'Judith Beveridge’s much-anticipated new collection of poems, the first since her prize-winning new and selected, Sun Music, in 2018.
'The poems in Tintinnabulum focus on animals, people, and places, though you could say that the real subject matter is the power of poetry, since the book explores how metaphor, simile, imagery and sound can reveal connections that are imaginative, revelatory and sometimes threatening. Beveridge’s creative use of language is most evident in the section of the book titled ‘Bizarre Bazaar’ ― where she plays on lines and titles by Wallace Stevens (a fitting companion), and offers linguistic elaborations on familiar objects, and strange beliefs and customs. Each detail leads to others through association, there is multiplicity everywhere, and movement and energy, and this is as true of the poems which capture the particular features of animals, the transient effects of landscape, or the memories of people and places, as it is of the language-oriented poems.
'There is a range of styles, lyrical, dramatic and narrative, which build on the achievements of poems in Beveridge’s previous collections. There is also an emotional range to the poems: some poems are joyous, celebratory, ecstatic ― others humorous, elegiac, nostalgic ― but the overall feeling is of the joy and richness of language.' (Publication summary)
'The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that metaphor is much more than a niche literary device. ‘Metaphor plays a significant role in determining what is real for us,’ they wrote in their classic study Metaphors We Live By. ‘Rather than simply giving us a way to conceptualise a pre-existing reality, new metaphors have the power to create new realities. This begins to happen when we comprehend the world in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we start to act in terms of it’.' (Introduction)
'We have been living with Judith Beveridge’s marvellous poetry since the publication of The Domesticity of Giraffes in 1987. With that length of exposure, I feel I should be more confident about the shape of her work but I always feel that I don’t have enough of a grasp of her “poetic-self” to generalise with any degree of certainty about what these poems actually do. At one level they are very similar – the tone, for example, seldom changes and neither does the pace: the poems tend to be expansive. But at another level they are immensely varied: she seems just as much at home in lyrical personal expression as she does in dramatic monologues, where she enters the personalities of very different characters: the Buddha, Marco Polo’s concubine and Hannibal, to name a few. Looking at the poems from this point of view – the stance of the poet vis a vis the human consciousness that the poem is dealing with – raises another difficult issue, or at least an issue I used to find difficult before I learned how to relax and not worry about it. That is that often we aren’t sure whether a particular poem is “personal” or “imagined”. “Making Perfume”, the fourth poem of The Domesticity of Giraffes, is written in the first person and luxuriates (a feature that runs throughout Beveridge’s poetry) in names, and, in this poem, the way in which they match the scents being created. It’s always worried me whether this is “personal” or not – ie is it a poem about the author’s adolescent hobbies? The answer is “probably not”, but the evidence for that would only be a matter of probabilities and one wouldn’. Was her father a birdwatcher with a special pair of binoculars (“Sun Music”) did she have a dog which died in 2016 (“Bandit”) and so on? It’s a complicated issue in reader’s responses to poems and Beveridge isn’t the only poet where it turns up, but it isn’t resolved by treating this as a voyeuristic desire to know intimate details about someone’s life. Somehow it relates to authenticity. There’s a big difference, for most of us, between seeing a host of golden daffodils and imagining that you have done so. Or of actually having a gorgeous girlfriend who is as beautiful as a red, red rose and imagining that you do. Somehow we want lyric poets to recognise the significance of special experiences they have had and to make them the basis of exploratory poems. In contrast, of course, imaginative, dramatic enterings into unfamiliar personalities – Marco Polo’s concubine, for example – must, by definition, not arise from personal experience but from imaginative reconstructions.' (Introduction)
'In ancient Rome, a tintinnabulum was a wind chime placed outside a house or shop to ward off evil. The word is most often associated, however, with Arvo Pärt’s self-described compositional style, drawing on the minimalism in religious chants.'
'Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.' (Introduction)
'Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.' (Introduction)
'In ancient Rome, a tintinnabulum was a wind chime placed outside a house or shop to ward off evil. The word is most often associated, however, with Arvo Pärt’s self-described compositional style, drawing on the minimalism in religious chants.'
'We have been living with Judith Beveridge’s marvellous poetry since the publication of The Domesticity of Giraffes in 1987. With that length of exposure, I feel I should be more confident about the shape of her work but I always feel that I don’t have enough of a grasp of her “poetic-self” to generalise with any degree of certainty about what these poems actually do. At one level they are very similar – the tone, for example, seldom changes and neither does the pace: the poems tend to be expansive. But at another level they are immensely varied: she seems just as much at home in lyrical personal expression as she does in dramatic monologues, where she enters the personalities of very different characters: the Buddha, Marco Polo’s concubine and Hannibal, to name a few. Looking at the poems from this point of view – the stance of the poet vis a vis the human consciousness that the poem is dealing with – raises another difficult issue, or at least an issue I used to find difficult before I learned how to relax and not worry about it. That is that often we aren’t sure whether a particular poem is “personal” or “imagined”. “Making Perfume”, the fourth poem of The Domesticity of Giraffes, is written in the first person and luxuriates (a feature that runs throughout Beveridge’s poetry) in names, and, in this poem, the way in which they match the scents being created. It’s always worried me whether this is “personal” or not – ie is it a poem about the author’s adolescent hobbies? The answer is “probably not”, but the evidence for that would only be a matter of probabilities and one wouldn’. Was her father a birdwatcher with a special pair of binoculars (“Sun Music”) did she have a dog which died in 2016 (“Bandit”) and so on? It’s a complicated issue in reader’s responses to poems and Beveridge isn’t the only poet where it turns up, but it isn’t resolved by treating this as a voyeuristic desire to know intimate details about someone’s life. Somehow it relates to authenticity. There’s a big difference, for most of us, between seeing a host of golden daffodils and imagining that you have done so. Or of actually having a gorgeous girlfriend who is as beautiful as a red, red rose and imagining that you do. Somehow we want lyric poets to recognise the significance of special experiences they have had and to make them the basis of exploratory poems. In contrast, of course, imaginative, dramatic enterings into unfamiliar personalities – Marco Polo’s concubine, for example – must, by definition, not arise from personal experience but from imaginative reconstructions.' (Introduction)
'The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that metaphor is much more than a niche literary device. ‘Metaphor plays a significant role in determining what is real for us,’ they wrote in their classic study Metaphors We Live By. ‘Rather than simply giving us a way to conceptualise a pre-existing reality, new metaphors have the power to create new realities. This begins to happen when we comprehend the world in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we start to act in terms of it’.' (Introduction)
