8 - Modernist poetry in the British Isles

Summary

Mina Loy's poem 'Brancusi's Golden Bird' was first published, next to a photograph of Brancusi's sculpture, in the same 1922 issue of the Dial as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. If The Waste Land has become familiar as a pivotal text in the institutionalisation of Eliot, Loy's poem remains unassimilated, still suggestive for what might become of twenty-first-century neomodernism. 'Brancusi's Golden Bird' is one among several poems in which Loy finds analogues and affiliations in the persons and works of her contemporaries. Elliptical and witty, these poems carve out transfers of energy from language used as an imagistic mode of description to a more synthetic, aesthetic compound. Combining free-verse forms, vowel over consonant patterns, with a sense of the play of concretion on the page, her poems have a sculptural and musical palpability. 'Brancusi's Golden Bird' moves from what might seem like a representation of another medium towards a poetics whose delight in Latinate concretion sits deftly across line breaks and intimations of a new silence in writing:

an incandescent curve

licked by chromatic flames

in labyrinths of reflections

This gong

of polished hyperaesthesia

shrills with brass

as the aggressive light

strikes

its significance

The immaculate

conception

of the inaudible bird

occurs

in gorgeous reticence