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burglar security systemAdriano Bulla, 'Heaven from Hell', th
The recent publication of 'Crosswords' in 'Autumn Leaves' has reminded us of a poet who, for unknown reasons, had disappeared from the poetic scene for four years: Adriano Bulla. This recent poem shows the same intensity of imagery and mastery of tropes his previous work has been noted for; a childhood memory becomes a poem in iambic pentameters where the function of caesura and internal half-rhyme is highlighted by symply splitting the pentameters in two, while a series of images produced by the juvenile speaker's mind project themselves on "monolithic stares" like a tyrannical sun, "phantasms" appear on the "glass" of a window pane at night and "crawl on wars", while the "infant" is "cut" (therefore an emotional caesura)after having felt "shards" and in a "cryptic" way "leave the world" to literary quotation, in this case, a famous line from Thomas Grey's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. In all these years, Bulla does not seem to have forgotten the power of his style, however, in all these years, since the publication of 'Ybo' and Other Lies' in 2005, his most comprehensive collection to date, critics have failed to come to terms with his most challenging series, 'Heaven from Hell'. Dr M. Rossi analyses the power of imagery in his war poems, almost suggesting he is akin to Wilfred Owens, others have celebrated the delicacy of his erotic poetry or the lightness of feeling in his 'Flickers' and only T. Harrisson seems to have analysed 'Heaven from Hell' in some detail in his publication in 'Great Works'. Most references to 'Heaven from Hell' in fact are limited to pointing out its complexity, its parodic nature and its use of different languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian and French. It is now time to look at this collection in some detail, to try to understand its structure, myth and poetic impact. 'Hevaev from Hell' is the parody of a parody, which makes it difficult to interpret. At its very heart is a set of footnotes, which are clearly introduced not to explain the plethora of references in one brief passage of the poem, neglecting the innumerable literary quotations that make up the very fabric of the poem, but to show how the heart of poetry and civilisation is broken, anti-aesthetic and referential. These footnotes could have been added at the end, instead they follow 'Orphalese', the centrepiece of the poem, breaking its very flow and beat. 'Heaven from Hell' clearly refers to 'The Waste Land', yet it also clearly refers to 'Paradise Lost'. However, despite being the illegitimate child of these two masterpieces, it never once directly quotes its parents. The title is an indirect allusion to Milton's epic, its structure and footnotes tell us that its genetic mould is inherited from the Old Possum's 1922 poem, yet the poem itself does not dare to name its own cultural parents. Is Bulla suggesting that Western culture has been disinherited? Is he suggesting that we all are illegitimate in some way? 'Heaven from Hell' is a contradictory journey through Hades, the Underworld, Dante's Inferno and the dereliction of the human soul, however, unlike in Dante's 'Commedia', the Pilgrim here does not come out "a riveder le stelle", to see the stars again like in the Italian poet's masterpiece: there is no resolution to the plight of humanity in the coming of a "Greater Man" like in 'Paradise Lost', no "Datta" no "Dayadhvam" and no "Damyata" like in Eliot's 'The Waste Land', therefore no relgious and philosophical solution to the soul's battering and anguish. This series of poems is contradictory from the beginning, it starts with a 'Letter to Charon' almost like a letter to Father Christmas, where the the deepest desires of the soul are set out, and the acknowledgement that Western Culture form Chaucer on has dried up: Whan in a sultry noon Of April We sweep the dust off The kerb oustide Uncle Hugh Selwyn's Empty brick house... - How to follow you Dear Charon, Down to the other side? Here two references, to Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and to Ezra Pound 's Uncle Selwyn ecompass six centuries of Western civilisation and "sweep" them like dust on a journey where the infernal ferrier, synonymous with death, becomes "Dear". The linguistic contradictions of the text are highlighted at the beginning of 'Orphalese', where the speaker shouts "STOP speaking in glowing terms!" yet goes on with almsot unintelligible language: it is as if the poem was conscious of its syntactic inconsistency, crying out against its own linguistic inability, yet is incapable of finding a solution to the incommunicable essence of life. Death is a clear theme, not only in terms of war imagery; the war imagery used in 'Heaven from Hell' is only expedient to the expression of the pain a dead soul, forced to roam the world of the living, encounters: the wars referred to in 'Heaven from Hell' are not the effort of conflicting armies, they are at the same time the Punic War and the Gulf War, yet even more precisely, they are the war of the human soul against its own destructiveness. Shakespere takes centre stage in 'Hevaen from Hell', of course with the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and his lover Ophelia. Hamlet's suicidal thoughts permeate this piece and and human life, in a reversal of fortune, becomes an imitation of the theatre. Hamlet does not die in 'Heaven from Hell' yet Ophelia does, and while the hero attends her funeral, he shouts out, "- Shit! This poem needs an epitaph!" The poem is conscious of its aesthetic and literary existence, Ophelia receives her epitaph, yet Hamlet is left a dead soul in the world of the living who "cannot drop" the dramatic "curtain" over his own suffering. 'Heaven from Hell' is a colossal attempt to come to terms with the poet/speaker's own mortality, with the demise of Westen culture and its illegitimacy: the metamyth presented is one of inhernet tragedy. It is a journey through Hell with no slution and no end, in fact, previous editions of the poem had the subtitle 'A fragment', so reminiscent of Eliot's "Fragments/ shored against my ruin", and it not only looks and sounds fragmentary in its language, but the journey itself, unlike Eliot's does not find its final destination: a monumental fragment indeed. References Alighieri, D., 'Divina Commedia',1321. Bulla, A., 'Ybo?and Other Lies', 2005, Poetry Monthly Press. Bulla, A., 'Crosswords' in 'Autumn Leaves', Volume 13, Number 19, 2009. Chaucer, G. 'General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales', 1387. Eliot, T.S., 'The Waste Land' 1922. Faraday,burglar security system, J., uances of Feelings? in UK Poetry Live, 2007. Harrisson, T. 'Adriano Bulla' in Great Works', Vol 8, 2007. Milton, J. 'Paradise Lost' 1677. Owens, W., 'Dulce et Decorum Est' in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, 1966, Queen Classics Press. Rossi, M., 'Adriano Bulla the War Poet', in 'Author's Den', 2009. Shakespeare, W., 'Hamlet', 1599-1601.