Robert McLean
The stunning debut of the repairing of a life, by Leigh Davis (Otago University Press, 2010), 216 pp., $39.95
The stunning debut of the repairing of a life, by Leigh Davis (Otago University Press, 2010), 216 pp., $39.95
Our stock of available reality not only has been more or less stopped being added to, it is rapidly shrinking, and what remains of it also is becoming costlier. The stunning debut of the repairing of a life by the late Leigh Davis is one of those increasingly rare books that not only dares to but succeeds in augmenting our stuff of life. It is a humbly ambitious work of wide scope and deep integrity. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, the ethical is fundamentally a question of an individual’s attitude when regarding the world-as-it-is, Davis’s book is quietly powerful enough to prompt the reader to question perspectives informing their own normative outlook. And it is in this regard that Davis’s The stunning debut can be considered the finest long poem published by a New Zealander since Smithyman’s Atua Wera.
It gets under way with a proem in which Davis provides a statement of intent: ‘I want contemporary forms, that is, to do something new. /I don’t want novelty but archaic ingenuity.’ This amounts to an honorific idea of poetry – or at least of what it ought to be: a desire for poems that are, amongst other ends, self-evaluative of an imagined life. It is a project that is greatly distanced from the young Leigh Davis’s iconoclasm, the provocative brio that informed him when he founded the journal And and the Jack Books imprint and through it issued his first book Willy’s Gazette. Wystan Curnow, whose own Cancer Daybook came to mind when I was reading The stunning debut, reports Davis felt that it seemed ‘increasingly clear that the old world—medieval, or more strictly post-Classical, thought—supplies major aspects of visual art’s contemporary meaning,’ to which Curnow appends the comment that Davis’s view applied ‘not just visual art either. If there was one idea that separated the later writings from the earlier, that was it’ (Journal of New Zealand Literature, Spring 2010).
As a student of modernism – of Pound and Joyce and Williams and so on – that Davis would arrive at such a view is hardly surprising. His redemptive archaeologies are tempered with scepticism derived from the American Language poets and post-structuralist theory, but similar doubt is evident in certain totems of the Pound era, as in, for instance, Dante, even at his most beatific: ‘How weak are words, and how unfit to frame/My concept…/Eternal light’ (Paradiso, Canto XXXIII). In Davis’s words, it is ‘(d)yslexia, or that trouble, again: original meaning arriving with more pressure or insistence through confusion in the signs’ (‘Bearing Witness’ – Davis on Stephen Bambury’s Siena Paintings, February 2001): the bewildered and complainant body, seen for its telling humours and perennial dislocations, is the vessel and terrain for the journey back, the voyage home. Language is crafted into a vessel with which to sail a katabasis to the sea of death. Davis’s usages of synecdoche, both pars pro toto and totum pro parte, make this subject and its object seem as boundless and unknowable as constantly-shifting seascapes and language themselves.
The section of the book following the proem consists of facsimiles of a notebook kept by Davis during his recuperation after serious brain surgery. A specialist of brain trauma or a student of linguistics would be more likely to offer worthwhile assessments of these than I can do, for whom they offer little more than curiosities of biographical circumstance. But insofar as modernism’s ‘etherised patient’ is remade and re-rendered as nonfigurative by medical realities, these higgledy-piggledy notations, gradually moving towards coherence and informed acceptance, provide evidence of the sad worldliness and trauma from which repairing of a life was made. Think of the serious illness John Donne suffered in 1623, which produced similar concerns: in ‘Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness’ the poet considers his destination as if he himself is a vessel that may reach the desirable places of this world and other, but only by negotiating some painful straits. His conceit seeks to catch the working of providence itself, which shapes human accidents in patterns of timeless truth. More recently, C.K. Stead’s collection, The Black River (i.e. the river Styx), was written after a stroke had left its author dyslexic for a time. Crested on life’s whelming finitude, many of the poems seem to project a desire to look back, to take stock, and, not unusually for Stead, to settle accounts and scores. The modernists’ anaesthetised bodies – deranged or sick selves and society – provide Davis with a means and a tradition with and in which to operate.
Yet, in contrast with Stead, it appears Davis had a rather more conciliatory purpose. I: Know God (Soft Structure), the book’s first section after the notebook reproductions, consists of a gentle Lucretian meditative sequence, a De rerum natura, which is characterised by supple and patient movements of mind, both in and through language, and in and through life. It resists paraphrase and necessitates a lightness of touch in response. Refuge and integrity are found in luminal abstractions and focused particulars. The language is open to the world and graceful in contending with it. Although it often skirts near to sentimentality, it never quite tips over into it; given such propriety, it is free of the standardised post-Language school diction, one that has rapidly become homogenised far beyond cliché, both saccharine and mouldy, that one often encounters when reading ‘experimental’ writing. Words are refreshed by the poet’s precision and lack of assumption, as is the world from which words ultimately derive.
The final sequence refocuses Davis’s poetry outwards and down into Odyssean actualities. The myth kitty, given its lack of bite and myriad of infections, is generally shooed off, and usually this is for the best. And although the culminating section seemed less fulfilled and more contingent than the preceding sequence, nonetheless, though only after several revisitings, its correlative significance clarified and became resonant. Far from the first time, Homer’s wilily luckless persistent navigator is called on to provide directions, to demonstrate proper conduct, and to translate the inscrutable terms of providence. In no way is this novel; rather, it is original, like reading your father’s or grandfather’s diary.
This review warrants an apology – albeit one that is soundly qualified. I have made few quotes from the text, and possibly not offered enough of the expected sense of ‘what it’s like.’ Indeed, I have made more from other sources than the book at hand. And yet I haven’t been able to resist this turn. Davis’s is an old book, almost old beyond words: it is filled with echoes; perhaps it contains nothing but echoes. And my reading of it has been ghosted by many voices. While I have been writing my response to Stunning debut, I have felt like I imagine it would feel to review, say, The Book of Job, Grimm’s Fairytales, or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These are bottomless texts. They are texts about which one could write an endless amount of different readings. And there have been many re-readings and many rewritings. Deadlines have come and gone. In the end, to borrow Wittgenstein’s words, let it be said that ‘this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts’, which, in my view, is every reader, if they are prepared to admit it. It is a book to be read – nothing else will prove sufficient.
John Newton made a provocative point when, prefacing his reading at the Home And Away trans-Tasman poetry symposium, he suggested that contemporary poets haven’t yet moved any substantial distance from the norms of Romanticism; feelings, he says, remain our poetic raison d’être. But if finding themselves under sufficient pressure or urgency, poets may find other older ways to write here and now. ‘What is most modern in our time,’ according to Guy Davenport, ‘frequently turns out to be the most archaic’ and ‘(t)he heart of the modern taste for the archaic is precisely the opposite of the Romantic feeling for ruins’ (The Geography of the Imagination, pp. 21–22): this is a perspective for which Davis has provided a timely instance. Sentimentality or swoons are not allowable when undertaking a Homeric Nekyia: Leigh Davis’s posthumous katabasis is a demonstration of both these truths: an unblinking steady-handed going down towards open water. The repairing of a life is a measured and moving retelling of a perennial story.
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ROBERT MCLEAN was born at Bethany in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1974. His poems, translations and reviews have been published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies both locally and overseas. His first collection, For the Coalition Dead, was published by Kilmog Press in 2009; For Renato Curcio (Gumtree Press) followed in 2010.
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