Don Paterson
’40 Sonnets’ by Don Paterson (Faber and Faber)
‘A Man Passing Through, Memoir with Poems, Selected and New’ by Gordon Jarvie (Greenwich Exchange)
Don Paterson and Gordon Jarvie are very different kinds of poet. Born in Dundee in 1963, Paterson is everywhere recognised as one of the best poets writing in Britain today. ’40 Sonnets’ was recently celebrated as the Observer’s Poetry Book of the Week, but since launching his career with a collection called ‘Nil Nil’ in 1993, Paterson’ s career has been one of unbroken success.
With subsequent volumes including ‘God’s Gift to Women’ (1997), ‘Landing Light’ (2003), and ‘Rain’ (2009), he has earned a series of prestigious poetry prizes – the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Poetry Prize, three Forward Prizes, and two T S Eliot Prizes. In 2009 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. An editor and musician as well as poet, Paterson is currently professor of poetry at St Andrews University.
Born in 1941, Gordon Jarvie grew up in Troon, and was educated at Trinity College Dublin, and Sussex University. After a career in publishing with such firms as William Collins and Oxford University Press, and always an occasional poet, it was only in the 1990s that he began to write and publish more regularly. In all, he tells us, he has published about a dozen books and pamphlets of his poetry. In addition he has edited several poetry anthologies, written short guides to grammar and punctuation, and books for young readers on Scottish history and culture. For Jarvie, then, writing poetry has never been more than one aspect of a busy life. To describe him as an occasional poet is not unfair – and indicates why his artistic status is more likely to be local rather than national.
Throughout his career, Don Paterson seems to have found the sonnet form exercising some kind of special appeal. In 2001 he published an anthology containing 101 favourite examples of the form. In 2006 he published ‘Orpheus’, his version of Rilke’s cycle of 55 sonnets. Then in ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary’ (2010), he explored his own responses to the sequence which, more than any other, defined the form’s lofty status in English literature. Attempting to account for that status, and to explain his own fascination with the sonnet form, he once suggested in an article ‘if human poetic speech is breath and language is soapy water, sonnets are just the bubbles you get’. Very neat, but not really helpful. Bubbles emerge spontaneously from soapy water, but it is hard to see the sonnet, with its formal requirements in terms of fixed length and rhyme scheme, as a particularly spontaneous form. The sonnet demands of the poet a high degree of artistic craft – and that challenge is one that Don Paterson meets superbly in ’40 Sonnets’.
As it happens, in only a single poem (‘Souls’) does the poet choose to write in the traditional Shakespearean sonnet form. But there is nothing here to suggest he wishes to simplify or avoid traditional rhyme schemes. On the contrary, in poem after poem, he succeeds beautifully in producing complex but unifying patterns of rhyme while occasionally maintaining the turn of meaning when moving from the sonnet’s opening octet to its closing sestet. Here too, however, are a handful of poems that radically deconstruct the traditional sonnet form: ‘At the Perty’ (14 one-word lines in Scots), ‘For a Drowned Poet’ (14 lines of iambic dimeters, ending ‘I mail this poem for him/ into the river’, ‘Séance’ (an Eddie Morgan-like sound poem), ‘Shutter’ (a concrete-style poem). All in all, this is poetic artifice at its complex finest – the work of a poet who is a master of his craft.
What does Paterson write about? There is no single unifying theme or focus here. Equally the tone and tenor of the poetic voice moves and shifts from poem to poem. Contemporary politics appear – ‘The Big Listener’ (for Tony Blair) and ‘The Foot’ – about the indescribable pain of Gaza in 2014. But ‘An Incarnation’ is a wonderfully witty version of an all too typical cold call exchange: ‘Hello? Yep Uh hu Speaking This is he/ The householder, aye Uh hu Yeah I’m free/ to speak right now How long’ll this thing be?’. ‘Requests’, opening with this couplet – ‘O tell us more about your dad/ or why your second wife went mad’ – and ending with – ‘go on with your brilliant poem/ Anything but read your poem’, mocks the poetry reading experience. In ‘To Dundee City Council’ the poet is ambivalent about his feelings for his native city to which he is once again saying goodbye: ‘Know at least I leave here with my tail/ between my legs again, and setting sail/ for that fine country called the fuck away./ Farewell! Good luck with the V &A.’
But the tone of the majority of ’40 Sonnets’ is much darker than these examples suggest. Many are a demanding read as Paterson wrestles with the biggest, complex and paradoxical issues of love and death, loneliness and division. Three are named for artists who chose to take their own lives. Another is a ‘Funeral Prayer’ for a friend. Overwhelming for me is the penultimate sonnet 39 entitled ‘Mercies’ – a poem so movingly recording the putting down of a pet dog. Only months ago my cat died this death and the parallel of the poem’s trust and love and dying moment is exactly mine: ‘I turned her face to mine,/ and seeing only love there…/ she lay back down and let the needle enter./ And love was surely what her eyes conceded/ as her stare grew hard, and one bright aerial/ quit making its report back to the centre’.
Once asked by an interviewer about the role of national governments in supporting artists and writers, Don Paterson chose to refer to ‘the unfortunate tendency for very small countries to survey their talent at far too high a degree of resolution’. Given that Scotland has only five million people ‘you’re probably only ever going to have a handful of poets who are any good. We’re not Germany, or Italy, and the sooner we realise it the better’. Our political and cultural nationalists will not be pleased with this, while the current vogue for performance poetry, the growing number and popularity of creative writing courses, and the boom in small publishers ready to print the work of new poets, hardly suggests that such a view is widely shared. In any event, I suppose the real issue is just how ‘good’ a poet has to be to be worth reading?
‘A Man Passing Through’ is an unusual book in the sense that it combines a wide selection of Gordon Jarvie’s poetry with a personal memoir that looks back over the mainstream of his life. ‘I have never been a fluent poet,’ he writes, ‘and I’ve always felt the need for an appropriate and compelling pretext for my text.’ In a sense, the autobiographical detail is here providing the larger context for the poems nearly all of which arise directly from the writer’s own experience. The book is divided into 25 chapters, which are thematic – for example, ‘In Brittany’ or ‘Poetry of Placenames’ or ‘Watching Wildlife’ – but also broadly chronological: from ‘Student Days, Mainly Ireland and France’ to ‘On Into Old Age’.
The result is a book that is indeed as Jarvie says, ‘a personal account, a set of scenes from a life, a kind of poetic autobiography’ describing everything of moment in the author’s life: his family, his writing and translating, his walking and climbing, his animal and bird watching, his gardens and flowers, his sense of place in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere, his sense of the passing of time and the changes it produces.
In a chapter headed ‘What is Happiness’ Jarvie, noting the truism that in literature it seems easier to make bad characters more vivid and memorable than good ones, goes on to suggest ‘it is sometimes useful and interesting for Mr Average to attempt to articulate why and/or when he is happy’. ‘Speaking of my own writing,’ he goes on, ‘I accept that much of it addresses the darker sides of existence. I concede that the subject of loss – whether the passage of time, loss of loved ones, loss of one’s youth or hopes or convictions – is amply covered in my poetry.’ But that is only partly true.
The life that is given poetic expression in ‘A Man Passing Through’ is no more or less than a quite average one – and that is the source of both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. There are many poems here that readers will enjoy and respond to. There are evocations of emotions and ideas they will recognise and share. The kinds of loss that Jarvie describes are those that we all at some point inevitably experience – but that hardly amounts to the ‘darker sides of existence’. Of all the poems in this wide-ranging collection only one addresses what the poet agrees is ‘man’s fathomless savagery’ – a poem about the horrific murder for political reasons of a colleague and friend who worked for Collins in Nigeria. And the poem itself does no more than tell us what happened.
Overall Gordon Jarvie’s poetry is reassuringly positive. In terms of language and style, his work is always reader-friendly. He writes vividly of Scottish scenes and landscapes. His observation of life is always humane; and he can be amusing as well as insightful. But to my mind at least, as an occasional poet, he modestly settles for less than the highest levels of poetic achievement. Writing about the poems and translations he wrote in Brittany, he tells us how for the duration of a riverside walk, ‘two poems were fighting for their existence in my hyper-charged imagination’. To my mind again, such a height of imaginative intensity, hyper-charged or not, is not within Gordon Jarvie’s range. Still there are pleasing consolations in this book. Consolations such as ‘Spring, in an Edinburgh Park’:
Livid dappled greenwood scene,
buds of May bursting with urgency,
sharp, foliage fresh, and squeaky clean-
in beryl, emerald, lime, aquamarine,
a dozen verdant shades of tingling green….
Here now is fullness, an effulgent whiff
to keep a ‘grand parfumier’ sharp of nose.
Here is a riotous rapture to sustain
Van Gogh, Cezanne, or Matisse on tiptoes
straining to make art approach this artless scene,
the greenwood’s fragrant flaunting of the green.
By Andrew Hook | November 2015