Book of the Month

February 2003

This, as they say, is the big one. And in more ways than one: it weighs 850 grams, or the best part of two pounds. It's an essential book, in that it gives us the chance for the first time to get our heads around the scale and breadth of Raworth's achievement. Few people will have the complete publications of this poet – in fact not even the author does, which explains why one obscure chapbook from the 1970s has been left out of this otherwise exhaustive compendium. The layouts are generous enough, though Ace is double-columned, as are a couple of other skinny long poems (not ideal, but I can live with it); it's a clean smart production and the texts are eminently readable. It's a book you need to buy, because you need to have the works of one of the most singular and interesting contemporary British poets, who proves you can be innovative, challenging and still have a sense of humour; one who proves that you can take a very singular path outside all known literary camps, retain your integrity and create work of lasting significance. I would be surprised if this has competition for "book of the year", come December.

Tom Raworth first came to notice in the 1960s, as a very talented book designer and as a poet. He co-founded the splendid Goliard Press with Barry Hall, which was later taken over by Jonathan Cape and renamed Cape Goliard. Goliard/Cape Goliard and Fulcrum were the seminal little presses of the 1960s and had high production values, which ensured that some of their books obtained readers because of their quality as objects. Goliard foregrounded new American poetry and work by the younger generation of 'alternative' writers in Britain.

In his early work there is a playful element, a subversion of the reader's expectations, with the introduction of graphic elements (he is also a talented artist), photographs and other non-literary material. Some of those beautiful early books (The Relation Ship, Lion Lion for instance) cannot be properly given their due in a compendium volume such as this, but the works are not too crammed here. There's an American tinge to the work from the 1960s, though it's a puzzle where it came from; that tinge lies in the confidence with which a disrupted form of demotic street language is used, the way the poems comment on the ordinary processes of daily life, the way the poems are not anchored by a tradition, and the way a kind of surrealism-lite, or absurdism, can lift the poems off the page.

i've never said you were unattractive      that's another
distortion    i've just said unattractive to me at this time
certainly men would be attracted to you but let them have six
years of this sort of thing then see what they'd be like

(from Love Poem)

the happy hunters are coming back
eager to be captured, to have someone unravel the knot
but nobody can understand the writing
in the book they found in the lions' lair

(Lion Lion)

By the mid-1970s a new type of poem starts to appear, one where the disruption level has increased. We also get the long skinny poem, like Ace, often having only two or three words to a line, the semantic elements driving the poem on at full-tilt towards an end, but not a conclusion. It's here that we begin to see also a connection between the reading aloud of Raworth's poems and the texts themselves – it has often been observed that no poet reads his work faster than Raworth, and these skinny poems in particular are made-to-measure for his headlong reading style, one that leaves the audience as breathless as the poet.

child
no longer
see
in dreams
small
focus
by lion
screw
rash
on your
face love
to stop
expansion
hot
while
who passes
nothing
explains
heavy
by delight
in softness
heart
and heart
so far
a
part

(in conclusion from Bolivia: another end of Ace)

It's always tempting, when faced with such a cornucopia of work, to emphasise the long poems as being central. Now, many people might not associate Raworth with the long poem, and it's true that they don't seem long – it's that speed thing again – but increasingly it seems to me that works such as Writing (1982) and Eternal Sections (1993) are absolutely central achievements, both in his own work and in English poetry of the past quarter-century. Writing is not about writing, as such, but it is a kind of action-poem, one where the act of writing itself is at one with the stimuli around the writer, one where the poet is like a cinematographer taking long shots, then jump-cutting to an entirely different scene for another long take, then a short intercut, a quick montage, and back to the full-tilt boogie of the main thread. But is there a thread? Yes and no. The thread for me is the participation in the poem that the reader feels – this is an extraordinarily involving work. Eternal Sections, like Writing first published in the USA, is a different animal. It consists of 109 14-line "stanzas", which – I suppose it should be said – should not be thought of as sonnets. The lines here are longer, imparting an almost narrative feel to the proceedings; indeed each 14-liner is a mini-narrative unto itself, the entire group revolving around an unspecified centre, imparting a little of the data required to comprehend the whole, but not in a linear narrative sense at all. The disruptions here occur between stanzas (or poems, or sections: choose your term), rather than within them, and quotation of one or two can give little hint of the cumulative thrust:

only slow ravages of rust
may be part
due to a balance
the collector would have
in the remote past
much earlier life
partitioned in a process
to reach a high level long
on a collision course
two chains are not identical
apart from a few credulous
drops of liquid
replicating themselves
for as long as a million

or

apart from supporting
those summer letters
he learned or resolved
a trick of memory or of style
fit for a dissertation
trying to embody a moral ideal
conscious political sentiment was rare
corresponding to logical propositions
moved in a direction
to be described later
on its own
conversation in the various senses
hangs on his absolutely morbid conviction
that he is certain he will die

This strain of work, which I find fascinating, continues in other long poems, some of which were unfamiliar to me. (Like many people, I have a large number of Tom Raworth's books, but have missed even more – one of the reasons why we all have to welcome this book.) The Vein is one such (published originally by the Massachusetts press The Figures in 1991), and is another where this wild narrative is foregrounded.

she was dealing with
an unworthy family
gathered for death
inconvenient location
gruesome tired mannerisms
a bit thick coming from her
losing the thread of argument
in a sinuous cartwheel
drained of what life
hurried out with a pushchair
unsparing he takes us
to the cabaret
into patterns and groups
contrived for distraction
more likely
to deepen withdrawal
such a decrease
in which women
had views diametrically opposed
soon changes his tune
howling
face to face
cruel for people
recoiling in horror
plastered indeed
by any form of social
charges and interest
it may be healthy
to change the tone
of administration
in growth dynamics
use of perspective
attachment to things
entail perpetual disruption
of what space is for

And at the end there are more books I'd never seen, one from Sausalito's Post-Apollo (Meadow), another from a small press in Bologna (Landscaping the Future). The former includes the fine long title poem, which one could relate to The Vein, and the latter shows that puckish humour still sneaking out in Warm Autumn Problem:

can
a
falling
leaf
hit
a
butterfly
?

Frankly, it will be months before I've exhausted the delights of this book, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman site at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003.