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The Slip is the final volume of Perril's trilogy excavating the crime scene at the centre of archaic lyric. We can't know whether ancient Greece's first lyric poet Archilochus 'really' used his Iambic prowess to curse Lycambes' family to its grave for a broken marriage oath. But neither can we doubt that his poetic legacy, in Antiquity and beyond, was a by-word for judgements over the acceptability, or otherwise, of indulgence in poetic harm; just as the literary form of Iambic he is famous for initiating is a locus of ethical crises.
The Slip is steeped in the animal fables within the surviving fragments of Archilochus, pre-Aesopical ainos that were likely stock elements of Iambic verse.Most famous are the sequence of fragments in which the fox recounts his revenge upon the eagle (widely regarded as code for Lycambes) who has betrayed their friendship by eating the vixen's cubs. The fox curses the eagle and appeals to Zeus to intervene and bring justice to bear; the greedy eagle steals meat from a sacrificial altar only to have it burn down his nest and cause its young to fall out into the jaws of its vulpine rival.
So, here are the last steps of the 'wolf walker' Lycambes, undergoing his curse in the Dog Days of summer on the cusp of following the death of his daughters with his own, and reminiscing. Central to this reminiscence are the early expeditions to colonise Thasos he undertook with Telesicles, Archilochus's father, and that doubtless confirmed, if not established, the bond between the families that he shatters in breaking his oath. In pottery, the slip is a liquified suspension of clay in water and was painted onto the areas of ancient pots intended to emerge black in the firing process. Needless to say, notions of the slip also encompass all manner of acts of evasion, disguise, and the tying of a noose.
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Simon Perril's poetry publications include The Slip (shearsman Books 2020), Beneath (Shearsman 2015), Archilochus on the Moon (Shearsman 2013), Newton's Splinter (Open House 2012), Nitrate (Salt 2010), A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher 2009), and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing (Salt 2004), as well as the chapbook, In the final year of my 40s (Shearsman 2018). As a critic he has written widely on contemporary poetry, including editing the books The Salt Companion to John James, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling. He likes noisy music, and silent film. And cats. He is Reader in Contemporary Poetic Practice at De Montfort University, Leicester.
