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I greatly
admired Robin Robertson's first two books, A Painted Field and Slow Air. He seemed to have his lyric
voice mastered, moving from personal to universal with control and poise. The
heavy weights of his traditional portfolio of lyric subjects - Love, Loss and
Death - were balanced by his muscular lines. In both books there was evidence
of a confident poetic directing the writer's own experiences of the thing-ness of the world with grace and a
singular music. His use of image was exact and uplifting, as much as it was
hard-hitting. He reveled in vocabulary and the music of his poems, revealing
the underlying savagery both on the heath and at the hearth. The poems in
those collections are hard-edged and tough, often dealing with visceral
material. In Slow Air, there was a shift towards the elegiac, with poems tracing a self
through the ins-and-outs of relationships and, at the same time, in
relationship to nature. That kind of writing appeals to me enormously - on a
personal level it's where I feel my own work comes from.
Some readers may have begun to tire of the weight of doom and destruction in
some of these poems in the first two books, but Robertson took the heaviness
in stride and simply enjoyed the musical and lyric intensity of his own
lines. A Painted Field was also rounded-off by the wonderful long work 'Camera Obscura',
which gave a fictionalized account of the life of the Victorian photographer
David Octavius Hill through letters, diary entries, verses and prose
extracts, all intermixed with poems that explored the views from the city
viewfinder (the camera obscura) on top of Edinburgh's castle hill.
Enormously inventive and dramatic, that work embodied a scope and vision (no puns
intended) sometimes missing in the more anecdotal varieties of mainstream
lyric writing.
Some of that scope and variety is preserved, nay continued, in Swithering, Roberston's third collection. Due for publication
in February 2006, I'm glad to have had a preview of what to expect next year.
Swithering contains a mixture
of all that was good from his first two books, but suffers from several less
successful moments; less variety; and less risk taking. The title, Swithering, we are told, means 'to be doubtful, to waver, to
be in tow minds; and to appear in shifting forms', this latter interpretation
perhaps accounting for the poems dealing with selkies, mermen, and Proteus.
The doubtfulness, accounts for the recurring theme of the poet questioning
the paths he has chosen in his life, the opportunities taken and those
missed; the doors opened, and those purposefully closed. It makes for a
brooding, self-reflective mood. Sometimes it accounts for brilliance as in
'The Park Drunk' and the lovely prophetic dream-poem 'At Dawn'. In these
poems, and others, Roberton's observation is spot on. He understands and
records how, for example, snow 'furs' everything 'to silence, uniformity';
whereas 'frost amplifies, makes singular:/ giving every single form a sound.'
In 'Between the Harvest and the Hunter's Moon', the sea is 'scalloped in
marble endpapers of green and blue and grey', not only encapsulating the
moment in a vivid image, but textualising (in the image of the book) the
natural world in a way that embodies the author's readings of nature. In 'What the Horses See at Night', he
mixes a close observation of natural diurnal rhythms - the movements of
animals, the sea, rain, the moon - with a domestic tenderness towards his own
loved ones 'breathing slowly in heir beds'. This concern with the natural
world is further embodied in excellent pieces such as 'Primavera' in which
the (potentially didactic) subject of global warming is dealt with in a fresh
and personalised way. In 'The Eel', one of a number of poems written 'after
Montale', the eel is
firebrand,
whiplash, shot
bolt of the
earth's desire,
aimed, by
these dried-up gullies and river-beds,
at the dark
paradise of her spawning;
she is the
green spirit looking for life
in the tight
jaw of drought and desolation'
that 'shot bolt' image recurring in the poem 'Entry' as the 'slung bolt' of a
buzzard's body. In 'The Eel' the 'green spirit' clearly stated; the tradition
of the modernist lyric clearly embodied in the tone and music of these lines.
If 'desire' figures subtly here, it is more explicit in other poems, such as
'Swimming in the Woods', a neat antique sonnet that is brave enough to still
put itself forward in toto as a
metaphor.
'Ghost of a Garden' is one of a number of poems that deals with family and
loss, locating the subject in the 'lost father's' garden shed. Heavily
symbolic, the confidence of Robertson's lines more often than not carries the
somewhat heavily laden tones of these bald metaphors. Where it falls down, however
- quite laughably in one instance, in 'Asparagus' - is where the desire
metaphor becomes a pastiche of itself. In 'Asparagus', we read lines and a
metaphor that are nothing more than the poetic equivalent of a Cadbury's
Flake advert: yes, they look like penises; yes, both butter and semen are
'salty' and 'viscous'; yes, both eating asparagus and making love proceed 'In
a slather and slide, butter / floods at the bulb-head'. I've read tens of
poems like this in journals and magazines over the years and they never get
any better. As an editor himself, Robertson really should know better; this
poem is juvenile and poorly expressed. What is more, it is really nothing
more than a reinterpretation of an earlier poem of his own about an Artichoke
(yes, fruit and veg and sex.. we knowÉ we know!). Sad where a writer has to
resort to rehashing their old work.
But I wouldn't want it to take the shine of the whole book - it should simply
have been cut - for the whole affair is, 90% of he time, certainly a model example
of the contemporary lyric. If there are moments of expository weakness in
'Still Life With Cardoon and Carrots'; and tired-old-male-narrators lusting
after young girls they can never have again in 'New York Spring', then there
are also those excellent poems already cited, alongside the spare
examinations of relationships in the powerful 'Heel of Bread'; and great
historical and imaginative scope in 'Sea-Fret', a poem commissioned for a
Tyneside installation, examining the dual life of a monastery in the region
as a military garrison.
'Siesta', another of the poems 'after Montale', explores a lyric metaphysic in Robertson's
characteristically measured and beautifully weighted lines:
And then you
walk, sun-blinded,
into the slow
and bitter understanding
that all this
life and all its heart-sick wonder
is just the
following of a wall
ridged with
bright shards of broken glass.
and, in 'Leavings', the beautiful image of a father tracing his daughter's
footprints across he snow; the snow then melting, leaving only
the stamped
ellipses of impacted snow;
everything
gone, leaving just this, this ghost tread,
those
wafer-thin footsteps of glass'.
This is one of the poet's trademarks: the ability to conjure love and loss in
all its pathos in a carefully considered fresh image, conveyed in beautifully
measured, weighted and phrased lines and forms.
©
Andy Brown 2005
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