Translating pasts to presence
Award-winning poet’s selected work a remarkable moment in a remarkable career
One of the lovely things that poetry does is to teach us to pay closer attention to the world. The good poet evokes just the right word, just the right image, just the right verbal music; and suddenly the reader becomes clairvoyant, attuned to things that had previously seemed obscure or invisible. They may even be seemingly obvious things, but we see them as though for the first time.
Steven Heighton is a good poet who works this seeming magic quite often. Heighton will turn 60 this summer. His first published poems appeared in the early 1980s. He has won many awards, including the Governor General’s Award, and is equally well known as a novelist.
Heighton lives in Kingston but, as his poems attest, he is at home almost anywhere in the world. Last year he published a book, “Reaching Mithymna,” about being a volunteer in Greece during the Syrian refugee crisis. So he is a cosmopolite, yet he also deeply loves nature and the land.
At its best, the work in this new “Selected Poems” records a sharp eye and mind, and reflects wide reading in several languages. Translation is a crucial part of Heighton’s writing practice and some of the best poems in the book are translations.
I am not competent to judge the accuracy of all of these — he has versions of poems from Spanish, French, German, Russian, Latin and both ancient and modern Greek — but of those whose source language I know, his renditions are superb.
His adaptation of a section from Book XIII of Homer’s “Odyssey” is beautiful and just as good, if not better, than that of one of the standard translations, Richmond Lattimore’s. His version of the Roman poet Catullus’s “Poem no. 8” (“Enough of this useless moping, Catullus”) is in strictly contemporary English but strikes me as achieving exactly the tone that Catullus, who died over 2,000 years ago, would assume if he were alive now and writing that little self-pep-talk in English.
Like most poets, Heighton deals with a pretty standard list of inescapable subjects: death, love, the natural world, dreams and so on. In his brief preface he calls attention to how important dreams have been to his poetry, something that I imagine most poets would also allege. But equally, he has a lively imagination that is happy to elaborate and fantasize unmoored from all the pressures of the real, the daily world.
So, on the one hand, he nicely captures the common experience of the man who has broken up with his girlfriend, but cannot stop nattering at her in his head:
So it starts again, night’s neural colloquy, the patient quarrel
exhumed, ex-rival you again cross-examine.
On the other, he puts these imagined words into the mouth of an old man painted by Rembrandt in a fine ekphrastic poem:
it’s not so hard to be happy, billions have managed before you, and with far less.
Heighton’s style alternates between the straightforward and immediately accessible (“Year by year the lindens he planted with his mother/tap deeper into the hills”) and a baroque, sometimes overly ornate language that can be difficult to navigate (“the eye is a diving bell plunged through the sea/ to where the sun’s silver machinery fails”). He can be too self-consciously “poetic.” But at his best, he is a fine poet and his “Selected Poems” represents a remarkable moment in a remarkable career.