Review of Silents by Claire Crowther, pub. Hercules Editions 2015-07-08

This little pamphlet is an assemblage of 15 short poems, plus essays and images from and about silent film. Crowther was intrigued by an art form deprived of speech, that had to rely on other means of expression like body language and captions, and also in exploring parallels and connections between this form and her own.

The poems are, then, meant to be read in conjunction with the images, essays and notes at the back rather than to stand alone. Actually some of them do work perfectly well on their own, notably "Jehanne d'Arc and the Angels of Battle" and "The Inflammatory Properties of Celluloid", which doesn't really need its explanatory note at the back of the book. It's also a good example of Crowther's tight, economical way of making words work hard:

Yes, film's made of light

and the director uses stars to silence race slurs
in intertitles.

If you should come across old film, a star on the edge
warns you that it burns.

The relationship between this poem and the image on the facing page has to do with the polarity of light and dark, positive and negative. But I'm not entirely sure it is a relationship, in that they both, in their own way, illustrate that theme but don't, as far as I can see, illustrate anything about each other; I don't feel I understand the poem better for seeing the image or vice versa. Sometimes that does happen, as when the shadow-show in "Shamakky Joe", innocuous in itself, is lent added menace by the image of a still from "The Cat and the Canary" next to it. But not every poem has an accompanying image, nor needs one, and I'm not entirely happy about the few times where the relationship between poem and image is spelled out in the explanatory notes. In "Song of the Stretching Tree" it simply doesn't need to be; it's clear enough from the poem what is going on.

I did sometimes feel the images, in particular, would have meant more to me if I knew even half as much about silent film as Crowther clearly does (rather than never, as far as I recall, having seen one). The images are interesting (and in the case of the stills often memorably sinister), but I found myself reacting more to the poems. One or two do feel slight (the one about Germaine Dulac didn't really work for me, though the Buster Keaton "silent sonnet" is best seen as a light-hearted quip), but in most, the odd power and menace of silence as a medium comes over memorably:

While I don't know what device will trigger
me, or why,

while I don't know
why one device rather than another will make me

yet while I know, words are triggered by shades
and why not gods

wanting to be triggered into worlds by these
devices of word and human.

("Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer")

The two essays at the start of the pamphlet, one by Crowther, one by Kevin Jackson, have some fascinating things to say, particularly about the relationships between film and poetry. But it's only fair to warn the reader of a practical difficulty here. I can see why, in a work about an art form that was not only silent but monochrome, this pamphlet is also black and white, sometimes black text on white and sometimes white on black. It looks very well, as a piece of design. But white text on black is actually a swine to read, especially in a small font, for anyone without 20/20 eyesight – it blurs and swims on the page. I could not read the first essay (white on black) without a strong lamp and a magnifying glass, and even then not all in one go, and I had the same problem with the notes at the back.

That is a pity, because in every other way this unusual project is accessible and readable. In fairness it may not matter to the large number of people with better eyesight than mine. And it's beautifully produced, as have been all the Hercules books I have seen.