CHRISTOPHER REID
For and After
Faber £8.99

PAULINE STAINER
The Lady and the Hare: New and Selected Poems
Bloodaxe £9.95

DENISE LEVERTOV
This Great Unknowing: Last Poems
Bloodaxe £7.95

Books of poems based upon a particular theme or mode of approach are to poetry generally what the ‘concept album’ is to music. Birthday Letters notwithstanding, they may tend to appeal to the student of poetry rather than to the general reader. There is something self-consciously literary, something of the poetic exercise, about Berryman’s Dream Songs or Lowell’s Notebook that is liable to intimidate the readerfor- pleasure, to whom ‘poetry’ suggests the finished lyric (the poetic equivalent of the four-minute pop song) and not the book-length composition or collection linked by form or topic.

One of the books of modern poetry that I occasionally give as a present to friends is Christopher Reid’s Expanded Universes (1996), and extremely popular it has proven, too, among those without the time or inclination to tackle Pound’s Cantos or Walcott’s Omeros. To any of those friends who are thinking of buying Reid’s new collection, For and After, but may be a little put off by the hint of a ‘project’ in the book’s description, I should like to say that such qualms are unfounded. For and After is a genuine medley. It only looks like a concept album.

The book is divided more or less equally into poems bearing dedications and translations of poems — in other words, into poems ‘For’ and poems ‘After’. As I say, this is not an organising principle. In fact, it is more like a happy coincidence: one is quickly convinced of what we might call the book’s ‘organic’ character. Some of the poems ‘for’ are occasional (revealing Reid’s role as part-time laureate to colleagues, friends and family), some are commissions or semi commissions (‘Edward’s Last Stanza’ was written for a film at the request of the novelist Ian McEwan) and some dedications are simply after-thoughts (certainly ‘Espionage’ appeared originally without its present dedication). A poem bearing a dedication should wear that dedication lightly; there are no such things as ‘only begetters’ where poems are concerned. ‘Lines’ (for Ian Hamilton) meditates on the frustrations awaiting the poet who attempts to over-personalize:

Two blackbirds were pretending to speak Swedish
at four in the morning, as I lay awake
putting the finishing touches to a work
of homage: musical, minimalist, unmodish…

No, I wasn’t. I was wrenching words
for rhymes — these same, poor, clapped-out hack words —
while out in the garden two never-repetitive blackbirds
were doing their free-jazz thing with the other birds.

The collection’s flip-side — the poetry ‘after’ — is quite as interesting as the poetry ‘for’, though whether one approves of Reid’s translations will depend on one’s view of translation generally. Those who favour paraphrase are unlikely to warm to Reid’s approach. Those who believe the translation should have an artistic merit all its own are likely to be betterdisposed, though only if they’ve accepted the taking of liberties as a natural and necessary part of the deal.

A section called ‘Smoking, Drinking, etc.’ is comprised of a number of translations from the French that illustrate Reid’s often quirky approach. Take, for example, ‘At the Green Man’, a translation of Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’. The title is more thoroughly ‘localized’ by the substitution of ‘Man’ for ‘Inn’, and the Inn is located, not in Charleroi, but in the English town of Hemel Hempstead. Rimbaud’s ‘je contemplai les sujets très naïfs / De la tapisserie. – Et ce fut adorable, / Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs…’ is translated by Reid as ‘I’m studying the décor, when – wa-hey! up flies / the bar-girl with her voluminous tits and flashing eyes’ — far livelier although less ‘accurate’ than Oliver Bernard’s 1962 translation, ‘I studied the artless patterns of the / Wallpaper — and it was charming when the girl / With the huge breasts and lively eyes…’ Essentially, the poem has been transformed into something much more ‘Reidian’.

Reid has a marvellous imagination, and For and After is full of invention, of surreal situations and fantastic locations. ‘A City that Marco Polo Missed’ describes the dreamlike ‘city of Sara’, which sprang to life from a child’s doodle, and where ‘no dog is without its necessary bone’. Then there is ‘Bermudapest’, where, ‘in the mid-morning blaze, / its beach cafés’ are ‘loud with the laughter / of chess-players and philosophers’. Finally, there is ‘Bollockshire’, a peculiarly British dystopia, which suggests that beneath the poet’s fancy there beats the mind of an angry satirist.

The easy way with rhyme and rhythm, the trademark whimsy, the flights of fancy — all the hoped-for elements are here. This is a fine collection of poems to which I shall return again and again.

Pauline Stainer’s The Lady and the Hare: New and Selected Poems, is a more than adequate introduction to this remarkable poet’s career. The selection itself is extremely generous, and the book contains a brand new collection, A Litany of High Waters, printed in its entirety. ‘There is a feeling of a body of work like water, there from the beginning’, wrote Stainer in 1997 (in a review of her own The Wound-dresser’s Dream, 1996), and looking again at her first collection (The Honeycomb, 1989), one notices that there is indeed a lack of development in the Stainer oeuvre. Apart from the fact that a few early poems are adorned with upper-case linebeginnings, the Stainer poem of fifteen years ago looks much like the Stainer poem of today. Perhaps Oscar Wilde was right when he said that only mediocrities develop.

It is almost possible to talk in terms of a ‘typical’ Pauline Stainer poem. For a start, it will tend to explore what she calls ‘the imaginative truth’ of myth and legend, which is not to say it will turn its back on science or modern life in general (on the contrary, the poems are often steeped in the detail of the scientific), but that a feeling for myth will envelop everything, like radiation from the Big Bang. Certain subjects will tend to recur: journeys across water, falcons, medicine.

The poem will be full of dazzling images, some revealing a Martian gift that admirers of Christopher Reid will appreciate (ice-floes are described as ‘gliding by’ like ‘chesspieces in lenten veils’). Above all, there will be a powerful sense of our Celtic/Saxon/Nordic inheritance, to which is allied a deep-rooted feeling for what Geoffrey Hill is wont to call ‘the vertical richness’ of the English language, of its ability to open a ‘sacred quarry’ at the heart of our physical and spiritual landscape.

Apart from the odd mimetic flare-up (‘machines that tunnel / so silently, dice no longer / jump on a drumskin’), Stainer’s is not an imitative art, except insofar as the poems suggest an almost sacred act of ‘making’ commensurate with the various crafts and skills that she often takes as her subject matter. Whether setting a broken leg in plaster or tightening the jesses on a falcon’s talon, the skilled practitioner will appeal to Stainer as engaged in a kind of sacrament, to which, I suspect, the writing of poetry is, in her mind, equivalent.

Stainer adores what Hopkins called the ‘gear and tackle and trim’ of ‘trades’, and her poems are full to the brim of references to precision instruments in particular — to ‘carbide-tipped drills’, ‘diamond-tipped scalpels’ and ‘scalpels / of divining-silver’. I imagine that the putting of pen to paper is, for her, a sacred act.

Occasionally — and only occasionally — the narrowness of register in Stainer’s poetry becomes a little trying. For example, in the space of just ten pages, we are given the similar-sounding utterances, ‘What caught in my throat / was not their swift embedding…’, ‘What I remember / is not so much their unguarded anger…’ and ‘What haunted us later / was not the cool dispensing / of sacrament…’ On the whole, however, I think we should be grateful for Stainer’s rather limited range, or rather for her acceptance of it, since it means that she concentrates on the kind of poems that she, and only she, can write. The weakest poems in The Lady and the Hare — there’s a ragged, unrhymed villanelle and a couple of rather sloppy ballads — are the ones which sample traditional forms. Traditional forms just don’t seem to sit with what this poet is trying to do.

This is not to say, however, that Stainer lacks formal expertise. A quotation from almost any poem in The Lady and the Hare announces her skill. I should like to quote the title poem of her second collection, Sighting the Slave Ship (1992), which, like the other title poems, ‘The Ice-Pilot Speaks’ and ‘The Wound-dresser’s Dream’, takes as its theme a nautical journey. It is one of the best things Stainer has written:

We came to unexpected latitudes —
sighted the slave ship
during divine service
on deck.

In earlier dog-days
we had made landfall
between forests of sandalwood,
taken on salt, falcons and sulphur.

What haunted us later
was not the cool dispensing
of sacrament
in the burnished doldrums

but something more exotic —
that sense
of a slight shift of cargo
while becalmed.

This Great Unknowing, by Denise Levertov, is a posthumous publication. Levertov died in 1997,
leaving a number of finished poems, reproduced here in what the editors believe is the order of their composition. The title is also the choice of the editors, taken from a poem entitled ‘Translucence’. It is, I think, a good choice, too, since the poet, writing in her winter years (I might have plumped for Mid-December, after the six-line poem of that name), is less concerned with death itself (that is to say, The Great Unknown) than she is with the process of attempting to glimpse the eternal in the here and now. ‘He lives eternally who lives in the present’, said Wittgenstein, and Levertov might have agreed. It’s a thought that is liable to gain in currency as one’s visits to the doctor become more frequent.

Only in the first two poems in the book is there any sense of a God ‘out there’. In ‘From Below’ the poet wonders about the light ‘so far above me’, and in ‘For the asking’ the soul is described as a house in which ‘a skylight’ opens. But it’s the latter poem’s epigraph — ‘You would not seek Me if you did not already possess Me’ (Pascal) — that strikes the book’s essential note, since it is, for Levertov, the act of looking which is in itself an act of devotion. ‘God’, for Levertov, is immanent, not imminent. Here is the wonderful poem, ‘Patience’:

What patience a landscape has, like an old horse,
head down in its field.
                                        Grey days,
air and fine rain cling, become one, hovering till at last,
languidly, rain relinquishes that embrace, consents
to fall. What patience a hill, a plain,
a band of woodland holding still, have, and the slow falling
of grey rain… Is it blind faith? Is it
merely a way to deeply rest? Is the horse
only resigned, or has it
some desirable knowledge, an enclosed meadow
quite other than its sodden field,
which patience is the key to? Has it already,
within itself, entered that sunwarmed shelter?

Whether or not the horse has entered ‘that sunwarmed shelter’ is an unanswerable question, but clearly the poet herself has done so. The ‘patience’ of the horse (and of the landscape itself), which leads to that ‘meadow’ of ‘desirable knowledge’, is also the ‘patience’ of poetry, and of this kind of poetry in particular. In describing the scene with such precision (‘fine rain cling’ is a lovely touch, and who would think ‘have’ could have such resonance?), the poet has attained that other ‘knowledge’, which is really not knowledge at all, but wonderment. The sunwarmed shelter is the poem itself.

This sense of being, as it were, transfixed — one could almost call it mysticism — spreads right through This Great Unknowing. A number of poems (I make it five) are about, or refer to, a mountain or mountains. Like a Japanese artist or wood-engraver (remember Hokusai’s Views of Mount Fuji?), Levertov is content to revisit her subjects, to re-inspect the familiar landscape. And again, it’s the looking which is important, which leads to the essential ‘revelation’. Levertov’s mountain is no Mount Sinai. Nor is Moses descending its slopes with instructions on how to get into Heaven. Heaven, in a sense, is the vision itself:

Westering sun a mist of gold
between solemnities of crowded vertical
poplar twigs. The mountain’s
western slope is touched
weightlessly with what will be, soon,
the afterglow
                                                                       (‘Mid-December’)

This book is only slightly marred by a number of Levertov’s political poems, which to my mind are rather heavy-handed. Or rather, it is less their heavy-handedness than their eschewing of good poetic technique in favour of plain political statement that I find disagreeable. But apart from these, This Great Unknowing is a moving and deeply pleasurable book. Its editors are to be roundly thanked.

Richard King lives in Oxford. He recently returned from Australia where he wrote for Australian Book Review and other magazines. He also writes for PN Review.

Please send books for review in Poetry London to:

Scott Verner
Flat C 147 Offord Rd.,
LONDON N1 1LR

You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
Tel / Fax: 00 44 (0)20 8521 0776