Tristia\u00a0\u00a0 by Jacqueline Saphra<\/p>\n
My friend, we\u2019ve been anchored here for years you pour for me a rare tea known as Lost Now you declare that Dante was superior through the window, framed and distant, look out. Beyond, the ocean foams and spits. Jacqui Saphra read this poem at the poem-a-thon she organised to raise money for refugees last year.\u00a0 I connected with it at once because of the sense of helplessness and uselessness it conveyed.\u00a0 It was easy to grasp what was going on in the poem because of the context.\u00a0 But when the Rialto team had an editorial discussion about it I realised that this wasn\u2019t immediately obvious.\u00a0 And there\u2019s a lot else happening, too.<\/p>\n Tristia<\/em> is Latin for sad things, \u2018Sorrows\u2019, the title of Ovid\u2019s melancholy letters from his Black Sea exile, dramatic monologues in verse.\u00a0 So the theme of exile\u2019s in \u2018Tristia\u2019 from the start.\u00a0 The poem describes a conversation between old friends, one they\u2019ve had before, more or less.\u00a0 The tone is desultory, full of Ovidian mournfulness and self-consciously literary (Ovid again).\u00a0 We\u2019re reminded of our comfort and our pretensions (modernism! punctuation wars! referring to books we haven\u2019t read, including Tristia<\/em>!) before we know where the poem\u2019s going.<\/p>\n There\u2019s humour in this, and in the tea \u2013 oh, the failed promise of exotic teas.\u00a0 The name of this one, Lost Malawi, has undertones of exploitation and wider loss: environmental, cultural.\u00a0 It\u2019s nice that \u2018stagnant rain\u2019 rhymes with \u2018writerly cachet\u2019.<\/p>\n At first the only thing outside the conversation is the room that \u201crocks gently\u201d.\u00a0 Then the room stirs and suddenly, at the enjambed beginning of verse 4, the world is up against its \u201cEnglish bricks\u201d, full of urgent sibilants: \u201csinking vessels toss and hiss\u201d.\u00a0 What\u2019s outside is \u201cframed\u201d, though, and the conversation continues until in verse 5 the ocean and its salt-stained victims take over completely.\u00a0 We can only watch.\u00a0 They don\u2019t enter the room; like our world, it stays intact \u2013 for now.<\/p>\n Fiona Moore<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tristia\u00a0\u00a0 by Jacqueline Saphra My friend, we\u2019ve been anchored here for years arguing the toss: semi-colon versus the long dash, our views on Ovid\u2019s Tristia though I haven\u2019t read it, nor have you – and as the room rocks gently underneath us you pour for me a rare tea known as Lost Malawi. We dare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4945"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6114,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945\/revisions\/6114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\narguing the toss: semi-colon versus
\nthe long dash, our views on Ovid\u2019s Tristia<\/em>
\nthough I haven\u2019t read it, nor have you –
\nand as the room rocks gently underneath us<\/p>\n
\nMalawi. We dare not say it tastes
\nof stagnant rain; we drink it for the ritual
\nof writers fighting in the afternoons,
\nwe drink it for its writerly cachet.<\/p>\n
\nto Eliot – I hold for Modernism though
\nI don\u2019t believe myself. The house stirs,
\ncreaking on its moorings as you fill
\nmy glass with stagnant rain again, while<\/p>\n
\nbumping up against our English bricks,
\nsinking vessels toss and hiss. You hit me with
\nan exclamation mark, I counter with ellipsis,
\ntake a bracing sip of Lost Malawi,<\/p>\n
\nPassengers cup their hands, mouths ringed with salt,
\nskin caked with white. The house lurches but
\nthe window will not give. Waves mist the glass;
\nthe faces blur and vanish in the spray.<\/p>\n