Wallace Stevens reads Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

Yellow Studio

A Review of Stephen Romer: YELLOW STUDIO (Carcanet, 2008)

   In a Radio 3 interview with Clive Wilmer conducted 20 years ago, Stephen Romer (a long-term resident in France and professor of French literature) speaks of the engrained disparity between the “post-Mallarmean reflexiveness’’ of French poetic idioms and an English tradition benched in the quotidian world of people and things: he related how a French academic, on being presented with a Larkinesque poem of urban mundanity, found it so alien to his sensibilities that he declared ‘Ceci n’est pas une poeme’. (A hint of Magrittean surrealism enters the picture here.)

    A major element of Stephen Romer’s project over his five published volumes has been to work through a complex negotiation between these two apparently divergent poetries and the epistemologies that accompany them, an impressive attempt to marry the philosophical elegance and linguistic clarity of contemporary French styles with the more worldly, experiential, noun-cluttered demotic of their counterparts in English. His new collection Yellow Studio furthers this ongoing dialogue through its five sections, plotting a kind of ironic narrative from the opening’s ambivalent francophilia, through a satirical American divagation, back to the poet’s English roots in the beautiful cycle of uneffusive elegies for his father which close the book.

     It’s as though, from the perspective of rueful middle-age, Romer is dismantling the bookish pretensions towards high-flown theory and aestheticism he may have indulged in when younger (just as in one poem he dismantles his library) in favour of the looser, more provisional modes of understanding that broken love and grief force upon us. In a characteristic paradox, however, the  pastoral withdrawal of aging is also ironised, and in the title-poem Vuillard’s stylised ‘Yellow Studio’ comes to symbolise the “humane heaven” of art he now regards “with nostalgia, with homesickness” – is its “sweet, autarchic rest” really to be longed for, though, if it provides only a “lumpy mattress” to lie on ie. hidden imperfections would always trouble you, such as the social contexts of the artist’s studio evoked earlier in the poem? The unusual word “autarchic” is also troubling, alluding both to an anachronistic notion of absolute power (attainable only in the abstract world of art) and perhaps even to a condition of autism that implies exclusion from human discourse and reality.

    This is a telling example of how subtly Romer “loads every rift with ore”: the wry, sophisticated surface of each poem often gives way on closer inspection to an unstable inner pattern of evasions and problematics, frequently hinging on nuanced ambiguities or oblique references to other source-materials. In this way, the oppositions the book initially seems to set up – between art and life, France and England, exile and home, youth and age – are consistently skewed and disjointed into more intricate relations. Equally, the urbane, knowing narrative ‘I’ who bobs elusively in and out of the poems keeps adroitly pulling the rug from beneath his own feet (the “two-tone shoes” he mentions hint at his doubleness): one is reminded of what one critic said of Rilke, that “by most revealing, he was most concealing himself”. Implicitly fighting shy of the unitary confessional voice which is all too often the default-setting of contemporary English and American poetries, Romer hives himself off into different registers, slants and postures which enact multiple perspectives on recurrent situations and locales.

      A further way the poems attain this polyphony is through the use of translation and adaptation to create personae, in the Poundian sense: four haunting versions of Apollinaire’s war-poems modulate familiar motifs of lost youth and thwarted love through a newly modernist tonality lent by unpunctuated parataxis and “calligrammatic” lineation. ‘Yehuda Halevi to His Love’ seems to wryly ventriloquise the 11^th Century Hebrew poet-philosopher, while the longer, obscurer piece ‘Jardin Anglais’ uses material from de Nerval’s Sylvie to set up a dialogue between conflicting historical voices, a ‘malentendu’.

     The book begins in a contemporary Paris kitsch with “sprinkle-glitter” and “seafood-platters”. Several of section one’s poems seem distant parodies of the bathetic amorous liaison typically encountered in Laforgue: the self-deprecating narrator struggling to seduce a markedly less literate (and in this case much younger) ingénue-figure. This ‘mid-life crisis’-type situation is mined for its comic potential, especially in ‘At the Procope’, when his young American dinner-date unexpectedly reveals hidden literary credentials in the form of

                                 “a snatch of Stevens- was it

        ‘The Idea of Order’? - indelibly tattooed

         On her back, just along the pantyline.”

 The lines ripple with wordplay: the double-entendre on the Americanism “snatch”; the adverb “indelibly”, seemingly tautologous until you consider that not all tattoos are permanent and indeed, in our throwaway culture, how few texts of any kind are indelible anymore – even those of Wallace Stevens, that lofty, metaphysical poet whose appearance along a girl’s pantyline seems surreally incongruous to say the least? What “idea of order” remains plausible in this kind of context?

      At the same time, as we read on through section one, a subtext develops implying recourse to frivolous sexual adventures is merely a diversion from the grievous breakdown of a more serious relationship (or marriage?) The mood rapidly darkens: the despondent parting in a Paris cafe sketched in ‘Recidivist’ hinges on two pregnant images. “The eternal Lipton’s teabag/laid genteelly on the saucer” works as an understated metaphor for something used-up or redundant, as well as carrying the cultural connotations of being the only brand of “English tea” available in France (and seemingly only ever drunk by the English abroad). Even more subtle is what the poem doesn’t say: that a Lipton’s tea-bag label is yellow, making it a tiny synecdoche of the ‘Yellow Studio’ that is an over-arching trope throughout the book.  The closing image - “The way your blue dress rises” - seems initially a straight visual-impression charged with misgiving, but it seems also to bear a buried memory of another wife poignantly mourned-for by an English poet, the “air-blue gown” of Hardy’s great ‘The Voice’: the rising-up is both the erotic uncovering of the narrator’s raw loss and his mediation of it through literary echoes and language.

     Section two steps back into the rural France of a middle-aged Horatian quietism not without its disquiets. Two exquisite landscape poems (‘A Small Field’ and ‘Loire, August’) and a concerted attempt to cultivate his own garden (‘pruned expectation’) give way to deflating incursions of loneliness and sexual frustration: he “check(s) the personals”, sees in a “full-bottomed urn” a former lover’s buttocks, sleeps guiltily with one of his young students (“the aging Don” is both university lecturer and ironic Don Juan). The Apollinaire versions shatter any further pretence at bucolic seclusion by bringing conflict and history back into the frame.

      This leads on to section three’s more measured and politicised slant on contemporary France, with side-sweeps at cloistered academia and its reductive over-analyses. The liberalism, both cultural and social (“the sensual life of art”), which France had represented to Romer as a young man is vividly mourned in ‘Farewell to an Idea’: he now feels “we are old, and exiled /into more frightening country”. Section four transposes this sense of political malaise to America in the context of 9/11: rather than simplistic condemnatory invective, however, Romer restores historical perspective to the “toxic darkness” he finds there, subtly alluding both to the pioneer-spirit of “the Founding Fathers” (ironically foisted into the setting of a Back-to-Nature weekend) and, via Coleridge’s “pantisocracy” and ‘The Tempest’, back to the United States’ conceptual origins in the French Enlightenment and Voltaire: this great intellectual tradition has disastrously terminated in the “autarchic” debasement of

                                    “a President

     sitting among children in a classroom

     with his reading-book upside-down.”

    Stylistically, Romer taps into the abundant resources of American poetry to work through his perennial French/English dichotomy: whereas Section One had included an unexpected reference to Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with you’ (‘Alas Without Constraints’) to signal its experiments with urban demotic, and the concluding lines of ‘Today I Must Teach Voltaire’ seem to borrow a tone and cadence of trans-political obloquy from George Oppen (‘He must explain to all of the children/this blazing love of death’), the excellent ‘Adirondacks’ takes a leaf out of Elizabeth Bishop’s magisterial later books, with its coolly defamiliarising outlook on a travelled-through landscape and its all-too-human inhabitants, obliquely summing-up a culture’s contradictions and discontents in a few off-hand, resonant images.

      What is so striking about ‘An Enthusiast’, the twenty four interlinking elegies for the poet’s father that conclude the book, is the way they explore intimately personal material in a manner quite new to Romer while at the same time drawing together and recapitulating many of the themes and images of the earlier sections. The tentative endeavour to posthumously settle differences becomes a continuous self-association with his father – whether in attachment to music, gardening (“my hedges gone haywire”), flirtatious encounters, religious belief, marriage – all these counterpointed by instances from preceding poems. Memory and imagination fuse as Romer reconstructs episodes in his father’s life from a “strictly private diary”, a writerly disclosure which once more unites them. Like Lowell’s ‘Life-studies’ (a memory-book ‘An Enthusiast’ has some formal kinship with, especially in its use of short-lined, irregularly-rhyming free-ish verse), there is also the attempt to read back current crises from family history: the repressed, privileged middle-class England Romer’s father was heir to perhaps lies behind the “silence, exile and cunning” of his son’s later defection to France and to poetry.

     In a final variation on the volume’s key-image, the ‘Yellow Studio’ of art becomes the “yellow attic room” of childhood, to be revisited in memory but not reclaimed, the poet reconciling himself to his father’s work of “clearance” out in the sunlit garden so that he can move forward and growth can begin again: the writing of these elegies has no doubt been a similarly cathartic labour for the son. Such subtlety and reluctance to polarise is typical of Romer’s art in this consistently-enthralling book – an object-lesson for less meticulous contemporaries in how to construct a complex, full-bodied book, not just a résumé of disparate pieces.

                                               (First published in The Wolf, 2008)

Dizzily Hereafter: Donnelly in Notting Hill

 Last week I ran through rain to attend the Q&A and reading by Timothy Donnelly at the Lutyens and Rubinstein Bookshop in W11. The initial conversation with Adam Phillips was both illuminating  and amusing for the way Phillips' earnestly soft-spoken, chin-stroking psychoanalytical manner often abutted against Donnelly's fast-talking and wryly down-to-earth Americanese, his speech-rhythms and frequent witty self-qualifications not a million miles from the peculiar syntactic propulsion of his poetry. In reading aloud he was careful to accentuate the acoustic richness of his lines, the "phrases of their idiosyncratic music"(to quote from a Stevens poem Donnelly said was particularly influential on him as a young man, 'Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow'.)
   If the poems of The Cloud Corporation seem to operate more often than not on a level of ambivalent abstraction, preoccupied with the blurred interface between perceiving mind and fluctuant reality, it was fascinating to hear Donnelly provide background-context for certain poems I was familiar with and dramatically reconfigure their meaning for me. The opening poem in the book, for example, - 'The New Intelligence' - came out of a period of debilitating illness when Donnelly was experiencing bouts of deafness in one ear and dizziness so extreme he would fall over. Doctors at the time could come to no diagnosis and the poet actually feared for his life: only after one specialist decided that Donnelly was suffering from a Sensory Processing Disorder - a lifelong condition he could learn to adjust to rather than a disease - that he could begin to recover his sense that a shared future with his wife and a faith in the objective world (rather than "the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten") was again possible. This then is what the poem addresses, although obviously at a querying slant: most startling for me was the realisation that the ending of the poem, which I'd taken to be hoveringly metaphorical, is pretty much literal and therefore incredibly poignant:

    "I won't be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily
      hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room
      perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins"

Dues of Hazzard

  Attended an interesting event at the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in Notting Hill the other night. Adam Philips was in conversation with Oli Hazzard, who last year had his first book of poems Between Two Windows published by Carcanet, a volume full of linguistic verve, inventiveness and promise.
   Philips began very much in chin-stroking psychoanalyst mode, gently probing an uncomfortable-looking Hazzard on his childhood and upbringing; one wondered if this was going to turn into a kind of public therapy session. But his questions soon took a more literary bent as they discussed influences and intertexts: chiefly, in the case of Hazzard, John Ashbery, whose work he said had kickstarted his own while at university and is now forming the subject of post-graduate research. Not that, as Philips pointed out, the poems of Between Two Windows are slavishly Ashberian; there's a variance precipitated by Hazzard's writing out of a more English idiom,for example, as well as him being a poet preoccupied with tighter forms and more deliberate constraints than Ashbery has ever gone in for.
     Questions around this Oulipan concern brought out what for me were Hazzard's most intriguing comments. When asked what was the value of the set forms and patterns his poems are often composed to, he spoke of how the partial, restricted version of language which results mimes the way in which all language-use is in fact partial and restricted in its perspectives on reality. There's also a ludic, comedic aspect (as with the Stevens of Harmonium) in the often failed attempts of an exaggerated formal design to square up to the ungraspability of the world "out there" (I'm paraphrasing, of course). When Philips followed up with the question "What is form?", however, Hazzard was a bit stumped and who could blame him? It would take a whole book to begin to address such a complex, far-reaching inquiry: perhaps the writing of poems is in itself a prolonged effort to answer this question.
    

Pindaric Mode

                                                  

  Ian Pindar’s Constellations is the most intriguing new volume I’ve read this year for a number of reasons. Like Tim Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation (which I wrote enthusiastically about last year), Constellations finds a way of utilising the great Modernist forebears - chiefly in this case Stevens, Aiken and late Eliot, with perhaps a few Continental masters like Valery, Rilke and Seferis thrown into the mix  – and remoulding their rhetoric of high-flung abstract lyricism into a more contemporary idiom.

     Whereas Donnelly’s style seems an understandable extension of what’s happened in American poetry in recent decades, where Stevens channelled through Ashbery seems a prevalent line of influence, Pindar’s feat seems all the more admirable within the context of an English poetry which has been fairly resistant to these kinds of writers since the Movement declared its highly-damaging moratorium on Modernism back in the late 50s – remember Larkin’s asinine rejection of “Pound, Picasso and Parker”?( His estimation of Charlie Parker as a radical Modernist -  a saxophonist who in the light of subsequent jazz-explorations now seems decidedly old-school – suggests how limited and partial his critical viewpoint was.)

     Even the more experimental British poets who have been interested in American Modernism, such as the ‘Cambridge school’, have taken more from the skinny-lined, syntactically-disruptive Objectivist/Black Mountain lineage than from the lusher, reflective manner typified by Stevens: “the tradition of Pound and Williams rather than the tradition of Pound and Eliot” as Crozier and Longville put it in their Introduction to what’s seen as the ‘Cambridge School’ anthology, A Various Art.

    What’s particularly important about Constellations is the way Pindar has forged a style based on Modernist and non-British role-models that sets it bravely apart from the run-of-the-mill complacencies of so many volumes published today. In so doing, it reminds us both of the restrictive set of tacit conventions many poets are writing by, and of the vastly wider possibilities embodied in looking beyond these same conventions and towards areas of poetry far more ambitious, complex and powerful than anything written in the UK in the last 10 years (the usual source of influence for new poets.)

   For a start, Pindar returns to an essentially impersonal aesthetic in Constellations, avoiding the  autobiographical-foregrounding which all too often dominates mainstream poetry. We learn nothing about Ian Pindar’s personal life or past in these poems because he is too absorbed in the task of crafting beautifully-measured lines and stanzas and allowing these to speak for themselves:

       “Old cars and roses. The yard prepares for evening.

         It knows the colour of yesterday,

         as the shapes in the yard are angles of themselves.”

Without the need to put himself in the frame of the poem, Pindar is free to evoke subtly-modulated scenarios which are frequently both painterly – the luminous semi-figurative landscapes of Matisse or Dufy spring to mind – and musical, with playful variations made on the sounds and meanings of words: “New vistas and visas, new rooms with new aromas”; “each particle part-icicle”; “engendered/in the consciousness, endangered in the consciousness”. The overall structure of the book, which indeed can be read either as a single long poem or as a linked sequence, is also more symphonic than narrative-driven, with themes and motifs (eg. the changing of the seasons) recurring and reconfiguring throughout its length. This is another key device used by Modernist poets, of course, with Four Quartets being only the most obvious example: the effect is to allow a complex, open-ended meditation on certain ideas and images without pinning down meaning to the kind of glib, unitary conclusion invariably encountered in the post-Movement poem.

    Despite its many virtues, my main reservation with Constellations is that the style often sails a little too close to Stevens and ends up sounding almost like an imitation; this is where the book diverges from Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation, which seems like a bold bringing-forward and revivifying of the Stevensian poetic, spicing it up with dollops of absurdist irony and post-Modern  weltschmerz. In attempting to capture the airiness and grace of Stevens at his most lyrical, Pindar sometimes overdoes the mellifluous “gaudiness” of his language and comes out rather over-alliterative and flowery (eg. “The rose/is a replica of a rose in a replica reality”); equally, there is occasionally a naive tweeness of expression which the political poems of the middle sections do not sufficiently offset: “ Life is a holiday. For love and sudden joy”;/ “How nice to make a Paradise./ How nice to know white pansies and white peonies.” Stevens brought darker tones into many of his poems (eg. at random “A little less returned for him each spring”) - as did other Modernists like the early Eliot, Montale and Vallejo – and one might say that Constellations could do with a touch more of this harsher, bassier octave.

  Still, airiness, grace and unEnglish jouissance are perhaps exactly what we need when there is so much dull and unimaginative poetry around.  It is summer, after all (allegedly). Far better poems that are too redolent of Stevens than poems that are too redolent of Don Paterson and Carol-Anne Duffy.

Colossal Rearrangements: Katerina Brac by Christopher Reid

                                                               
   A comment made by Todd Swift the other week at the end of a hyperbolic post about Jon Stone's new volume - "English poetry was perhaps last this differently, oddly smart with Christopher Reid's Katerina Brac" - sent me back to the book in question to check for myself if it was as seminal as Todd implies.
    To be honest, I've never given Reid's work much consideration. I confess to being guilty of lumping him glibly in with his fellow Martian, Craig Raine, whose characteristic early poetry seems to me now as much of an outdated 80's fad as the Sinclair C5 and the ZX Spectrum (no doubt some Hoxton retromaniac out there will tell me that these are now the height of cool...) Worse, its over-reliance on  flashy, gimmicky tropes at the expense of all other components of poetic meaning or emotional/intellectual/social resonance seems reflective both of the design-over-content ostentation prevalent during the decade and even of the deregulating,brashly acquisitive spirit of Thatcherism underscoring it. (Worse still, Raine continues to write in more or less the same, clever-tricksy manner today.)
    Although Reid's first two volumes seemed to be vying with Raine for who could come up with the silliest, most fanciful metaphor (a weightlifter compared to "a human telephone", indeed!), there were always more interesting undercurrents at work even in his most affectedly Martian display. Titles like 'Academy of the Aleatoric' and ' Holiday from Strict Reality' flag up the clear influence of Wallace Stevens, unusual enough for a young English poet of Reid's generation: viewed in the light of the "essential gaudiness" of Stevens' poetry, its linguistically playful dialogue between metaphysical speculation and "things as they are", we begin to discern a persistent philosophical vein in Reid that goes some way to justifying his ludic observational jugglings. It's in this, moreover, that he departs from Raine, whose poems are largely idea-averse, his similitudes amounting to visual puns serving an ultimately descriptive, realist purpose which on scrutiny unravels to a bland thinness of content (the self-defeating aporia of A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, for example, is that why should the recipient know what a mechanical bird or tracing paper is if he doesn't know what a book or mist are); whereas Reid in fact seems more concerned (like Stevens) with the epistemology of seeing or apprehending an ever-shifting reality, and how this is figured in poetic language.
    If the early Reid falls drastically short of the scope and depth (not to mention the formal mastery) of Stevens, he was at least mindful enough of the limitations of Martianism to attempt a more sophisticated mode of ostranenye in his third volume Katerina Brac (1983). While the sustained use of a hetronymic persona links Reid (via Hill's Sebastian Arruruz and Middleton's Herman Moon) back to the Pound of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Homage to Sextus Propertius, his complex elaboration of an East European poet writing during the time of Communism is refracted through several layers of equivocating distance even these distinguished forebears didn't employ, although the deliberate anachronisms and mistranslations of Propertius might have given Reid his starting-point. 
    The maladroit translationese of Katerina Brac fosters an off-kilter, wonky manner and rhythm that work in two ways: firstly, as a subtle parody of the often less than felicitous attempts to 'english' East European poets during what Ted Hughes called the "unique tidal wave of poetry translation that swept through English in the sixties and seventies". Few could doubt that this bringing-across of poets like Holub, Joszef, Popa, Celan, Herbert, Brodsky and Milosz (largely promulgated by Hughes and his friend Daniel Weissbort through Modern Poetry in Translation) amounted to an enormously important phenomenon; few also would dispute that a particular overfamilar style - often clunky and ungainly - grew out of the boom (it certainly fed into the purposefully "uglified" poetry of Crow). Secondly, Brac's wryly not-quite-correct-English, intensified by the inclusion (no doubt under the influence of the state censor) of fragments of ridiculous officialese, serves a defamiliarising function which subverts the totalitarian construct of reality she finds herself in. 
    These quirky, ironic observations on love, history and identity might bring to mind the whole tragic lineage of 20th Century poets who struggled to maintain their writing in the midst of brutal suppression and the obligation to conform to "social realist" tenets of literary value (not least Tsvetaeva, Ahkmatova and Ingeborg Bachmann), but also transcend their (imagined) moment by being rueful insights as resonant to a contemporary audience as to an earlier one. The task of confronting a received and politically-devious state-reality is a constant, Reid seems to imply; especially at the time of the volume's composition when Thatcherite policy was leaning towards a reassertion of top-down hegemony.
    With this task (gesturing back towards a Stevensian philosophy) goes the need to recreate a more open-ended and fluid sense of the real through the unpindownable, unlegistated ambivalences of poetic language, like the "pale-blue butterflies" of Katerina's first poem, suggesting "this would be the perfect time/to mend the whole of one's life"; or later in the poem the summer thunder that's like "colossal rearrangements/somewhere at the back of the mind".

A Rare Privilege

  Just back from a restorative half-term break in Finland visiting friends, where the intense weather made England’s recent cold snap seem negligible. Despite the chilliness, to be surrounded by depths of powdery new-settled snow blanketing the whole countryside made for some starkly beautiful landscapes, the ideal window-view for the writer who wants to clear his/her mind of urban clutter and try to return to what Stevens calls ‘a mind of Winter’ – ‘nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’. It also made me think of the somehow amusing image of monks on a pilgrimage plunged over their heads beneath snow-drifts in the Prynne poem ‘Frost and Snow Falling’ – ‘That /sounds to me a rare privilege, watching/ the descent down over the rim’.

   My friends took me to visit the house of Finland’s national poet JL Runeberg (1804-77), as far as I can gather a sort of Tennyson figure who wrote lots of long heroic epics and narratives about rural hardship. He’s certainly respected in his home-town of Porvoo, where the cafes even sell a rather tasty ‘Runeberg cake’ around the time of his anniversary.(For more information on Runeberg see the link to a very interesting post by Michael Peverett in Comments)

  I've also been trying to engage with more contemporary Finnish poetry through the fascinating anthology How to Address the Fog: XXV Finnish Poems 1978-2002 (Scottish Poetry Library/Carcanet). In most of these poems the unique quality of the Finnish language - with its bristling dots, long compound words and apparently (due to its structure of inflections) a kind of modular connectivity that lends itself to neologism and wordplay - is married to a dark, off-kilter pensiveness that is certainly more akin to Transtromer's work in Swedish or to East European poets like Holub or Popa than to anyone writing in English. No doubt you need a philosophical outlook to get you through such harsh winters: as Sikka Turkka puts it, "I also want to add that snow is a great delight, though I do not understand why so much of it is needed".

The Cloud Corporation

                                                             
  It's not that often I get excited about a contemporary volume but here comes Tim Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation (Picador) to replenish our sense of what's possible once again. It's a style I seem to have been waiting for for a long time: an American poet who's actually been able to utilise and build on the rich, distinctive resources inherent in the achievements of Wallace Stevens. There's a good deal of Stevens in Ashbery, of course; and Ashbery seems to be Donnelly's second major influence, though tellingly what he takes from Ashbery is less the disjunctive, skittish manner of The Tennis -Court Oath than the more sentence-lead, meditative poetry of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
   Stevens is immediately evident in the beautifully elaborate titles Donnelly gives many of his poems - 'Partial Inventory of Air-borne Debris', 'The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports', 'Team of Fake Deities Arranged On An Orange Plate' - whereas 'The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking' is clearly a play on Stevens' 'The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain' (with a possible further nod to the line "The malady of the quotidian..." from 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad'). The sequence of poems which gives The Cloud Corporation its title seems intimately related to Stevens' great modulation-piece 'Sea-Surface Full of Clouds' in the way its three-line sections spiral off from a repeating phrase - "The clouds part revealing..." ( and to acknowledge this reference, in the final section we find " and warm, saturated air on the sea-surface rising".) Donnelly also frequently favours an "essential gaudiness" of diction and sound which - albeit more wryly deployed than in Stevens - works towards a playful undermining of the poetry's abstract leanings - rather like the "counter-eloquence" Montale spoke of aspiring to.
   There's also something very interesting in the way Donnelly handles syntax, as he straddles his long sentences over lines that seem too short to contain them, almost as though he's thinking in terms of the extended, groping, musing, tentacular "sentence-sounds" of a Whitman or CK Williams but wants to abut it against the formal restraint and shapeliness of a shorter line and stanzaic patternings. The effects can be - as you can see here - extremely beautiful:
   " To notice wind incite the branches to interact in a manner
      mistakable for happiness when happiness has stopped

     seeming so implausible.Just to see the gold bolt through air
     is explanation enough, a knowledge that opens itself up
     without ending, an end in itself without having to conclude.
     Just to breathe on purpose is an act of faith in this world."
                                                                   ('Explanation Of An Oriole')

Full of It

  Penned a 'Disgruntled of Ladbroke Grove' type email to the Guardian Review last week to complain about a poetry article by John Fuller last Saturday, which was not only quite remarkably asinine for a poet of his standing but also factually wrong. My 'letter' didn't get published, but the three responses to Fuller that were included covered similar points as I was making (perhaps more lucidly or concisely).
  For what it's worth this is what I wrote:
  'John Fuller's assertion, in his article about "the puzzles of poetry" (Riddles in the sands, 21.5.11) - "No-one really seems to know, for example, why Coleridge calls his lime-tree bower ( ...) a "prison" in his poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison " - is itself extremely puzzling.

   Coleridge's prefatory note to the poem explains that "In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay." The poem is perfectly clear in evoking a scenario of its I-narrator being left behind against his will while his friends have gone out walking, making the bower in which he sits a gently ironic, metaphorical "prison".

   But Fuller's whole piece is off the mark: his suggestion that poems can be reduced to crossword-like puzzles that can be "solved" is a deeply misleading over-simplification of how poetry operates. He fails to acknowledge that his crude reading of Wallace Stevens' The Plot Against the Giant' is only one interpretation of many, providing an example of how the symbolic resonances of poetry are marred by having this kind of literalising story superimposed upon them. As Stevens wrote elsewhere: "The poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully."