Peter Kane Dufault : Looking
in all Directions. Selected Poems 1954-2000
(Worple Press, Tonbridge, Kent, 2000; h/c,
174pp, £10.00; isbn 0-9530947-5-8)
David Morley & Andy
Brown : Of
Science
(Worple Press, Tonbridge, 2001; h/c, 43pp, £6.00; isbn 0-9530947-4-X)
Peter Robinson : The
Great Friend & Other Translated Poems
(Worple Press, Tonbridge, 2002; h/c, 75pp, £8.00; isbn 0-9530947-7-4)
The blurb on Peter Kane Dufault's Selected Poems will
leave you mystified: a poet in his eighties with accolades from Ted Hughes,
Amy Clampitt, P.J. Kavanagh and Richard Wilbur—how come we haven't
heard of him? In spite of the vagaries of the poetry world we all like
to believe the best will shine through, so what's happened here?
Back in 1994 Brad Leithauser, in The New York Review of Books,
put it down to 'impatience with the “poetry scene”'.
The colourfulness of Dufault's life makes this easy to believe:
numerous career changes, including running for US Congress; local musician
and dance caller; his residence a homemade a log cabin and all his poems
recited from memory. Clearly what we have is a larger-than-life character
who has probably never played the game.
Yet, more importantly, how well, to use Phillip Larkin's words,
do the 'poems stand up on the page'? From the evidence of
this Selected Poems, very well indeed: these are tightly crafted
poems, providing close observation and subtle argument. So it is
all the more bizarre that his four earlier books (published from
the fifties onwards) are all out of print, this in spite of the
fact that his poems have been consistently published in prestigious
journals throughout his writing life. But Dufault, I suspect, once
found is found for life: a poet who, although clearly politically engaged,
angry on a number of fronts — destruction of the environment, urbanization,
American warmongering —,
is able to retain his feelings of wonder at the world around him:
the cosmos, the animal (particularly insect) world, the landscape
and individuals who are important to him. It is this ability to
be constantly amazed at what he sees that makes his poetry so uplifting,
and helps his poetry avoid a more cynical, political didacticism — as
he says in 'Burden', 'I
called you because I could not stand alone / looking north to that
skyline'.
His early work and the selection from On Balance immediately
reads like a collection of 'greatest hits' so that it's
frustrating not to be able to talk about all of them. He observes the
natural world closely, from scientific and epistemological perspectives,
describing its mystery and complexity with a religious awe, but one free
of dogma. The wind in 'Logos' is a permanent reminder of
the world's newness, as if 'now were the Beginning, it the
Word/and the Deep just now rent', and in 'Fall' the
maples are 'yearly more violent,/in red-gold' yet they, 'forebore/any
plain testament'. The violent, superhuman quality of his landscapes
suggests a possible influence on Hughes' poetry. Note, by way of
example how in 'Half-Moon' he extends the description beyond
the natural horizon into the cosmos:
There is our highest hill,
summit to tantalize
eagle and edelweiss,
so high it couldn't still
be socketed, so fell
into the stars.
or how the landscape also conveys an undercurrent of violence as in 'Hills': 'that
they can pull a man down too/to his knees, if he look suddenly
at them'. This poem goes on to set human transience against nature's
continuity with the superb concluding lines, '[the hills] strengthen
prophets and empower/lovers by their long paradigm'. 'Snow' shows
the virtuosity with which he switches from the macro, 'Number itself
goes numb under/its simple addition' to precise, microscopic description
at the same time as he meditates on first causes:
One Gothic individual crystal
gets caught on the long mane
of our neighbor's mare,
and a vast theological problem,
a band of angels, pivots
upon an asterisk:
A particularly beautiful poem is 'Ruth' which feels like
precise observation but is actually something imagined, presented as
an idealized, heightened reality, its colours reminiscent of a pre-Raphaelite
painting, its effect achieved largely through hyperbole suggesting that
sounds and sights are all magnified:
She lies now in the long
dawn in a room mid-maple high.
She sleeps. Twenty million leaves
clatter, conveying the blue-green-gold
light to the south east windows
minted into their millionfold
swivelling shadows. Under the eves
jays bluster, ravening among
numbed wasps, too slow either to sting or fly.
When it comes to political statements we see him juxtaposing nature's
wonder and the world's ills, as in ' Leaving a Station-Sunday
February 1, 1970':
Someone, when I was four,
pointed out overhead an eagle. It shed rings
of vertigo and glory.
…The Whole
system is Breaking Down. Money has moved
on, out of rails, into madness
and real estate on the moon,
futures in black air and dead waters.
As we proceed further through this collection there are shifts in style
and subject matter. He includes two narrative poems: Themes for Pibroch,
and A Memorandum to the Age of Reason, the first a poem that
will whet your appetite to go whale watching, on the 'wind-ivoried
black-hackled ocean', the second, the most overtly political poem
of the collection, providing a meditation on the American Constitution.
(Here I felt he was being a little didactic, though it is poetry
with its heart in the right place). The remaining two collections New
Things Come into the World and Looking in All Directions build
on his earlier work. We see the perennial observational poems but
also poems in urban settings and, increasingly, carefully crafted minimalist,
philosophical essays. In the second collection in particular there
is a strong shift towards scientific themes, reflected in many of the
poems' titles.
In general his language gets plainer but is even more able to pack a
punch, such as the love poem 'The Way of Her':
It was like clear water
or like clean air:
No particular taste to it,
no odor, no color, nowhere
anything put up in front or in back of it,
so you saw clean through
and never knew it was there.
Until it was taken away
and you knew at once you'd begin
dying from the lack of it.
And to conclude, it is one such plain observation that encapsulates
both the simplicity and complexity of Dufault's consistent argument,
taken from 'Flaws':
…Even so,
nobody proved to me
bluebirds were beautiful.
One flash did against snow.
Dufault never mentions the word God but somehow seems to suggest there
is one.
David Morley and Andy Brown's Of Science comes across
as cute little Pandora's box of puzzles, a poetic Rubic cube we
can spend ages juggling with but are not obliged to solve: reflected
in the poems, the opening epigraphs and Preface as well as the desire
for anonymity that drives the entire project. But how seriously are we
to take the text's science-versus-emotion discussion? Are the writers
really just asking us to have a bit of fun with these ideas? Are they
just having fun with us?
There is certainly fun to be had. They cite the Lyrical Ballads to
emphasise the emotion that lies behind all science, 'We have no
knowledge . . . but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in
us by pleasure alone' but then show the cards all stacked on the
side of the scientist, citing Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual
Impostures, 'But scientific theories are not like novels .
. . If one uses them as metaphors, one is easily led to nonsensical conclusions'.
So clearly art is not allowed superficially to feed off science. With
their Preface the scientific poetry conundrum really comes into play.
First of all, one wonders whether it was a deliberate attempt to throw
us by stating that the poems are 'a sample of poems by contemporary
poets who are also trained scientists'. One would be forgiven for
not realising that they are talking about themselves. From here they
argue that anonymity empowers the poems (as it does scientific research)
at the same time as they tentatively imply that only proper scientists
should be allowed to write scientific poems, (except for the arty poets
they happen to like). They flex their muscles only to immediately withdraw.
When they finally lay their cards on the table it is to say that they
are following in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Some clarity
at last—but no, because the Lyrical Ballads are equally
opaque: once the men of science have made their discoveries 'manifestly
and palpably material to us as enjoying and sufferings beings,' only
then will the poet be allowed to engage with science. My response to
this can only be, come on guys, poetry isn't rocket science—but
then of course it is, isn't it.
In the end what does anyone want but good poetry: novelty, quirky angles,
unusual linguistic combinations, freshness, skill — the list is
endless, and Of Science is a good collection because the writers' scientific
focus has provided a way for such good poetry to happen. The
book seems short at first, but this is more than made up for by
the book's
absorbing density: many of the poems grip you like a mathematical
problem because of the way the language is being manipulated. Consider
this extract from 'Conception':
There are wounds in the carpet where their bed goes mad
tottering on daft feet and dancing down the room
something is gathered and is gathering a name:
it wants to lift itself, he or she, at once to go
tottering on daft feet and dancing down the room
with its own life and limb. And the lovers know this.
It wants to lift itself, he or she, at once to go
at their speed in its own conception from these two
with its own life and limb. The lovers know this;
Though there is a narrative of sorts, one is more interested in the
architectonics. This involves examining the poem's shifting juxtapositions
and the subtle changes in individual repeated lines. It really does feel
like one is 'playing' with the poem.
The text is also multi-layered in the way some of the poems tempt the
reader with scientific detail as if to say, there's a whole world
of knowledge out there that you should know about. 'Audubon Becomes
Obsessed with Birds' begins each line with 'because . . .' to
provide an accumulation of both minutiae and more grandiose observations
on birds, leaving you with a feeling that the poem is only the tip of
the iceberg of a poem that should continue with its reasons off the page
and into infinity.
Some poems reflect the text's opening debate by interweaving scientific
and emotional knowledge. Sometimes it's just an opportunity for
a good line, by combining fact and feeling such as in 'Friendly
and Equitable Insurance': 'I must do as I please/with this
sunlit morning: the light is accurate'. Elsewhere it gets more
extended treatment. In 'Verres Luisantes' there is the interplay
between 'rite of passage' sex versus the study of biology,
opening with, 'I'm sitting in a lecture in invertebrate zoology,/learning
the mating habits of the beetle genus Lampyrus' and concluding:
& I can taste garlic on her lips—taste a woman
for the very first time—while a sea of glow-worms
lures us in below, in the brilliant attractions of sex.
One of the most intriguing, absorbing and cryptic poems in the collection
to provide this science-versus-emotion interplay is 'First Circle'.
Here we have subtlety, complexity and I suspect, a bit of fun,
to describe the break up of a relationship among other bizarre things.
These lines can only give a flavour of the linguistic interactions going
on in the poem:
I take my head off. It is the same face you kissed as you sloped off
to our bedroom on that last night in our home. And how I ground
into you, knowing next night would be his. And how I was miles
off.
Or how this grief is the age of that woodpecker in the garden,
a problem of style even or of timing for a predator in its circle.
Not you, waiting in the rain in your green coat, when I'd gone
ahead
finally into this garden (I made your little confidence blow up).
But that this garden is the first circle; and here, love, is my
head
to be left in the ground as a marker for where the matter was left
off.
I'm still working back and forth through this one with my calculator
but would love to beam down Morley and/or Brown and ask them to
give me the book with the answers at the back.
Peter Robinson's The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems illustrates
the translator's role as a kind of literary agent for the dead
or, if not, then at least for poets more recognised at home than abroad.
There is something deeply personal in this. Robinson's poetry,
translation and literary criticism have been published widely and this
volume reads as an affectionate showcase of much-loved poets he has translated
over the years: mainly Italian, but also French, Japanese and Austrian.
His aim is to provide translations that are close to the original while
producing poetry in English. The few originals I had access to (mainly
Ungaretti) would support this, and there isn't a hint of 'translationese' in
the entire collection. These are all beautifully crafted poems in their
own right. Eighteen poets are represented but only a handful have a substantial
number of their poems included, and it is these selections that are the
most valuable for the would-be poetic talent spotter.
Robinson opens with the work of the French Cubist poet Pierre Reverdy
(1889-1960), providing not only a gateway to a poet but also to a movement.
Kenneth Rexroth's definition of Cubist poetry is helpful here: 'the
conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into
an artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture'.
This definition, interestingly, begs similarities with some of the poems
in Of Science discussed earlier. Reverdy conveys experience
as fragmented. Loss is there on the margins. Relationships are expressed
through settings and objects but are often shown as insubstantial or
transitory. Consider 'On Ten Fingers':
Violin broken
Book put by
Silent mouth
Her eyes were raised towards me
and I have blinked my eyelids
One word
The very last
I hold between my fingers
her still lukewarm hand
In 'Anguish or Remorse' such feelings are combined with
religious guilt: 'You hear the prayers in the vaults of the convent/you
hear the broken voices that respond' and concludes: 'But
eyes stay on faces whose lies are transparent'. Many of the poems
are hauntingly pessimistic; everything may pass, but the lightness and
transparency of the language makes the passing moment all the more desired:
Consider 'the Distant Voice':
Further on you despair
and all about the sky stars are extinguished
The
air is spent in final rays.
Between
my overflowing hands
It's waiting day
You'll
have to come back here again
In another season
Or
to another pain.
Line after line is movingly bleak: 'the hand that guides the seasons
is mistaken', 'the door of clouds turns and opens the sky/the
black you'd not seen behind the stars' — wonderful
stuff.
Vittorio Sereni (1913-1983) was imprisoned in Algeria during the war
and his work is set against the backdrop of Italy's period of Fascist
dictatorship and post-war instability. Robinson has translated a large
selection of his verse (in collaboration with Marcus Perryman, Anvil
Press 1990) and he is a poet with whom he has particularly close affinities.
Unlike the Reverdy selection these poems are placed solidly in the real
world. Not surprisingly, Sereni writes many poems on lost friendships
but what is distinctive is the subtle ways he uses nature to add pathos
to such loss. The war experience comes 'In the True Year Zero' where
he plays around with the word 'Sachenhausen' (a Frankfurt
district as well as the first Nazi concentration camp). 'On the
Creva Road Again' provides a portrait of an old woman in mourning
who might be considered war's Everywoman, in her endurance against
the odds:
And
nothing
beside her scarlet laughter
was the catholic twilight, nothing
her mourning weeds.
There are also two poems on friends we can presume lost due to war.
In 'Niccolò' the poem subtly shifts between an actual
search for the lost friend and the more abstract journey through memory:
No use searching for you on further beaches
all along the coast pressing on to the one
called the Dead's to know you want come:
So
now
the world empties of you and the poets'
false-true you replenishes with you
Some of his most moving lines are in the poem Robinson cites as his
favourite, 'Disease of the Elm'. It's not hard to see
why. Presumably the title is a metaphor for life's decay but the
poem also recognises the world's ability to survive in the face
of history's attempt to destroy it:
—and the day casts the banks in honey and gold
and recast them in an oily dark
until the teeming of lights.
. . . .
Come near to me, speak to me, tenderness,
—I say turning back towards
a life until yesterday close to me
today so remote—drive out
from me the insistent thorn,
the memory:
it is never satisfied.
The other Italian poet who gets a large showing is Franco Fortino. His
poetry doesn't have the subtlety of either Reverdy or Sereni, but
he has something to offer in his photographic quality. His poem 'In
a Florence Street' takes you on the journey with him into a courtyard
that is engraved with personal history: 'ancient graffiti are on
the inner walls: / Hercules and Hydra, victory, laurels, Love' and
provides a rather endearing concluding line: 'a rose may waver
within the stone'. 'One September Evening' provides
a similarly photographic scene:
I saw beneath the copper moon
two workmen on the violet road to Lodi, three girls dancing
between dribbles of phosphorus ink on the tarmac.
Finally the first-class Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann
(1926-1973) gets a well-deserved airing in Robinson's collection.
In spite of her Selected Poems being the most likely poetry
book to find on the very thinly stocked poetry sections of German
bookshops one only catches intermittent sightings of her in journals
and anthologies over here. Her poetry gives the illusion of simplicity,
plain statement, but is in fact subtle and complex often concerned with
philosophical issues. Robinson's selection here reveals the extreme pessimism
of much of her work. A flavour of this can be gained from her poem 'Enigma':
No more will come.
There'll be no more spring.
Thousand year calendars predict it for all.
But summer too and such, that had so good a name
as 'summer-like'—
it will come no more.
You mustn't in the least complain,
said a piece of music.
No one
else
said
anything.
From the range and quality of the translations in this book one is not
surprised to discover that The Great Friend was a Poetry Book
Society recommended choice.
All in all, these three volumes from Worple Press are extremely diverse
but each has much to offer in its different way.
