History and Nature

Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations translated with a preface by John Ashbery, Carcanet, £12:95, D.Nurkse: Voices Over Water, CB Editions £7.99, Eric Ormsby: The Baboons of Hada, Carcanet, £9:95, Nancy Gaffield: Tokaido Road, CB Editions £7.99, Nerys Williams: Sound Archive, Seren £8.99, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Understudies, Seren £9.99, Alasdair Paterson, Brumaire and Later, Flarestack £4.50, in arcadia, Oystercatcher Press £4.00, Paul Munden: Asterisk* with photographs by Marion Frith, Smith Doorstop, £12.95, Glyn Hughes: A Year in the Bull-Box, Arc, £7.99

 

reviewed by James Sutherland-Smith 

 

Poetry from North America seems to be as significant for the British and Irish archipelago as poetry written by its inhabitants. I'm not sure if the interest or impact is reciprocal.

Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations appears to be a natural affinity of imaginations, the great free-associating American aficionado of French modernism and the great avatar of Symbolism, Surrealism and Dadaism, as well a presence invoked by the likes of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. Ashbery has a distinguished record of translating the outstanding poets from these movements, and for many would seem to be the ideal poet for a definitive translation of LesIlluminations. There are issues with the original. Rimbaud left the manuscript with his lover, Paul Verlaine, who subsequently lost possession of it. Due to the vengeful behaviour of his former wife, it was not published until 1886. By then Rimbaud had long since departed from Europe and literature, and so the poems were published in the order they appeared in the manuscript that their first publisher received. Rimbaud never gave anybody the slightest clue as to the order he wished, and consequently editors have gradually arrived at a conjectural order.

All editions begin with the poem 'Aprés lé deluge'. Jean-Luc Steinmetz in his Arthur Rimbaud, une question de présence (translated by Jon Graham as Presence of an Enigma) cites a number of the poems as announcing a radical conclusion. These include, as Ashbery has translated them, 'Clearance', 'Barbarian', 'Departure', 'Democracy', 'Devotions', and 'Lives.' Ashbery has used the Garnier edition - now identical to the Pléiade edition of 2009 - where the poem 'Genie' concludes the collection. In his brief preface, Ashbery asserts that Genie is one of the greatest poems ever written, a strong claim to make with 'After the Flood' and the three City poems as other contenders. The edition that Ashbery has used reflects a view of Les Illuminations as gradually moving towards transcendental affirmation, a suspiciously romantic position given what we know of Rimbaud's life and attitudes towards poetry once he had given it up. Oliver Bernard uses the 1954 Pléiade edition in his excellent Penguin Poets translation of Rimbaud's complete poems, and his version of Les Illuminations ends with 'Solde' (Clearance) which seems more in accord with the Rimbaud who simply shrugged off poetry and thereafter spoke of it with contempt. In the absence of an explicit ordering by Rimbaud, the order of the poems in Les Illuminations is a construct motivated by how we interpret his poetry.

Are Ashbery's versions the best that can be achieved in English? There seems to be little difference in readability between the Ashbery version and the Bernard version. Some lines in both translations are identical because it would be impossible to translate them any other way. Both have a slightly inhibiting presentation for the Anglo-Saxon reader. The Bernard version followed the Penguin Poets in Translation policy under the late J.M. Cohen, which was to provide prose versions underneath the originals. However, Bernard's versions of Les Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer are something more than mere cribs.

For some reason the titles of the individual poems are not available in Ashbery's versions as a list of contents at the beginning of the book, but only as an alphabetical index at the end. One senses an additional construct here: the poems presented for continuous reading as if somehow in the reader's imagination they could run into one another and become parts of a single poem. Whether Rimbaud intended that or not is yet another conjecture. The title Les Illuminations suggests a number of individual epiphanies which at one level can be related to the life that Rimbaud was leading when he wrote them, most explicitly in 'Drifters' (Vagabonds) whose point of departure must be his love affair with Verlaine: Pathetic brother! How many horrible evenings I owed him! The intimation that Rimbaud viewed their relationship as part of his quest to break through to another reality emerges at the end of the poem: I had in fact, and in all spiritual sincerity, taken on the mission of returning him to his original state of child of the sun. It would have been better if the publishers had adhered to conventional Anglo-Saxon design, and allowed the reader to decide for himself whether Les Illuminations is a poem-sequence (which may be claiming  too much given the history of the manuscript, or a single poem composed of fragments anticipating the procedures of modernism. Non-professional readers might prefer to be enchanted, disturbed, shocked and have their consciousness pulled this way and that without being too concerned about its overall unity or lack of it. In this regard Ashbery's versions are as good as one is likely to get at present, although sometimes the language is a little sedate. For example, in 'Childhood' (Enfance) les fleurs de rêve tintent, éclatent, éclairent is rendered by Ashbery as dream flowers chime, burst, lighten. Bernard finds a better equivalent for Rimbaud's alliteration, dream flowers tinkle, flash, flare  - which is perhaps a nod in the direction of Hopkins.

Elsewhere there are local dissatisfactions. Wayside crosses in 'Childhood' is not an adequate translation of les calvaires for a poet raised as a devout Catholic as Rimbaud was. The effaced highway in 'Common Nocturne' is a dull transliteration of la grande route effacée and the word measurement makes for a limiting translation of mésure  in 'Genie'. Measure is immensely richer in implication. Ashbery's translations, however, in 'After the Flood', 'Tale', 'Sideshow', 'Being Beauteous', 'Morning of Drunkenness', 'City', 'Ruts', 'Cities [I]' and 'Clearance' are exemplary. On balance, this is a collection worth buying, though some readers may prefer to explore the web for the Bernard versions which come in an edition with all the rest of Rimbaud's poems.

Voices Over Water is a collection by a highly regarded American poet and human rights activist, who has published nine collections to date, the first of which appeared in 1996. It is a fictional account of Estonian peasants and their experience of the First World War and subsequent emigration to central Canada, and it concludes with a sequence which follows the widow to her death. Nurkse's father was of Estonian origin A web search will reveal that Ragnar Nurkse was an extremely distinguished economist whose life was cut short by heart failure, and that Nurkse's mother was an artist. Nurkse was brought up peripatetically in the USA and Europe. The book is dedicated to his paternal grandparents and perhaps draws on their accounts of their life in Estonia and Canada. Nurkse's relatively restless life has perhaps prompted poems which seek to anchor his identity in the experience of his family, and might be regarded as a familiar North American exploration of one's roots. The 1996 publication of a collection of poetry located in Estonia was perhaps timely bearing in mind Estonia's regaining of independence from the former Soviet Union. Neither of these circumstances qualify the collection's poetic originality and quality. CB editions has established a reputation for publishing what it likes rather than what everybody else likes, and so the strangeness of publishing an American's second book fifteen years after its first publication rather than a mainstream Selected Poems can be explained by the narrative unity of the three parts of the collection. A Selected Poems would not have communicated the implicit yet compelling narrative flow from poem to poem.

In the first part, set on one of the islands off the coast of Estonia, the poems are divided between the woman and the man. There is the sense of a society at the beginning of the twentieth century whose beliefs and way of life reach back for centuries to the time of the Teutonic Knights' Crusade. A harsh Christianity prevails, as in the account of the man's father; he was a lay preacher covering his son's eyes to hide the sight of a prostitute being pushed out to sea / in a boat with no oars. Power and energy are constrained by religion and poverty, leading either to destruction, Though he could will himself to dream only of God's love, / porcelain shattered in his grasp, or to the denial of the primacy of human love, She didn't know I was already in love / before she shared my bed, with those fruit trees / that I earned raking and burning / the landlord's leaves. War is the backdrop for most of the poems in the rest of the section, seen from the perspective of the civil population that bears the brunt. 'The Hidden Fighters', set in winter, is a phantasmagoric fairy tale journey: we came across a child's swing dangling from a branch / then another and another, a forest of swings.

The mixture of atmospheres continues in the next two sections. Poems such as 'Plains', The wells are so deep you drop a bucket / and lace your boots before it hits water and 'The Body Across the Yard', and the owl was perched on the barn gable / with its cat-face and eyes like gold coins, have the quality of a fairy tale, but one which is the result of the strangeness felt by the new emigrants. In the last two poems of the collection, the fictional construct is abandoned and we have two poems in the third person by a grandson. I assume this is Nurkse writing a memorial. It's difficult to decide whether the transition from fiction to real life works. The old lady in the last two poems seems socially a cut above the Estonian peasant who is such a powerful presence. Perhaps such teasing dilemmas are part of the point. Voices Over Water contains powerful and at times unrelenting poems.

Eric Ormsby begins and ends The Baboons of Hada, the British edition of his Selected Poems, with a lyrical economy at odds with the verbal luxuriance of the work between the first line of 'After Becquer', The dark swallows will come back again, and the last line of the collection from 'History', The place is empty now where we began. Marianne Moore, James Merrill, and most obviously, Wallace Stevens are echoed in Ormsby's poems not because he is their epigone, but because what they did right he does too.

The collection opens with celebrations of animals and plants, often the unconsidered and repellent such as spiders, the Egyptian vulture, and Skunk Cabbage, with even the flamingo coming in for some exact observation, They mimic ballerinas and yet stink. 'Watchdog and Rooster' takes us back to the fifteenth century Robert Henryson's alliterative re-telling of Aesop's fables, He took the raucous rooster by the throat and trounced / Him on the barnyard till he bit / His insupportable windpipe cleanly through. However, 'Cradle Song of the Emperor Penguins' varies the cliché of the tenderness of mothers towards their young by evoking the care lavished by the male penguin in the world's harshest environment, Yet I will shelter you against my belly skin / And warm your feather-weakness with heart's blood / And cradle you on the crèches of my claws.

The second section memorializes Ormsby's forebears. This seems to be a compulsion of North-American poets, although Ormsby is less po-faced about them than Nurkse. We cannot choose our ancestors nor, it seems, can we escape the way they shape our memories and imagination: Our ancestors are stronger than the taste / of some abandoned attar we still find / back of the jewel box. The poems on his grandmother are moving in their intimacy especially when Ormsby decorously prunes his verbal foliage: I snipped her toenails / evenly ('Getting Ready for the Night').

Sometimes it seems that Ormsby feels that his verbal gifts distort reality. In 'My Mother in Old Age' the loving detail of And the freckled skin at her throat / Gathers in tender pleats like some startled fabric is contradicted by Oh, don't prettify decrepitude, / she demands, Don't lie! Occasionally his poems don't quite succeed. In 'Dicie Fletcher' the black humour, complete with Homeric simile, of a lady Greek teacher having a tooth pulled without anaesthetic by a dentist who lusts after her, is let down by the mock-moral of the last couplet: Precarious in hero as in suffragette, / Propriety is terror turned to etiquette.

Sections 3 and 4 demonstrate Ormsby's strengths and occasional weaknesses. The dandyism of 'For a Modest God" where he sings for his supper: That fresh towels invigorate our cheeks, / That spoons tingle in allotted spots, / That forks melodeon the guested air is light as meringue where Blood is apodictic in its contradictions, / Cascades from Adam's heart the crimson fictions is like Peter Porter at his most tiresome. Section 4 is topographical in subject, and balances the sometimes purulent animal life of the opening section. 'An Oak Skinned by Lightning' recapitulates Ormsby's celebrations of unregarded life forms. The random meanders of the blind woodlice / Cut their labyrinthine cicatrice / Of cryptic squiggles in soft cambium is possibly slightly rich for contemporary, plain-spoken tastes, but Ormsby goes on to develop a wonderful conceit of the woodlice trails as akin to musical scores. Writing as sumptuous as this is rare, but anybody who loves language, and how it can be deployed by a poet of great technical gifts and erudition, will revel in this essential collection.

Nancy Gaffield's Tokaido Road is a sequence of fifty-five poems based on the woodcut prints made by the nineteenth-century Japanese artist, Hiroshige, which depict the points on the journey connecting the eastern and western capitals of Japan. Gaffield's poems follow the geographical route, but are not confined to a particular time or individual view. Sometimes she refers, as does Hiroshige, poems to events in Japanese history, whether they be legendary or factual. Sometimes Hiroshige is a persona in the poems. At one point Gaffield drops back into present time and in '6 Totsuka' she provides an account of her first encounter with the prints: These prints I saw in Eugene in the spring of 1977. In the very next poem. '7 Fujisawa', she writes a variation on Ashbery's What is Poetry, and in '15 Yoshiwara' she flits between woodcut and present-day tourism, from Three riders atop one horse leave Hara in a blizzard to I find the bus stop named Hijari Fuji. The two time frames are held together with the view of the mountain: Fuji doesn't change.

Gaffield's perceptions continually seek to escape the picture/poem frame. Sometimes these work to add power to sentiments of longing and regret, particularly as she accumulates a multiplicity of personae: an old woman, a young girl, a geisha, a daughter whose mother was murdered. Some personalities recur: Mariko, Kikuyu and the voice of a river. This multiplicity, and these shifts in time, are matched by a variety of form and diction. Usually individual poems are in a free verse of short lines and irregular stanza length. There are frequent forays into prose poetry, a poem in couplets and one which uses long lines reminiscent of CK Williams. The whole sequence is held together by a pervasive melancholy, and occasionally what sounds like Poundian pastiche: Anyone could see the shogun was beaten ('24 Shimada') and I soaked the hem of their silks ('25 Kanaya').

Where there are references to history or myth, Gaffield appends a note at the end of the respective poem, and at the end of the book there is a glossary of Japanese vocabulary and phrases used. The mix of poetic strategies and notes could make The Tokaido Road a very learned enterprise. But it is surprisingly accessible in terms of meaning and feeling, with a number of wholly successful individual poems. '38 Fujikawa' , for example, includes with an exact description of physical discomfort: The cramp starts in the arch, / writhes upwards and emerges /in wet mascara. I try flattery / until eventually the foot goes numb.

However, despite these complete successes the collection is bedeviled by a number of technical flaws. Besides the customary, contemporary usage of enjambment without point except to trim lines to roughly similar length, one or two clichés - that old fugitive time - and fustian language, - I want to tarry / but it is the fullness of time - there are faults in technique and language usage. There is obviousness in the use of assonance - a trace // of place - and sometimes an alliteration - river's surface solid - which suggests that Gaffield's ear fails her on occasion. There are conversions, underlined, which suggest the influence of advertising copywriting: heft up the hill, hats process down the hill, tendrilling, the vermilion bird / schooners south, a flock of herons / skein through schist, with the last of these misusing 'skein', which only applies to a flock of geese. There are danglers, face painted white with a pair / of heart-shaped lips, a pun that is surely unintended, My fish have lovely fins / they rarely flounder, and one bad tense, I am wanting to speak to my mother. The most irritating fault is the inconsistent use of articles. '11 Hakone' begins unexceptionably enough, Did the face of the ridge change as we climbed. By the end of the fourth stanza we have Path succumbs to thicket, to sedge. Thicket and sedge without article are reasonable, but not 'path.' Poem after poem have perfectly formed sentences, only to be marred by inexplicable omissions of articles. Given the Japanese context, it creates the unfortunate impression that Gaffield is trying to create a Japanese 'voice' in English in the way that Arthur Cooper perpetrated a Chinese 'voice' in his translations of Tu Fu and Li Po. Language is a recalcitrant medium. Sometimes there are no short cuts, and Gaffield takes far too many on the Tokaido Road.

Sound Archive is Nerys Williams' first collection, and it introduces a poet with a gift for imagery equal to that displayed in Alice Oswald's first book. However, Williams' work is neither beholden to Hughes' imagined and frankly imaginary natural world nor to Hopkins' diction. Behind Williams there are echoes of Eliot. For example, the second section of 'The Dead Zoo, Dublin' and the opening lines of 'The Maestro' owe much to the rhythms of 'The Hollow Men'. Williams' poems are replete with reference, and often slide into mere knowingness. In 'The Dead Zoo, Dublin,' which is ostensibly an elegy for the music presenter John Peel, the line there was nothing left but teenage kicks depends for its whole effect on the knowledge that The Undertones' single was said to be John Peel's favourite of all time. 

A final caveat is that Williams is not always punctilious with the organisation of her free verse, so that there are a number of unintended - as opposed to deliberate - occasional rhymes.

Putting these reservations aside, the poems have an instant impact, and when they are read for a second and third time, a complex of meaning and feeling make them a rare experience. 'Sound Archive', the title poem, is exemplary in this regard, balancing the awareness of the nonsense of pure noise against the meanings that language seeks to convey. Images from a vast range of references, including scholarship, religion, music, and even daily life, coalesce in misremembered movement as a form of resistance to the use of language as a form of assent to received belief. The individual preserves an absurd lyrical existence - I will wear boaters in the rain / and fill one room with flowers - and by the end of the poem a kinetic imbalance is struck: jazzed up and jiving / a bouquet of spectral dandelions / for you to hold.

Williams' characteristic method is to build up poems from a series of aphoristic observations loosely connected by their lexical field or by reference, sometimes allowing the reader's intuition full play as in 'The Book of Aphorisms': Her letters in the boot of his car. What is half an hour between lovers? // What I miss: detergent, mints, paraffin, / banknotes in a broken bag. Despite the risk that anything might come to mean everything, the most successful poems move towards intellectual and emotional conclusions, for example in 'Global Warriors': waiting for sheeted ice, for smoke , / waiting for heat to ambush.

Despite the riddling surface of the poems and a forbidding array of citations, which include Jozef Capek, Escher, Cocteau and Gwen John in the opening poems Williams' work is capable of great clarity as in 'Shopkeeper's Song': How to sing the texture of hair / drying near fire on a winter's night? // Free your stories into air. / Go tell it to the crows.

Understudies is a selected poems by an Irish poet of, to judge from her surname, Scottish ancestry, published by a Welsh-based publisher. She lives in London where she works as a teacher of Creative Writing. She organisesthe highly-regarded reading programme at the Troubadour Coffee House. She was once Chair of the Poetry Society, and therefore can be regarded as a force for good in the dissemination of contemporary poetry.

Her selected poems are arranged in the chronological order of her published collections, but with new poems at the beginning. The early work has an attractive lyricism, with her family in Northern Ireland and travel as abiding preoccupations. 'Motel' and 'Broken Journey' are successes in which the disquiet brought on by the isolation of the traveller is successfully conveyed. The first poem harks back to Fyfe's childhood and the second is a fiction in the manner of Matthew Sweeney. The influence of Sweeney is highly visible in the first three collections, and enabled Fyfe to develop an economical narrative style where poems are closed in the most ordinary language as in 'Broken Journey': picking up a burger / he hit the road again / nervously, looking out / for the right exit sign.

The poems whose point of departure is her family acknowledge the temptations of nostalgia. 'First Houses' draw on memories from just before Fyfe went to school when her mother taught her to draw, but it is pervaded by the sadness of her mother's illness. The language once more is plain, allowing the heartbreak to emerge without adornment: I stopped drawing perfect homes. / For nice families. / Even before my mother got sick. 'First Houses' is followed by darker poems, 'Vacant Possession' and 'Our House', the first playing on a sense of ghostly possession and the second a Kafkaesque tale where the protagonist returns to her house to find that my key won't turn in the lock and a neighbour saying the next-doors are long gone.

Fyfe's first two collections established a distinctive narrative style able to probe the anxieties and the mysteries of the everyday. In her third collection and the new poems simplicity and linear narrative have been replaced by multi-layered description straining after significance. The Sweeney manner has become ingrained with the prize-winning poem 'Curaçao Dusk' an impeccable example of his mid-nineties manner: A plane flies off a map's edge / today. At the console O'Hara inhales / the ozone of Curaçao dusk. In the new poems detail is piled on detail, with Fyfe flitting between the West Indies, Antrim, North America and London. Individual detail is gorgeous, as in 'Book of the Dead': an elder groundsman stoops / tubercular, sweeping a mound of arid / mulch into a low mound, strikes a Lucifer, holds / for the first small conflagration. Yet they seem to be doing duty for genuine movement within individual poems, whether narrative or rhetorical. An atmosphere of disquiet is not convincingly supported by reference to those old supporters of literary paranoia, Harry Lime and Philip Marlowe. Technically, the lavish use of enjambment serves only to enhance a sense that Fyfe has little to add beyond her descriptions. The last of these new poems, 'A Good Trade', perhaps indicates Fyfe's own anxieties about her work. The poem equates the long-gone trade of knife-grinding with that of poetry, an apt metaphor for some poets: old themes / of long embittered hearts. The kitchen scissors / won't cut parsley, the bread knife that sliced / clean through our thirty years lacks its old edge.

There is probably not a more elegant poet writing today than Alasdair Paterson. Two pamphlets whose combined contents amount to almost a new book indicate that the revived Paterson is flourishing. 'Brumaire and Later' contains two sequences, the first based on a proposal by a minor French revolutionary poet to rename not only the months, but the days of the year after plants, animals and implements of work. The second is set in post-revolutionary Russia. 'in arcadia' takes Sir Philip Sidney's romance as its point of departure, once a classic of reading- for-pleasure until the novel superceded it. This reviewer received his own copy in 1978 as a Christmas present and still has a third of it to read.

The Brumaire sequence contains twelve poems with deceptively simple surfaces which might be derived from Paterson's experience as a gardener. 'Pear' combines an image of the fruit with that of the hot air balloon, perhaps that of the Montgolfier brothers. The final verse brings together fallen balloonists and fruit in a telling image of the immediate consequences of revolution: Or they lay somewhere on the soft earth, / spoiled, among so many spoiled, / ungathered harvests of the season. The later sequence starts from an anecdote based on a remark by Stalin on how those French usually turn out to be a good lesson but a bad example. The poems are less compact in form than those in Brumaire and the menace implicit in Brumaire is more evident, as in 'Bookmark': You know what it means, / this contempt like tenderness. / You recognize by now / the gentle sine wave of revenge. Yet Paterson would not be Paterson without wit: Snow is the cow-lick / of a thousand bald dictators / pointing from their plinths. (Plinths).

'in arcadia' uses a much shorter line and a more open syntax. The eighteen sections of the poem are called 'metamorphoses', 'exequies', 'shepherds' and 'princesses' with six metamorphoses and four each for the rest. The sequence is a fragmentary romance where myth, love, jealousy, fear appear and disappear: my tongue adventure / call it metamorphosis / and shipwreck / and princess ruin and / the slow fade / of shepherds // into arcadia / then. The motifs are familiar, and the pastoral imagery contained in the free-form sentences is wholly musical. This is poetry as ballet.

Coffee-table poetry might be one direction poetry publishing could take in response to the web. But has there not been a sense of crisis ever since Dylan Thomas drank eighteen whiskies in a row and the popular song stole our clothes? Poet Paul Munden, a photographer, Shandy Hall guide Marion Frith, the Laurence Sterne Trust and the publisher Smith Doorstop have collaborated to produce Asterisk*, a catalogue-style book of poems inspired by Shandy Hall, complete with photographs of Sterne's home. Munden's introduction recounts a Shandyesque moment which set in train the writing of the poems. Munden had given the potter, Ruth King, a computer keyboard which turned out to be faulty, producing asterisks whenever she pressed return.

However, the poems and the conventionally attractive photographs seem more the products of the conservative English sensibility that preferred A Sentimental Journey to Tristam Shandy. Occasionally Munden approaches the wit of the latter as in his list poem 'A poem of Roses', - Scented Durex, Madonna Centifolia, Paul's Pink Climber, Crimson Flush - and in 'A Short Natural History' amidst digressive references to a rubbish dump outside the grounds of Shandy Hall, there is the celebration of a rat: "Me!" shrills the little fella / clambering back to life, unfurling like a miniature umbrella. But elsewhere there are nudging references to Sterne's life, work and death, as in 'Skulduggery'm and jokes which don't come off, as in 'Breakfast with Malcolm Bradbury' which I quote in its entirety: Full English. 'Bookmarks' recounts Munden's holiday reading in agreeable parts of Europe, Tristam Shandy was a corner of Umbria, / seven children making mayhem in the pool, a poem of middle-class pleasure written without a trace of irony.

The poems face attractive colour photographs, and I suppose part of the intention is to publicise Shandy Hall and encourage visitors. It is also interesting to note that the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), of which Paul Munden is the Director, are the sponsors of the publisher's pamphlet competition this year. There is an encomium from David Morley which describes the poems and photographs as numinous. He should be ashamed of himself. The hardback, coffee-table version retails at £18:95.

Glyn Hughes's began his writing career as a poet and his last three collections were poetry. In between there were some highly regarded novels, autobiography, plays, and even an orchestral suite. A painting of his has provided the image for the cover. Between 1979 and 2006 there was a gap in the publication of his poetry until the last three collections, of which the sequence under review was the last. I met Hughes shortly after the publication of his second collection, Neighbours, in 1970 when his publisher, Kevin Crossley-Holland, who was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at my university, brought him along to the workshop he ran for undergraduate poets. Hughes impressed us with his account of making habitable a cottage he had bought near Halifax for £50.

A Year in the Bull-Box is located in and around an isolated stone hut in the Ribble valley, made available to Hughes, coincidentally, with the onset of the cancer which led to his death. A note prefacing the collection dedicates the book to those who are helping me through, although in retrospect this seems to relate more to the serenity of mind that Hughes achieves in the sequence. It seems to be utterly opposed to the strenuous pursuit of magical transcendance of the kind that Rimbaud sought, and more akin to the poems of T'ao Ch'ien in the fourth century of the last millennium whose life as a rural recluse and limpid commentary on that life made him an exemplary model for later generations of poets.

The Bull-Box is divided into six sections. The first, the title poem, could almost have been written by a classical Chinese poet: The less you possess, the more they are / not decorations but what is more needed. The middle four sections follow the seasons from winter to autumn, and the last three poems are concerned with his illness, but are no less composed in mood. It is a collection of nature poems which do not console. Hughes's temper is far too alert to the being of other forms of life. He makes himself part of the natural world around his hut which may or may not recognize him. Occasionally he allows a glancing identification with the animals he observes, as in the second poem, 'Salmon in Twiston Beck': I am not the owner of my planet / even in imagination: the salmon / are too different. Yet the salmon's / log-like sickness couples with my own. Otherwise Hughes allows observation to impart this sense of 'too different' with striking effect. There are dark shooting stars of fieldfares with hard voices, rooks with voices that sound like a bagful of stones, and the recurring presence of a whitethroat. Hughes permits himself few conclusions, and those few are striking: I fancy that in such scraps of light / our insights come, the grace of words (Radiants). Some times there is a valedictory note, but it is unflinching: I was going to a place all art and poetry reaches ….. / Where unlike at first birth no-one celebrates our coming.

Written in a free verse where all the lines are self-contained units of sense whose sound is clear, precise, A Year in the Bull-Box is a book of wisdom and grace.

* 

 

Pamphleteering 

Tim Love, Moving Parts; Kirsten Irving, What To Do; Gill Andrews, The Thief; Michael Mackmin, From there to here; all published by HappenStance, £4

 

 reviewed by Peter Daniels

 

Tim Love's poems are experiences of the world, embodying the moment, the reality; poems that don't exactly go anywhere, but inhabit where they are, while leaping across gaps in a satisfying way: 'of course words aren't the world / but they take us where we want to be' ('Action at a distance' ). The poems themselves aren't at a great distance from the poet and the reader, but there is a detachment from the self as well as the observed scene.

'Taking Mark this time' is about bringing a son to a dying grandparent, whose condition 'I decode /… /until my cleverness runs out'. Tim Love's is a cleverness that's clever enough to be aware of its limits, and is balanced by a lot of feeling. This includes enjoyment of things being both systematic and personally felt:

 

I bought a bag of flour

only hours old, ground by the wind that made

my cycling there so tiring. ('Windmills')

 

'The fall' puts the changes in the world into a pattern for timescale and perspective, with the rate of mutation of chromosomes from which 'we can / recalculate the evolutionary tree', and the rate of linguistic change known to be 1.5% a century; but the scientific is combined with the mythic, including the calculation of biblical creation to October 4004 BC; 'there must once have been / a common tongue, a first kiss'. The crossing-over of perspectives then moves deftly to the divergence of American and English exemplified in fire engine sirens, and we are where 'London leaves fall / yellow as cabs'.

In Kirsten Irving's What To Do, the note at the front of the book helped me with 'Nancy Archer steps out': I'm too uncool around B-movies to have known that Nancy is the main character in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and that her husband is with someone else (the note does not say that under the influence of aliens her anger makes her grow). We see her contemplating her change of size, 'what to do' with herself and 'Dreading my period. It'll be more of a plague / than ever.' Like Tim Love, Kirsten Irving makes use of perspective, but the changes in point of view are mostly to do with science fiction, the supernatural, or are uncanny in other ways. 'Restorative Justice' is a short story or prose poem in which the apparatus of making amends is turned away from the usual with unanswerable logic, the situation clearly unreal but the observed human behaviour authentic.

There are two sequences, 'Recreation period' (in a mental hospital, with classical mythology crossover) and 'Casenotes' (inspired by a 1940 book, The Sexual Perversions and Abnormalities); again, these have some neat storytelling in small spaces, and an uncertainty around what is to be taken literally. But another aspect of Kirsten Irving's work that needs mentioning is her lovely way with language in the texture of a poem, and the way she plays around with form - such as the repeated end words (eight at a stretch) in 'Three betrayed lieutenants', or the fifteen endings and other variations on L and R in 'Laura' -

 

With your last reserves, tell her this: Your areolae -

soft, hairless, your wet moss. I really think, Laura,

that you can save me.

 

Gill Andrews has an economical and elegant way of giving us worlds and things in them that are themselves economical and elegant. 'Skein' is told by a down-to-earth voice which is weaving the cloths of heaven as an alternative to starvation: 'Folk can't fathom us // living up here but there's not much weaving work back home nowadays' - but in this fairytale sky world a migrant weaver can wire money back home every month. 'A yard / of that costs more than you or I'll ever earn.' This down- to-earth voice is evidently from a Lancashire childhood, and can seemingly make real money out of the intangible, but there is also the contrasting world of power and surface in the City, with the intangible money world of Tom Potter,

 

a man

who held dice in the bowl of his hand and

never revealed when he'd use them.

 

With his repeated advice - 'do nothing' - the poem works by doing almost nothing itself, and closes 'I will always be the woman who once knew Tom Potter' with an unspoken perspective into the void he represents.    

Several poems have their devices in the foreground: 'Estd in 1769 London' works by the not-mentioning method (something that comes in a distinctive green bottle); 'Is' finds a way to reinvigorate the word 'is', in six stanzas opening 'Her brother is…' until he 'is in his coffin in the aisle'. The title poem 'The Thief' is one of those games of tag, moving from 'Thief, you're the Viscount…' and 'Viscount, you're the spider…' to 'Bridegroom, you're the Thief'; for both thief and bridegroom, 'I look amazing on your arm.' 'Greater Love' consitss of two poems with the end words repeated in reverse order: the first poem, about a family panicking at news of (maybe) 9/11, but receiving a phone call - 'I'm safe' - is a well-told moment, but the other seems too unrelated to it, and too much an exercise. Nevertheless, the poems in this pamphlet are altogether impressive.

Michael Mackmin is editor of The Rialto magazine, and perhaps a poet's poet: unsurprisingly, his own poems have well-chosen words and careful placing, especially of the spaces where nothing is said. 'The voice, cluttered with certainty, / bites. I have the teeth marks inside' he writes in 'Sentences', a poem highly aware of uncertainty and making its sense across gaps. 'This poem explains' seems like a found poem from Mackmin's editing life, a covering letter that puts no trust whatsoever in the poem or its reader; placed opposite is 'Then', which naturally does it right, while asking 'How do you show, / not tell, the first true love?'

These are decluttered poems, not haiku-like but economical and seeking meaning beyond their internal resources. Syntactical sense may not be paramount in negotiating what words are possible. 'The word' begins:

 

As to why you come to see me Ms

Muse after so long and asking,

of all unlikely things, I get

a stick of seaside rock

 

- and I am unclear about the 'asking' or how the rock appears, but take it in a swirl of uncertainty, while the reappearing Muse develops the poem which 'must have the right word', and rounds it off with her advice - 'Nice, but you know you need / three more lines', thereby slipping them in. This is not so much the self-referentially ludic so beloved of postmodernist academics, as simply the Muse at her job. Other poems like 'Notes towards a September Sonnet' and 'The list' likewise look deliberately underworked, yet are fully working. With a breathtakingly light touch, Mackmin can give us a realistic Srebrenica in rural Norfolk in 'Things fall apart', or in 'Interlude' a multi-purpose Edenic fig-tree-of-knowledge where the 'Us, innocent / blatant' are surprised to be invited by the farmer to 'take more, eat.' Maybe these are poet's poet's poems, but they are real ones.

* 

 

Always Abroad

 

 

 

 

 

Bernard Spencer, Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose. Edited by Peter Robinson.                                                          351 pp. Bloodaxe. £15.

Reviewed by Paul Rossiter 

 

 

 

When Cyril Connolly reviewed Spencer's second book of poems, With Luck Lasting, for the Sunday Times in 1963, he described its author as being 'charming, but always abroad'. He was talking about the person rather than the poetry, of course, and certainly as far as Spencer's personal charm is concerned, many other tributes could be cited: the poet Bernard Gutteridge, for example, in a letter quoted by Peter Robinson in his introduction to this new edition of Spencer's writings, wrote of being 'entranced' by the poet, 'especially in those two last gloomy years before the war when he was always one of the gay reliefs.' Given the liking that many people seemed to have had for him, the fact that he was 'always abroad' was clearly a matter of regret. Connolly, however, was also speaking of 'a poet marginalized by his fragile metropolitan connections,' as one of Spencer's previous editors, Roger Bowen, put it. Spencer joined the British Council in 1940, and although after that there were short periods of employment at the Council's headquarters in London, essentially from that time on he lived and worked abroad, in Greece, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Greece again, Turkey, Spain again, and finally Austria, where he died in Vienna in 1963 at the disastrously early age of fifty-three.

 

The fact that Spencer was 'always abroad', and thus not closely in touch with the literary world of London, is one explanation for his relatively low profile as a poet. But there are other, more telling reasons: the marginality was not just a matter of lack of contact with metropolitan editors and publishers, but was also seen by many in the metropolis itself as a marginality of concern and subject matter. 'Nobody wants any more poems about . . . foreign cities', said Kingsley Amis in 1955. Blake Morrison drew attention to this issue when he began his review of Roger Bowen's 1981 edition of Spencer's poems by saying that 'Spencer's reputation as a poet, like Robert Graves's and Lawrence Durrell's, has always been tainted by his association with the Mediterranean, an injustice which . . . Roger Bowen seeks to put right.' Bowen to some extent succeeded in this aim: I am sure I am not the only person who first came across Spencer's work in Bowen's edition. The effect was short-lived, however, and the book has long been out of print.

 

There is, however, another reason for Spencer's relative invisibility. He was not a prolific poet: he only published two full-length volumes of his own work in his lifetime, a total of eighty poems. Alan Ross, who edited the first Collected Poems shortly after Spencer's death, added a further ten, Bowen a further twenty-nine uncollected or unpublished pieces (including nine juvenilia), and Robinson, who includes the complete juvenilia, three limericks, several occasional verses and some unfinished pieces, a further seventeen, making a grand total of a hundred and thirty-six. (Robinson also adds forty pages of translations and fifty of selected prose, of which more later.) The sparseness of this poetic output can easily be judged if we compare Spencer with his near-contemporaries: Louis MacNeice, two years older than Spencer, and like Spencer dying prematurely in 1963, produced thirteen volumes of poetry, including two book-length sequences and well over four hundred shorter poems, while W. H. Auden produced fourteen individual books of verse, along with co-authored plays, travel books and libretti, and more occasional prose than perhaps anybody except his literary executor Edward Mendelson has ever had time to read.

 

In terms of quantity, then, Spencer's was a modest achievement. Unfortunately, 'modest' - and indeed Connolly's word 'charming' - are words which seem in some way to have attached themselves as much to the work as to the man. When used of poetry, 'charming' is a particularly damaging epithet: it seems likely that poetry that is merely charming will lack moral seriousness, philosophical depth, or even perhaps any kind of proper engagement with its subject matter. Although he uses neither 'modest' nor 'charming' to describe Spencer's work, Blake Morrison, in his review of the 1981 Collected Poems, is representative of this view of Spencer. Morrison notes the centrality of 'travel' in Spencer's work and draws attention to the attractiveness both of Spencer's 'casual, accumulative mode of observation, the poet noting with curiosity what other travellers might miss or think unworthy of mention (a watchdog on a building-site, a soiled door-curtain to a Spanish café, chickens feeding behind a customs post)' and of the modesty (in a good sense) of his 'growing tentativeness about passing judgment, [his] understanding that signs can easily be mistranslated.' This modesty also has its downside, however: Morrison criticises Spencer's 'lack of a settled voice', a lack which he claims arises from Spencer 'having no strong ideas or feelings to impart, and, indeed, having little firm sense of himself.' Morrison concludes by saying that although Spencer 'is attractively receptive to an alien world (and even his London is alien) . . . one sometimes wishes he had a more forceful poetic personality to impose on it.' In other words, it is perhaps not only the person but also the poetry that is 'charming, but always abroad.'

 

To describe Spencer as lacking a 'settled voice' is, I think, an unfair criticism: Morrison's judgement is certainly true of the juvenilia - as one would expect - and also of the earliest poems (1933-35) in the first section of the Complete Poetry, but from 1936 on almost every poem he wrote is instantly identifiable as being by him. The criticism that he has 'little firm sense of himself' also misses the mark. His writing is not about imposing a 'forceful poetic personality' on the world or on his material; rather, he seeks as far as possible to avoid any such imposition. In his comments in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in 1963 introducing With Luck Lasting, he said that he had

 

learnt long ago from . . . George Seferis to think of poems as sometimes waiting around to be written, perhaps in a certain part of town, until a poet comes along. But then, of course, he must be alert enough to recognise them. And what freaks of accident - or is it more than that - take him to the place where the poem is?

 

In other words, as a poet he waits on occasion, and when the occasion arises, his job is to be attentive, not to impose. Spencer's approach when writing about a place, for example, is not to use the place as a source of metaphor, nor to harvest imagery in order to express what he is feeling, nor to impose his own ideas or interpretations on it, but to look at it, and then to look at it again, attending to it, describing it, and accumulating perceptions. This 'cumulative style', as Martin Dodsworth calls it in the earliest and still one of the best essays on Spencer's work, has a double effect: on the one hand, it establishes the place as undeniably present to us in its own terms, 'the profusion of objects [having] something of the enhancing confusion of the natural world itself' (Dodsworth's words), while on the other hand, Spencer 'uses the cumulative style in a way which suggests on the part of the poet the discovery of a hitherto uncomprehended complexity in his feelings'. There is thus a sense in Spencer's poems of someone discovering the world, of attention being conducted deeper into the world until an understanding of the self in its relation to the world is achieved. The arrival of this understanding is a product of a temporary but attentive inhabitation of the place, and thus depends on receptiveness, even self-abnegation, rather than the imposition of a 'forceful poetic personality'.

 

This attentiveness results in remarkably vivid representations of experiences of people and places. In 'Aegean Islands 1940-41', which was inspired by a visit to Mykonos and Delos in the summer of 1940 and which later became the title poem of his first book, Spencer gives the sea an almost physical presence in his lines, writing of 'sun[ning] one's bones beside the / Explosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea', and of 'know[ing] the gear and skill of sailing, / The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses', and such sharpness of perception appears throughout his work. 'Egyptian Delta', written in 1941 or 1942, speaks of 'the runnels feeling among the crops / like fingers stroked through hair', of 'the floating bare-foot walkers at evening, / the upright women with burdened heads who wear / five thousand years like a dress', and of 'blossoms catching fire like a match's flaring', and describes the encounter with the Nile itself in these terms:

 

Pulling through nations, fountained further than thought,

the river with a breeze on its back

suddenly lifts your hair with coolness.

 

In 'Acre', the sea is 'gay as a scarf' and 'the Turkish mosque [is] fountaining delicate / columns like sheltered thoughts'; in 'Morning in Madrid' we hear 'a donkey's bronchial greeting, groan and whistle' and 'the thunderstorm of iron shutters lifted' while in 'From my Window', another Madrid poem, we see a watchdog on a building site as night falls 'rais[ing] its head / at a barking that chips a hole in distance". In 'Castanets' we see 'the wrists arch up' and hear 'the castanets, those fever teeth / begin to sound'; in riot-torn Athens during the Cyprus crisis we see barbed wire, 'gawky, rusty, useful wire / with little dirty fangs each way', and hear the 'cry of crowds and doors slammed to'; in 'The Leopards' we hear 'the bang of a whip' and see it bring the circus cats 'lolloping onto their chairs (a tail / hung long and twitching, talking its own thoughts)'. In other poems we are shown Balearic fruit trees which 'out of age or wantonness of fruiting' need wooden props to support their branches, so stand 'bolt-shot with perfume, leaf and juice / like cripples on crutches or men crazed with drink, / staggering and laughing, arms hung up to the light', or we meet a Turkish donkey with 'big dirty hearthrug head and gorgeous eye' whose 'ankles are tiny like children's wrists', while on a snowy plain outside Vienna we see 'nothing moving, and a sky the colour of grey trousers'.

 

Once having started, it is difficult to stop quoting such passages, and verbal pleasures such as these, evocative of 'the enhancing confusion' of the world, are to be found on almost every page of those parts of the Complete Poetry which reprint Spencer's mature work (basically all the poems he published from 1936 to 1963, plus a few unpublished pieces from the same period). But if this were all there were to Spencer, there might be some justification in the claim that his poetry, even if 'charming', is finally too slight to achieve importance. The sensuous and celebratory qualities of his writing are not in any way escapist, however, and his verse is perfectly capable of handling darker and more problematic matters: war (the invasion of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War are both referred to, and the impact on civilians of the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940 is directly described); loneliness (Spencer was involuntarily separated from his first wife, Nora, from 1940 to 1945); loss (Nora died in Rome of tuberculosis in 1947); and the alienation, or even disorientation, that can be one effect of spending much of one's life as a foreigner in other people's countries.

 

When he deals with these matters, however, he does so in an inclusive way: the weight of the theme does not preclude attention to the various specificities of a world which includes both air-raids and apple blossom. A good example of this inclusiveness, of the even-handedness which does not deny the multiplicity of the world, whether painful or pleasure-giving, is his much-anthologised poem 'April: Allotments', first published in 1936. The poem describes a walk through some allotments on the edge of an industrial town in spring and asks, 'In what sense am I joining in / Such a hallooing, rousing April day?' Faced by a contemporary reality which includes 'the wireless voice repeating pacts, persecutions, / And imprisonments and deaths and heaped violent deaths, / Impersonal now as figures in the city news,' the poem rejects as equally inadequate the religious response to spring ('the festival joy / At the bursting of the tomb') and the traditional aesthetic and romantic response ('the only pretty ring-time'), until finally it provides its own answer to the question by describing what the spring does and does not do. April, which 'delights the trees and fills the roads to the South, / Does not deny or conceal' the political realities of the Abyssinian War or the economic realities of life in England in 1936 ('the worry about money, the eyeless work / Of those who do not believe, real poverty, / The sour doorways of the poor'); spring cannot remove or assuage any of these things. What it does do, however, is add something; it adds 

 

What more I am; excites the deep glands

And warms my animal bones as I go walking

Past the allotments and the singing water-meadows

Where hooves of cattle have plodded and cratered, and

Watch today go up like a single breath

Holding in its applause at masts of height

Two elms and their balanced attitude like dancers, their arms                                                             like dancers.

 

This was a breakthrough poem for Spencer, the poem in which his voice becomes fully recognisable for the first time, and in many ways - in its vivid evocation of landscape, its sensuous precision, its clear-eyed awareness of both the legitimate and illegitimate demands of politics on one's attention, and above all in its celebration of specificity - it is typical of much of Spencer's mature work.

In his poems of the forties, this valuable specificity is often under threat. 'Salonika June 1940', for example, a poem written after the fall of France but before the Italian invasion of Greece, begins:

 

My end of Europe is at war. For this

My lamp-launched giant shadow seems to fall

Like a bad thought on this ground at peace,

Being a shadow of the shadow of a war.

 

The poet's shadow, 'launched' by the lamp, as if it were an invasion fleet perhaps, is felt as a threat to 'the lives that here on the crook of this bay . . . are lived as I know', lives which are characterised in terms of

 

The dancing, the bathing, the order of the market, and as day

Cools into night, boys playing in the square;

Island boats and lemon-peel tang and the timeless café crowd,

And the outcry of dice on wood[.]

 

All this complexity of everyday ordinariness is vulnerable to a 'shadow' which is in fact a foreshadowing of the realities of war, a war that will be destructive not only of these lives being lived in Salonika, but of language, safety, and love. The poem goes on:

 

I would shut the whole if I could out of harm's way

As one shuts a holiday photo away in a desk,

Or shuts one's eyes. But not by this brilliant bay,

Nor in Hampstead now where leaves are green,

Any more exists a word or a lock which gunfire may not break,

Or a love whose range it may not take.

 

The poem is simultaneously capable of presenting a vivid, almost photographic representation of the life of the Greek town and of showing that, in the face of a threat that extends from Hampstead (which is where Nora was living at the time) to Salonika (where a few months later Spencer's hotel room would be demolished by an Italian bomb) any such representation is no more help than an ostrich-like shutting of the eyes. But in its vivid picturing of the place, the poem values intensely the life and lives that it knows it is helpless to protect.

The balance between attention and vulnerability, and the inclusiveness that is capable of embracing both delight in specificity and awareness of shadows, are matched by an equivalent balance in the formal means used to achieve them. Peter Robinson writes well in his introduction about what he calls Spencer's 'erratically sure-footed verse'. Spencer, he notes, 'was on the lookout for rhymes'. This does not mean that Spencer uses strict forms; there are no sonnets or villanelles in his work. Openness to the accidental quality of the world lies at the heart of Spencer's poetry, and this means that he eschews strict forms since their use would only pre-empt exploration and attentiveness, and thus be an imposition on the poem's occasion. But a poem is not a shapeless thing, and Spencer's poems, for all their openness to the world, are not notebook jottings; the shapes they attain, however, are ones that seem to have been discovered, or to have emerged, through the act of attention, rather than anything that has been imposed. This balance between formal attention and improvisatory opportunism allows his poems to, in Robinson's words, 'accommodate the pressure of a merely accidental proximity of things, even as they work to transform accidental proximity into meaningful structure.' Robinson goes on to say that Spencer's stanzas 'have a precarious, stabilising regularity that establishes itself only as opportunities appear to present themselves, the stanzas seeking form even as they would not, cannot, and must not insist upon it.' This feels exactly right as a description of the formal qualities of almost all Spencer's poems; the stanzas quoted above from 'Salonika June 1940' would be one example, but further examples can be found on almost every page, and this shapely openness is one of the greatest pleasures of Spencer's work.

 

Peter Robinson's introduction also provides a biography of Spencer, including some new information - although nothing revelatory - that was not in Roger Bowen's introduction to the 1981 edition. In addition to the new introduction and Robinson's helpful annotations, there are four new groupings of work in this edition: the complete undergraduate poems (1919-1932), including seven poems not printed by Bowen; seventeen occasional, unpublished or unfinished poems written between 1940 and 1956; Spencer's collected translations (most of them done in collaboration with Lawrence Durrell and Nanos Valaoritis); and an almost complete gathering of Spencer's prose.

 

The first two of these groupings do not contain any pieces that I shall be hurrying to re-read, but it is useful to have them for the sake of completeness. The best of the undergraduate poems are perhaps the earliest ones, especially 'Schedules', a high-spirited description of a train arriving at a station, and 'Festa', an equally extravagant portrait of a funfair and firework display. (Both of these were printed by Bowen in an appendix.) After this lively beginning, the remainder of the undergraduate poems are perhaps more valuable as a record of the impact of Auden on an immature poet of the thirties than for any intrinsic interest.

 

The occasional and unfinished poems are also good to have for the sake of completeness, but the unfinished ones really are very unfinished indeed: it is difficult to see 'Look at my suit . . .', for instance, as anything other than a very slight notebook jotting. It is fun, however, to have the complete text of Spencer's contribution to the great Cairo-Alexandria flyting of 1943-45, a piece which starts, 'From Cairo this: scorn upon verse from Alex, / whether in long hand, short hand or italics', and which, after summarily despatching the work of Gwyn Williams, Harold Edwards, and Robert Liddell, all expatriate poets resident in Alexandria, finishes, 'But oh what startled Muse would not miscarry / when in the swollen'verse of Durrell (Larry) / pornography and Greece and gaga marry." Pleasant also is the epithalamion for G. S. Fraser, apparently written on Fraser's stag night in London in 1946, while he was 'knocking back [a] noggin / With me and Tambi in the pleasant Hogg Inn' (Tambi being Tambimuttu, the Ceylonese editor of the magazine Poetry London); the piece ends:

 

I wish you all the beer you need and more,

Safety from most relations, and each bore,

A little touch of Bloomsbury in the air

And anniversaries thick as Tambi's hair.

 

'Charming' might in fact be the best word for this nicely turned bit of light verse.

 

The translations are a different and more substantial matter, however. Spencer, Durrell, and the Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis collaborated in 1944 on translating a selection of the poems of George Seferis, who was in Egypt from 1942 to 1944, and whom they all knew; Spencer and Valaoritis continued the work in London in 1946, and John Lehmann published the completed collection as The King of Asine and Other Poems in 1948. As Peter Robinson points out, it is impossible now to sort out which poet wrote which words, or to know exactly what contributions were made by the Greek critic George Katsimbalis or by Seferis himself, but it seems clear that Spencer played a leading role. These were the first English translations of Seferis's work, and they have stood the test of time very well. Here, for example, are some lines from the twenty-four-part sequence, Mythistorema, the second part of which begins, 'Still another well within a cave. / Once it was easy to draw up effigies and ornaments / To please the friends who still remained faithful' and which then continues (incorporating an allusion to the poet Dionysios Solomos):

 

The ropes have snapped; only the grooves on the lip of the well

Remind us of our past happiness:

The fingers on the rim, as the poet said.

The fingers sense for a while the coolness of the stone

And the warmth of the body passes into it,

And the cave stakes and loses its soul

Every moment, filled with silence, without a drop of water.

 

These lines compare very favourably with the version of the same passage in the next book-length translation, done by Rex Warner in 1960:

 

The ropes have broken now; only their marks on the well's mouth

Remind us of our departed happiness:

The fingers on the rim, as the poet says.

The fingers feel for a moment the cool of the stone

And the body's fever passes into the stone

And the cave stakes its soul and loses it

Every second, full of silence, without a drop.

 

The earlier version seems preferable in almost every way, especially in terms of word-choice ('snapped / broken', 'lip / mouth', 'past / departed', 'sense / feel', 'coolness / cool'), but also in its avoidance of the clumsy repetition of 'stone' and in its specification that the 'drop' in the last line is indeed a drop of water. It is interesting to note that the version of the same lines in what is now the standard English translation of Seferis, that of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1995), although different from the 1948 version in many details, is verbally closer to Spencer than to Warner: Keeley and Sherrard have the fingers 'feel' rather than 'sense' the coolness of the stone, but in all the other cases mentioned above they make the same choice as Spencer and Valaoritis.

 

In addition to reprinting the whole of The King of Asine and Other Poems, the new Complete Poetry also includes versions of 'The Mad Pomegranate Tree' by Odysseus Elytis (translated with Valaoritis in 1946), of four poems by Eugenio Montale (translated by Spencer in the late forties), and of two early poems by Seferis translated by Spencer for a radio broadcast in 1957. This is a valuable section of the new edition, and it is an especial pleasure to see The King of Asine back in print.

 

The section titled 'Selected Prose' is more of a mixed bag, but there are some valuable things here, too. It could, I think, very nearly be titled 'Collected Prose' as it looks as if only four pieces are missing: Peter Robinson has chosen to exclude an early (1932) review of John Lehmann, and two other pieces ('Talking of Barry', published in Cairo in 1944, and an article about hospital life, published in 1949) no longer seem to exist. There is one inadvertent omission, however: the radio talk called 'Travel in Greece', which Spencer gave in 1946, and which was later published in The Listener (25 July 1946), is not reprinted here and does not appear in the bibliography. This, although a pity, is not in fact an enormous loss, and Robinson's edition does include the more interesting companion talk, 'The Wind-Blown Island of Mykonos', published in The Listener about six weeks later; it would be good, however, if the earlier piece could be included in a second edition of the Complete Poetry.

 

There are some weak things in this section: a 1929 review of an exhibition of Dutch art is very much an undergraduate piece; the short 1944 obituary for Keith Douglas does not really seem adequate to its occasion; the 'Dialogue on Poetry' with Maria Alfaro (translated from the Spanish) seems rather stiff and cumbersome; and there are a number of other pieces that do not fully earn their keep. There are, however, some extremely worthwhile pieces. In addition to 'Ideas about Poems', published in the Cairo magazine Personal Landscape in 1942, and Spencer's introduction to With Luck Lasting from the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in 1963, both of which were printed in an appendix by Bowen, it is very good to have gathered here the radio talk 'The Wind-Blown Island of Mykonos', which provides a backdrop for Spencer's set of four Aegean island poems, and three pieces from 1962: his clear and interesting replies to a London Magazine questionnaire on 'Context'; the lecture on his own work which he gave at the University of Madrid, where he starts, rather characteristically, by saying, 'I feel I should explain why I am not offering you a lecture on some more important subject than my own poems', and then goes on to talk about them in unpretentious and revealing ways; and an insightful interview with the poet conducted by Peter Orr.

 

Spencer's prose does not in any way constitute a project; like his poetry, it is occasional, and when it is at its best, its strengths are occasional ones. Thus the real finds in this edition are some brief journals written in the fifties - six pages from Madrid, three pages from Ankara, and two pages from Anatolia, none of which have been published before. These are obviously written fast ('write quickly so that nothing that is not green survives', said William Carlos Williams); although they are not poems - they lack any of the kind of shaping that his poems display - they share the sharpness of eye, the openness to experience, and the improvisatory quality of the best poems. They are messy, quirky, very intelligent, often funny, and full of great quickness of perception, as when, while talking to a Spanish antique dealer in a bar about archaeology, Spencer suddenly remembers 'the long, empty, roofless boulevards of Delos, with the wind blowing, a few pillars standing; nobody', or, in a passage about the various shapes of Spanish clouds, there is an involuntary memory of wartime: 'or in an empty sky there is one small cloud shaped like a star. Unpleasant reflection; the burst of an anti-aircraft shell, but white.' Here is a longer passage, from the Ankara journal, a splendid cadenza with the heading In the Wagon Lit:

 

Morning. What a show of wide-waisted trousers! What belts around what great bellies! Beautifully pressed trousers of rich and strange materials! 'Co-respondent' shoes. Cuff links, silk shirts with initials under the heart, and buttons, buttons everywhere. Signet rings. Watch straps. Key chains leading into side pockets. Key-rings. Stamped leather wallets, no doubt, special belts with purses for strapping money and other valuables to the body. Trusses for hernia, sock suspenders. Men: the artificial sex. Cf. the old armour display in the Wallace Collection. (My father's and uncle's leather hair-brush cases, stud boxes with initials, sets of razors, razor straps, tie presses, tie pins etc).

 

These few journal pages are full of pleasures such as these. The passage which best captures the flavour of Spencer in situ, though, is the closing section of the 'Madrid Notebook' ('El Tenis' in the extract below is the name of a local bar):

 

Standing at the window 9:30 pm 'mist' across the stars, still visible. Radios, the warmth, stir. . . .

The group around the street lamp outside the provision shop. Some chairs. A children's group farther down. Loungers. El Tenis.

So many windows and scenes opposite. A chair someone is going to sit on. The relief, the sociable hour.

What are they thinking? Girl with beautiful hair looking out. I have no secrets. Windows all open. A book of poetry on the sofa. A glass of wine.

Am absolutely lost. Hope for more evenings like this.

 

Those last two sentence fragments are startling, and I think moving, in their unguarded freshness; and it was in moments like this that Spencer's Madrid poems ('Notes by a Foreigner', 'From my Window', 'Mediterranean Suburbs') very possibly found their origin.

 

It is also moments like this in both Spencer's poems and journals that make clear that he should be seen not just as a minor poet of Mediterranean travel, but rather as someone whose sensibility had been relativised by extensive non-English experience so that his best work feels interestingly adrift from the cultural certainties of his homeland. The resulting poetic tact and lack of presumption make his poems about other places and cultures deeply attractive - and indeed, as Blake Morrison implies, even his poems set in England ('Regent's Park Terrace', 'By a Breakwater' or 'Train to Work', for example) are in a sense poems about foreign places. This experience of cultural relativisation, of living 'widely asunder . . . at large . . . freely moving about . . . out of one's house or abode . . . out of the home country . . . in foreign lands' (as some of the OED definitions of 'abroad' have it), is one that has become much more common since Spencer's time, so much so that the weight of the metropolis appears less impressive than it used to, and the decentredness of being 'always abroad' seems more valuable and less marginal than it did in Spencer's lifetime. In this sense, Spencer, with his non-metropolitan emphasis and his modest, attentive and non-authoritative approach to his subject matter, seems more in tune with the twenty-first century than with the nineteen-fifties.

 

The Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose thus includes much to value and enjoy. In living up to the adjective 'complete', it also includes some material which is less interesting: I think that finally Spencer's reputation will depend on the hundred or so poems which were previously printed by Bowen, on the collaborative volume of Seferis translations, and on about half of the prose which Robinson prints here. But all of these pieces are included in this edition in good texts, and the key point is that we are now in a position to read them, whether again or for the first time. A fascinating and deeply pleasurable poet has been brought back into print, and Peter Robinson and Bloodaxe deserve all praise and thanks for that.

 

 *

 

Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery, Carcanet Press, £12.95

Thief, teenage master-poet, gun-runner in Africa, attempted murderer, the life and the oh-so-tragically-short-lived and sensational achievements of Arthur Rimbaud haunt all of us. As I was reading this new translation of Rimbaud's late(ish) cycle of visionary poemes en prose, I was put in mind of two things. When I returned home from Charlesville, his home town, in 1994 - I had been researching a centenary profile of the boy wonder for the Financial Times - I discovered that my house had been burgled for the first and only time. Though long dead, Rimbaud was clearly still amongst us. When I finished re-reading Carcanet's parallel-text edition this week (with its new translation by John Ashbery), my head was full of words by those whom Rimbaud had so palpably and near-overwhelmingly influenced, from Bob Dylan's 'Desolation Row' to Lennon's 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and 'I am the Walrus'. It struck me that there was no real distance between Dylan, Lennon and Rimbaud. And that is generally the case with him. It always feels such a shockingly quick and easy jump from the 1870s to the present, psychologically and emotionally, in the risks he seems to be taking with human experience. He is so completely at one with the idea of the simultaneity of the self, that master discovery of the 20^th century. He feels to be so vividly our contemporary. That can be said of so few 19^th-century writers.

It is difficult not to feel oneself wholly in the grip of Rimbaud in these poems. He is moving at such an imaginative pace and with such verve. There is such imaginative vertigo here. He is in a kind of fever, helplessly in the grip of whatever it is that is forcing him to lay these rapturous words down. When he writes in the first person, he seems to have absorbed everything into himself. At other times he seems to be both himself and many others all at once. He is perpetually travelling through strange lands. Fantastic scenes, bizarre architectural wonders, are always being flung out in front of him. As with the so called Apocalyptic School of the 1940s, the poems are peppered with exclamation marks. The world is such a wonder. It is always so fleeting, so perpetually self-renewing and self-distorting. It has to be snatched at before it careers away in yet another wholly unpredictable direction.

John Ashbery is good at rendering him too. There is so much fellow-feeling here. Ashbery too is a poet for whom life feels to be a perpetual surprise. He walks into it, time and again, as one would walk into a closed door. At times his translation may seem a bit too casually demotic, a little undercharged. Rimbaud, being so close to his schooling, can be quite a high-flown, formal poet. Ashbery occasionally shifts him a little too far in the direction of Walt Whitman, turns him a touch too loose-limbed and demotic. To translate the word 'écrasée' as 'squelched', for example, doesn't feel quite right. Those are minor quibbles in a version which shows off the sequence as 'a disordered collection of magic lantern slides.' A lovely turn of phrase which seems to capture this butterfly in its net.

* 

 

Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology

Compiled and edited by Jessie Lendennie,

Salmon Poetry, £15

Reviewed by Leah Fritz 

 

Dogs Singing is an international enterprise. More than ten years in the making, it is four hundred and sixty-three pages long (which include biographical notes on the 200 contributors), and it comes complete with an index, a brief foreword by the editor, and an introduction by Eileen Battersby, described simply as 'dog lover' (but who proves to be a noted American literary scholar). Well-known poets represented include Maxine Kumin, Matthew Sweeney, Alicia Ostriker and Julian Stanner, among others, some of whom may be more familiar in Ireland, America and elsewhere than in Britain. There are several poems in Irish with English translations. 

 

It is happily surprising that in an anthology whose dedication reads 'for Zookie, her book', the poems are so consistently well-crafted and largely unsentimental. No one, of course, suggests that Zookie will actually read the book, but it's clear that her spirit, and those of dogs like (or unlike) her, serve as muse for a remarkable number of fine poets. 

 

The names of dogs here run from Rimbaud (for a female!) to Einstein, and go much farther out. The book is divided into three parts: By, For and About. Jessie Lendennie says, parenthetically, that By is 'a smaller section, since dogs are often reluctant to describe themselves as poets.' In this section, Maxine Kumin has committed a sonnet, 'Xochi's Tale' (now there's a name!) and Neil Astley has put words into the mouth of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles.' 

 

There is much humour in the book, most of it intentional. Julian Gough begins 'A Dog in California' as follows: 'It's hard to keep your balls in Beverly Hills...' In the 'For' section, 'To My Dog, With a Broken Leg', by Larry O. Dean includes these two lines: '... lifting a leg.../,,,in the genetic celebratory/ dance of the relieved bladder...'. And then in the next stanza, '...no Nureyev or Fonteyn/...', Dean mentions the cost of the plaster cast: $900.01. No greater love...

 

Not all the poems are light, though. Sharon Young's 'For Pine Goose, the Best Dog in the History of the World' in the 'For' section, a parody on Jenny Joseph's famous poem 'Warning', is sweetly touching, although purists might complain that it really belongs in 'By'. And there are well-wrought elegies. Perhaps it is easier to express grief for a pet than for a beloved person, symbiosis being less fraught than human affections often are. 

 

Maurice Harmon's sequence of four poems, 'A Dog's Life,' which is actually about his life with dogs, abounds in a variety of emotions, intentional as well as inadvertent perhaps. He starts with present company: '...We raise you like a Spock child, no wonder/ you are nervous, highly strung...', and goes back in the second and third poem to detail the dogs he has had from infancy. In the last he prepares his current dog for a future move: 'Oh, my beautiful girl, you will love Ardgillan,/ no restraints, no rules, nothing to hedge you in./...We need a big sky, love, the startled imagination.'

 

I particularly like the descriptive poems in 'About.' My favourite could well be 'Dog Outside a Grocery on Broadway,' acutely observed by Joan I. Siegel. My husband's favourite is 'My Captain,' by Pete Mullineaux. Both of these must be read in their entirety to be appreciated. The penultimate poem, 'Beating the Dog,' by Judith Barrington, left me breathless. 

 

Included for fairness' sake is one called 'Cat Person' by Michele Vassal:

 

'...

you are now the Tonton Macoute

of the Cats Junta 

.  who brings your offerings

(or are they bribes?)

tiny velvet corpses of

mice and voles

...'

 

For fairness' sake. Of course.