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It feels presumptuous to
review a book by someone who was writing poems before I was born, someone
who's received many prizes and honours, including a CBE. I did wonder whether
I would find as much to enjoy as I had done in Jubilation, the
last book of his I read. But there are themes that run right through his
work: art, friendships, marriage, seasons - and walks and the garden. In
'Jubilaci—n', written as a letter to a friend in Spain in celebration of
retirement, he said 'So I must pause from versing and start burning / To
anticipate the time we're once more here / In the great cycle of the
ceaseless year.' He's still busy, and still writing.
In spite of his translations, the languages he speaks, and his cosmopolitan
friendships, his writing always sounds very English (or maybe is it because
of all these things rather than in spite of them) - by which I mean the poems
are characteristically quietly spoken and well-mannered, courteous and
somewhat self-effacing - the 'I' of these poems isn't about to unburden his
psyche; this 'I' is immensely interested in looking at the world out there.
And what he sees, he sees as a painter does, registering shifts in the light:
The window frame, cut out in black,
Lies beside the sun on surfaces
Not seen
before - the walls that we had come
To take for granted, as the unchanging shape
Of home.
['Seasons']
while interpreting the changes in that light as poet - that 'unchanging shape
/ Of home.'
Reading the poems, you become accustomed to this tone, so it's interesting
that the poems which break with it are the ones I enjoyed least in this new
collection: 'Lessons', a group of poems which are personal, looking back to childhood, and figures
from whom he learned - mainly to draw, (but also to ride a bike). Maybe these
should be read with the poems about artists; there are many, from Cezanne
learning from Pisarro, to the American sculptor David Smith.
Unburdened by current compulsions to sound as much like speech as and as
unpoetic as possible, he is comfortable with myth and abstraction. Walking
'In the Valley'
Lethe rose beneath the layered leaves:
I thought of
the murk of Dis, of lavaflow,
But this was one of mercy's moments:
Lightly I
trod between the shadowed earth
and the unseen horizon, entering
A cool as of
waterÉ
An awareness of time passing, which becomes of increasing concern with age, seems
to run through the book. This comes from the cumulative effect of many poems
which pinpoint moments in the natural cycle of the year; poems like 'In
Autumn', 'In January', 'November', 'Morning' - there are more than a dozen
such accounts of objective observations of the world out there in rain,
frost, wind, sun which nevertheless add up to lengthening shadows in human
life: 'Returning' opens with this image:
My
long-legged shadow
pointing east
measures out
the sundown
across half a
field
Measuring out the sundown is a metaphor which develops quietly and inevitably
across the body of these poems. The last two stanzas of 'Morning', a poem
which wonders what the weather will be when the curtains open (in winter) are
as explicit as Tomlinson comes - that is, not very: leaving the vocabulary to
do the work of implication, before returning the poem for closure to the
actual moment of opening the curtains:
The choice is
not ours to make,
so we await
the chance
of weather's looming,
loosening
in its long
advance
up the valley
reaches
and straight
at our panes,
not to be
predicted, contradicted:
let us draw
back the curtains.
A very definite and concrete closure sweeps up the exploring thought and tidies
many poems like this. 'In the Valley' ends with
The drift
Of a
universe, rehearsing its own end,
Stood at a pause, in a present
Brimmed with
unexhausted time
Between the hidden sun and the awaiting dark.
and the final line of 'Across the Dark' could itself describe such endings:
'To arrive, through limestone, time, palpable here.'
© Jane
Routh 2006
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