Michael O’Neill

Coloured Flares

The White Silhouette, James Harpur, Carcanet, June 2018, £9.99 (paperback)

James Harpur’s The White Silhouette is a significant volume of poems that is unabashedly concerned with religious quest, with intimations of the sacred. In the title poem he traces his search for the poem’s ‘you’, who turns out at the close to be a composite of the self’s deepest projections and the figure central to Christianity: ‘I you us / Iesus’. The poem manages to be both direct and artful, oblique and affectingly straightforward, hesitant in its self-critical qualifications and hearteningly bold, too, in its embrace of the epiphanic:

Sometimes I’d sense you as a glimmer As in that dream I once had out of the blue When you stood at night on a Greek island shore; Your face was hidden, but it was you …

That ‘out of the blue’ shows how, MacNeice-like, Harpur can revitalise the hackneyed; the phrase means ‘unexpectedly’, but, after the next line, we realise it also works in a literal way, ‘removed from the blue sky of a Greek day’. If the fourth line’s confident trust in plain statement is a hallmark of Harpur’s style, so too is the immediate shift into gorgeous celestial imagery, a shower of comets appearing first ‘As if they were on strings, like Chinese kites’, and then changing ‘Into letters of Hebrew, emblazoning the night’. There’s an allusive borrowing in ‘emblazoning’ from the end of Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ (‘emblazoned zones’) that fits Harpur’s post-Stevensian theme of a ‘rage to order’ that derives from the self yet seeks out ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’.

Typical, too, of Harpur is the loss of conviction that attends his moments of imaginative exaltation, a loss of conviction that is inseparable from the

momentary poetic victories bought by adherence to the seducing allure of ‘if’: ‘’I knew if I could grasp those words, / Your silent message across the stars, / I’d know my destiny on earth’. ‘And silent answers crept across the stars’, writes Hart Crane in another poem, ‘At Melville’s Tomb’, that bears on Harpur’s poetic concerns. Crane’s ‘answers’ are Symbolist enigmas, Harpur’s ‘message’ is there yet indecipherable, and his next paragraph begins: ‘I do not search for you any more; / I don’t know whom to seek, or where’. The poetry ‘does not matter’ at such a moment, as in Eliot’s Four Quartets, and, in not mattering, works with a bare weariness of cadence that is refreshingly pure and expressive in its inflections:

Too weary, disillusioned, I’m not sure What I think or if I really care Any more; my last hope – that my resignation Might be a sign of the Via Negativa, A stage of my self-abnegation – Prevents the thing it hopes for.

This may strike some readers as merely flat, and surely the Via Negativa announces itself in the finest religious poetry a little less dully. At the same time, it’s the very weariness of the hope that makes it believable, and, in the context of the poem’s overall movement, the passage can claim a credible explicitness, preparing as it does the way for a transitional ‘And yet’ and an explicit poetic credo:

I still write to you, poem after poem, Trying to shape the perfect pattern Of words, and the mystery of their rhythms, An earthly music audible in heaven – Each poem is a coloured flare A distress signal, an overflowing Of myself, a camouflaged prayer dispatched towards the Cloud of Unknowing …

The writing mingles memories of Eliot (‘the perfect pattern’) and Wordsworth whose ‘mystery of words’ ghosts the third line and the later

idea of ‘overflowing’ , while George Herbert sponsors the sudden access of imagined audibility in the beautiful line, ‘An earthly music audible in heaven’. Yet what gives bricolage and pastiche the slip is the sense of effort, of a poet ‘Trying’ to find words for ineffable feeling.

The poem and the volume as a whole have a strong conviction of the truth embodied in Les Murray’s lines from ‘Poetry and Religion’: ‘Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words / and nothing’s true that figures in words only’. Harpur breathes life into his words precisely by suggesting that their ‘coloured flare’ can never quite capture the ‘white radiance of Eternity’, in Shelley’s phrase from Adonais, a Plotinian elegy that comes to mind in several places in the volume, high points of speculative daring in which the poet imagines in rhythms that moves with a grace appropriate to their Idealist concerns ‘the path / of all created things returning / to their uncreated source: / the Fountain / of ever-flowing light / that pours out forms, or patterns, / from which our world derives’ (‘Goldsmith’), or (in the wake of Teillhard De Chardin) ‘ribbons of light converging / in the knot of the omega point’ (‘Gerald of Wales’): ‘in’ rather than ‘on’ a smoother subsumption than the ear was expecting, yet a smoothness that ‘knot’ prevents from being too easy.

It’s in these freer lines that Harpur’s imagination seems most at ease, able, for example, to isolate with quietly arresting effect the phrase ‘the Fountain’, or to switch deftly and affectingly from the objective ‘their uncreated source’ to the more participatory ‘our world’. Harpur may long for Plotinus’s or Yeats’s world before the world was made and quotes the great Neo-Platonist’s ‘Our home is where we were / before we were born; / we cannot return by foot’ (‘Scribe B’). But his poetry is in love with ‘all created things’; bestowing a sacramental gleam, in Derek Mahon’s words, on everyday things and creatures, the ‘chance events / and small miracles of life’ to which he refers in ‘Trinity’, a poem that describes a visit to Moscow to see Rublev’s ‘Icon of the Trinity’.

The quarrel between image-hatred and image-worship, iconoclasts and iconodules, which came to a head in Byzantine times and fought itself out

with particular virulence during the Reformation, is close to the heart of Harpur’s meditations on poetry and religion. Iconoclasts and their impulse to destroy provoke the powerful sequence ‘Graven Images’ which records various examples of religiously inspired disfigurement. The fine poem ‘Cross’ carries the subtitle ‘Vandalised finial cross, Rievalux Abbey’, and responds wryly in its shaped form to Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’:

amputated cross a cross remains: phantom limbs remembered pain

Even remembrance has undergone typographical amputation, as the ‘phantom’ limb of ancient devotions finds touching expression.

Harpur and his different speakers – monastic and scribal in his vivid poems about The Book of Kells – worry whether graven images distract from or enhance the spiritual life, and, without fake piety, fan the ashes of longgone controversies into the fires of contemporary religious poetry. Both sides are given their voice, but the iconodule in Harpur, for whom the image is a mode and justification of beauty as ‘a streak of lightning / connecting heaven to earth’ (‘Gerald of Wales’), wins the day in a volume that has interested me more than virtually any other that I have read for a while. Inevitably this reflects subjective factors of my own: religious instincts not wholly repressed by Catholic schooling; an uncle (William O’Neill) with deep scholarly, and scholastic, interests in Plotinus and Proclus; and many unavailing attempts to record in poems my sense of the cultural meaning (including trauma and loss) involved in the Reformation. But I have rarely encountered a contemporary voice that brings out as strongly and convincingly as does James Harpur’s in The White Silhouette the way in which spiritual wrestlings and traditions can live again in poetry.