Middleton
is a magician and the magic has not dimmed with the passing years.
Few poets writing in English today possess his ability to construct
such highly-wrought word-things, their music dense, the words
an intoxicating rush of 'rightness' but nonetheless fitted together
with a rare craft, nary a join to be discerned. Assonance, alliteration,
end-rhyme, half-rhyme, and more besides; the full armoury is
on display, and glitter it does.
And
why are these words here? Well, it's the very stuff of poetry;
they're here to enchant, to enlighten, to mesmerise, to leave
the reader with that flash of realisation that it was just
so, yes, and a gasp, a shock that visions can be communicated
thus. Miracle indeed, in these parched days of limited song,
less thought, and minimal craft.
Derided
often enough in English environs for being an aesthete (a word
that, to English ears, conjures images of absinthe, a curl of
cigarette smoke, a dozen identical grey suits, frock-coated perhaps,
and an impenetrable air of superiority), Middleton is in fact
one of our premier observers. But he is a particularly
well-read, well-travelled, and polyglot observer, and a voluntary
expatriate
these past 35 years and more. Not that you'd realise the latter
from the well-modulated tones of his voice: no impression there
from all those years in Texas. The American south-west has cropped
up in his poems in the past, but these days France, Germany and,
above all, Turkey seem the paramount locales for his observations,
studies – or perhaps études, for music
rides these words almost imperceptibly from page to ear,
to inner ear.
And the music has a subtle rhythm, a cadence, a structure that
is all too rare these days; is that perhaps why he is criticised
here?
Because the
reviewers have no taste, their palates so dulled by
years of over-boiled, monochrome gruel
that they can't deal with the flights of fancy and erudition
on display in a book like Of the Mortal Fire, or its
fine predecessors?
And
what does observation mean in the context of these poems? Well,
it means that someone with an eye has caught a detail. He's no
mynah bird, mindlessly transposing what's there into random cackle;
there's no mimesis here, for what's the point of a meditation
on, say a Rembrandt painting, which got it so right in paint
that
most
observers' words just stumble around looking embarrassed? A painted
canvas, an awning in Cappadocia, a coffee in Paris or Istanbul,
all trigger thoughts, trains of thought that, converted into
poetry, serve to enchant rather than document.
Articulate
as a dandelion,
Up through a crack, here
Between slabs, tombs, paving stones,
What a world sprang up to defend itself,
And has become, this too,
An uttermost of worlds, a breather;
Or
else Caracci, catching his breath,
Simply had to tell the duo and the boatmen
Why he made rectangular,
to catch the oval
Undulant eye's attention, this rift in time
Their
beauty issues in and out of —
Content
anon to dwell
On earth as refuge, while, as may be,
Other planets
risiing will subside.
(from Caracci:
A River Landscape, 1600)
Middleton's
late style has settled into a mixture of the elliptical lyric and
the meta-narrative. The ostensible subject-matter of the poems
is often foreign lands, art, history and exotic cultures – but
they are more often than not merely jumping-off points from which
the author sets off, musing, into the world of language – a
compressed environment where all spare words have been excised
and the remainder operate in virtuoso mode. There's not a lot of redundancy
in these poems. Take the opening poem, the beautiful Memory
of the Vaucluse:
In this French September light
Picking out profuse
Corals that invade the vine,
Yellows in the hayrick
And pools of blue somehow
Round the rooster's comb,
To
die—undiseased,
Tending a lavender field,
A naked eye
Braving the angel who descends
As angels on the loose
Holycards in a junkshop do,
Still
with time enough—
Fear forgone, bondage to speech
Waved
away—to
sense the feathers
Rush and whisk,
Then giving up on it
To stand, the more to live.
This
poem typifies his elliptical method, and his understated style.
I'm fortunate enough to have been in the Vaucluse several times and
the colours and natural elements here are very much drawn from nature,
but the key to the poem is that it is not a descriptive vacation-type
piece (the bane of all amateur poetry readings), but a working
through of memory. Memory is never reliable, and it has a habit of
putting some things in bold relief, while losing others of equal
import,
and fleeting impressions can take on the appearance of reality, as
those holycards in the junkshop fuse with the angel who descends.
No, I don't know who or what the angel is but, frankly, it doesn't
matter. The apparently clear surface hides a number of pitfalls,
deceptions, and syntactic manoeuvres that confound. But it's beautiful,
and it's true, and little else matters.
Of
the Mortal Fire is one of the best books of verse
to come my way this year. It's a wonderful experience to realise
that someone's
still out there, capable of writing like this. If only others would
realise.
