The Sound of Meaning

Return of the Gift, Michael O’Neill, Arc Publications, 2018, 102pp, £9.99 (paperback)

Ravishing Europa, Peter Robinson, Worple Press, 2019, 95pp, £10.00 (paperback)

The Sound Sense of Poetry, Peter Robinson, C.U.P., 2018, 238pp, £75.00 (hardcover)

Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs, Christopher Reid, Faber & Faber, 2018, 128pp, £14.99 (hardcover)

‘ Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation. The sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning, just as the sound of the notes played on the proper instruments is the meaning of any piece of music.’ The opening words of Basil Bunting’s only written statement concerning his major poem appeared in 1989 in Ric Caddell’s pamphlet from the Basil Bunting Poetry Archive at Durham, A Note on Briggflatts. Two years later Donald Davie wrote a response to this when he reviewed the publication of Bunting’s Uncollected Poems for the Times Literary Supplement:

Disabled as I am by my musical obtuseness, I must protest that intelligibility becomes possible only when we deal with, not notes and chords, not rhythms and cadences, but words.

In his recently published book of essays, The Sound Sense of Poetry, Peter Robinson entered the debate with a fine pulling together of separate strands that when woven together present us with what it is to read a poem. His opening statement alerts us to the importance of the very phrase ‘sound sense’ and he suggests that ‘it draws together in its various meanings

and implications three key elements of poetry, elements in composed conjunction, each essential to its contributing to such events in life and culture – namely its shape of spoken sound, its articulation of meaning, and its capacity to perform acts of truth-accessing evocation, faithful commitment and appropriate expression of response.’

These three elements can be found threading their careful way through the recently published volume of poems by Michael O’Neill, Return of the Gift. The focus upon ‘shape of spoken sound’ and ‘articulation of meaning’ is felt as we recognise O’Neill’s yearning movement towards accuracy in his poetry, his repudiation of the general in favour of the precision of what needs to be noticed in the present. This reflective awareness of the relationship between the self and the world around it can be traced back to ‘The Half-Landing’, a poem published by The English Association in 2002:

Pausing on the stairs, you see through the window at the half-landing that the sky is now a stoic blue the shade of a bruise.

A bruised heaven, drawing your eye upwards in a self-mocking arc of transcendence… Cloudily, unmistakably,

something about you drops away like a sack carried for so long you’d forgotten how heavy it was.

You tilt, as though from purgatory, towards a dream of release, until the next stair brings back roofs, dwellings.

In this new and final book of poems by the Durham Professor who cofounded and co-edited Poetry Durham for twelve years the awareness of the destructive nature of the cancer that would claim his life emphasised the urgency of the need to place the world of imagination face to face with the inescapable realities surrounding him. In ‘Bookshop’ he opens with the easy expectation of what social interaction can offer as he goes in early for his haircut ‘with Dominic’ and ‘a good chat about the world and life.’ However, this general exchange of mundane views suggested by the phrase ‘good chat’ is quickly juxtaposed with the poet’s dipping into the nearby bookshop where the ‘varnished stack / upon stack of words’ had ‘once made me safe.’ The dislocation of reading from commonplace reality is presented to us as he becomes aware of the words acting as a barrier between the life of the mind and the ‘onslaught of the minor stuff / — age, illness, death.’ This quiet recognition that these ‘dull and commonplace’ inevitabilities are in fact ‘in charge’ echoes that ‘Pausing on the stairs’ from some sixteen years earlier before his next stair was to reveal ‘roofs’ and, most importantly, ‘dwellings.’ In ‘Bookshop’ O’Neill lists those novels read in ‘avid youth’ as he moves from Vanity Fair (taking its name from the loud commercial world confronted by John Bunyan’s hero in The Pilgrim’s Progress) to The Castle with its ‘illusory emptiness’ that stands above the narrator. The third novel he sees amongst those ‘ranged before me’ is Middlemarch which beckons one into a fully active world of politics and romance, aspirations and disappointment. These monumental volumes appear to the poet as ‘ruins of truth’:

If any vistas gleamed, arch after arch,

they’ve rubbed themselves out now. No chance, no chance at all, of starting over again; whatever they gave – some control, sure, sane sentences shaping an intricate dance –

will have to do. And when I step outside, I might have been away a year or so, swimming against the sunlight’s brilliant tide, staring at nothing that I care to know.

That quiet register of determination, a facing up to everyday realities and the inevitability of forward movement, paces its way through O’Neill’s poetry and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the thirteen poems that make up ‘The Cancer Diary’, the concluding sequence of this aptlytitled Return of the Gift. Number six, ‘Mists’, might almost bring before us that gift of the poet returned:

Mists spiriting up from the fells the sure and certain knowledge

they will continue to rise and catch the gaze of others

after I’m no longer around to steer the car towards

that imaginary vanishing point I’ve had in mind for many years.

That ‘tilt, as though from purgatory’ from ‘The Half-Landing’ of seventeen years ago finds its echo in this new volume with ‘Earthly Paradise’ a translation from Canto 28 of Dante’s Purgatorio. Matilda, the dancing lady whose presence in the Canto seems to present a sense of the perfect realisation of the NOW, pivots ‘feet on the ground, close by each other’ before turning to the poet:

she turned to me upon the red flowers

and on the yellow too, with the air of a maiden whose eyes are lowered;

and brought appeasement to my prayer,

approaching me so closely her soft voice was audible, its meanings clear.

In his 1939 prose translation of Purgatorio J.D. Sinclair had suggested about this image of Matilda that ‘the best dreams of all the poets are

hints and premonitions of a reality which surpasses them all.’ And as if to embrace that reality O’Neill translates the Italian word riso as ‘grin’, an acknowledgement of the combination of humour and intelligence on the faces of Statius and Virgil, the two poets standing behind Dante. O’Neill’s acute perception of what the lady might mean concerning sound and meaning finds its way into his own poem ‘Porthmeor Beach’ in which

The waves would get to haunt you, drawing you back to the sands and the sky, to the blue and the green, to the wet and whiteness

of crests you’d watch lapsing into foam, lost soul-essences in quest of God knows what past the horizon.

It isn’t a far leap from Michael O’Neill’s presentation of Dante and the way in which he in-forms our culture to Peter Robinson’s world which focuses on the centrality of Europe. Ravishing Europa combines both beauty and loss in a manner that reaches out far beyond any messy divorce as England leaves the E.U.. Robinson’s own literary connections underwrite the centuries of cultural interchange between this island and the Continental mainland and the complementary world of books and language finds its witty interlacing in the opening poem of this latest collection. In clear acknowledgement of our cultural links Robinson opens ‘Belongings’ with a quotation from Apollinaire: ‘ Les jours s’ent vont je demeure’ (‘The days go by I remain’):

Staying in Europe, as you do, now on a train from Milan we happen upon two Belgian girls with strawberries, a ball of wool and a copy of Apollinaire’s Alcools

(one quotes ‘Le pont Mirabeau’); two teenage girls off to see the world, they’re going as far as Istanbul. So when our train makes Parma station, we’re wishing them a ‘ Bon vacance!’ and they reply, ‘ You too!’

Different languages, as with different places, reveal our shared understandings.

Heidegger’s collection of essays, Holzwege (The Wood-Ways) was first published in 1950 and it included his lecture ‘Why Poets?’ delivered four years earlier. Heidegger had been addressing the issue of the bleakness of the world around him and concluded that:

In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and must be endured. However, for this it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss.

For Heidegger poets are those ‘who gravely sing the wine-god and sense the track of the fugitive gods; they stay on the gods’ track, and so they blaze a path for their mortal relations, a path toward the turning point.’ In Ravishing Europa Robinson titles one of his poems, ‘Die Holzwege’, and as epigraph presents us with a quotation from Nietzsche asserting that the eye of the nihilist ‘is unfaithful to his memories – it allows them to drop, to lose their leaves.’ The poem itself opens in a world that could almost suggest a landscape from Dante:

These wooded paths like arguments about belonging here have rents shot through with leaf-stopped rays and shady undergrowth, tired ways in a world of airborne ills where, detached, we’re able still to care that Dutch elm, dieback, acid rain find the woods in trouble…

The interlacing of literatures and languages hinted at here echo both Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ with its streets of argument whilst concluding with a nod at A.E. Housman’s ‘Wenlock Edge’ from A Shropshire Lad and it might be worth recalling that the Housman was a great favourite with soldiers during the Great European War of 1914-18. When the Cambridge University Press edition of Heidegger’s Holzwege was published in 2002 under the title Off the Beaten Track it opened with a comment upon these pathways emphasising both similarity and difference, community and individuality:

Each goes it separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so.

In Peter Robinson’s fifteen ‘European Epitaphs’ the theme of divorce, paths coming to an end, a widening of the gap between the island and the mainland is dealt with in a quiet tone of resigned acceptance. We are offered glimpses of Paris, Sicily, Murcia, Norway, Dieppe and are made aware of loss:

Although what’s carrying farther is a grief, first loss then anger, sudden, and in need of nursing – its voices like those for a child sent to bed at eight o’clock sounding as remote and near as the trains to Murcia…

The distance is felt as loss and it is in the music of voices that this loss feels both ‘remote and near.’ In O’Neill’s ‘Earthly Paradise’ the lady who stands beyond the stream had told Dante about the source of those sounds he hears:

‘Now since all the air must turn in a circle driven by the primal motion, unless the circuit is at all broken,

the motion, striking this mountain

as it dwells freely in the living air, then touches into music vegetation.’

In his new book of essays about poetry and sound it is the ‘sound sense’ of poetry which opens up what Robinson refers to as ‘spatial presence,’ a comment he makes about Adrian Stokes’s early writings on sculpture and art. That touching into music, with its hint of fingers playing an instrument, which produces an ‘all-at-once’ revelation of aesthetic form.

When T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats appeared from Faber in 1939 it stated on the wrapper that the poet ‘has been fortified by a growing desire for the company of cats, and a growing perception that it would be improper to wrap them up with dogs.’ Noting this in his review for the Listener Stephen Spender pointed out that poets have always shown a marked preference for cats, whilst dogs have been treated ‘either satirically, or else sentimentally, tearfully even.’ Whereas cats are mysterious and need interpretation dogs are themselves ‘too like little satiric poems on the behaviour of their masters to need much interpreting.’ Spender quotes from Eliot’s opening poem ‘The Naming of Cats’ and refers to the feline whose ‘mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation / Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of / his name.’ As a response to Eliot’s publication Christopher Reid’s Faber volume Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs offers a witty exploration of some of those very ideas that lurk beneath the surface of Nonsense poetry, the verse that Eliot saw as important in Edward Lear whom he once compared to Mallarmé. Reid’s Flo, ‘The Philosophical Foxhound’, contemplates the ‘ stickness of a stick’ and seems to let her mind float around such central questions as ‘Why are dog biscuits always too few?’ or what are shoes for ‘If not to chew?’. The derivation of the word ‘wit’ takes us back to the world of knowledge and imaginative understanding and in Nonsense Verse it relies upon a union of incongruities. Embedded within Christopher Reid’s enormous sense of fun, joyfully complemented by Elliot Elam’s illustrations, there are those sharp perceptions which enable us to recognise the serious poet whose work remains firmly ‘on the Gods’ track’: he too has reached into the Abyss. When Arete Books published his collection, A Scattering, in 2009 Reid

dedicated the poems to his wife Lucinda who had died four years earlier. It remains both moving and enormously serious when the poet recognises the enormous gap between his words, his formality of language, and the reality of the sarcoma which was working steadily within his wife:

Glib analogies! Makeshift rhymes! Please pardon the crimes

of your husband the poet, as he mazes the pages of his notebook, in pursuit

of some safe way out.

It is no surprise to see how the pursuit of an understanding of the political world in which we live alongside the social realities attendant upon it have found their way into Reid’s new book of Consequential Dogs the title of which echoes the comment apparently made to Eliot by his chauffeur who described his own mongrel as not being ‘what you would call a consequential dog’. Reid’s new ‘The Stray’ doesn’t have a name and just lives on its experienced reaction to events:

Rapid exits and vanishing acts Are part of any Stray’s bag of tricks; Likewise, a gift for covering tracks And escaping from even the tightest fix. Without a home, without an owner, A Stray, to be safe, must keep on her toes And be true to the faith of outlaw and loner, Trusting no one and nothing wherever she goes.

The sound of words becomes meaning but their intelligibility rests with the sharp juxtapositions and associations which lurk within them.