The emergence of the London-based poet Ned Denny has been a light in the darkness of the last four years, during which worldwide circumstances have changed to alarming effect.
In 2019, his Unearthly Toys won the Seamus Heaney Prize for a first collection. He followed it with a version of Dante’s Commedia, recasting the original into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas and titled B (After Dante), which Alberto Manguel described as “a great English-language poem in its own right”. Carcanet has now published his second collection of poems: Ventriloquise.
Dante’s great, ground-breaking, vernacular poem – so Catholic that Pope Paul VI proclaimed “Dante is ours!” – was inspired by exile. Denny’s interpretation, written in recognition of what he conceives as the contemporary exile of the soul, appeared in locked-down, secular, allegedly even “post-Christian” Britain.
Supermarkets remained open in the pandemic lockdowns, while churches – hallowed sanctuaries within living memory – were closed from 23 March 2020. The last time the churches of England and Wales were closed was on the very same day in 1208, under the interdict of Innocent III after King John refused to approve the papal nomination of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Denny provides notes in the end pages of Ventriloquise to 23 of the 67 poems; they are useful, entertaining, provocative and searching. The collection has a number of poems inspired by Heine, Pindar, Chénier, Ronsard, Holderlin, Mallarmé, Hugo and Lorca, as well as classical Chinese poets. “Arrest”, written by the soon-to-be-guillotined Andre Chénier (1762-94), whose original was composed on strips of paper smuggled out of prison in a laundry basket, “seemed particularly apt when I made my version in the superficially idyllic, but in fact cowed and credulous, days of late March 2020”.
But day’s now a prison yard; you were right
To choose life. Friends, stroll at ease,
Be unwilling to take this road in spite
Of your vanished liberties…
Denny heeds the advice in Chattels (Civitas Dei):
I live deep in the city in a glorified
shed lined with old books and threadbare flying carpets
and unearthed bottles loved for an aqueous light
the striped or speckled stones I’ve chanced on here
and there
black paintings I have slowly harried into life
a necklace made from a king cobra’s vertebrae
a bowl resurrected from the grave of the sea
I have elected not to be a happy slave
Ventriloquise, like B (After Dante), can be read as a redemptive whole and is in two parts, I: Mode of the Orphan – Time to Die; II: Mode of the Flowers – Alive, Alive-O. He explains in a blog post that these “two phases of gloom and splendour” also account for the “descent-and-ascent structure” of the Commedia: “Death and resurrection whilst living: such was and is the sacred theme, the ‘antique story’ that, according to [Robert] Graves, by medieval times was lost to bland courtly convention and only kept alive by the ‘gleemen’ [from the Old English gamen, meaning joy, fun, mirth or glee]: poets of the holy fool or wandering minstrel sort in these islands’ Celtic past…that seeded the troubadour movement in medieval France and thence Dante and the whole romantic tradition.”
Denny is a defiant contemporary example of the ‘gleemen’. Commedia’s dualism is encapsulated by the single couplet “Florescens”:
The bent apple tree bears light in the sun,
Inferno and Paradiso in one.
Ventriloquise has two epigraphs: the first, the OED’s entry for ventriloquism, “the art or practice of speaking or producing sounds so the voice appears to come from some person other than the speaker”, is a description corresponding to St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20).
As described on the back cover, “Denny’s adept voice ‘throws’ itself into and through other texts, forms, places, things and times.” A profound spirituality lies at the root of it, for example in Two Deathbed Sonnets After Ronsard:
Sweet not to be born and sweet to return
to the silence one is, sweetest of all
to be new-made and to dwell with the Son –
discarding to swell and rot in the sun
the body that fortune kicked like a ball –
and as both man and deathless spirit burn.
Denny’s poetry is sometimes punctuated, sometimes not; sometimes in rhyme, sometimes not or both together. He has come to poetry through extensive travel in South America and the Indian sub-continent, writing art and music reviews and doing physical jobs, indoors and out – a liberating background.
His fellow Carcanet poet the American AE Stallings, newly elected as Oxford’s professor of poetry, upholds rhyming verse. When she first submitted poems to US magazines, she would be rejected with “No rhymed poetry”. She feels “estranged from some of the US scene partly because so much of it is based in academia, and creative-writing programmes”. In their opposition to convention she and Denny surely share “gleeman” ground.
The long, climactically placed Iron Age, driven by rhyming couplets, is a denunciation of the pandemonium which evidence increasingly shows the pandemic to have caused. Its epigraph, “Secol si rinova; torna giustizia” (The [great] age begins anew; justice returns) is taken from Purgatorio, Canto xxii. The second half of the first stanza reads:
and it’s bugs for you while they feast as they please
and Medusa smiles from a billion TVs
and the medicine’s seeded with wasp-eyed death
and all you can trust is your own wild breath
and “disinformation” is cried at the Word
and they tell the biggest lie this chained world’s heard
and commit the greatest fraud hell’s ever seen
and claim the stricken tree is green
Tellingly, the concluding line of the poem is optimistic: “A bird will sing dawn wield your gold”.
In B (after Dante), Denny was meticulous about the numerical fidelity of the divine order of creation, which underlies Commedia. He provides no note for his poem Comedy; the title and its three numbered sentences are a précis of Commedia, inviting an alert reader to enlightening analysis.
In detail, Commedia’s 100 cantos are grouped in three canticles, 33 cantos in terza rima per canticle, plus the introduction. The three lines of Comedy correspondingly add up to 33 syllables. The Blessed Trinity thus upheld is compounded by Christ’s death supposedly aged 33 – the human backbone comprising of 33 vertebrae further proof of his humanity.
It seems appropriate to end with the climactic quotation from the last lines of Paradiso in B (After Dante), first showing how they are echoed in Maker from Ventriloquise:
I go to bed early and rise even earlier
make a pot of coffee and sit in the dark and purr
or step into the garden and wonder what God meant
when He made night air so sweet and spread our
starry tent.
And, from B (After Dante):
All power of representation here fails me,
but – like a golden wheel rotating steadily –
now the intellect, my will and every desire’s
held by the Love that moves the sun and
untold stars.
“Ventriloquise” is published by Carcanet (£12.99)
This article first appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, and receive our limited-time Easter offer, go here.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.