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Recent collaborations by Ian Robinson and Ray Seaford(1)

Mallarmé saw the world as a book of abstract symbols. The poets of the following generation could not remain unaffected by this outlook but reacted with a more down to earth programme. For Pierre Reverdy 'the poet is essentially a man who aspires to the domain of the real'. On the other hand, 'the innermost quality of man is his inexplicable need for the marvellous. And that is his sharpest point of divorce from nature. We no longer believe in miracles – nothing is more obvious. But the miracles in which we no longer believe are as nothing in comparison with those that each man carries in reserve within his innermost self and which his imagination is offering him all the time.'(2)

This conflicts with the Platonic world of shadows cast by the ideal. It is instead a world of fragments that the mind greets with small shocks of indefinable recognition, the world that Philippe Jaccottet continued describing just as Reverdy was falling silent. In it, in Anna Balakian's words, 'the part is greater than the whole, for were you to see the whole you would give it limit.'(3) The poet does not so much interpret as point the mind towards the problem of interpretation. The text therefore becomes a collaboration between writer and reader, for the reader must confirm from his own resources what the writer describes. The search for significance is a joint venture.

Reverdy's 'domain of the real' is, then, a somewhat special case. He called it 'surreality' (transcendent reality, one might even translate it as 'magic realism'), a term promptly colonised by André Breton and his followers. But for the Surrealists too the writer was less expositor than facilitator; his job was 'to give sight' (donner à voir, Eluard), 'to enable vision' (faire voir, Breton). Wordsworth had claimed as much for his poetry, but he set his subjective glimpses of wild daffodil and daisy within an ideological framework. On the one hand he was harking back to the 18th Century didactic tradition, on the other he sanctioned the lyric as purveyor of egocentric anecdote, a catastrophe from which English language poetry still suffers two centuries on. He set limits by insisting on his own interpretation rather than encouraging an exploration of experience on the part of his readers.

There were two waves of Surrealists – the pre-war generation and then a postwar generation whose younger members were born during the 1930s. Ian Robinson and Ray Seaford come from the right date-band for the latter. As a figurative artist Seaford has obviously been influenced by Surrealism while Robinson's figurative work inclines more to 'magic realism', as does his writing. His world too is fragmentary, authorial interpretation of which would be regarded by him as arrogant betrayal. Seaford's writing has in general been more hit and miss, inclined to anecdotalism and weak endings. Every now and then, though, there emerges the same bizarre imagination as informs his art.

It was to encourage his strengths through the provision of a disciplined framework that Robinson suggested they collaborate on a couple of extended prose works. They had in fact already collaborated in an amusing hoax. This was Censored Mistletoe (S Editions, 1980), purporting to be the translation of a piece of German experimental writing. There they worked jointly on the various short prose texts it contains. In their latest publications authorship alternates between the pieces.

26½ Things, the first of these, attempts to reach Reverdy's miraculous domain by way of a series of wry stories, rather ordinary slices of life and plangent reminders that death is not far round the corner. Where the authors are content with a simple presentation of their material, occasionally little more than a bald listing of particulars, this works quite well. It's a risky business, however, since they are necessarily grazing the edge of anecdote and banality.

Such writing calls for a craft of constraint and simplicity but there are times when both authors overwrite, strain their fancies too hard or lose balance. Unfortunately this happens most often in the opening sections. There we find such pearls of wisdom, cultured out of Patience Strong, as 'Life can be very simple sometimes' and, in an adjacent piece, 'Yet nothing lasts forever'. There is, too, the kind of stuffed shirt gaiety typified by this ending to a description of Ray Seaford's bed sheet: 'It is unlikely that the awesome relic found its way into a museum; far more likely that the dustbin consumed this thin fragment of my dubious history.'

Yet even coy clichés and superfluity of adjectives of this order have impeccable Surrealist precedents. Take Breton himself, recalling the birth of The Exquisite Corpse: 'Almost every evening we gathered around a table where Châteu Yquem deigned to mingle its suave note with that of other, equally tonic local brews.' Or here is Jacques Rigaut, so proud of this piece of infantile terribilism that he published it twice in nine years: 'The first time I killed myself, it was to annoy my mistress. That virtuous creature brusquely refused to sleep with me, saying that she was overcome with remorse for betraying her first-string lover. I do not know if I loved her – I suspect that a fortnight away from her would have singularly diminished my need for her – but her refusal exasperated me. How to reach her? Have I said that she retained a deep and lasting tenderness for me? I killed myself to annoy my mistress. I am forgiven this suicide in consideration of my extreme youth at the time.'(4) Hard though it is to plumb this level, their latter day disciples come near it on occasion.

It is likely, however, that whatever Surrealist manifestations we find in either of the works under review are more a matter of pastiche. They are stylistically varied and borrow techniques from many writers, not all of them by any means within the Surrealist sphere. Furthermore, the general tone has none of the evangelical fervour of the genuinely innovative. There is much more of the world-weary scepticism typical of century's (not to say millennium's) end writing. Reminders of death are everywhere and, as the past is bidden farewell, the possibility of renewal is firmly and explicitly rejected.

Thunder on the Dew is something of an advance on 26½ Things but there are continuities as well. Both are 48 pages long, but the later work is A5 where the earlier was A6 (a size dear to the heart of the editor of Oasis Books), and printed in the same eye-strainingly small font. As against the 29 items in 26½ Things, there are 31 in the new. It can easily be deduced, therefore, that these are longer. In fact, they get increasingly so as the work progresses. From three to the page at the start they stretch to three pages long by the end. The genre of the work stops far short of the prose poem. It can best be described as fragmentary narrative. Indeed, both books only fall short of becoming mere chrestomathies by the grace of the minimal unifying principle behind their creation.

What is most evident in Thunder on the Dew is that each piece is a response to the one before, taking up some image, theme or phrase that appeared there. Every now and then there are recapitulations of several preceding pieces. Another of the rules is not so obviously spotted. At the start a list of words was drawn up, some of which had to be incorporated in each piece. There is an element of intermittent response in 26½ Things as well. Robinson mentions worms in compost, a bit later Seaford has a worm in a cemetery. Two funeral pieces appear side by side. A man taking a vacuum for a walk is answered further on by a man playing a saxophone while cycling. One of a pair of socks is answered by one of a pair of gloves, the former treated from the finder's point of the view, the latter from the loser's.

The links in Thunder on the Dew are more tangential or, if you like, subtler. Item 3 has a man walking towards an icy horizon and eventually hidden behind the words 'The End'. Item 4 is set in a church and begins with the phrase 'World without end. Amen'. 5 takes us gravestone browsing in the cemetery of All Saints' Church, Fulham; the narrator in 6 is cloud-gazing and makes out a corpse at a wake. Item 7 begins 'Through the window there were no clouds to be seen. The sky was blank and blue.' As well as a response to the foregoing, it also echoes the blank grey horizon 'framed in matt-black plastic' of item 3.

What we have in this book, in fact, is an approximation of the Japanese renga form. Two or more poets took turns in composing the first and second parts of the five-line tanka (5/7/5/7/7/) in such a way that each pair of units formed a complete poem at the same time as transforming the themes or emotional tone of preceding sections. In 1971 the poets Charles Tomlinson, Jacques Roubaud, Octavio Paz and Edoardo Sanguinetti published their joint Renga in which the poets alternated between the various sections of the sonnet form. This was made the more disjointed by the lack of stylistic concord between the poets and the fact that each wrote in his own language (although, to be sure, a translation is also provided). But it was far more 'a macaronic gathering' than Thunder in the Dew claims itself to be on the strength of a few phrases of Russian and Lithuanian that appear in a couple of Robinson's pieces. One wonders whether the authors are up to their old tricks of Censored Mistletoe days and are giving us an indirect clue as to their real aim in so misleading a subtitle.

By the purest coincidence, a set of ten interlinked prose poems by the American poet Eliot Weinberger appeared under the title "Renga" in the May 2000 issue of the free web magazine Jacket (www.jacket.zip.com.au). A glance at it makes clear how far the Robinson/Seaford collaborations fall short of the renga ideal. Since they are for the most part cast in autobiographical form, there can be little unity between sections. Their fragmentary nature is emphasised the more by their coming to no satisfactory resolution in themselves except at a purely anecdotal level, nor do they tend to any unity of purpose overall. Left in exactly the order of their writing, the pieces give only the impression of a rather aimless exercise in composition.

Hitherto Ian Robinson's several collections of experimental prose have been varied, subtle, original and challenging, but working in collaboration is obviously not his strength. Lacking a more bracing organising principle, these pieces differ hardly at all from the vapid conversations overhead in pubs and cafes upon which several of them in fact comment. Corpses they may be, but rarely exquisite.