative desire or comradely promise escapes the void of incandescence to insure the reader against its most blinding desperations. There are stronger and weaker versions of each of these basic techniques, yet in their insistence that we know the truth about what is going on, both struggle to get beyond what it is we already know and what it is we are simply writing about. The struggle itself — the how of any given attempt at a poetical treatment — is the latent content of these poetries and the mode by which they bear witness: how is it possible to write about anything else, given the onslaught of livestreamed atrocity beamed directly into our third eye; how is it possible to maintain a critique of our complicity in the suffering perpetuated by the state to which we are subject, funded by our hard-earned taxes, when critique itself feels as inadequate as a 24-hour hunger strike, which at least has the good grace to wear its spectacular privilege on its own livestreamed sleeve; how, the old lamentation goes, how.
5. The form of intertextuality known colloquially — rather than technically — as détournement offers one way into and out of the problem posed above. Grab a line from the canon, smack it around a bit, turn it upside down, shake out all its pocket money, then stand it back on its feet and dare it to mean something else. Poets do this because it confirms our historicity in the same breath as proposing the kind of radical transvaluation of values only a line break and a couple of dactyls can conjure. A good détournement creates an intra-literary stale reference manipulation hack, writing over the world-code of canonical investment by backpropagating a future we didn’t have but might’ve guessed by now, turning life inside out so that we’re living in it. A good détournement turns the how of how to continue into a vortex of continuation, making a model not of blind contingency but of historically contingent otherness. What was deeply held or truly felt in the détourned original carries all its affective modality into the détournement, whilst the détourned dares the original to keep mattering by rubbing its face in the dirt. What can we make possible in the face of the boring new catastrophes that sanction our exhaustion? Where are the poems that won’t just keep us going but will tip us over the edge of where we are into the edgeless plain of where we weren’t in the first place? What does it feel like to be alive when our basic material is unaliveness?
6. Robin Purves’s poem Sperm Coffin begins, after its initial invocation, with a détournement of J.H. Prynne’s poem ‘The Holy City’ and proceeds throughout to make pointed reference to Prynne’s poem, as well as to William Blake’s Jerusalem and Milton. Prynne’s poem is a visionary celebration of divinity in the basically diurnal. Associating an Olsonian ontology of presence, minus any ‘mystic moment’ (allegedly), with the demotic and specifically sensual experience of the world as a respiratory gestalt — the wind as the breath of love, ‘quite warm on the sides / of the face’ — it postulates a Wordsworthian interface of body and world as the antidote to the ruse of alienation. Just being there, Dasein-like, walking ‘over the rough grass—all of this / is that we do, quite within acceptance [...] love is / when, how & / because we do: you / could call it Ierusalem or feel it / as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.’ Early Prynne sticks more in the craw the more its prosodical Olsonisms (‘sides / of the face’) stick out of its hedge-betting utopianism. You could call it Jerusalem, as in, it doesn’t matter what you call it (wink wink) so you might as well call it Jerusalem, or, no, actually do call it Jerusalem, because that’s obviously the most appropriate name for it, notwithstanding its manifest imperialist jingoism, just fuck all that for the moment.
7. ‘Roadkill and history’, writes Purves, ‘all the other words are under these ones and showers of sand and dust’. Then he writes:
History show
places Masjid Al-Aqsa mosque
complex the cornice of limestone the
square where the prophet ascended
first qibla and from there
to the martyrs’ brigade an
exterminating angle leads
to our tearing up
call it Al Quds or feel it
when we run on the pulverised
tile of all that
we do it and it’s complete
ly acceptable [...]
If we are indeed what we do, the terms of which are baked in to the détourned objet petit a, then what we are is state sanctioned ethnic cleansing, and what we are in this sense is completely acceptable, malgré international law (ha ha), since that is what history shows us. The lines compress a rehearsal of the Western reaction to 7 October 2023 into a grimly sarcastic conflation of Islamic origins, spectacular atrocity, and moral outrage (‘our tearing up’). All that Jerusalem has meant consists in the justification of utopia as imperial wish-fulfilment. What does it mean to ‘call it Al Quds’? There is a contrarian nihilism to the line that says fuck you, all you get is partisan perspectivism dressed up as solidarity. Later on in the same section, ‘you / call it Al Quds but don’t / feel it’, as if the thrill of throwing it back in their faces has already worn off. But all that Al Quds would mean or feel doesn’t just switch the polarity of ethical nominalism by exchanging one name for another; it absorbs from the détourned object its useless utopian insistence, then yeets it over the perimeter fence. The quiet imperative flaunts the dumb certitude of historical perspective itself. Call it Al Quds names the broken promise of what used to be called reconciliation in the teeth of its pulverisation. What I am trying to describe is what aches in the line despite its own sardonic plot armour. I think Purves repeats it three pages later because that ache is addictive, it matches the simplest and most obvious and easy thing we do all the time, even quite jauntily, despite the ruse of poetical uselessness, which is to steal their language and sell it back to them, one metaphor at a time. The poem starts like this because this is how poetry begins: by revaluing the terms of our inherited disgrace.
8. Sperm Coffin is as deadpan as it is pathetically beautiful. The positive détournement described above is mirrored by the negative détournements of Blake that crop up at the end of part two. Purves tells you the apocalypse gently, like a mother putting a baby to bed: ‘The mosques destroyed. So shall we fold the world in two: a pillar of fire by day and a pillar of fire by night. One girl was covered in bloody books; the second fell into my garden. All that can be annihilated will be annihilated in streams of blood and clouds of gore and view the human harvest. The ovens are prepar’d, the wagons ready. Ok, we’re good to go; now we will fold up the world’. The nihilism is cool and steady, the Blakean vision now properly appalling. The ovens in Blake are to feed the world, Live Aid style; Purves splices them back into focus with the genocidal irony they were always waiting to radiate. The pillars that guide ‘Israel in her Tents’ are in Jerusalem ‘of a Cloud by day’ and ‘of fire by night’, but under current circumstances the diurnal must be flushed with fire twenty-four hours a day. The Blakean twist points in Sperm Coffin are somewhat overdetermined: open Jerusalem or Milton at random and you’re likely to find some eminently collage-ready object, some Furnace of Affliction or Void Outside of Existence that could be torqued into evocative usefulness, and the way Purves deploys Blake says we are familiar with this, too, we know what to expect and we know how to do it. It is a technique as familiar to us as the ventriloquism of ghoulish life-extraction, the animation of our lives on the stage of historical nightmare, and it is a way to speak to each other across that stage and in the wings and under the trapdoor of history itself, waiting for our comings and goings.
9. The cumulative effect of the Prynne- and Blake-shaped nodes of Sperm Coffin is to infuse Israeli atrocity with the prophetic destiny of romantic universalism, to hurt as much as to illustrate the affective coordinates of state terror as Western manifest destiny. But it is also to frame the harm that threatens the poem’s central object, and by framing it to protect that object, so that it might be held and caressed and made into an icon of what we are here to do and to be. The object in question is a dead baby bird, a desperately fragile thing that is the poem’s own little piece of pathetic atrocity propaganda, levelled uselessly against the might of the forty dead babies with which the poem ends in a spree of semantic negativity and extinction. The dead baby bird functions as an emblem of a fragile wish and a protective instinct that radiates through the poem amid all the catastrophic bluster of Blakean fire and fury. Here is its second appearance:
[...] a dead
baby bird if you hold
it by its leg droops
in unabating love until
the stench of its loving
pervades half the crescent
like the miracle of day
light we are here for
good there is no one to
be us instead blossoming
[...]
The audacity of such an ethico-existential assertion would come off as the meanest posturing were it not for the inversion of day’s divinity with which the poem begins and the prophetic flames that lick its feet. But since it is so surrounded, the claim is held steady and true, the ‘stench of its loving’ akin to the ‘tiny / poet’s arms’ that reach out of the poem near the end, the better to be snapped off or flambéed by an airstrike.
10. What is it like to write poetry against the basic unbearableness of reality when to do so is also the most obvious and familiar thing, the thing that is why any of us think writing anything is a good idea in the first place, or the only idea we have, rattling around the back of our minds like a marble in a warehouse? ‘the babies were beheaded’, the poem begins to end, ‘unable to smile / from the waist up / they turn to face / that part of itself // which is absent / because there’s no place / and no body / a bird flitting over nothing / but waste terrain’. The poem must end in the teeth of the atrocious levelled as one tiny part of the relentless campaign of dispossession and inordinate cruelty to which the Palestinians are subjected, and it must end this way because if it didn’t the baby bird would be an image of the most repulsively projected redemption or salvation. The dead object phases in and out of animality and humanity across the poem – sometimes bird, sometimes baby – but by the poem’s true end it has settled into infancy: ‘He sat on the edge of a thermal, legs dangling in empty space and waited there, the infant’s head held between his knees, enjoying the soft but insistent pull of gravity trying to drag them both down into the boundless, the black, the bloody sea.’ One of the things that poetry is for in the current clusterfuck called history is to make dead things come to life for each other. We write ‘in the last free space / you can’t grasp through / the locked nothing’, not in the service of the last unalienated thought, but because to do so is to make life matter where it is most perfectly obliterated.
11. The dead baby bird is life unmade in lament to make it liveable. Sperm Coffin will not make a difference to anything, but since ‘no poem / is an argument for doing / nothing’, it cannot make no difference either. All the laws of the universe forbid it. There, is that better now?
Sperm Coffin can be got for £10 incl. P&P by writing to RPurves@lancashire.ac.uk
