Robert Adamson: The
Goldfinches of Baghdad
(Flood Editions, Chicago, 2006; paperback,
103pp, $13.95; isbn 0-9746902-8-7)
In the darkness beyond our garden fence,
a white-tailed water-rat.
Sometimes you can see poetical quality in a flash, and in the most ordinary
or uneventful material. Like this opening of Robert Adamson's poem Winter
Night (p.72). There are many ways in which you can define it, or
fail to. You can talk of rhythm, balance, sound values. In the
first line a simple two-stressed rhythmic and phonic structure happens
twice as sign of a familiar normality. You would hardly notice such a
line, but its song-qualities which lure us into the poem are reflected
back from the second line, which breaks the regularity with a completely
different rhythm, no longer "sprung" between stresses but
iterating four unequal stresses — a quickening and faltering of speech.
All the main vowels of line 1 are of the "open" (relaxed,
continuing) kind; line two is the antithesis of this, except the first
vowel of water which as-it-were "captures" the sonic
values of the first line, almost into a rhyming structure. The antithesis
already has a small hint of harmony. The alliteration of Ws in line 2,
what does that do? The stopped initial consonants are replaced by fluid
ones, mental speed of sudden perception set against horological darkness.
Or you can talk of imagery. The dark enclosure (fenced with those initial
consonants) is broken, darkness by white, garden
fence by water-rat; the dull, unknown but tense distance
leading nowhere breaks into a focus on a contrastive thing, an object,
a creature, suddenly, white-tailed like lightning. What difference would
it make if our garden were the garden? Not a lot, but
a little mutual/domestic tag is attached to the scene which is liable
to be challenged by the ensuing visitation. All the time, of course, "nothing
happens". There isn't even a verb.
How important is that? I feel that most British poets, especially the
high-profile kind, would not be able to bear to place that full-stop
after rat. The animal would have to do something, there
would have to be an act. This is because what most British poets
are doing most of the time is making speeches — they are operating a
rhetoric, and that demands sentences because the sentence is where you
form perception into a completed structure which is your claim on it,
and the claim is your power over your listener. Or you could say that
the absence of verb results in a different sense of the speaking self,
who is no longer demonstrating before the reader, no longer making a
declaration of any kind, no longer parading his perceptual abilities,
but rather calling the reader in to a mutual witnessing, and participating
in a kind of (mild) helplessness which says what is there but has no
syntactical leverage on it, no designs on it. It is then a sheer presence
and the artistry lies in the unappropriated quality of perception in
this exposed condition, its fidelity to implicit world structures. So
it is very important. (Some people think this "floating" syntactical
mode is American, but I think it derives rather from Central Europe).
This could be a complete poem in the pseudo-haiku tradition — it has
the parallelism too, particularly marked in the double-barrelled
term which ends each line. And it has implications which could satisfy
any analysis of subsumed world perception. It is in fact the first
line and a half of a twenty-line poem which goes on to develop
the imagistic sense of this opening ("Stars fracture the sky with
light")
and beyond, with plenty of verbs and plenty of indicative rhetoric,
but without losing the poised calm of the outset. It becomes a narrative
of successive percepts within this little night scene, into which
the self is gently, firmly, as if reluctantly inserted, not actually
emerging as first-person-singular until just before the last verse —-
As
I come up from the wharf,
a flying fox rattles in the banana palms—
I hear the long whisper of its beating wings
follow me up the stairs. The stars flicker
letters from a dead god's alphabet.
That last image is, of course, what the water-rat's white tail
has come to be through the process of the poem. It is the result of a
process offered by the poem as it moves through a whole theatre of images
(old and new, natural and artificial: cat, whiskey, river, motor-boat,
nightjar...) to find the fact of writing reflected back to the poet from
an immense elsewhere. The impulse which leads into these final terms
is a notation of pain, a hook-wound in his finger that "stings
like hell", and then we move into the final pact where "I
come up", "I hear", are safe in the presence of the
furthest possible distance in space and time. There is a kind of
unstated morality in it, a chastening, as it attaches the self with all
its desires and wounds, as well as its eventless normalities, to the
world at its largest extent.
* * *
Robert Adamson is an Australian poet of considerable repute in his own
country, not so well published elsewhere as he should be. He lives on
the Hawksbury River in New South Wales, which is a tropical zone so that
the banana palms, flying foxes etc., are not some kind of exotica but
daily sights of his normal existence. He has almost always lived there,
his family were fishers there and he is a fisherman himself. To give
an overview of his poetry is difficult, but it is largely concerned with
where he is: the river, the natural environment and creatures, his life
and history, his neighbours, love and death. It has little of the "pastoral" feel
about it, being obsessively attached to the present condition, and it
never gives any sense of a contented settled existence free from urban
cares, quite the reverse. There is indication indeed of a quite fraught
personal existence, both past and present, without the poetry ever for
a moment becoming "confessional". It is to objective
for that and too poetic — it always has the world on the edges of its
vision, it always brings the poem to an utterance which reverberates
across and beyond its immediate focus of attention. Images of the great
river and the creatures it attracts, especially birds, are held against
various sense of personal pain and loss, seeking through the movement
of the poem a settlement with existence, often terminating in a pure,
objective notation of the existence of natural objects without any intervening
interpretation. But the scope is wide: local humour, international politics
or literary comment may emerge at any time. The manner of writing is
mostly within the lyrical ecstasis of Winter Night but includes
a more leisurely descriptive mode in longer lines.
A substantial selection through his career called Reading the River appeared
from Bloodaxe in 2004 and remains his only British book. The
Goldfinches of Baghdad is a selection of his later poems, about
half of which are also in the Bloodaxe book. Even if you have that, this
book is well worth getting for the rest, for Adamson's standards
are consistently high.
One informative and intriguing factor of the new book is its sectioning.
It is in three "parts", suggesting a sequentiality, and there
are signs of one, from an opening credo through to poems at
the end which seem to gather in towards a final pact with images and
figures foudn throughout the book. But the most interesting thing about
the sectioning is its elusiveness. The first section of what I take to
be the most recent poems (because they are mostly not in the 2004 selected) has
many poems with the name "Eurydice" in the title or other
references to the Orpheus story. But no rational or mechanical consistency
emerges — what Eurydice is in one poem she cannot possibly be in the
next poem and the only possibility of narrative lies in further reaches
of the imagination. Eurydice may correspond to the figure of absence:
the lost or departed or maybe just-nipped-out-to-do-some-shopping person,
with great temerity and fragility made party to a self-drama which re-emerges
near the end of the book. But even this is contradicted by at least one
of the Eurydice poems in which she is pictured as present. It is as if
this kind of claim to significance is not the poet's principal
interest — that is the poem itself, which whatever material it handles
from trivial to mythic, first and foremost is made to exert is own power
on the succession of words, and reach its own conclusion out of the perceptual
and linguistic materials on offer.
There is also a section of bird poems, which is good to see as it has
always been a favourite mode for Adamson of attaching the world outside,
to focus on one of these flying creatures with their constant suggestions
of distance and souldom. They are to us exotic birds, various kinds of
parrot, cockatoo, bee-eater, bird of paradise etc., and they are mostly
common enough sights for Adamson where he lives. He describes, wonders,
is amazed at their brilliance, familiar with their habits, plays them
against his own being, contemplates their reality on the edge of the
anthropomorphic, but keeps his distance and returns to what precisely
distinguishes them, how integral their nature is to its function, "how
inhuman / they are, how utterly bird." (The Ruff, p.44).
Their paradisal richness is both longed-for and distanced from. Ornithology
triumphs and is suppressed. The self only really meets the bird at a
high poetic level.
But the main point is that these are not bird poems at all. The bird
may fill a poem are be merely glimpsed or thought about in the middle
of a quite different matter. Again it is the poem's sense which
defines its purpose, not its object of attention. One of the finest poems
in the book, the title-poem The Goldfinches of Baghdad (obviously
not a local phenomenon) is a thoroughly "poetical" address
to the recently inflicted tragedies of that city. It is a very simple
and moving poem. The paradisal, musical, caged birds treasured by the
Iraquis, now as in the aristocratic past, are literally on fire, they
are burning, and as in other ways in other poems the human presence is
delicately, regretfully inserted into the account by an identification
which can only be reached at this deathly extremity—
Flesh
and feathers, hands
and wings. Sirens wail, but the tongues
of poets and the beaks of goldfinches burn.
Those who cannot speak burn along with the
articulate — creatures oblivious to prayer burn
along with those who lament to their god.
And this comes in the end to an apotheosis where the living totality
itself is encaged in the mortal poetical music as its ultimate condition
—
We sing or die, singing death
as our songs feed the flames.
(NB Salt Publishing will have copies of this book later.
Meanwhile UK orders free of delivery charge can be placed through
the website www.floodeditions.com)
