Reviews of Geraldine Monk, Ghost & Other Sonnets and Tim Atkins, Folklore

Geraldine Monk, Ghost & Other Sonnets (Salt, 2008), £12.99
Tim Atkins, Folklore (Salt, 2008), £12.99

Difficult is a very loaded term when it comes to the reviewing of poetry. Its notional function is to impress upon the potential reader that the work described as such is exciting and fresh, perhaps even — shock and awe! — a tad experimental in its approach. But more often than not there is a shade of judgement in the use of the term: poetry is difficult when it refuses to give up its secrets in one sitting, when not every page is left justified, when the poem doesn’t round off neatly with a twee and epiphanic observation from the author’s own life. Difficulty, goes the logic, is the antithesis of democracy, indicative of a poetry that wants to drive audiences away, that desires to be read solely by a coterie of like-minded souls in dingy academic pubs, the marginal preserve of perpetual library-haunters and green biro-wielding scribblers of letters to the editor. In short, never trust a review that uses difficult as though it were a dirty word.

For my part, I’d like to ban the use of the term, at least for the foreseeable future. Geoffrey Hill noted once that difficult poetry is, contrary to opinion, highly democratic, as it assumes from the outset that the reader is at least as intelligent as the poet. Arguments in favour of literary populism suggest that difficulty in poetry is elitist, potentially fascist, and alienates the common man from the production and reception of poetry. But this argument has never held any water for me, not least because the assumption that ‘most people’ aren’t capable of understanding Prynne, and so therefore shouldn’t be encouraged to read him — stick to Pam Ayres, that’s more your level is the underlying assumption — doesn’t sound especially democratic to me. Quite the opposite, in fact. Isn’t it about time we stopped patronising the ‘common reader’ by spoon-feeding them traditionalist verse from the lowest common denominator cracker barrel, and declaring the linguistically innovative salad bar strictly verboten?

More importantly, I often imagine that the word difficult has the same effect on readers as the white rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail has upon King Arthur and his gaggle of knights, and can picture hordes of poetry enthusiasts hurtling through the rain-slopped streets of Covent Garden whenever Caroline Bergvall drops by for a session, screaming ‘Run away!’ and hunting for the safety of the nearest John Hegley gig. But reading habits are never innate — there’s no reason schoolkids shouldn’t be reading Tom Raworth alongside Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy (it might even do them some good) — and difficult poetry is only difficult if you conceive of it as such (or if you’re constantly told the same). I’m glad I managed to discover Lee Harwood’s poetry — or Barry MacSweeney’s or Tom Raworth’s or Chris Torrance’s — before anyone had the chance to tell me it was difficult and not worth the effort, because I haven’t looked back since.

On my desk right now are two new collections of poetry — Geraldine Monk’s Ghost & Other Sonnets and Tim Atkins’ Folklore — both of which, to all intents and purposes, are difficult, in the sense that they don’t give up their secrets at the first hurdle. But they also reward close attention and repeated readings, and are, moreover, both vivid and exciting in ways which so much contemporary poetry is not. If that’s difficulty, I’m all for it.

Monk is a stalwart of the small press scene and alternative poetry circuit in Britain, and her work has developed a formidable reputation. For the most part — particularly in Interregnum, which is generally regarded as her masterpiece — Monk’s work is focused on longer sequences and forms as she works through a series of linguistic, social and historical investigations, using the full spread of the page, á l’Olson, as a primary component in the generation of meaning. Monk’s poetry, whatever else it is, is never neat: it sprawls and mutates, digresses and deviates, circulating round its subjects in a non-linear fashion. In Ghost, she’s turned her hand to that most restrictive and logical of forms, the sonnet, and much of the joy of reading these poems derives from the tension between Monk’s tendencies towards a looser and process-orientated poetics, and the necessarily strict constraints of the sonnet as it has traditionally been conceived.

The degree to which Monk is both working within and actively working against the constraints of the sonnet form is apparent when considering the mutated presence of rhyme in these poems. The sonnet’s accepted reliance upon an end-stopped rhyme scheme has been replaced by a wonderfully sinewy and tongue-twisting series of half-rhymes, sonic distortions and syntactic doublings that create a dense verbal webwork that cries out to be read aloud. Here’s the opening sonnet entire to give a sense of what I mean:

It started with a tryst and twist of
Lupine lovely arms along a rural railroad
Bank. Winter rose up summer’s rise.
Throes of profound bafflement.
Vague was the impression of fossil
Teeth across the false breast
Yearning for a straight line in
Nature digging the what that lies
Oblong and lewd in the tube of
Afterlife lingerings.
Unsourced scent so strong it
Overpowered sense and narrative.

Disturbed earth grew stripes.
A stalk broke too far.

At first the reader is perhaps most taken by the line ‘Throes of profound bafflement’, as it most closely describes their immediate experience of the poem. But Eliot’s old chestnut — that a poem communicates before it is understood — holds true here, and what the poem communicates first and foremost is sheer linguistic joy. The marriage of sound and sense here is remarkable: meaning is generated at least in part by the free play and mutation of syllables at the level of sonic rather than semantic construction. Tryst in the first line seems to breed its immediate rhyme twist through an almost organic process, whilst elsewhere the insistent alliteration — the Anglo-Saxon deposits in English seem to be central to Monk’s project in Ghost — lend the poem the incantatory force of a spell or a curse.

As to meaning, I would struggle to produce any kind of a paraphrase, which is partly the point — besides, I don’t know if paraphrasable poems are ever worth reading — but I would make a case for reading ‘the what that lies / Oblong and lewd in the tube of / Afterlife lingerings’ as referring to the coffin resting snugly in the grave. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard adjectives more suited to the task of describing the physical fact of death than oblong and lewd, juxtaposed as they are with those deliberately foggy ‘afterlife lingerings’. The clash of registers suggested here recurs throughout Ghost & Other Sonnets, as Monk plays the full range of the English language as though it were a musical instrument. Latinate phrasing works with and against the Old English seams I noted above, mono- and polysyllabic words jostling against one another to create rich harmonies and jagged discordances. Monk, it seems to me, is more attuned to the physical heft of words than any other poet working in English today, and the sheer linguistic density of Ghost is hard to convey. Suffice it to say that this is a truly remarkable collection, and anyone who cares about modern poetry should get a hold of it immediately. That said, anyone who has written the line ‘Peaks blether in marmite dark’ doesn’t need to worry about securing anyone’s approval: Monk’s in a league of her own.

Tim Atkins, prior to Folklore, has also turned his hand to the sonnet form, but whereas Monk’s approach seems to be a matter of concentration, the language boiled down to its strongest, strangest flavours, Atkins’ sonnets were built upon a process of reduction or extraction, the poem seemingly removed piece by piece until barely a trace remained. Atkins’ Zukofskian translations of Horace, however, also suggest that, like Monk, he is attuned to the buried richnesses and complexities of language. Both these facets of Atkins’ work — the poem as the trace of a radically altered, even annihilated extant text; the poem as finely wrought linguistic artefact — are on full display in Folklore, a long sequence of prose poems which has been brewing for some while now (the first twenty-five segments appeared in 1995 with Heart Hammer Press). It might be possible to call Folklore ‘nature poetry’, though of a very idiosyncratic kind. Atkins’ subject here is landscape, or rather the subjective experience of landscape in the body, in history, in social organisations. The body’s points of contact with the world — the ear, the eye — are constantly invoked as a means of reading landscape, and the body’s movements through it:

Already the eyes. Cannot distinguish between adjectives. Anger requires cranes. Too much eyesight. Looks like stars.

Stares between rooms. Letters in the breath. Large & blur. Towards books.

This, from section 13, is arguably typical of Atkins’ methods throughout. Of particular interest is his use of the full stop, not simply as a marker of semantics and syntax but also as an aspect of musical phrasing. Constantly, the reader is drawn up against the full stop, invariably appearing where it should not: the breath halts like a horse at a high fence, and the reader must pause and reconsider meaning at every turn. Are we to read ‘Too much eyesight. Looks like stars’ as a single sentence, or as fragments of two distinct sentences (‘[There’s] too much eyesight. [It] looks like stars’ — the second fragment makes sense if we replace ‘stars’ with ‘rain’, by the way)? This method effectively forces the reader to become an active participant in the reading process, and not simply a passive vessel for the information the author wishes to impart.

Robert Sheppard’s distinction between ‘the poetry of saying’ and ‘the poetry of the said’ is instructive here. The poetry of the said, argues Sheppard, already knows what it plans to say before it begins: it unfolds its intentions in a clockwork fashion, and the reader absorbs this passively, ‘getting’ the ‘meaning’ when the last piece of machinery slots neatly into place, usually in the form of a glib observation or moral instruction. In the poetry of saying, meanwhile, process — form, if you like — has a part to play in the generation of meaning: syntactic disjunction, cut-ups, multiple reading possibilities, the use of the page like a musical score — these are all weapons in the poetry of saying’s arsenal, and as such, the reader must cooperate with the text in the creation of a final meaning, however tentative and transient that meaning might be.

This is not to suggest that Folklore is formidably impenetrable. Far from it, in fact, and what truly sets Atkins’ writing apart are its clear concise language, its highly tuned ear for the demotic in speech, and the sheer vibrancy of its sense of landscape. The nature of Atkins’ project means that isolate quotation is difficult, but I would put forward ‘Cheese of the long river’, ‘The down of her hair. In bubbles less worldly things. Voices spinning in the river’ and ‘The taste of light will always be on your tongue’ as a random selection of some of my favourite lines.

I’ve never liked rounding off reviews with a hyperbolic statement, but I will say this: both Monk and Atkins have raised the bar of what the long poem — indeed, the poem full-stop — can and should be capable of doing. They offer a challenge to the reader — to other poets as well — that demands to be met. However ‘difficult’ the work might seem, it is also supremely necessary. Take the risk: it’s worth it.