in this light in this light
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"Kitchen Garden at the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise", Camille Pissarro
Fiction

in this light

Evie Shockley
Reading
time 2 minutes

If you are reading this poem on a mobile phone, we recommend rotating the view to horizontal (landscape) orientation.

 

a canvas contains wrung grey clouds

            and the river wrong around tree trunks,

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tall and bare to above the waist, crowned

                        in dull gold and hazel, nothing to lighten

            our load, our eyeful. a greener green grows

                        as a lettuce row, and a tone arises hinting

rose—the hue of the blue, the kissed color

            of the stucco hulls of houses up the hill,

the dry grass and bark, brown but slightly

                        glowing—and a garden opens a canvas

            onto a fairytale. a road runs down a river,

                        lined on the left with trees alive in leaves,

while ancient stone buildings with water

            views stream along right to the right, part

of the canvas in shade and part in june

                        sun flame. a painter provides a season,

            a setting, and an oil-thick frame of mind.

 

                        after Monet’s Flood at Argenteuil; Pissarro’s Vegetable
                           Garden at the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise
; and Sisley’s
                           Saint-Mammès and the Slopes of La Celle—June Morning

 

Read an introduction to this poem.

 

Also read:

An Introduction to Evie Shockley’s “in this light” An Introduction to Evie Shockley’s “in this light”
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"Kitchen Garden at the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise", Camille Pissarro
Experiences

An Introduction to Evie Shockley’s “in this light”

Julia Fiedorczuk

Evie Shockley’s work, like all great poetry, is indefatigably experimental, playing with various registers and the sonic possibilities of English – not just one kind of English but many kinds, spoken by various people with different histories and sensitivities, exposing the flexibility of this language in ways that make her work notoriously difficult to translate.

The poem “in this light” takes on three impressionistic paintings (identified just below it). As all ekphrastic work tends to do, the poem provokes questions concerning the relationship between the senses (in this case, of sight and sound), as well as between various artistic media. Describing in words the canvas of Monet, Pissarro and Sisley seems to be an especially paradoxical endeavour since Impressionism relies not so much on the figurative content of the paintings as on nuances such as light and shade. However, it is that quality of Impressionistic art that Shockley’s poem translates into its own medium, employing such nuances of sound and meaning as the audibly minimal difference between “wrung” and “wrong”, which, however, has serious consequences when it comes to sense. The phrase “wrung gray clouds”, though suggesting some agency that has given the clouds this particular shape, evokes primarily a visual image, while “the river wrong around tree trunks” transcends the visual realm to tell a story: the river shouldn’t be there, it has flooded. But isn’t the flood the consequence of the fact that clouds have been “wrung”, shedding their water onto the early-spring landscape? That this is thinkable in the difference between the vowels ‘u’ and ‘o’ is a token of Shockley’s poetic genius, and perhaps also an echo of the relentless linguistic inventiveness of Gertrude Stein.

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