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Before I start gushing praise
about this debut collection of poetry, I need to lay out my biases. Although
I've seen hair nor hide of him for several years, I had the fortune to be
taught by Peter Davidson many years back. I remember some fantastic
discussions about epic poetry, including on how camp Paradise Lost is and a brilliant, if bizarre, slideshow lecture on
seventeenth century baroque Dutch art, as an analogy for Milton's
over-the-top approach. I also remember having a strong, though reasonable,
disagreement with him about Simon Armitage's poetry. 'Give him more time,'
Peter told me. I did. I budged, slightly.
With this in mind, I will now unashamedly declare this one of the most
exhilarating debut collections of poetry I've ever read. Davidson's
attraction to luxuriant, 'performed' language, in visual art and
architecture, is here given free reign to chart territories never before crossed
in such style. Everything about it screams yesteryear, while at the same
time, line by line, resonating with immediacy and a tremendous amount of
emotional energy, ranging widely across real experience and the vicarious
lives of personae and characters drawn from a seventeenth century timewarp.
Moments of sharp, courtly satire (though it's really the characters on the
peripheries of courtly life that dominate Ð the patronned poets, the spies,
the explorers and seekers of courtly favour) sit alongside moments of despair
and bitterness, driven by a sense of dislocation from locale. I had a strong
sense throughout that the many voices were linked by an exile without
movement, but the sheer range of the poetry means any attempt to capture all
the facets of this diamond are going to end up as futile quantitative
assessments. And that would be a pointless approach in this case.
The over-riding feeling I had reading this collection can best be described
by an act of theft; the Singh Twins (a kind of post-colonial Chapman
brothers, identical Sikh twin sisters) describe their work as 'past-modern'
and that seems a perfect description for Davidson's poetry. By
time-travelling, unearthing closed treasures locked away in history's
archives, questions are raised over how we arrived at where we are; and, of
course, the inevitable questions about the world we are in today. You can see
this in the first poem's opening lines: 'Lady of cultured pearls, fictitious
skies, real shit: / Stirring dust like powdered almonds, movig in sirocco and
sacred heraldry' (Prologue to 'The Palace of Oblivion'). Modern diction rubs
up against something conjured, self-consciously, from the dust of the past.
The image evokes the 'dust on a bowl of rose-leaves' of Eliot's Four
Quartets combined with the almond
blossoms of Odysseas Elytis, while the style is reminiscent of Larkin's
casual bathos drowning in the aforementioned over-exuberance of Miltonic
language.
The opening section of the
collection, the eponymous 'Palace of Oblivion', continues with great panache.
Structurally, the ten part sequence, pillared by prologue and epilogue,
evokes epic poetry, but also courtly masques. There's a knowing, English
humour, a language rife with double-entendre and wit, that gives each poem
the sense of being performed, though the dominant trend in the opening
section, the masque of the book's title, seems more intimate, letters from a
strange and distant psychogeography:
It is as
though we were approaching the end of a fiction of espionage
Set in the last Edwardian years,
amidst forebodings and rumours of
invasion,
Greatly
preoccupied with darkness and the sea, with docks, foreshores
and saltings
('V A Choice of Emblems')
It is as
though we return at evening after a journey lasting months or
years
(Approaching
the gates of the park, mooring the boat at the water-
stairs)
To find few
works ruined and few things terribly altered
('VII Returning at Evening')
The openings of these two poems sit either side of the heart of the 'Palace
of Oblivion', marking both a figurative voyage and return. Both poems,
couched as they are in that odd 'It is as though' context, seem wispy,
non-existent. Yet they lead to a very definite sense of fear, as in the end
of the seventh poem, where the speaker is 'troubled with glimpses and
warnings... Beyond which foreshadowings stir as incandescent cities, /
Reflected furnaces, towers of combustion, thunder in burning air'. These
images seem very real in light of the burning oilfields in Iraq, or the
collapsing towers.
I don't want to call 'The Palace of Oblivion' an allegory for war on terror,
but it seems that way from some of the poems. At the same time, the
sequence's real intentions, at least for me, is a personal journey of loss,
or sorrow. The actual heart of the sequence is 'Atalanta Fugiens', in which a
scrap of paper is found tacked to 'the wall by the marsh-gate', while
Spinola's troops occupy every port of the city. The title is taken from Michael
Majerus' book of alchemical emblems, written in Latin and published in 1617
(which, after a quick online search, I can authoritatively describe as
beautifully barmy, full of outsiderliness and clearly something the poet has
digested).
Davidson's scrap of paper is also entirely in Latin, a gimmick one would
attribute to the rather basic showmanship of early Eliot, if not for the fact
that the Latin recurs at points of great sorrow. The first occurrence is in
the form of an echo-madrigal in 'The Keeper of a Troubled House', which draws
out the end-vowels to create a series of depressing chimes, in Latin, such as
'nothingness', and 'without hope'. The tattered message in 'Atalanta...'
starts like someone looking for a good time with a strapping young lad, 'fit
to copulate with basilisks... to blow manticores', but the boy's reward for
answering this classified advert is 'to pass through the palace of memory
leaving no trace in its dust... and to go without sorrow amid the
burning-glasses and the ruins of Europe.' The later two uses of Latin are
laments, cries of shepherds and beggars, sealing the deal on a decidedly
heartbroken code.
Though the rest of the book is peppered with odd phrases from European
languages, which do borrow Eliot's penchant for the mysterious and alienating
intelligent display, these particular poems are translated into prose cribs
(which is fortunate for readers like me). It does beg the question why
Davidson has buried such key emotional energy in history. Perhaps these heavy
bursts of melancholic disillusionment are too off-putting at such length
(even Geoffrey Hill would attest to that). The intellectual filter perhaps
allows the reader to acknowledge, first of all, the sardonic wit, the
linguistic dexterity, the genuine passion for the beauty in the world, and
for the Queen of Arcadia.
The second section of the book, 'The Spy's Letters', is a sequence of similar
length and tone, striking up more obviously a dialogue with the state of
being exiled from one's place of residence, opening with a challenge:
And how would
you suggest that I should live in England in this year
Ð and how
should anyone live in England now?
The answer, 'As a spy. How else?' is
decidedly menacing, evoking the idea of alienation brought on in any society
during a war, or the build up to war, where racial and cultural divisions
lead to internal scapegoating. The time feels more contemporary in this
sequence, though not quite today. The train journey and the last piece,
'Portraits from the Thirties', suggests this sequence is in a pre-war state
of tension. Either way, the sense of displacement and paranoia is genuinely
disturbing, the letters almost completely bare of life when the
narrator describes place, atmosphere Ð always seemingly devoid of people, a
land where the scholars are fugitives, London is 'the dead centre of this
country'. Even the narrator's 'principals are dead or have run mad
through the ruins of their mirrored offices'.
I could go on. I could try to
capture the full experience here, but it's just a lot of pointing at small,
isolated parts. This is one of the best collections of poetry I've read in a
long time, but also one of the most unified. There's a third sequence, at the
end, 'Aberdeenshire Elegies', which marks one arc through the book, from
exuberance to paranoia, to a state of muted bereavement. There is far more
here, but it is the endless avenues of meaning, the very physical
landscapes, the clashing language and baroque imagery, that have drawn my eye
back and back to reading this collection. I wholeheartedly recommend you read
it yourself until you find as many faults with this appraisal as I have now,
knowing I can't ignore The Palace of Oblivion, but not having the words to express its many wonderful
qualities.
©
George Ttoouli 2009
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