ROBIN ROBERTSON
Slow Air
Picador £7.99 Pbk, £12.00 Hbk

ADRIENNE RICH
Fox: Poems 1998-2000
W.W. Norton and Co £13.95 Hbk

If the first problem for every poet is to find an individual tone of voice, the second problem is to find new things to do in it. Slow Air is Robin Robertson’s second collection, after the highly acclaimed A Painted Field in 1997, and we can see him wrestling with these issues.

His tone of voice in A Painted Field was very distinctive: deliberate, slow-moving, carefully chosen language, describing concrete events with the sort of bleached accuracy that conveys a mood of anxiety: it has the air of great seriousness, can achieve real wisdom, and, when it fails, can risk portentousness.

His new collection begins in the familiar style, and the opening poem, ‘Apart’, is a most successful example of it. It’s a sort of shrunk sonnet, two triplets and two couplets, not rhyming, and it begins:

We are drawn to edges, to our own
parapets and sea-walls: finding our lives
in relief, in some forked storm.

I hear this as a rather beautifully allusive way of speaking about sex, and one of the couplets conveys something very truthful about men’s experience of sex:

Thinking how much more we wanted
when what we had was all there was;

The quiet, possibly rueful simplicity of this is both touching and genuinely thoughtful. The second poem, ‘Head over Heels’, is equally successful, a lovely image of a couple on a Ferris wheel high above Paris at night, in love and looking towards a shared future:

the way the bright circuitry of Paris
lay beneath us like the night sky,
like the plan of our lives.

This unmistakable honesty and specificity of language are characteristic of Robertson’s work. There are great strengths to such a style. It slows up our responses to individual words and images, and allows time for unspoken thoughts and associations to form in the reader’s mind. The linking of ‘circuitry’ with ‘night sky’ and ‘plan’ in that poem, for example, touched in my mind on thoughts of astrology, destiny, and the brain whose electrical activity does indeed depend on and determine our capacities for deep relationship. These associations, though personal, are not arbitrary and are part of the poem’s richness.

Later poems more often portray moods in minor keys. Physical details continue to be described with great skill: ‘The side of the house came away / like a glacier calving’ (‘Thermal Image’) or ‘The firewood’s sap / buzzing like a trapped fly’ (‘The Long Home’) — this is a very skilful and effective use of imagery. But a certain bleakness of tone in the last lines of poems comes to seem a bit like a mannerism. Here are a few: ‘holding water, feeling nothing’, ‘proving I exist’, ‘of fear behind the eyes’, ‘into its pocket of loss’, ‘of the wounded touch-me-not’. Three poems are entitled ‘Anxiety’. When he translates Dante — as he does, very well — he chooses Canto XIII, ‘The Wood of the Suicides’, with its horrifying imagery of the souls of suicides, banished from their bodies, who have now grown into trees that are eternally torn at and shat on by ‘women with the feet of birds’. When he writes about a painter, he chooses Mark Rothko, whose massive and sombre masterpieces also led to suicide.

A poet can only write out of the mood in which he is creative — which is not necessarily his prevailing mood in ordinary life — but there is a certain monotony to this expertly realized emotional world which invites one to wonder where Robertson might go next. Perhaps we get a glimpse that he is wondering the same thing in the fact that he also translates another ancestral poet, Rilke, who dealt with the problem of subject-matter, at one point, by compelling himself to write a series of poems about the animals in a zoo. It is three of these poems that Robertson translates: ‘The Panther’, ‘The Gazelle’, ‘The Flamingos’. His sheer poetic skill, and his capacity to convey the sensuality of movement and colour, are very much in evidence in these translations.

Poetry reviews create strange bedfellows, and it’s hard to imagine a more striking contrast to Robertson than Adrienne Rich, now in the later part of a huge and energetic career. And yet, back in the 1950s, Rich too began with carefully written, rather conventional poems. The path she took to a powerful individual voice has been well-documented, both by herself and others. In life, as in her poetry, she set out to do the expected thing (she married, had three children while still in her twenties), and then, as she has written, she felt ‘pulled along on a current which called itself my destiny’ (When We Dead Awaken, 1971) and decided to get off it. Over the years she has put herself in touch with her Jewish background, her lesbianism, and her passionate feeling for the gifts and sufferings of women. The things she feared would make her an outsider have turned out to be the things that allowed her to feel connected.

She learned to write with a joy, passion and concreteness that are both her own and profoundly ‘American’. When in a sort of manifesto she wrote of her determination ‘to feel existence as this time, this place, the pathos and force of the lumps of snow gritted and melting in the unloved corners of the courtyard’ (‘Shooting Script’, 1970), she was both asserting what she believed to be a peculiarly female sensibility, and standing squarely in the wonderful affirmative American tradition that has its roots in Emerson and Whitman.

Her new collection, Fox, contains poems written in 1998-2000, when Rich was aged 69-71. One might expect some slowing-down or loss of pressure, but that is far from the case. This is marvellous writing, grappling with issues on every scale from personal to political and ecological, but always direct, moving and concrete.

In many ways, despite her continual development and change, Rich remains true to her vision of the lumps of gritted snow in the ‘unloved corners’. One of the most successful poems in this collection is the quite unassuming ‘Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot’. She describes a banal tourist experience, waiting for her friends by a gift shop while they join a tour party to climb up to a ‘Mystery Spot’ where occult things are said to occur. Rich describes the picnickers around her, the gift shop with its ‘scorpions embedded in plastic’, its MYSTERY SPOT bumper stickers.... if she can make a poem out of this, one is tempted to think, that will be true mastery.

She goes on: ‘if anything up there was occult / nothing at ground level was’, and (having thus disarmed the reader) she continues to describe the families milling about, the shafts of sunlight through the redwoods, each one saying (and suddenly we realise something profoundly unexpected is taking place):

And then her friends come back from their tour, each one given their particular name: ‘Anne, Jacob, Charlie!’ Thanks to those shafts of sunlight, her joy in these particular people, her delight in and sensitivity to all that human crowd and its family life, are now touched by the awareness of her own ageing and the frailty which presumably has caused her to remain waiting below while the others climbed up to the tourist attraction. These latter things remain entirely unmentioned, but we have become aware that the apparently ordinary scene is utterly un-banal, something in it is deeply moving and altogether more astonishing and ‘occult’ than anything the Mystery Spot might have offered us.

Rich’s writing is rarely quite so full of descriptive detail as that. More often, she is extremely economical, and one finds she has packed a punch that has its effect almost before one has quite taken in her meaning. Here is one short section from ‘Victory’, in which she visits a friend who has cancer:

I guess youre not alone    I fear you’re alone
There’s, of course, poetry:
awful bridge rising over naked air:   I first
took it as just a continuation of the road:
‘a masterpiece of engineering
praised, etc.’   then on the radio:
‘incline too steep for ease of, etc.’
Drove it nonetheless because I had to
this being how — So this is how
I find you:   alive and more

Another sequence, ‘Terza Rima’, uses Virgil’s guiding Dante through the Inferno as a background for thinking about issues of leadership and following. Rich can think of no ‘great teacher’ whom she would trust to be a guide, and so becomes herself the ‘limping / teacher I never had I lead and I follow’. She comments on her own status as a guide, great in the past. ‘How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman” / for mere continuation / when the broken is what I saw’. And finally, as I read it, she suggests that ‘the map / of chance and purpose’ (fine phrase!) equips no-one to be a guide: we can only, all of us, accept both roles, be both ‘guides and novices’ in our own lives.

For all her modernity, Rich speaks out of a highly literary education; she is full of references to the past and to other writers. In ‘Grating’, which is about being a woman unbemused by ‘beauty’ and ‘innocence’, able to be ‘naked / free of beauty / ordinary in fact’, she suddenly introduces a remarkable old-fashioned iambic pentameter: ‘There is a dreadfulness that charm o’erlies’. I think the reason for its appearance in this poem is to remind us of earlier women, less fortunate in some ways, who have had to cover up all sorts of inner chaos in deference to these external tyrannies. In ‘Four Short Poems’, however, she confesses her love of romance and mystery — her own, not something imposed — and surely she has a sense of fellow-feeling with the boy from Prague, who plays Beethoven’s Appassionata one night, and then ‘for a whole month droops over the Internet’.

Perhaps she is again thinking of the costs of leadership when she describes dissent as ‘soul-splitting’. In ‘If Your Name’s on the List’, she writes:

Yes, I know a soul can be partitioned like a country
In all the new inhere old judgments

We want to be part of the future’, she writes, but ends the poem:

Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century
screams   Don’t let me go

Don’t let me die   Do you forget
what we were to each other

This is the wonderful voice of an authentic poet who is also a deeply learned human being, deeply marinated in emotional experience.

D.M.Black’s Collected Poems 1964-87 (Polygon) was published in 1991, and his translations of Goethe have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London and other journals. His website is www.dmblack.co.uk