Since there’s no rice for poets on the dole,

Let’s do a flower arrangement in the bowl!

With these lines of Basho (1644-1694) our poet starts his book. That start removes a layer of many layers under which the poet camouflages himself. By quoting him, Alan Jefferies does not hide his admiration of Basho whose spirit appears more than once in ‘Blood Angels’. 

As we go a bit further into the book we step into a river. Walking on its bank does not answer our questions. We need to go deeper to feel the movements of the stream and to let it feel us. He says in the first poem of the book:

The stream says nothing

moves undereye,

says nothing

does not believe itself

does not compare

only in movement

does it feel

the hand inside the stream

Only in movement we are alive, only in knowing people we know ourselves, we understand ourselves through understanding them, and only in movement we feel the world and make it feel us. Stillness does not provide comparison, nor does it offer understanding. Feeling the stream of life is life itself, when we’re one with nature. This poem is written by a Zen poet and leads us to a question: Should a poet describe the world or change it? Reading more poems of our Zen poet may help us to answer the question. The second poem called “Gate”:

I have travelled two thousand miles

in your love

like this wind,

have the birds wept.

Is it the gate of love that the poet travelled all this distance to reach? Do birds weep? If they do, do they weep because the poet did not reach the gate of his love? It’s an unfinished journey and the poet’s lover is yet unknown, it is his quest, his secret, his destiny.

          When a poet describes something, it can’t be merely for the sake of that thing or for the sake of description itself. That kind of poetry has only one layer of meaning and once you peel it off you find nothing but vacuum. A true poet would not commit such a mistake. When he describes or narrates something, he always conveys a hidden message between the lines, behind the similes. Sometimes he describes his own subconscious, his own suppressed thoughts that he refuses to reveal but through some symbolic poems. Our poet says in his third poem ‘The Spell’:

Old winter coat shadows

hung against the door.

Autumn’s leaves in piles.

I get the coat down from its hanging place

its shadow contains piles of leaves

and remnants of earlier seasons.

The coat has been left here

for quite awhile;

there is a skeleton of a moth

on one shoulder

and it’s too intricate to move without breaking.

          What can that old winter coat be if not an old relationship that the poet decides to end, yet its shadow still lingers there with all its remnants in piles, like memories refuse to be erased. They clutch to the mind just like a fragile skeleton of a moth that a slight movement would break it. So it stays motionless, fragile but stays as a symbol of the past, a spell from the past. Obviously the poet enjoys it being around or he could have brushed it from his coat.

          Yet, in the following poem the poet says:

A cat falls

& doesn’t break

in two we drift

through perfect field

there is no ending

We are

closed eyes

on a hill

Openings

on our bodies.

          In the previous poem a moth skeleton would get broken from the slightest movement. Now a cat falls and doesn’t break in two. What could that cat be? The poet’s spirit? His will? His quest? His dreams and ambitions? After this fall, we drift through a perfect field. It’s a spiritual field where we close our eyes on a hill and surrender ourselves body and soul to nature, a bliss of no ending.

His preference of nature reveals itself again in his short poem “Gypsy” about gypsies and rats – creatures of the street. He ends it saying:

and the people there

calling them by their names,

hey gypsy! Hey rat!

          No individual names given. No adornments! A mere statement like what nature wants us to be. I tend to think that the poet wishes people to call him ‘hey human!’

          In ‘It’s Sunday morning now’, he declares his closeness to nature by saying:

Perhaps I have more in common with the sea

than all that. Perhaps it is the sea

that has an effect on me

my juices linked to it in some abstract way

          Jefferies’s Zen mind writes about nature and its creatures, about harmony with life. Yet his other self appears in other poems with different writing style. Poems written about city life, yet he wrote them with a touch of Zen reveals itself discreetly now and again.  He looks at some airplanes flying up and down the coast and see them birds.  Though he lives in a modern city, he still can see nature around him. He advises his worried mind to listen to the wind and to write the diary of the fishes splashing through the leaves! Is he the incarnation of Basho who renounced the world to live in the heart of nature and then returned to live in Tokyo among his disciples?! Jefferies talks to the clouds and people look everywhere searching for him, searching for the poet who talks to the clouds. In ‘Sky poem’ he talks to the sky and asks whether it is tired of carrying planes and balancing skyscrapers!

          Our poet continues to lead us in his spiritual journey from a poem to another showing us his world of symbols. The last time he saw his friend when he was working in an ice factory. Returning to the same place, he found no factory and the people did not even hear of it. He does not believe the ice factory has just melted! Nothing can melt and vanish in a thin air so easily.

          A man yells and tells people about his problems with his wife. The poet does not listen to him any more. It is Sunday night and the man is drunk, standing on the backseat of a bus yelling at the top of his voice. The poet wonders sarcastically what else a man could possibly need! His poem ‘Feeling terrible, looking OK’ raised on similar pillars that seen in many poems of the same style throughout the book. His language is an everyday language, not adorned with carefully chosen literary words. We find dialogues in his narrative poems. We read short biographies of his friends. We know them by names like Ken, Bill, Paul, Nigel, Rose, and Mariah. Another pillar on which the poet constructs his poetry is the repetitions of some certain words in one poem or dividing the poem into stanzas that each one has either a similar opening or ending like ‘STICK*MAN*CYCLE’, ‘Once we were separated’, ‘Ambition’, ‘Still life’, and ‘Sad’. In the latter poem he uses a round-up technique by starting and ending the poem with the same stanza. This is done in a simple language and style but a simplicity that does not fail to speak to our hearts. It is not a simplicity that implies shallowness but it is like nature itself, it is beautiful only because it is simple and natural. It is like the simplicity of a Zen master, whose look does not reveal his wisdom. One must remember that only empty drums sound louder.

          The poet is realistic with himself. He imitates nature by keeping only the useful. He says about his denied love:

love that has grown useless

is poisonous to me.

          In another part of the poem he says:

Keep it, out of the way

away from the child’s reach

the heart’s passion for strange drugs.

          But can he escape from what he describes as rain in another poem?

You were like rain

you cleaned my blood

and the rain was like love

wetting the street

and you were able to be

all over town at once

at the mention of your name.

          It seems a hard task for once again the poet declares that stillness is the opposite of life. And only his love can be the source of that movement, of that life.

Another love

walks out

behind my back

down stairways,

I never knew

were there.

Down

outside

the street below

is coming alive

and here,

everything still

as it should be

when you’re not around

to move things anymore.

          ‘Fountain’ is the last poem in ‘Blood Angels’. Jefferies’s fountain is his talent, his creativity. He lost his tongue, his genuine inspiration. He rejects all his attempts to write poetry if they do not spring from true feelings. He buries them as though he buries an ugly tongue dropping off his mouth. However, poetry does not leave him even when he rejects it. His lips become a fountain of water. His creative works gush forth. This spilled water is not wasted, drunk by children, a symbol of innocence:

Children would come

& stop & peer into the fountain

unknowing that with every drop they drank

from the purling waters that flowed

would slowly but surely,

restore my voice to singing.

          Innocent and genuine appreciation is a drive that can restore our poet to poetry. Alan Jefferies does not write poetry to change the world nor to describe it. He writes poetry only to understand the world, to be in tune with it. A Zen poet seeks nothing but understanding. And only understanding can change the world. Only understanding can bring peace and love to a world seen by a Zen poet as a place of chaos!