Guest Review: Last night, the mountain by Manuela Moser

In ‘Notes on attendance’, the poem that opens Last night, the mountain, Manuela Moser writes: ‘Complex things resurrect the ordinary and you must’. Moser achieves this in her debut pamphlet with consistently delicate and graceful phrasing throughout. She combines this with versatile use of the available space on the page, such as indentation and long-running lines. As someone who predominantly writes poems in typical stanzas and line-length, I found the cascading quality of the line break in Last night, the mountain to be very refreshing. This is heightened by the progression of Moser’s poems, which delicately inflect their narrative, inviting the reader in. 

One of the most visually appealing qualities of Last night, the mountain is the appearance of the poem titles. These are right-justified, and their text size is smaller than that used in the body of the poems. Moser’s main form of choice is the couplet. For me, the diminished titling combined with the lightness of the form resulted in seamless transitions between poems and encouraged me to look for resonances between them. In addition, the titles are carefully arranged such that they themselves can be read successively: ‘Notes on attendance/ For example, somewhere there is a history of progress/ Not an exact measurement’.

Returning to the cascading lines in Last night, the mountain, these are exemplified in ‘Notes on Attendance’, which reads: 

‘One of your responsibilities is to think of yourself as alone…

— Another: to query the war…

—To understand as a character the fabric of it

—To have a privileged relationship with language’.

Here, Moser deploys the indexical quality of the word ‘it’ with brilliance. I found myself wondering whether it applied reflexively to the fabric of responsibility, the fabric of war, or the fabric of language itself. This device comes into its element by working in tandem with the title and its open-ended connotations: physical presence, the presence of an attendant mind, attendant consequences. ‘Notes on attendance’ primes the reader for successive poems encouraging us to be, in the truest sense of the word, attendant, mindful that ‘Complex things resurrect the ordinary and you must’.

Moser’s sparing use of syntax modulates the desired momentum of the poem to great effect. In ‘For example, somewhere there is a history of progress’, the syntax in ‘We were in America, we were on a trip’ establishes the setting of the poem abroad in relation to the concept of home: thereafter, the fast-paced action in the poem evolves with a hyperreal quality through its unexpected leaps: 

‘I went out into the snow

And thought about running the goodwill store’.

Similarly, in ‘Not an exact measurement’, Moser uses the em-dash to draw out the action from the brief moment of a ‘deer being shot’, frame by frame. The clarity of the closing stanzas of this poem put me in mind of William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’:

‘the sound of the shot

ringing out—

Unmistakably a deer, glimpsed through trees, upright and then not’. 

Here, the reverberation of the gunshot manifests subtly both in the sight rhyme between ‘shot’, ‘out’ and ‘not, in addition to the rhyme itself. Similarly, in ‘Notes towards Life? Or Theatre?’, Moser uses the visual cue of indented lines to formally represent a moment of realisation on the part of the speaker. This works in concert with pervasive images of windows and stairs:

‘…recent knowledge

From another place quite like this but smaller perhaps, with fewer

windows…’.

My favourite poem in Last night, the mountain is ‘Notes towards Prague/this leads back to the idea of transcendence’, whose title resonates with references to theatre and attendance in the titles of preceding poems. The apparent transition from the city of Prague to an almost biblical desert scene makes me read this poem with the Old Testament in mind. There is a mysteriousness to the introduction of the subject ‘he’ in the fifth stanza:

‘Now I’m thinking about what he said about monotheism, deserts,

God as creator’.

The poem closes with a beautiful turn of phrase:

‘The heat in the desert that doesn’t fall with the sun…

that burns like sleet

when you first feel it’.

This is a prime example of the precision of imagery throughout Last night, the mountain, and it strikes me that this can be extended to the pamphlet’s title as well, which becomes for me a central, enduring image when reading the poems. The use of the mountain as an image puts me in mind of the mountains in the background of Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm. Writing about these mountains, T.J Clark says, ‘An accurate likeness of the unnoticeable is as testing, as dignified a task as getting…right…subjects, in other words, on which the picture turns, these reflexive and metaphysical props’. 

I think that Last night, the mountain achieves this, and heightens its images by, as expressed in ‘For example, on a regular and friendly basis’:

‘…letting the

lines shape the image rather than the thing itself in front of me’.

This can be seen in the long poem of the collection which gives Last night, the mountain its title, where ‘waiting for the weather to change’, the scene descends into snow with each successive short stanza, into ‘Trees and beyond the fir trees only white’. Here we see the musicality of Last night, the mountain  in its element, as 

‘A taxi driver points to a rook in the sky and says Here, when we see a 

dark bird like this, we expect snow. That’s Basho you whisper’.

Eoghan Totten grew up in Newcastle, County Down and began reading and writing poetry in his spare time as a visiting student researcher at The University of California, Berkeley, in 2014. A recently completed PhD student in Geophysics, he has returned to university to pursue an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. His most recently published poem is to appear in Local Wonders. He is a marathon-running enthusiast and trains in his spare time. You can find him on Twitter @totten93