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mountainous terrain, with the result that we have come to undervalue the stark beauties of fenland and marsh. In Essex, the result of this devaluation of the landscape has been particularly damaging, effectively offering developers and their bulldozers a carte blanche. The poems in ‘Elementary Estuaries’ try to let us see these flat yet rich landscapes afresh, defamiliarising them by use of periphrasis, close-up, recontextualisation, juxtaposition, and the quennet’s typical recombination of the noun-adjective pairs in the final two-line stanzas. In this, the poems pay homage to a long tradition of nature writing, stretching from Thompson’s The Seasons and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads to the work of poets like Peter Riley, Frances Presley and Tim Atkins in the present. The second sequence of quennets is based on walks carried out between July 2007 and July 2009 round the 160-kilometre Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, and in the tradition of W. G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair it attempts to explore the psychogeography of the city. The Mauerweg is one of the achievements of Berlin’s Social Democratic/ Green coalition of 2001–2. The original aim, which included putting all remaining traces of the wall under historic preservation orders, was to make the entire perimeter accessible to walkers and cyclists, an aim which was briefly achieved in 2005, though already, especially in the wealthier suburbs of the city, parts of the trail have been blocked and sectioned off, to be reincorporated into private parks and gardens, or earmarked for development. Originally, these poems were begun using the same form as ‘Elementary Estuaries’, but I quickly realised this wasn’t working – Queneau’s original form is too open, too playful even, for what were essentially poems about a political boundary and Cold War enclosure. Consequently, the form was adapted into a wall-like block of prose, but a block of prose that was nevertheless fractured by the refrain, suggesting the collapse of the wall in 1989 and the new vistas opened up by this momentous event. The final sequence of poems, ‘Waterlog’, which retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, as recorded in The Rings of Saturn, demanded yet another adaptation of Queneau’s form. Here, influenced by the walk poems of Richard Long, the quennet is stretched out to give a long, thin poem. The wide, unjustified right- 142 | QUENNETS
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hand margin deliberately mirrors the eroding effects of the sea on the Suffolk coastline near towns like Dunwich, now partly submerged beneath the waves, the words clinging to the edge of the page like houses to a threatened cliff top, while the text here is itself partly made up of fragments of Sebald’s writing, as if his work had also been subject to erosion. This potential for the quennet to reconfigure text borrowed from literary source material was seen early on by the Oulipo, who have published quennets collaging text derived from such sources, including Queneau’s novels, in the Bibliothèque Oulipienne. At the same time, the straightness of the poem mirrors the often linear nature of Sebald’s perigrinations, though at times, it must be said, the paths Sebald follows are far from straight, and often discontinuous, just as the stories he recounts, while sometimes straight, are just as often tangential, barbed and unreliable, at times branching into pure fiction. While Sebald asserts that the White House at Bredfield in Suffolk where the writer Edward Fitzgerald was born on 31 March 1809 was ‘levelled to the ground in May 1944 when one of the German V-bombs, which the English nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’, suddenly deviated from its course’, the local postmaster confidently assured me that the real cause of damage was dry-rot. Similarly, when Sebald asserts that the train which ran from Halesworth to Southwold ‘had originally been built for the Emperor of China’, a connection which facilitates a long digression on the last days of imperial China, there is no factual basis for his claims. Such findings, and many others, work their way into the poems, which at once retrace and interrogate Sebald’s steps. Philip Terry, May 2016 143 | AUTHOR’S NOTE

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mountainous terrain, with the result that we have come to undervalue the stark beauties of fenland and marsh. In Essex, the result of this devaluation of the landscape has been particularly damaging, effectively offering developers and their bulldozers a carte blanche. The poems in ‘Elementary Estuaries’ try to let us see these flat yet rich landscapes afresh, defamiliarising them by use of periphrasis, close-up, recontextualisation, juxtaposition, and the quennet’s typical recombination of the noun-adjective pairs in the final two-line stanzas. In this, the poems pay homage to a long tradition of nature writing, stretching from Thompson’s The Seasons and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads to the work of poets like Peter Riley, Frances Presley and Tim Atkins in the present.

The second sequence of quennets is based on walks carried out between July 2007 and July 2009 round the 160-kilometre Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, and in the tradition of W. G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair it attempts to explore the psychogeography of the city. The Mauerweg is one of the achievements of Berlin’s Social Democratic/ Green coalition of 2001–2. The original aim, which included putting all remaining traces of the wall under historic preservation orders, was to make the entire perimeter accessible to walkers and cyclists, an aim which was briefly achieved in 2005, though already, especially in the wealthier suburbs of the city, parts of the trail have been blocked and sectioned off, to be reincorporated into private parks and gardens, or earmarked for development. Originally, these poems were begun using the same form as ‘Elementary Estuaries’, but I quickly realised this wasn’t working – Queneau’s original form is too open, too playful even, for what were essentially poems about a political boundary and Cold War enclosure. Consequently, the form was adapted into a wall-like block of prose, but a block of prose that was nevertheless fractured by the refrain, suggesting the collapse of the wall in 1989 and the new vistas opened up by this momentous event.

The final sequence of poems, ‘Waterlog’, which retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, as recorded in The Rings of Saturn, demanded yet another adaptation of Queneau’s form. Here, influenced by the walk poems of Richard Long, the quennet is stretched out to give a long, thin poem. The wide, unjustified right-

142 | QUENNETS

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