Spare and Unadorned

Michael Hulse, The Secret History, (Arc, 2009). ISBN: 9781906570248. £9.99

One of the many problems with what Andy Brown terms the “binary myth” of post-war British poetics is its tendency to steamroller the complexities of the individual talents involved.  To think of poetics solely in terms of a war of attrition between opposed mainstream and alternative camps fails to account for figures such as Donald Davie.  In many regards, Davie is the one-man propaganda wing of the Movement, with his landmark work Purity of Diction in English Verse setting out most clearly the Movement principles of linguistic clarity, formal control and subjective restraint, the Little Englander mentality of the Movement inherent in the title.  Yet at the same time, Davie was a long-term disciple of the Poundian tradition of international modernism; an enthusiastic supporter of Ed Dorn and Charles Olson’s radical continuation of that same tradition (even if he signally failed to comprehend the ways in which their lessons might be applied in the context of British poetry); whilst in his landmark work on Thomas Hardy, he provided in depth critiques of Roy Fisher and JH Prynne along with the usual suspects, giving their work the serious and prolonged attention that it deserved.  His reading of Fisher’s poetry in relation to Larkin’s, in particular, is still in many regards a yardstick of Fisher criticism.

I mention this because it strikes me that Michael Hulse is very much a part of the Davie line of dissident mainstream poetics.  At first glance, we can see in Hulse the heritage of that supremely reasonable Movement aesthetic: a surface clarity and classicism (both of style and, on occasion, of subject matter); an evasion of the overtly autobiographical; a quiet rejection of the greatest excesses of twentieth century modernism.  As with Davie, however, this is only part of the picture, as Hulse’s most successful work to date, Mother of Battles, demonstrates.  The poem, a long sequence responding to the Gulf War, whilst decidedly not linguistically innovative — whatever that might mean — is nonetheless extremely open-minded in its formal choices, and keeps at least one eye on the various structural innovations that contemporary poetry has inherited from the various inter-war avant gardes.  It is also, moreover, something of a blueprint for a successful modern civilian war poetry. 

The Secret History, Hulse’s first collection since his selected in 2002,is both a continuation and an expansion of the strategies he has pursued throughout his career, and is arguably, along with Mother of Battles, the most successful expression of his various themes and concerns so far.  If the collection follows faithfully in the linguistic and formal footsteps of the Movement, its raw autobiographical subject matter is a distinct and radical departure from the Larkinesque.  The Secret History is in many regards an autobiography by other means, composed with greater narrative and thematic care than many collections, navigating through a series of movements, each of which are dependent upon the other for their full clarification.  The first and most successful section deals broadly with family history: both with personal griefs, and with the shadows of European history. 

‘For my Father’, the centrepiece of this section, is a long sequence dealing seriously, at times almost unbearably, with questions of loss and grief.  The language follows in the Larkinesque tradition — Hulse’s metonymic reduction of a chapel to “Plastic flowers.  A cross.  Consoling light” reads like ‘Church-Going’ condensed into a haiku — but this essentially reasonable language is wedded to extremely raw emotional material, rendered
all the more startling due to the bare-bones language in which it is couched.  To have treated the material otherwise would be to have committed a kind of violence to it.  As such, the isolation and quotation of individual passages, the reviewer’s stock in trade, is difficult: there are no, or few, lines that sing immediately and ring in the memory.  What the reader takes away instead is an impressionistic emotional narrative, no less powerful for being expressed in the plainest of terms.    

The following section, dealing with the breakdown of a relationship, is arguably the weakest, though it is without doubt a necessary bridge between the preceding section and the redemptive finale of the collection’s narrative.  The problems with these poems are at least in part problems of form.  Here Hulse forgoes, for the most part, the spare vernacular he deploys throughout the remainder of the collection, opting instead for rhymed quatrains and couplets to frame the emotional content of these pieces.  It is the use of form which is at issue, pointing to the gap which opens up between form and content.  ‘Winterreise’, for example, seems to bounce along far too jauntily, the end-rhymes snapping too readily into place, for a poem detailing the gradual and painful end of a relationship; whilst ‘Television’, in which the speaker pines for his absent lover whilst allowing his attention to be absorbed by televisual depictions of the feminine, is merely slight, and rather creepy into the bargain: I had always assumed, naively, that the point of watching tennis was to watch a game of tennis, not to ogle Anna Kournikova’s “body moving in a dress.”      

The following section, detailing the development of a new relationship, more than makes amends for the limitations of these poems, however.  Hulse’s method here is to juxtapose the more traditional motifs of love poetry with the darker chaotic forces of political history, throwing both into sharper focus.  ‘Photographs of K.’, which opens this section, is typical. Each poem in the sequence is built around two oppositional images: one describing a moment charged with historical resonance — Mussolini stifling a sneeze “with leather-gloved efficient fingers”, or the famous photograph of Lee Miller bathing in Hitler’s tub — the other providing a detail of K. (an odd decision, given that the collection is dedicated to ‘Kathrin’, though the reduction of the lover’s name to an initial succeeds in universalising the poems to a greater extent than might otherwise have been the case), in the shade of an almond tree, or walking “into a silent clearing, / January sunlight on her brow”.  Without commentary, without forcing the reader to see what is intended, Hulse suggests the importance of human relationships as a necessary corrective, a refuge, however slight, from the ravages and abstractions of historical progress.

‘The Garden’ proceeds along similarly oppositional lines, with the greater portion of the poem taken up with a portrait of ‘the city’, sketched with an almost Biblical vitriol:

This is the city.  The city you know.  The city you have always known.
The dark has been dispelled.  At night the city’s domed with noxious light, 
a patient smothering of its own free will beneath a toxic tent.
By day it’s bedlam.  Even the indolent lilies of the field
are toiling and spinning as if there were no tomorrow.  This is the city.

The poem concludes, however, with a litany of poetic praise for K., drawing heavily on Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (the most familiar section of which relates to Smart’s cat Jeoffry):

For she is philosophy drawn from examples. 
For she surprises by a fine excess, and not by singularity.
For she is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is
nowhere.
For she is everything that is the case.
For she is the fulfilling of the law. 
For she too is in Arcadia.
For she is the empress of ice-cream.

‘The Garden’ powerfully expresses one of the definitions of finding a home that Hulse identifies in his preface: “seeking ease of spirit in a life without God”.  The notion that love should prove a valuable replacement for God might seem like an easy answer to an indefinable question; but as a conclusion to this collection, it makes perfect sense, and is, moreover, hard won.

The Secret History is by no means an easy collection, and is not without its faults, but at its best it adds considerably to the body of poetic autobiography in its deployment of a spare and unadorned diction, through poems driven with a quiet power.  Though Hulse suggests in the author’s note prefacing the collection that this is likely to be the only work of this type he produces, it would be unfortunate if he were to abandon this mode altogether.