‘Through the Eye’s Essential Oils’

Tim Atkins, Folklore (Salt, 2008). ISBN: 9781844714193 (hardback). £12.99

The sorting of poetry into ‘difficult’ and ‘accessible’ piles tends to raise my hackles. Not because I don’t find plenty of poetry challenging (I do), but because for every poet I struggle with, I know there will be readers who, well, don’t. All good writers communicate, even if poetic communication knits a more complex texture than prose. So, assuming T. S. Eliot is right, and a poem communicates before it’s understood, surely the point isn’t difficulty but reward: does a poem invite us into a multi-sensory experience? After that first rendezvous, will we be welcomed back?

Tim Atkins has so far – in To Repel Ghosts, 25 Sonnets and Horace – combined an evident love for poetic tradition and form with a gift for pushing the envelope of language.

Folklore (which began life in 1995 with Heart Hammer Press, as Folklore 1-25) is both a long poem, and a sequence of not-quite-prose poems (having some lineation, and a haiku). They could be likened to excavated Anglo-Saxon fragments, or hallucinogenic potions blended by a hedge-witch from the ingredients of language.

Whatever they are, they begin by subverting Ted Hughes (who reached for strange transcendence not quite as often as photographic accuracy), where Man linguistically morphs into his familiar, Crow:

Man walks in to sky. Crows, a muttering, didicoy.

Lays his feet in the rain. Tar paper peeling & waters form. His piss blades. The bramble hedge. Crawls through doors. Feathers fall over. His black suit. Lies inside. His dark song.

Atkins foregoes his wheels (‘Tossed his bike in the hedge and wrestles a man down’), and joins a procession of poet-ramblers interested in the leisurely stroll as vehicle towards revelation – John Clare, Wordsworth (with his Daffodils), Blake, Byron, Shakespeare (celebrating land lore in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) – who viewed nature less as a mirror of the self than as a window into the metaphysical.

By swapping points-of-view between an archetypal ‘I,’ ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘we’, he breaks down the idea of the differentiated self. Mythic characters can be one-dimensional, but these personae are fully-formed because we are. Atkins’ lyricism and fine attention to detail allow their experience to become ours. Like them – or Adam and Eve in the garden – we disappear into the landscape with all its colour, eroticism and black magic, appearing here as fruit, cider and fly.

Smears her back with soft fruits. Love in its traditional. In a different field. Cider is the fruit of. Making love.

Catches flies between her teeth.

Folklore is able to change form at will. Sometimes it’s a pinhole camera; other times it sprouts wings, and flies over fields for a bird’s-eye-view of its underlying themes. Long poems often shift between imagery and commentary, and the joins are sometimes not quite seamless. But Atkins never loses sight of lyricism and imagery (which ‘must be made from the absolute’).

The book’s elegiac nature joins Atkins to poets like A.E. Houseman, John Clare, Blake, to mourn an ancient countryside sold to the machines of industry and religion:

The sold priest in the fields. Smells of mildew and rust.

Tewkesbury, Monmouth, Warwick, Burton. Torches walks. Burns it up.

The idea of our possessing the countryside is brimming under this passage, which subverts Blake’s England. Christ, who once walked ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, is now the night itself, pacing like a farmer through a barn:

Was in the barn where. Where the night. Where the night lifts itself up & becomes a sad thing that walks walks like Jesus. Like Jesus in the fields. He places his hand on the machine and the night &. Is not wanted there. Night will be filled now without him.

This machine.

These lines rail against the reduction of primal experiences to ‘deadly sins’:

Dusk. In church singing. Spitting out pips.

The first day I greased her. Bitter kings.

Folklore explores complex feeling, thought and multi-sensory experience. It isn’t a deliberate attempt to alienate readers, but to get us closer to an authentic, waking-dream encounter of England’s shifting landscape. There’s no cynical rejection of meaning and emotion (even if their nature is questioned) and the writing is as concrete as experience (even if, like experience, it’ll require reflection to glean meaning from it). So for all its postmodern Language-esque experimentation, it sits firmly in the realm of modernist lyric poetry. But particular to Atkins’ brand of lyric is his use of synaesthesia, which permeates and colours the entire text. Senses, images, syntax and grammar bear strange relationships with one another (‘Milks. Stitched into history’). Sentences are cut to their essential parts, a full-stop reduced to nothing but a pause for breath. We’re used to seeing end-stops in a ballad, for example, but here it’s unsettling. The eye is forced to focus on the poem’s tiny composite parts, before enjoying its tumbling long lines. It’s Whitman, filtered through a broken radio:

From twelve till light. It – Grains. Through the ear. Through the bird. The blue chair. A heard falling. & no promised. Comes. But a night.

Taking off. The Light behind. The colds. Suns. Spectrums not seen. Through the eye’s essential oils.

For those unsure of experimental poetry, the most postmodern thing about Folklore might not be its difficulty, but its old-as-the-hills message: in love and landscape, beauty was always coupled with complexity, and has emerged all the more rewarding for it. Start here, and keep walking.