I keep my face inclined towards the earth.
        —Cassels
       

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(26.06.26)

‘Hares on the Mountain’ [Roud Folk Song Index. 329] is a ballad of the emotional imagination; a classic of the ‘floating verse’ tradition that, initially logged as an Irish air by George Petrie as a melody alone (‘I neglected at the time to write [the song] down, and I have never since met with any one by whom it was remembered,’ 1902), is variously known as ‘Blackbirds and Thrushes,’ ‘Creeping and Crawling’ or ‘A Knife in the Window,’ amongst other variations.*
        The song parses a wound through a lens of creaturely re-visioning, in all its variants and mutations, to cocktail desire and threat—tenderness and fury—memory and change, and portray the inevitably lossy qualities of the felt. It tracks an effort to cloak a wound in image and in simile amidst the vines of vocabulary, consider avenues taken / untaken, and the scope and shape of an afterthought in the present tense.

An observational suite of airs obsessed with the act of looking and watching as a transformative play, Cassels’ Hares on the mountain examines the dealer’s hand to portray the habitually wounded. These poems are an active ‘watching’ of the wounded as she goes out and sets her stall for wounding in kind; and an effort to convey what she finds—or subsequently forges—in her finding. 
        Across three discrete chapters that aim their gun at affection as though a false phoenix—in ‘Kerosene,’ the first section of this volume—we’ve verses that commit to setting something on fire only to watch it burn down. ‘Cadences,’ the latter set of poems, are involved with sifting through consequent ashes, hunting for bone-fragments and other recollections purified through heat. In ‘Trance states,’ an interlude between the two, one longer poem re-traces the steps of a recurrent and hopeful summer.
        In a merger of tenses—of foresight, hindsight, and presentism—Hares on the mountain mimics the want and will of a song to walk, stroll, and wander—to drift in a leisurely and aimless way between contexts, whilst remembering and/or misremembering something of its true self as it travels—to observe the tidal drift of change engendered by climates and elements and objects in a landscape of good / bad emotions until the season is over, and the subject repairs itself to a new winter. 

(From a poem called ‘Freehand.’)


A few days later I watch landscape for fire
the drag rhythm
                                              staggered oxygen
and woof of heat.              All the re-writes
of the lighted world.

How much do you want me to hurt you? 

Your ribs don’t give under my hands,
but the mind slips, I think, anyway.

And the beam is a tripwire, that smirks
to blunt itself against a wall. I could make

anything possible, and feel the tug
of its double-edged pull as it widens. The well.

We share the dry, dry scratch jasmine,
gleeful jump-ring, our separate

devotion to the same songbook,
faulty and switchy, 

the brutish, infinite deferral of pleasure. 
I keep my face inclined towards the earth.


[...]

*   See The Petrie Collection of
the Ancient Music of Ireland (1902)       





The following air was set at the Claddagh of Galway, in the summer of 1840, from the singing of Anne Buckley, [...]. The song which she sang to it, and which gave its name to the tune, was an Irish one; but I neglected at the time to write it down, and I have never since met with any one by whom it was remembered.

[The first printed record of ‘Hares on the Mountain,’ here named as ‘The Blackbird and the Thrush,’ and as would be otherwise and elsewise and elsewhere titled and sung [& in variation] as—

                       ‘Blackbirds and Thrushes’  
            +         ‘If All the Young Women’ 
            +         ‘Nancy Lay Sleeping’
            +         ‘The Knife in the Window’
            +         ‘Shepherd So Bold’ 
            +         ‘Sally My Dear’
            +         ‘Lightning and Thunder’ 
            +         ‘Crawling and Creeping’
                        & ‘Ain't Gonna Do It No More.’

Et cetera & on
& endless
& on ... ]

(Praise for Cassels’ Hares.)

Reading Hares on the mountain sent me to Simone de Beauvoir, who writes that ‘The girl watches herself suffer: she is savouring in her heart the taste of violence and revolt rather than feeling any interest in their results’—there is something deeply feminine about Cassels’ poetry—the clichés de Beauvoir identified ‘moonlight, pink clouds and velvet nights … marble, jasper and mother of pearl,’ but there is also the decision to make an art of watching and of savouring the world when it does not adhere to these alluring projections.
        De Beauvoir puts imagining on the side of inertia, ‘she tells herself silly fairy stories. She sinks so often into such foolishness because she has no hold upon the world; if she were supposed to act, she would have to see clearly, but she can wait in a fog.’ Cassels’ poems are precise, littered with birds and other creatures, as well as barrettes and briolettes, and while they describe waiting and absence, they are demonstrations of presence and attention. She charts being in a fog—and moving through it.
        As lyric, they slip and slide with astonishing clarity—they make slight and beautiful renderings of the world. I want to read and read again.
        —Edwina Attlee

Cassels is a fencer of a poet, nicking the throat of language while pivoting with adroit feet. Surely, I think, the poems in Hares on the mountain are the lost songs of Wyatt’s diamond-studded hind, or the dreams of cursive font. I gasp when I read them, knowing Cassels has once again shredded breath into meticulous and exquisite evasion.
        —Jennifer Soong

(Praise for Cassels’ Silk Work.)

A former Foyle young poet of the year, Cassels’s debut conjures a world where lemons glow with awe, and furniture blushes.
        —Rishi Dastidar,
        The Guardian

I am in awe of the way Cassels combines nouns, sounds and histories with life, where the craft is both eccentric and full of attuned resonances to lyric cultures. New paradigms are woven, then shot through.
       —Holly Pester

Imogen Cassels’s Silk Work (Prototype) is a mightily intriguing debut collection—often demanding in its complexity, but always compelling in its concentration: a striking achievement.
       —Andrew Motion 





Silk Work folds then re-folds the increments of an intensely lived day, whether in ‘hot January,’ a church-cool summer, or mornings dotted with ‘freezing dew.’  ‘Will you come and see me again before the world ends?’ asks the one who speaks inside these poems. Or: ‘I want to eat foam, like a cardinal’ ... That’s not a question, it’s a ‘portrait of yours truly,’ the moment where ‘attention becomes form.’
       —Bhanu Kapil

Beauty is always dying in Imogen Cassels’s poems, just as it is dying all around us. I say this because Silk Work, her debut collection, might seem to be a book in which the “real” world is far away. But this is writing interested in the private ways that we find the world precious, which are the only meaningful basis for the idea of beauty in the first place. 
        —Jeremy Noel-Tod, 
        The Times Literary Supplement

Cassels’ extraordinary book feels both singular and choral—singular in that she has already established her own distinctive chorality… This agile, subtle, purposeful work produces in me a kind of vigilance which feels portable and sustaining. 
        —Oli Hazzard

See here for the Prototype publication 
of Cassels’ Silk Work.