IT IS, AS IT’S ALWAYS BEEN, A MATTER OF BELIEF

Bernard O’Donoghue’s appreciative reading of three poets of diverse genres

SUSAN MITCHELL
Erotikon
Harper Collins ‘Perennial’ £9.00

MIMI KHALVATI
The Chine
Carcanet £6.95

JOHN BURNSIDE
The Light Trap
Cape Poetry £8.00

It is not a large sample, but this group of three poets from diverse cultural, ethnic and geographical backgrounds offers an interesting occasion to look for common features in contemporary poetry. The presence of Mitchell as an American not well known on the east of the Atlantic is particularly to the point. In the course of the twentieth century, poetry in North America and the British Isles diverged so much that they often seemed to be mutually unintelligible. Not just the subjects, but the forms and moods seemed utterly different. Recently the gap has seemed to be closing, for instance with the moving of Paul Muldoon to America and the popularity in England of Anne Carson: Carson’s moods and forms were still different, but there was a sense that she had the same concerns and attitudes.

This reflection arises again looking at this group. Mitchell fluctuates between tight forms and writing that is much looser formally than anything found in Britain or Ireland. As with Carson, she uses prose as one of her poetic options, and in some of her best pieces. By contrast Burnside is invariably controlled and chaste in verse-form; Khalvati uses a more narrative syntax but she is far from loosening to the point of prose. Described in one way of course, Mitchell’s procedure is a venerable one: her oscillation between prose and verse belongs formally to the classical tradition of prosimetric writing, associated not only with the high-minded Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius but also called ‘Menippean Satire’, associated with a much more profane subject-matter, more akin to Mitchell’s.

Perhaps surprisingly, both of these contexts of verse-prose variation are relevant to Mitchell who sometimes writes in a highly metaphysical — even academic — vein (as in the prose opening of the title-poem which is subtitled ‘a commentary on Amor and Psyche’): ‘I feel the need for something that does not exist. This wanting is like speed entering a tunnel. Philia, said Augustine, keeps everything moving from one place to another. Orexia, said Aristotle, because he liked the sound of the word.’ (We learn from the notes that Aristotle’s Orexia ‘is one of several instances where Erotikon attributes to real people statements they did not in fact make’ — a sub-Borgesian fictionalizing tendency in Mitchell, the point of which is not entirely clear.) Erotikon itself develops into a fast-moving internalized narrative whose subject (reminiscent of Gravity’s Rainbow in its shifting between the surreal, the actual and the erotically imagined) seems at its most interesting to deal with real or fantasized sexual experience.

All this is still pretty foreign to the concerns and procedures of poetry on this side of the Atlantic. But Erotikon (likewise glossed in the notes as ‘a made-up word created by eliding erotic and ikon’) is only section 3 of the four parts of Mitchell’s book. Section One is also a single long poem, entitled ‘Bird: A Memoir’, and this seems to be the book's dominating centre. Bird has been reading a lot of English Medieval and Renaissance literature: Chaucer, Lyly, Spenser and the Mirror For Magistrates.

Bird is the family ancestor of the poetic voice through which the poem is composed, to explain a central characteristic of poetry: its operation between the unintelligible-musical and the intelligible-rhetorical. Throughout the book the syntax either breaks down or threatens to, as a representation of the invariable failure of articulacy in the endeavour to express the libidinous. Section Two is formally more orthodox, a series of eight shorter poems of a kind to which the English ear is more attuned. And Section Four is a single short poem, glossing ‘The Golden Fleece’ as language in a way that makes clear what Mitchell's whole enterprise has been in translating the sensual into the verbal:

It is difficult to convey in our language the willfulness,
the animal energy of the original. All those snorts,
growls, leaps, and bounds. To ride that
language bare-assed: no saddle.

Burnside and Khalvati would neither ride the language bare-assed nor draw attention to it if they did so. Still, there are surprising shared elements in these three poets. Most striking is the inclination towards the metaphysical, either as an image or subject (as its title suggests, Burnside’s book is as concerned with light as Erotikon is with darkness). The second most striking common tendency is towards learnedness; all three carry their learning relatively heavily. Despite the profane eroticism, Mitchell requires us to recognize her sources in Petronius, Goethe, Medieval History and so on. Burnside leaves us to translate Lucretius for ourselves, as well as Walter Benjamin’s German, not to mention Heraclitus’s Greek in Greek script in the ‘Phusis’ section of his book. I would have benefited from some glossing of the allusions in Khalvati, evocative though they are as it stands.

I am not saying this as a philistine sneer; indeed I rather admire the seriousness of purpose that this kind of intertextuality might be thought to declare. (My more general quarrel with contemporary poetry is its blasé ignoring of the desperate seriousness of the contemporary public condition; but let that pass.) I just wonder why learned allusiveness is so prevalent in these three poets of such diverse provenances and genres. Mitchell might be called postmodernist (for example in her Muldonian half-made-up etymological jingles); but what is striking is how modernist this falling back on classical literature sounds, redolent of the era of Eliot and Pound (when I.A.Richards said that modern poetry was more in danger of being too simple than too difficult). Perhaps that was the last time that a common English poetry was shared between poetic practice on the two sides of the Atlantic.

For the most part of course Khalvati is very different from Mitchell: a poet not of the lustful-erotic but of the long European/Middle Eastern tradition of love with a large measure of Platonic agape. And she does it wonderfully. The Chine is also divided into thematic sections (all these three books are): the first deals with ageing and troubled childhood and home; the second, beginning with a magical sequence called ‘The Inwardness of Elephants’, is broadly about motherhood and innocence; the recurrent theme of the third is the metamorphosing of experience and story — especially of love — into art. (My characterizations are at once too restrictive — the categories are by no means exclusive — and inexact.) Khalvati has been extraordinarily and successfully productive in recent years; her prolific output is maybe attributable to the admirable ease with which she turns everyday events into poems of weight and strangeness, no pace perceived. This Midas touch can be illustrated from anywhere in The Chine, but it is spelt out in a beautiful poem from the Elephants series, ‘Literature’ which

is one of the saddest roads remember?
that leads to everything, so Breton said:
el camino where a traveller,

slumped in his saddle, wanders;
a motorway in Sophia where a cyclist's scarf
flutters; by a stream you hear laughing

and catching a glimpse of, wonder
how a stream so small and dry
could dream itself into a river.

This open and generous readiness to engage with all realities and see its worth gives Khalvati her power (the openness of the syntax is symptomatic); it reminds me of Coleridge’s wonderful tribute to Charles Lamb: ‘To you... no sound is dissonant / that tells of life’. The crucial thing is that in Khalvati’s world the commonplace never remains commonplace, though there is nothing forced or grandiose about the process and no linguistic special effects are employed. The reader is often arrested by sudden general truths: ‘Size is never what it seems at first glance’, it says in ‘Moving the Bureau’; in Khalvati’s world nothing is exhausted at first glance. One of the masterpieces is ‘The Alder Leaf’ which is a parable of the child’s maturing process, learning to recognize the complex links between the beautiful and the troublingly physical. Her poetic accomplishment has been much praised: her formal wit and grace in set-pieces recalls John Fuller (‘I’m Christmas without mistletoe, / a firework missing fire’ (‘Just to Say’); the rhyming in the last poem (‘after Faiz Ahmed Faiz’, it says at the top) is — again typically — both semantically right and surprising: ‘fonder’/’longer’; ‘silence’/‘presence’; ‘summer’/‘flower’; 'wars’/‘stars’. This poem, ‘Don't Ask me, Love, for that First Love’, is the book’s masterpiece, the culmination of an unlaboured urgency that makes the book more compelling with every reading. The graceful accomplishment is always in the service of a fundamental seriousness.

John Burnside’s reputation is already secure, especially after the successes of The Asylum Dance which swept all before it only two years ago. He too is highly prolific — the author also of several successful novels. Much as I admired The Asylum Dance, I admire The Light Trap much more; I don’t want to sound unduly portentous, but this seems to me an important book in a way that not many books of poetry are. Burnside's writing is more pared down that Khalvati’s but his interests are remarkably similar. Their common subject is spelt out in the poem called ‘History’ at the end of Section 2 (the first two sections are linked: the second, ‘Phusis’, is concerned with the physical processes that underlie the fragile animal reality of section 1; both sections end with a poem called ‘History’):

Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear
of losing everything — the sea, the sky,
all living creatures, forests, estuaries:
we trade so much to know the virtual
we scarcely register the drift and tug
of other bodies.

This poem, set on the beach at St Andrews with the poet’s small son, in the days after 11 September 2001 (‘the end of history’, we recall), is the culmination of the idea that lies beneath the book: the essential fragility of things which are brought about by such weird animal processes that non-being was always more probable than being.

As with Khalvati, the continuity between the everyday and the mythic is unbroken, in haunting poems like ‘Deer’ which ends by explaining why the learned is as present as the ‘meal in the garden’,

                      knowing the chasm between
one present and the next as nothing more
than something learned, like memory, or song.

Burnside's writing is building on the classicism it always favoured, into an exactitude that in one poem inevitably recalls Marvell:

I remember shining a torch
at a moonless sky,

knowing that feeble ray
would travel on

for all eternity, through
space and time,

more permanent
than anything

I thought about
as matter
                                                 (Haronobu: ‘Catching Fireflies’)

The most surprising thing about this metaphysical reflection is that it is true. And it is typical of the quiet and profound surprises that Burnside offers. One of the poems in his first section is called ‘Animism’ which could have been the title of the section (the actual section-title ‘Habitat’, with its sense of where people as well as animals live, is equally fitting). Burnside’s gifts have been recognized enough: the ease with which he leaves metaphysical reflections to come to you: the penny sinking through the sand which

I thought about for days, through paper rounds
and chemistry exams.

You have to read the whole book to realize the full significance of the selection of these two childhood activities. In his spare verse the imagery never goes wrong: animal and living fragility explains the recurrence of moths here, but Burnside never labours the point or any point. He is building towards a poetic corpus of the first significance.

In the end there is no point in comparisons: we should just note that many things are going on in contemporary poetry, and that they are engaging with our dilemmas. Any public impact of poets has to be achieved obliquely, but it must be unmistakeable too to an attentive reading. Khalvati’s translation which concludes Chine ends with a great statement of the individual in history:

Why build a dam at Sefid Rud
if not to water land for years?

Though we'll never see the olives,
ricefields, shelter in an alcove
from the sun, in our time, our lives
have more to answer to than love.

It is, as it always has been, a matter of belief.

Bernard O'Donoghue teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford and is the current director of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. His most recent collection of poetry was Here Nor There (Chatto 1999), and he is the author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (Harvester 1994).