FINE LAMENT
By Rachel Warriner
£5 / €7 / $10
52pp, 14.81×21.01 cm
ISBN 978-0-9791411-4-0
Published July 2013
SOLD OUT
The motive operator of Rachel Warriner’s Fine Lament is "wrecked by | forgetting" her way through a lyric growth out of two operas playing endlessly in memory—"no thoughts, just quotes". Imagination is foreclosed by bailout, by death. The social violence is quiet, cellular, sterilising: a state of "ectoblastic austerity" acted out on the obscenely microscopic surfaces of domestic life.
assenting with alacrity
varnish and lacquer
that wild
that flutters
those idle fears
the genetics of failers
skin dipped
in gold paint
as punishment for
*your feigned interest*
earth my wrongs
in star shearing contempt
brickwalls and coldwelcomes
my skin dried
Fine Lament moves through three acts in nearly six-hundred short lines, largely unpunctuated, wobbling under crushing headlines and a dossier of images which include the author’s own figure drawings. It is a poetry against distraction—"attention slash desire | attention/desire"—exorcising the grandiose against the grant-friendly arts of distraction. Fine Lament is a work of elegiac social consciousness, floating with life-affirming sarcasm through the pseudo-paradises of lived histrionic platitude—"i fake die and you hold me"—hilarious in despair before the manufactured tragedies of material life.
in pure welfare anguish
that ice interferer
frowning until things have changed
engineering contempt
blue lined radiation
The author writes: "Emerging from a childhood spent in too close proximity to the weird and powdered world of amateur operatics, Fine Lament explores that strange bourgeois desire to play at the tragic and extreme in church halls in Chorleywood. Interested in the affect inscribed in operas of death and love lost, Fine Lament is both seduced and unconvinced by it, taking moments to dwell in its comfort before pulling away. Using formal constraint derived from the arias that frame it—‘Dido's Lament’ from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and ‘One Fine Day’ from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly—Fine Lament considers how love, death, and sacrifice appeal to people as ways to deal with much smaller troubles: ageing, mundanity, pettiness, personal relationships, boredom. Painting your face and feeling really strongly for an hour or two makes things seem different, but it always collapses back to nothing but the strange sense of how lovely it can be to sing of suicide."
Fine Lament is Rachel Warriner’s fourth book, and her first to be published outside of Ireland. It is preceded by the three-part simultaneous poem Primary (Default, 2009), the psychogeographic photo/text work Detritus (Dusie/Default, 2010), and the poems of the high-speed anti-IMF protest Eleven Days (RunAmok, 2011). Her work has appeared in Cleaves, Dusie, Hi Zero, Poetry Salzburg Review, International Egg and Poultry Review, and Default.
