by Anthony Nanson
Charlotte Hussey’s Glossing the Spoils is rather more than a collection of poems. It will have a particular interest, not only to admirers of edgy and crisply constructed verse, but to anyone engaged with medieval romance, legend, and epic, especially in Celtic, Old English, and Arthurian traditions.
Awen have now published a new edition of this book, first published in 2012, with an expanded introduction by the author in which she goes into more detail about her fascinating method. The ‘Glossing’ in the title refers to the ‘glosa’, a poetic form that functions as a gloss, or commentary, upon a pre-existing text. Each of the poems in Glossing the Spoils takes a short extract selected from a medieval source – such as Beowulf, Mabinogion, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Parzival, and many others – and expands this into an expertly metred poem that imaginatively both unpacks that moment in the source story and evokes resonances with the modern world. This nuanced relationship between ancient and modern is then neatly reinforced by concluding each stanza with one line from the source extract.
Let me show you what I mean with an example. Charlotte’s poem ‘Tree’ is based on this extract from the Arthurian tale ‘Peredur Son Evrawg’ from Mabinogion:
On the bank of the river,
he sees a tall tree:
from roots to crown one half is aflame
and the other green with leaves.
The first stanza of ‘Tree’ goes like this:
She passes through a skeletal wall,
door blown off, its skeletal
frame leaning inwards. The drone
of the bombing squad begins to fade
as an eerie music like wind through the ribs
of something large grows louder,
rising over the rubble, stirring her
to cry and laugh and wish to sleep,
not knowing whether, like a dreamer
on the bank of the river,
— and so the narrative continues into the next stanza …
An encyclopaedic knowledge of medieval literature lies behind these poems. Charlotte Hussey is a scholar in this field and teaches courses on Breton, Irish, and Arthurian literature at Dawson College in Montreal. The poet Lorna Smithers has described Glossing the Spoils ‘as exemplary in re-envisioning the oldest myths of Western European tradition with formal mastery’. This is truly bardic poetry and I hope you will enjoy it.
Buy directly from Awen – awenpublications.co.uk/
Buy from Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1906900523