COMMITMENT TO
OPENNESS
Roy Fisher: Poems
1955-1987, Oxford University Press.
Lee Harwood: Crossing
the Frozen River: Selected poems, Grafton Paperback.
Lee Harwood:
Rope Boy to the Rescue, North and South.
Tom Raworth: Tottering
State: Selected poems 1963-1987,
Grafton Paperback.
When a comprehensive literary history of late
twentieth-century British poetry is undertaken, it will have to take account of
various writers who have not conformed to the still dominant norms offered by
the Movement. Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood
and Tom Raworth have all refused the orthodoxy; each has a commitment to a
poetry that emphasises its own procedures, which explores reality in language,
rather than through it. Writing, for
them, need not be tied to realism or social perspectives; to varying degrees,
they have felt obliged to break the paradigms that generally define what poetry
will be, and have not been afraid to assimilate European and American
modernism.
Roy Fisher’s work has been
acknowledged as some of the best of the last thirty years, though so often in
partial accounts that hint at, or openly regret, his formalism while comfortably concentrating on his
‘English’ empiricism. His writing encompasses
the Angst-ridden perceptual realism
of City, and the surreal prose narrative,
The Ship’s Orchestra. The essential point is that what generates
the brilliance of Fisher’s writing is precisely that tension between formalism
and realism, experiment and empiricism. Poems 1955-1987 is an expanded,
paperback version of Poems 1955-1980. Despite Fisher’s identification of the poet
as a ‘spy’ or, less subversively, as a ‘witness’, what has developed in the
twenty-four new poems printed here is an anecdotal ‘voice’, even if it is
distanced, as in the humorous ‘The Lesson in Composition’: ‘I could feel
slighted / knowing my own work hardly ever mentions me, except / by way of some
stiff joke like this one.’
This section contains some
of Fisher’s finest poems, some of which extend or re-examine previous
successes. In ‘The Home Pianist’s
Companion’, Fisher takes the same attitude to involuntary memory as in the
terse lyrics of the 1970s. He still
avoids the ‘comforts’ of a falsifying nostalgia, but he allows himself a more
discursive explanation of the processes of association experienced while
playing the piano. He reflects on the
value of early childhood memories, a value which combines the surprise of
specific details with the anarchy of memory’s unpredictable realignments:
reminding me
what it was like to be sure,
before language ever
taught me they were different,
of how some things were the same.
In Lee Harwood’s Crossing
the Frozen River there is also a productive tension: between his desire to
write as simply and honestly as possible and his taste for baroque and
fictive. This collection shows the
excellence of his best work and the diversity of its attempts to delight the
attentive reader. Early poems tinged
reality with dream, in a controlled surrealism that is still present beneath
the most elaborately constructed of his later fictions. The ‘voice’ is so frequently that ghostly
presence, the fictional narrator.
Harwood’s aim is to leave
the text open, to enable his readers to participate in its creation of meaning,
to force them to make connections between disparate fragments. This, combined with his eroticism and concern
for the meaning of human relationships, makes for a poetry at once distanced
and intimate, unique in British poetry.
holding a young rabbit in my hands
walking across the stubble in the late afternoon
soft fur shocking
like the heart-beat
the dark river and
angry knights milling
in the courtyard
setting it free in a hawthorn thicket
safe from the dogs
at night the land so bare ‘rustles’
‘They have no tradition of keeping their colonies neat.’
‘I care for that woman’ the song began
This style culminated in the expansiveness and
openness of the book’s longest text, ‘The Long Black Veil: a notebook
1970-1972’. Since then the
juxtapositions have become less abrupt.
The ‘assorted stories’ of ‘Dream Quilt’ are presented in a wide-ranging
sequence that still requires the reader to assemble the sum of its parts. In his latest poems - and there are more in Rope Boy to the Rescue - there is a new
romanticism that, in the imaginary ‘song cycle’, ‘Gyorgy Kurtag meets Sandy
Berrigan’, achieves a lyrical combination of directness and artifice: ‘Naked
heart to heart could warm us, / yet my fears, our fears, freeze us.’
Tom Raworth’s poetic
iconoclasm has been total. From the
start, his refusal of certain conventions of artifice and his invention of new
ones has caused his extraordinary work to be neglected in Britain, a state of
affairs now happily rectified by the publication of Tottering State. Early poems
were often a combination of Olsonian projectivism and a surrealistic
concentration on the quirkiest of everyday perceptions that normally remain
unsorted by our minds. The poems are not
afraid to refer to themselves, or to delete or revise themselves, though always
with Raworth’s mercurial wit.
Recently Raworth has
favoured long poems of short (even one word) lines, as in Writing and ‘West Wind’.
Like subliminal messages on film, the lines flicker past the reading
eye: the sudden jumps in point of view and discourse are alarmingly
unpredictable. As in Harwood’s work, the
reader has an active role to play, though here it is constantly to revise
deductions and predictions, each poem a ‘tottering state’ of referential
acrobatics:
‘beware of the bomb’
nailed to our fence
a little
skeleton rattling
the romance
of the politics
of romance
relax
a muscle remembers
saved by the breaks
fragments
of black spider motion
All three of these writers exemplify the best of a
certain tradition in British poetry.
Raworth’s work, with its energetic juxtapositions, points to where that
tradition might be heading.
1989 Times Literary Supplement, 10 March 1989
