Review
Crossing the Snowline, Pauline Stainer
Crossing the Snowline, Pauline Stainer, 2008, Bloodaxe Books.
After five years (her last book was The Lady and the Hare, New and Selected Poems, 2003, Bloodaxe Books), Stainer, one of the keepers of the grail, rewards us with a solid and substantial 96 pages. For many of us, Stainer is an important, indeed an essential, seminal voice in contemporary poetry. In an unusually long explanatory book-cover note, the poet explains how grief for the loss of her daughter “took away the magical currency of the word”. This book restores it.
At the most basic level, the poems here invite attentive study because they are so ‘pared down’. The longest is 29 lines, the shortest six, and most poems here consist of a handful of three- or four-line verses. Form per se is normally quite work-a-day, though there is subtlety in versification and subliminal use of, for example, alliteration and half-rhyme.
Because, after the process of ‘cutting to the quick’, there is often a residue of bright images in these poems, I have sometimes thought this poet’s work ‘imagist’. In fact the ground-plan is often a narrative picked to the bones. These narratives are inspired by, for example, the New Testament, the lives of poets and painters, or episodes from history, such as Quantal:
Clearances,
the turf
a singing green,
downwind
of the deserted crofts
an owl,
releasing its third eyelid
against the sleet,
opaque as history.
This refers to the Highland clearances (though the word also suggests fast-moving weather, the poem is both history and depiction of landscape). Crofters driven off their land are the losers of “a singing green”, now obliterated, as the poet watches, by an incoming storm of sleet. The effect is the same as the passage of time (past suffering becomes “opaque”). The owl’s third eye is our third eye, blotting out pain, but “opaque” also suggests the landlords’ thick skin, birds of prey like the owl (but the owl also stands for the disinherited, no-longer part of community, “downwind / of the deserted crofts”). The poem is one of many essentially about loss and displacement.
It is easy to illustrate Stainer’s honed skill, but the boiling down, the alchemy, is only truly worthwhile if what remains is sufficiently rich. In A Pouch of Saffron, we are shown a field in October edged with orange poplars. When the dew has dried, field-workers “nip the purple blooms / at the base”. We then move into total surprise: something (the plant, the pickers, the poet?) is:
giddy with
barbarous blood-sugars,
the pressure of sunlight
on pistil and stamen.
There is sudden rawness, heat and pressure here – sexual feeling, if you like – but not explicit, and therefore not limiting for the reader. Many of Stainer’s poems remain ‘open to interpretation’, to some degree occlusive. This does not mean, however, that she is an inaccessible writer. She is not, especially in this collection, at all remote, but, in fact, ‘draws us close’, often by the wry, witty quality of the writing.
The process of arrival at such vivid discoveries is no doubt ultimately dependent on a fallible ‘total receptivity’, and, naturally, there are lapses. Stainer is a creator of iconic images (she has this in common with some of the so-called English Metaphysicals and with, in modern times, TS Eliot). When a new image does not come, sometimes old effects are repeated. The image of the hare running in some of these poems is ‘bleached out’, I think, in comparison with a new image, “foxes raze the electric field // with their burning tails” (Cobra Mist, Orford Ness).
Imagination needs feeding, not only from within, and we are aware that new sources of inspiration, visits to India, Japan and the Azores, and the practice of painting, have all contributed, for example to the many vivid colour references (“that register of blue-darks”, “the moon mines its cobalt”, “their fluted whites”, “racks of new-dyed sarees / billowing / the scarlet wind”, “the yellow gloom / of rape-fields ripening in rain”, “insolent light / on a blue lintel”, “notoriously fugitive yellows / over the wheel of the horizon?”).
Perhaps it is appropriate that, in Afterlight, the one poem here “for my daughter”, colour plays so large a part. The quotations at the front of this book are ‘Even in Siberia, there is amber’ (Colin Thubron) and ‘There is only one fault, incapacity to feed on light’ (Simone Weil). Afterlight focusses on yellow, the colour of light (did Van Gogh call it ‘the colour of life’?). The bold handling of the ideas here could well draw one of those churlish workshop utterances, ‘Isn't there too much yellow?’ but, in fact, there is bold freedom in the way Stainer holds, and plays with, the central image.
In Afterlight we are back with Stainer’s capacity to eschew context (she says in her cover statement that she is not ‘confessional’) and to write narratively but with telling brevity. Stainer refers to the liquid-amber tree lighting “its own dying”, to wasted children “wrapped in gold foil”, to autumn leaves “fallen on the fallow glimmered by sun on frost”, to the “saffron-yellow shoes” of the kings of Persia, and finally to a jewel of her daughter’s, “the single topaz at your throat”. The resonances of these images in fact recreate a chain of events: wasting, hospitalisation, a funeral and memorial planting, a subsequent fallow period of grief and silence, with the glimmer of a lost gift. This is Stainer at her strongest, utterly focussed, each found, iconic image a delightful surprise to us and perhaps to herself.
Page(s) 20-21
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