‘A Large Jar of Onions’

Peter Robinson, Spirits of the Stair: Selected Aphorisms, (Shearsman Books, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610620. £9.95

Troubles Swapped For Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos, ed. Rupert Loydell, (Salt Publishing, 2009) ISBN: 9781844714711. £11.99

Siobhan Campbell, Cross-Talk, (Seren Books, 2009) ISBN: 9781854115096. £7.99

Poetry, in the crucible of its composition and the reading, is a struggle with language. Obviously writers don't sit down at the desk boxing-gloved. But there's a sense in which the genre, with its penetrating focus on words' minutiae, is an attempt to deal with their knottiness and multi-faceted nature, to batter and mould them into new shapes. Talk to any writer, and they'll chat about complexes of strange habits, states, processes. Perhaps the most valuable writing on it, then, comes to us not in the form of theory — top-down, all-encompassing, hermetically-sealed — or even the how-to books and essays of poets and fictioneers, but in odd and sidelined forms: the aphorism, the fragment, the manifesto. These dispatches from the frontline of the writer's desk leave the author with both more and less at stake in each attempt at spelling out the nature of writing. The aphorism and manifesto, after all, are spoken by the most unreliable of narrators — the writer themselves. And they can be thought of not as light reading or spare-time pontification, but as a poetry of a sorts. As Peter Robinson notes in his Afterword to his selected aphorisms, Spirits of the Stair, the aphorism bears more resemblance to the prose-poem or the haiku than to the conventional 'writer's note'.

An advantage of the aphorism is the fact that it feels unplanned, the utterance of a moment — the sort of one-liner we all imagine coming to our tongues at just the right time, although they never have. Hence Robinson's title, after the French l'esprit de l'escalier — the witty comeback that arrives too late. He never planned, Robinson says, to write aphorisms — he “thought [him]self incapable of such mental agilities”; they simply began slipping out and into the notebook, during his nearly two-decade-long residency teaching English in Japan.

They're not, by any means, all about poetry: he saves much of his best and most wounding wit for New Labour, the inhabitants of Grub Street (“Is there anything worse than a poet manqué? Yes, a critic manqué”), and the publishing industry. There's also a generous and powerful concern with the stuff of everyday life, with the messy business of getting from one end of a day to another, written with the combination of offhandedness and thought-out lucidity that characterises the best aphorisms. One can almost picture Robinson's hand scratching across the notebook page to make an entry like this: “Beware long afternoon shadows of branches and tree-trunks at winter's end.” Each is an acupunctural pin-prick, at our own illusions and those of the whole mad world around us; Robinson is nothing if not dry and pithy, and while some will raise only a half-smile of recognition — the degree you get from a New Yorker cartoon — others will be the catalyst for genuine LOLs.

If there is a problem with the book, it's organisational: being essentially two books stitched together (a reprint of Untitled Deeds (2004) with another 388 aphorisms stuck on the end), there's no sense of shape, themes recurring and sputtering out seemingly at random. But then again, as fellow aphorist Don Paterson advised in The Book of Shadows, “[r]eading a book of aphorisms diligently in the sequence they appear makes about as much sense as eating a large jar of onions diligently in the sequence they appear; and it should go without saying that no-one should try to finish either in one sitting.” Enjoy it, but not too much.

Marjorie Perloff remarked that the manifesto was theparadigmatic modernist form; with little constraining tradition, they act as a platform for iconoclasm and a chance for the makers of the new to shove words around the page in just the way they want. Of course, any manifesto issued nowadays seems more like a symptom of stomach-gripe than radical change; sober and practical, we've matured past modernism's temper-tantrums. Which makes the occasional boot up the arse even sweeter. Stride editor Rupert Loydell, an unclassifiable creature himself — halfway between the raging energies of the neo-avant-garde and the amenability of the mainstream — has here given licence to a whole stack of folks to do exactly that. And the results are, well, mixed, but mainly fresh and energising.

The title, taken from Andy Brown's text 'Poetry' (as in “Poetry is troubles”, etc.), is very appropriate: the manifestos make you want to leap at the typewriter and get at it. The absolute highlights come from Luke Kennard and Robert Sheppard: the former deploys his usual arch wit to demonstrate the fracas between poetry's powers of perception-shifting and the need to quash literary egos. The prose-poem sequence 'The War Poem Letters' practically rattles with quotables: “Listen to me! I'll be pouring my soul out to the debt recovery services next!”; and, “If you ever see me eating anything, you should wrest it from my hands and throw it to a dog”. He seems unable to stop undermining himself, and we love him for it.

Sheppard, in two short texts, gives us, in a very different way, the potency of poetry's linguistic fission: “eversaying, yes — / saying, gainsaying, // truthsaying, lying”. If there's one thing the best manifestos in this collection show, it's that poetry's conflicts — the tussle of grasping and saying the world — are always desperately engaged with the realities of our lives: “House numbers telephone wires. Humming with Power. Not poetry and the antimonies. Satellite navigation. Data shadow. Inside. They share the world is not escaped but elsed”.

Many of the other stand-out texts also play with the history of the manifesto form: the usually-intimidating Alan Halsey enumerates nine pared-down and playful 'Ways of Looking at a Manifesto', always  refusing to set out a particular path for the poet or reader: “2. 'This baboon teaches letters.'/Tell me, Thoth,/what this says about baboons./And what does it say about letters?”. Ditto Lael Lewy, leading the reader down a corridor of self-contradictions (“Poetry should [...] / 15. Be handwritten / 16. Include hypertext, if desired”). The whole collection gives the impression that poetry is not now aimless, but that all paths are open. It's where the texts stray into the badlands of capital-T Theory — Scott Thurston and Andrew Taylor's texts — or become turgid with verbiage — I'm looking at you, Ross Flint — that the interest wanes. Salt's design is, as usual, charming, the more spacious layout giving the classic manifesto feel, leaving these pieces delightfully poised between poetry and hectoring.

Finally, a different kind of struggle: Siobhán Campbell's collection hums with the tensions of language embedded in the political context of Northern Ireland. The question of language, in its minute variations, has been particularly fraught for Irish and Ulster poets; the modern Irish lyric tradition draws a lot from Heaney’s simultaneous interrogations of language and landscape.

Born in Dublin, with family ties in ‘the North’, Campbell struggles, throughout the collection, with the opposing significances in her overlapping vocabularies. In 'Campbell', a sparse monologue framed in quotation marks, her family name is a mark of damage, a map of internal divisions:

“Though you are from the south, you need to find the will
to hold a vowel too long...
          Keep always your own name.
It takes a softened tongue to fill a twisted mouth.”

The collection’s title suggests the cross-chatter of British Army radios, part of the everyday aural backdrop of the Troubles, or the anxious and cautious discourse sent back and forth across the lines between communities; but it also calls up the MacNeice quote she includes as an epigraph: “all poems... contain an internal conflict, cross-talk, back-wash”. It points to the fact that language, as Derrida would have it, is always excessive, always partially escapes our most ardent attempts to harness it with significance, because every word contains the potential to mean or to be something else.

In each lyric a vast amount of care and control is evident: only occasionally does she break into free-verse and, even in those instances, the tension and weight of each line seems carefully measured. In sonnets and near-sonnets like 'Parsing' and 'Troubled', her fraught engagement with tradition is palpable. In one stand-out poem, 'Almost in Sight' — an extended memory of crossing and re-crossing the sniper-guarded border of the Six Counties — she uses stanzas that recall Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings', its sly rolling rhythm repurposed to communicate the sensation of self-contradiction that came with her travels:

No bees here yet,
but midges that gather in the dusk.
Trees slow to leaf have not quite hid
the sign, 'sniper at work'. Light fades
just as we'll leave, afraid our southern car
could lead to something more
than cousins spending time as planned
Even the bread is different, comes in rounds,
farls quartered with a steady hand.

It's the accumulation of small, localising details, down to that “farls”, which gives a sense of what values are at stake for the poet and her narrators, in speaking out. Names — of plants, places (“Warrenpoint”, “the Mournes”) and animals — and stories (one poem refers to the folk belief in the cursing power of 'fairy rings') crop up repeatedly, as they do in the work of Heaney, Longley and the rest.

There’s a peculiarly Irish mark of difference embedded in what should be known and trusted that can become almost cloying, although Campbell's astringent sensibilities mostly keep it in check. As Northern Ireland after the peace process is largely free from the constant violence of the Troubles' worst years, it is perhaps harder to grasp and to write about the conflict, a fact that shifts Campbell's approach. The absences, everything she keeps under the wrap of that cool tone, are all the more glaring; even the most innocent poems — and she has plenty of those — seem to heave with unspoken violence. We hear, bubbling underneath, plenty of cross-talk. This is what the struggle with language means: our very lives.