Love on Cold Concrete

New Selected Poems, Tom Paulin, Faber & Faber, 2018, 208pp, £12.99 (paperback)

In Tom Paulin’s ‘Sentence Sound’, a version from Leopardi in The Wind Dog (1999), the narrator reads in ‘a Fontana paperback’ that ‘the ear / is the only true reader / the only true writer.’ Paulin’s own poems, as this New Selected richly demonstrates, have undergone several changes of musical genre, from their early, austere ‘vigilant clinking’ to a later sonic freedom, full of punning, wordplay and vernacular overhaul. The early Paulin, of A State Of Justice (1977) and The Strange Museum (1980) especially, is a clipped, at times cramped, observer. The tone of these early poems is restrained and vigilant, a voice of endurance – there is a dutifulness at their heart, a watchful chronicling of Northern Ireland during low, violent times. ‘Surveillances’, from The Strange Museum, gestures towards this:

And if you would swop its functions For a culture of bungalows And light verse, You know this is one Of the places you belong in, And that its public uniform Has claimed your service.

This allusion to service, and uniform, isn’t overstatement and there is something of Keith Douglas’s officer-class stringency to the early books; they have a grace under pressure, a refusal to sentimentalise or indulge, which lends them something of that great curtailed war poet’s authority. They share something tonally, too, with Douglas – in lines such as ‘A town the mountain simplifies/To spires and roofs’ (‘Ballywaire’) or ‘The girl I had scared easily. She saw / The dead bareness of the floor, her body near/

Both it and mine’ (‘Under A Roof’). The landscape, geographically and temperamentally, is one of concrete, silence and watchtowers, a gunmetal grey mood punctuated by occasional colour, literally in ‘Free Colour’ where flashes of green and yellow are the closest the narrator comes to freedom, or unrestraint. The state is a ‘metal convenience’ where the wind ‘slices gulls’; the reader feels the sense of permanent watchfulness, unease and suspicion, as in ‘Anastasia McLaughlin’ ‘When they found nothing, they suspected everyone.’

There is an underlying narrative of escape in the early books, and of its impossibility. There is plenty of motion: the transport of guns, the crossing and settling over water, but behind it all is a sense of futility or entrapment, thanks in part to what has happened, to the pressures and ordeals that have gone before, the demands made upon citizens of this place where ‘It’s an autocracy, the past. / Somewhere costive and unchanging’ and ‘the tyranny of memories / And factual establishments/Has stretched to its breaking.’ The staccato, at times almost comically stripped back, diction is matched by the little pleasures it allows, ‘They pickle herrings he catches, eat sauerkraut / And make love on cold concrete in the afternoons’ and perhaps, most tellingly, in a narrative poem about a ‘lost great uncle’ who found the ultimate freedom, ‘the freedom / Of nothing-was-ever-heardof-him-since.’ The narrator’s reaction, aside from a cautious envy, with regards to ‘Arthur’ who escaped to ‘the packing-case republics’ of South America is telling:

I know that if you turned up on my door step, An old sea dog with a worn leather belt And a face I’d seen somewhere before, You’d get no welcome. I’d want you away.

That ‘You’d get no welcome’ feels double-edged, a nod both to the way these alert, judgemental communities react to comers over, or returners, but also to the narrator’s longing for the possibility of escape, and its projection onto this one alleged example of it; his hope that such a disappearance

can occur and last. It has something of Larkin’s ‘Poetry of Departures’, his wry paean to not throwing it all off to ‘swagger the nut-strewn roads.’ The Larkin of ‘Here’, the documentarist, attuned to and respectful of the little rituals and detritus of lives not ‘Reprehensibly perfect’ seems to sit somewhere behind ‘Under A Roof’, not least for its ability to handle a conversational tone across tightly rhymed and metred stanzas.

The Strange Museum’s title poem pointed to a new strain in Paulin’s work, anticipating some of its next moves elliptically, albeit not yet stylistically. ‘I woke in a tennis suburb. / History could happen elsewhere, I was free now / in a neat tame place whose gods were milder.’ If this hint of a freedom was overly optimistic – Paulin has escaped neither history nor the ‘elsewhere’ of home – it did flag up more explicitly his status as émigré, and while The Strange Museum had an increased interest in exiled writers and figures such as Trotsky, it was his third collection, Liberty Tree (1983) which saw him escape, paradoxically, into his own displacement. This manifested itself in a new lexical openness, a fuller embracing of the vernacular and a loosening of his tightly-buttoned, pressure-cooked diction. Poems such as ‘What Kind of Formation are B Specials?’ and ‘Off the Back of a Lorry’ pair a shorter line with a more fast-moving voice, the whole less corseted and psychically oppressive. Punning and overt, playful rhyming, especially in the latter, add to a sense of a less dutiful voice emerging, and lines about ‘prod baroque’ and ‘my own boke’ open up new opportunities for mixing in dialect as a stylistic, as well as political, gesture. The effect overall is of upending his earlier concrete tables, and singing among the wreckage, and it is at this juncture that it becomes more pronouncedly clear of how important the ear is to Paulin’s work. If the earlier measure had been within a more traditional, often mildly iambic, stanzaic – albeit mostly free verse – form, with Liberty Tree the breath and the phrase become a much more crucial unit.

To call Liberty Tree a transitional collection is to undersell it, given some of the riches within; the brilliance of ‘Desertmartin’, a skewering dissection of life in Presbyterian territory, the ‘Parched certainties,’ ‘Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just’ and the righteous ‘shaggy speech’ of ‘Black Bread’,

but nonetheless most of its strengths are as through a glass darkly versions of what makes Fivemiletown (1987) such an astonishing achievement. If Liberty Tree saw a less restrained Paulin, in Fivemiletown he’s positively gleeful – a far cry from those austere pleasures and pip pip kapoks. What this new mode lost in oppressive focus it made up for in brio, and delight, a word hitherto nigh on implausible, let alone unlikely, in a Paulin poem. If the early work was often static, pressurised and vigilant, these poems move ‘like a patched Oldsmobile/heading for Donegal/with a raft of hooch in the trunk’ – they have the getaway car’s cocktail of panic and adrenaline, and they are smuggling illicit words in their boot, ‘stramash’, ‘eejits’, ‘dwammy’, and non RP phrasing. They rejuvenate the language in the process, as all great vernacular verse does. The title poem is a heartbreak narrative that glides on castors of short lines and conversational phrasing, but is still capable of heightened emotion, of gracefulness and ceremony – ‘I need only go back,/though all of my life/was pitched in the risk/of seeing and touching you’ – as well as tragicomedy, brief encounter and missed connection.

‘Breez Marine’ too is an entirely different sort of Paulin prospect, he’s added a comic surreality and lightness to the perceptive, note-taking of the earlier books, he’s still a documentarist but now he’s making cartoons: ‘Each stunned eye / it shone like a dog’s nose/pointing at a prison dinner’ and he’s having a whale of a time, too:

All I could try was turn a sly hurt look to soften her and that night in bed I stuck my winedark tongue inside her bum her blackhaired Irish bum repeating in my head his father’s prayer to shite and onions.

The near-doggerel quality to some of this, the playground rhymes and mischief of it is all centred around that ‘tongue’, an ongoing trope in Paulin and linked to his talk of the ear as true reader. The tongue is his chief organ, and it plays several parts – not just as the lusty member above but also the generator of dialect words, and of the phrasing which by this stage of Paulin’s career is his chief asset, overtaking his focus and compressions. ‘Winedark’ is also crucial, bringing us back, via unexpected, knowingly bathetic allusion, to Homer and orality, to the poem as measure and product of the tongue, a demotic prayer, as in ‘his father’s prayer / to shite and onions.’

There is also an increased acceptance of need, and want, in Fivemiletown, the earlier implicit drive to escape – in place, in love – was always buttoned up, forlorn or quietly yearned after, but here it is explicit, unabashed – ‘Was I meant to beg and be grateful?’, ‘he’s as bare as need, poor guy,/or the sole of that trainer.’ These are European poems, too, versions from Akhmatova and Mayakovsky, displacement taking the narrators to a ‘Europort’ and, as in the earlier Liberty Tree, there is a pervasive mood of mitteleuropa, its constrictions, state intrusions and interventions. ‘All our victories/ were defeats really’, from ‘The Defenestration of Hillsborough’ strikes a mordant note, its final line ‘either to jump or get pushed’ no less resigned to fate, but the air that’s been let in to these poems, the mixing of registers and vocabularies, seems to run counter to the more despairing moments. There is a dark hopefulness to it, even as it denies the simplistic takes on history that would pretend we were on a singular long march towards perfection, or progress.

Paulin’s career, too, is not a simple tale of progress or, indeed, of a straight line. Fivemiletown is an undeniable highpoint, turning the earlier, admittedly arresting and memorable intensities into a blending of erudition and entertainment, a melding of observation and movement, all in a language which, by then, he seemed to have brought to the boil with a Joycean fervour for blending and refreshment. If Fivemiletown was an example of letting the tongue, and ear, be full partners in the language, the best of what’s happened since has mostly been the result of letting

them predominate. There are some unmissable poems in the books after Fivemiletown, ‘The Sting’ from Walking A Line (1994) a sort of remix of some of Fivemiletown’s energies but with a more pronounced tendency to pun, or play with sound to generate, rather than enhance, meaning. This exploration of sound within poems, of letting music and noise lead the way, reached its apex in The Wind Dog (1999) with its barrelling title poem rapping over 20-plus pages, thinking out loud about Robert Frost’s sound of sense and childhood memory in a kind of love song to sound which doesn’t ever quite do, for all its eye-catching associative strutting, what some of the earlier poems achieve in much less space.

Elsewhere there are plenty of other sorts of achievement, from the occasionally misfiring but well-handled verse narratives of The Invasion Handbook (2002), their prosaic newspeak a reason to revisit his earliest, more flattened, style and the versions taken here from The Road To Inver (2004) particularly ‘Belongings’ from the Palestinian Khazendar, with its poignant questioning, reminiscent of Ian Hamilton – another ingredient of Paulin’s earlier terse tone. Paulin’s most recent collection, Love’s Bonfire (2012) felt at the time a little like the dying embers of the fire in its title poem, but the pieces taken from it here, with the light cast on them by a career of experimenting with tone, sound and delivery, feel somewhat recast, and relit, especially in their moments of reckoning up: ‘Forty years on/in a deep dark time/with a permanent pain always in my head / I see where that pain began.’ The selection taken from them here ends with a handy capsule summation of all that’s gone before in a career long overdue a more prominent renaissance in readership, and attention, thanks to its overhauling of a gripping but restrained voice into something which, at its best, was able to meld street slang and vernacular with the great poetries of exile to create something singular, irrepressible and unforgettable: ‘that’s the honest truth/according to Tom.’