Robert McLean
Scenery and Agriculture, by David Beach (VUP, 2012), 64 pp., $25.00; Punctured Experimental, by Iain Britton (Kilmog Press, 2010), 44 pp., $45.00; Cominghomeland – Poems by Terry Moyle (Ducks on the Wall Publishing, 2011), 74 pp., $32.00.
Scenery and Agriculture, by David Beach (VUP, 2012), 64 pp., $25.00; Punctured Experimental, by Iain Britton (Kilmog Press, 2010), 44 pp., $45.00; Cominghomeland – Poems by Terry Moyle (Ducks on the Wall Publishing, 2011), 74 pp., $32.00.
To have an open mind is usually held to be a prerequisite for book reviewers. Indeed, it is difficult not to pity biased or embittered critics, who admittedly make up a fraction of the trade, for whom the next book is no more than an opportunity to pick masochistically at their scabs of disappointment — William Logan’s poisonous parsing at the New Criterion is a particularly sad example of this sorry spectacle. I wonder, though, if we’ve tipped the scales too far in the other direction, and that too often readers, of whom book reviewers are but a part, don’t expect enough of writers. To be surprised by the wonderful — and it is very much a surprise — doesn’t require readers demand less of writers in the meantime. Doing so does authors no favours, and I fear that many of them who could produce better work aren’t doing so because there isn’t enough pressure being applied on them under which they might write as well as they should.
And it’s business as usual with David Beach’s latest collection Scenery and Agriculture. In 2008 his first book, Abandoned Novel, catapulted its photogenically bemused author into the thick of the middle-class. But whereas Beach’s second book The End of Atlantic City bounced its conceits and witticisms off the Iliad, his new book attempts to play the same tricks with much less resonant material.
The book is divided into two sections. ‘Agriculture’ resembles popular human-interest journalism (Beach’s source-notes explain why); ‘Scenery’ reads like cribs from copies of ’70s National Geographic. ‘Agriculture’, in which stuff gets done, proved more interesting reading than ‘Scenery’, in which there’s little doing at all. This imbalance in textual vitality is mitigated by the latter being less than a third of the length of the former.
As one would expect, foibles are wryly enumerated, and hypocrisies are gently ridiculed, most often those of the hapless bourgeoisie, whom Beach self-reflexively attempts to outwit on their own turf. In that respect not much has changed for Beach. There are, however, some changes worth noting. For instance, given I’d steadied myself for Beach’s third instalment to be as nerdy and prosaic as its predecessors, I expected T’s and I’s would be crossed and dotted, no doubt respectively. My expectation wasn’t borne out in reading. Indeed, some sections are downright rough. A34 is grammatically shattering: it’s errantly parenthetic, wonting of a copula; and its syntax is morbid. Also, there is topical licence and looseness of pitch: A39 doesn’t even tangentially deal with agricultural concerns. Perhaps Beach ought to have considered an Architecture section. Rather than laxness on Beach’s part, it’s more likely he’s toying with my over-inflated readerly expectations.
And, for what it’s worth, Beach has sloughed his decasyllabic pedantry. This has barely changed the texture of the poems, but it makes the rationale determining line-breaks and enjambment more difficult for me to puzzle out, or for Beach to justify, and leaves the whole shebang one wink short of its punch-line. No doubt only a handful of readers would concern themselves enough with such an issue to count syllables. In my defence, I was no more than curious. Even so, my arithmetic done, I was left feeling cheated.
Similar experiments in exclusive habitation of ‘sonnetoriums’ (of one kind or another) by the Tennessean psychiatrist Merrill Moore and the Boston Brahmin Robert Lowell respectively, passed their use-by dates far more quickly than their authors deigned to notice. I would still advise anyone who reads for enjoyment and who enjoyed Beach’s previous offerings to read this one, too. They are guaranteed not to be disappointed and might even be pleased by it. I am sure he has hit all targets at which he aimed. For me, though, that’s not enough. For me this is a book irredeemably of its time and place — from my perspective, that would be a time a decade-and-a-half past and, at a guess, a place 450 kilometres away to the north.
Iain Britton, in Punctured Experimental, depends wholly upon mood — usually an unnaturally drawn out last gasp — as his principle of coherence. Once more, hypocrisies are exposed and occasionally given a scabrous what-for. The tone is uniformly world-wary, into which, here and there, a beatific pinhole is sometimes poked, allowing in a little light, which is a spotlight trained on the poems’ protagonist, which I take to be their author.
Most of the poems are pieced together with unadorned ‘man bites dog/&c’ constructions, which are frequently deconstructed by authorial fiat. Transitive verbs are set in action by subjects without objects to be done with, presumably to affect a sense of discontinuity. Pronouns are routinely employed without antecedents, making antagonists seem hollow or spectral, especially when posed as ‘they’ or ‘them’, which also adds a conspiratorial air to proceedings, often circumambient in extent. The odd poem occasionally re-gathers its scattershot self into an aphoristic climax: ‘From the balcony/blunted-blue agapanthus/choke in numbers’ — achieving in this case, an umbral Eliotic bang. Routine perversity is the day’s order, a bleary day-glow miasma, which leaves curiosity wanting in the reader. ‘I join the party/celebrate/ (with others)/the soft-bloated idols of a painted procession’ (Elephant): this turn-coating seems oddly disingenuous. Later in the same poem, Britton writes ‘Great animals/fascinate/the wannabes amongst us/looking on’: I’d like to know how one might differentiate wannabes from the real deal. Again, to whom does ‘us’ refer? The conspiracy, naturally, deepens.
These are mostly cosmopolitan poems, and in accordance with Britton’s take on things, they are uniform, grimy, and grey; a used prophylactic or syringe may be but a footfall away. When it appears, the ‘natural world’ is cast as indifferent, cruel, or malevolent; the ocean, for instance, ‘is a carnivore’, which simply isn’t true — this statement is rhetoric. Britton has indicted under the general charge of hypocrisy the perceivable world: against people and their works, and against its inanimate balance. His attitude seems to forestall any possibility of connection, until on the last page I read ‘I feel an intimacy’ – but then more cynicism: ‘A dream is coughed up/Longevity is measured by a spark’ (more echoes of Possum), and this after a charmless image of ovine placenta being ‘laid to rest’ on barbed wire. I think human dignities expressed through ritual aren’t equivalent to exigencies of animal husbandry, and I hope other people share my view. Neither are the former reduced to the level of the latter simply by a poet deciding to slap them together.
It seems to be a grim world Britton has written in wait for us. And it ends up seeming rather wilful. Guy Davenport, in his interview with Paris Review, said he felt writers believed it was ‘taboo to write about any kind of happiness. I mean, Joyce Carol Oates would burn her typewriter if she accidentally wrote about some happy people.’ It’s a peculiar and po-faced indulgence. I know poems aren’t a mirror held up to the world. Britton reminds me of this, most assuredly by his seedy Calvinistic dystopia’s failure to measure up to the world in which I live, one that admittedly has much to point my finger at, but sometimes because I’d like to share the simple unaffected wonders with which it is so redolent, and in which we can find consolation for which we needn’t apologise to anyone, least of all ourselves. Britton has written better.
*
‘Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.’ This is the battle-weary Herman Melville writing to his brother in 1860 — nine years after the publication of Moby Dick and three years after that of his last novel, The Confidence Man — in a memorandum concerning the publication of Melville’s first book of poems. Cominghomeland – Poems by Terry Moyle, its author’s first book, is no exception to this rule; indeed, it almost seems written as its proof.
Moyle displays more enthusiasm for his life and medium than do Beach and Britton, but lacks the scepticism one needs to balance against it. He takes his poetic licence for granted, and isn’t ashamed to flaunt it. Apart from people posted in Classics Departments, I can’t think of any vocation whose practitioners could mention Odysseus in day-to-day communications, an exception that includes, these days, poets. Terry Moyle thinks otherwise.
Moyle’s poems weren’t subjected to the strictures involved in soliciting for publication in journals prior to their being collected in Cominghomeland. Submission requires just that — one must grant authority to an editor and consent to their judiciousness, even if their criteria aren’t to one’s liking, and which often are mysterious or esoteric, even to writers who play the game. I wouldn’t go for a knee-jerking internet forum as a surrogate, and I don’t think Moyle has done himself any favours by doing so. Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of scrappy, indulgent, and repetitive poems in splendid isolation. She also wrote a dozen or so of the finest lyrics in the English language. She was exceptional. Works of language are communal.
‘Odysseus with Poplar’ demonstrates Moyle’s way with words. The conceit of relocation is tired. The presumably eponymous tree throbs in the first stanza. I have never known a tree to do so, and that one does in this poem calls into question the back-cover testimony to the ‘markedly … realistic character’ of Moyle’s poetry. Further on, sheep and clouds are yoked in a hackneyed Keatsian fashion. A proud show of anthropomorphism promptly follows. Then hair is brushed from eyes. A ‘long green hill’ is walked a ‘long time back’ (emphasis added). The warmth of the beloved is imagined to be that of the sun, after which a careless hyphen stands where a dash ought to be. Even after much effort, I can’t make out what the final stanza is trying to convey, not even in the most oblique or generous senses.
It is unfortunate that when the book is read under artificial light, the type gleams disconcertingly, making it difficult to focus on the text. I found this effect very annoying. Publishers and printers should note that antagonising readers in this way does no one, especially their authors, any favours.
*
Donald Davie, in his discussion of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, suggested Larkin achieves his equivocating of poem to society by settling for ‘lowered sights and patently diminished expectations’. Davie at least felt assured that Larkin was trying to write as well as he possibly could. Having made my way through these three books, I share Davie’s disappointment; if only I had his reassurance.
ROBERT MCLEAN was born at Bethany in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1974. His most recent publication is a chapbook length poem A Graveyard by the Sea (Cold Hub Press). He lives in Lyttelton, Banks Peninsula.
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