If Your Poet is Dead …

Paul Evans, The Door of Taldir, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Sheppard (Shearsman, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610255. £9.95

The task of selecting poems from a large-ish body of pretty much unknown work can’t be easy.  How should you approach editing a ‘Selected’ like this?  Is it a Greatest Hits?  Should it show the poet’s full range, warts and all?  Or are you trying to show the poet in a particular light and in the process entice new readers? 

I would imagine too that the whole thing is made far more difficult if your selectee is little-known outside a small circle of friends and die-hard small-press-admirers, and especially if your poet is dead.  The editor’s job must be even tougher when the reputation of a poet you presumably admire is in your hands.  And, just to note, all of Paul Evans’s books are out of print and there is no Collected Poems.  So, this is a brave one from Shearsman – and from Robert Sheppard, who does opt for the ‘warts and all’ approach. And, I should add, The Door of Taldir is a much-needed corrective to years of neglect.

Paul Evans’s writing trajectory was not straightforward: he lurched, late in his career, toward a completely different kind of poetry from that which he had been writing previously.  But there are questions to consider before we get there, not the least of which is: who was Paul Evans?  The following is in Evans’ own words, extracted from a letter to Eric Mottram quoted in Robert Sheppard’s introduction to The Door of Taldir:

When I’m at my best, I don’t draw or tear a hole in the world – there is an exchange between me and things outside me so much so that I begin to have distinct feelings of merging with the forms of earth

Evans contrasts his poetic outlook with that of Kathleen Raine, who “gives so much symbiotic meaning to everything that we are bound to come out as mind-stuck-in-matter...” (Robert Sheppard points out that ‘symbiotic’ is probably a transcription error for ‘symbolic’).  And between these two quotations you can get a fair feel for Evans’ style and standpoint.  He was a poet closely associated with what has come to be known as the British Poetry Revival, whose best work merits comparison with that of Lee Harwood and other luminaries at the approachable end of the (scare-quoted) ‘innovative’ poetry spectrum.  Take the first section of ‘Dark &’:

days of rain, last of the year

our children play games in which
well-known securities are rehearsed:
‘I am the small puppy
belonging to the mother dog’

a dullness
not reached by music, dope or sex
approximates despair

my poems have been too full
of your absence for years

The diction is conversational, the tone confiding, and the scene and mindset of the poet/narrator captured casually and apparently effortlessly. This is what Evans is so good at; making the complex simple and beautiful, and making simple language sing.  He’s not a poet of grand gestures or linguistic pyrotechnics.  Essentially Evans’s work is lyrical and rooted in the apparently personal.  As Sheppard says in his introduction, “there is – throughout his work – a general refusal of the guru-like posturing of authority figures”.  This refusal to take on the role of authority figure, combined with a natural reticence in putting himself about as a poet and an untimely death, has probably contributed to his comparative obscurity.  

At this point I ought probably to mention that, for me, this book is preaching to the converted.  Tony Frazer introduced me to Paul Evans’s work a number of years ago, loaning me the wonderfully titled The Manual for the Perfect Organisation of Tourneys, published by Oasis in 1979, and it has been one of the books that has most affected and influenced me.  Having subsequently picked up most of Paul Evans’s work second-hand, I’ve been waiting for this book to come out since I first got wind of it in a dingy pub in Exeter – the kind where you swap pamphlets in brown paper bags and genuinely worry that someone might nick your laughter if you leave it unattended.  And I’ve been wondering what kind of a book it would turn out to be.

The Door of Taldir is arranged chronologically, beginning with a poem published in Young Commonwealth Poets ’65 and ending with around thirty pages of largely unpublished work from Evans’s later, more formal phase, collected under the title ‘Romantic Relics’. A minor quibble here: I think even Evans’s closest friends would agree that the later poems are not nearly as interesting or as satisfying as his earlier work, and yet the last thirty pages of the book are given over to them. It slightly overbalances the whole, and for the most part they read like rather minor experiments with form. Sheppard justifies this by stating that:

[Evans] investigated the radicality of artifice in the original sense. Read alongside Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s use of traditional poetic artifice or Douglas Oliver’s contemporaneous use of the stanza of the Pearl poem, this late work does not look so untimely

But I’m really not so sure.  With the best will in the world, Evans’s ‘poetic artifice’ does not stand comparison with Forrest-Thomson’s.  Evans’s later work is both more reactionary and less crafted than Sheppard’s explanation suggests:

Up here I hang, for all the populace to see,
And even babes, with chubby fingers, point at me.
Old ladies nudge their neighbours, whispering my name,
Till every street throughout the town applauds my shame.

(‘The Poet Virgil Suspended in a Basket’)

The seventy-odd pages in the middle of The Door of Taldir are, by a long way, the most interesting and it’s a shame that a larger selection of this work seems to have been squeezed out by the later, uncollected poems, which are given an emphasis disproportionate to their importance.  In terms of the numbers of pages alone, the unpublished work gets thirty while none of the original collections is given much more than twenty apiece.  As a fan, I was interested to see poems I’d never read.  But, also as a fan, I didn’t want other people to see the later work without having read Evans’s published work first, and there’s just not enough space given to the earlier work for the reader to follow Evans’s trajectory, to realise the sea-change that occurs between, say, the poems collected in February and the uncollected ‘The Poet Virgil...’ quoted above. 

I was also slightly surprised by just a couple of the editorial choices in the main body of the book.  For instance, the selection from the sequence ‘Taldir Poems’ (from February) seems a little arbitrary.  The sequence should start with a beautiful, conversational, prose poem, which contextualises what follows, and I don’t really understand why it is left out here.  And I’m not sure that presenting a sequence like this, which relies on the cumulative effect of its admittedly lovely parts, in bleeding chunks, quite comes off.

But these are the kinds of carps that you always get with Selecteds.  No two people will agree on what should or shouldn’t be included.  And there’s still great work here, most of which has been out of print for years.  The second of ‘Two Nature Poems’, ‘Four Ways of Looking at an English Landscape’, provides the opportunity to see Evans in his earlier, freer and more lyrical, mode.  He engages conversationally with both reader and landscape, setting up scenarios into which the reader is invited, rather than thrown, giving the reader a window for imaginative collaboration:

While waiting for help to arrive
we had the leisure to admire
the golden foliage of the oaks,
half-concealing precipitous crags
on the sandstone escarpment.
Robins sang, and the first thrush.
A flock of redwings overhead
to land in a hedge stained with crimson.         

The reader learns later that this poem is the result of city-dwellers breaking down in the countryside (in a car, that is, rather than emotionally), but by the time the prescriptive element of plot emerges, the reader is already inside the poem on their own terms.  Evans’s descriptions, which stop short of pretending to understand or contextualise the countryside within a pre-existing system a la Hughes and his chums, give the reader space to engage with a landscape sketched clearly enough to be imagined, but without feeling they are being preached at.  And this is one of Evans’s great strengths – the subtlety and emotional intelligence to not stand on a soap-box.  His work never feels like it is setting out to impress or convert, it’s just there, conversational and engaging (a quality he shared with his friend Lee Harwood).  I’ve never really understood why this sort of poetry is considered difficult, when ease of delivery and simple but focused language are the qualities that mark it out.

Despite his insistence on being a city-dweller, much of Evans’s work interacts with natural phenomena, drawing on techniques presumably learned from the New York and Black Mountain schools (the latter studied by Evans for his MA thesis).  Syntax is secondary to meaning, words are foregrounded spatially to create logical or aural disjunction, different trains of thought and interruptions interact with each other to build up poems that rely on organic, quasi-improvisatory sprawl rather than narrative.  The opening of ‘The Manual for the Perfect Organisation of Tourneys’ illustrates the effect Evans achieves by juxtaposing the conversational and the fragmented, carefully calibrating the speed of the poem to first stun you with individual words that build towards an image, and then put his arm around you and talk:

the mountain

                         translucent

in winter sun

shoulder of crystal

 

it is not, as Henry Miller says
of Capricornians
                                   that we are
‘perpetually bidding goodbye
to all that is terrestrial’       
rather
                that everything
– ­of earth, of sky –
needs us to name it

not that by naming
the nebula in Andromeda
we make it ours
but that
                we can create
(courtesy of George Crumb)
Music of the Starry Night
by covering the piano strings
with sheets of paper
‘thereby producing a distortion
when the keys are struck’

 

The switch from the transcendental to the personal here is handled with such relaxed dexterity that you almost miss it.  And it’s this kind of conversational charm – New York-influenced name dropping and casual, thought-based line-breaks –  no matter how big the subject, that is Evans’s greatest strength.  You’re always happy to follow him, even if you’re not always happy with the direction that he’s taking.

In the final analysis it’s great to have some of Evans’s work back in print, and great too that there’s the opportunity now for reassessing him.  I do wish that there was less of the later, more formal, work in the book – that’s one direction in which I can’t follow him.  It’s not that I’ve got anything against form or metre.  It’s just that these later poems read like the work of a poet feeling around for a new way to say things, without actually finding it.  The casual charm and ear for free music of the earlier poetry seems to vanish before Evans finds anything substantial enough in his new style with which to replace it.  The book I’d really like to see is a ‘Collected Earlier Poems’, which would really allow his work to take its rightful place alongside his contemporaries.  But that’s for another day.  For now it’s a cause for celebration that a fine poet in danger of being forgotten has been given a new lease of life.