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Batu-Angas, Anne Cluysenaar, 2008, Seren. £8.99 ISBN 978-1-8541146-4-8

 
Cluysenaar is one of the finest poets writing in English today. She was born in 1936 and published her last major collection (Timeslips, New and Selected Poems, Carcanet) in 1997. Poetic form and underlying idea in Batu-Angas are fresh, daring and idiosyncratic. This is her most exciting work to date. For me the entire book of 24 related poems (1-XXIV) had a dramatic quality – a mimesis, enactment – but more of that later. 

A familiar nexus of interests in Cluysenaar’s poetry are present here: precise identification of locality, with exact descriptions of flora and fauna; over-flowing response to landscape, creatures, fellow-man, with concern for the integrity / responsibility needed to protect the environment. All the poems in Batu-Angas relate to the life and ideas of Alfred Russell Wallace, the nineteenth century naturalist. He was born where Cluysenaar has now lived for twenty years, near Usk. 

There are parallels here with Vaughan Variations, a sequence of 23 poems in Timeslips. The subject of these poems is Henry Vaughan, the seventeenth century metaphysical poet who also lived in the Usk area. The Variations derive their power from Cluysenaar’s empathy with Vaughan’s poetry and ideas. She repeats this approach in relation to Wallace. Like Vaughan, Wallace is a major figure of the past – he shares the honours with Darwin for ‘discovering’ natural selection. His life and work focus on interests deeply important to Cluysenaar.

Engaging with Wallace has involved an important journey of the imagination. With characteristic tenacity, Cluysenaar has made a deep study of Wallace’s formative experiences, personality, mentality and the issues (environmental and others) raised by his researches. She has also been engagingly ‘touchy-feely’, contacting scientists / curators to examine actual specimens:

                         Pinned on the tray,
                             his wings outspread, 
                                    still and dry:
                                         Ornithoptera croesus croesus.

                        ‘This may be the actual one’, 
                              you tell me, angling the glass –  
                                         the sooty texture
                                                   of immense wings 
                                                         dazzles by its darkness.    (I) 

The publisher, Seren, has done Cluysenaar (and Wallace) proud by publishing these poems with an excellent apparatus of full page illustrations, a foreword by the poet and an introduction by the Wallace authority, Charles H. Smith. The book reaches out to the scientific community and to those with a love of nature who may, or may not, read contemporary poetry. Strangers to poetry will be rewarded by finding Cluysenaar’s approach as steady, receptive and as slow to leap to judgement as any scientist could wish – and her intensity and enthusiasm must also be infectious: 

                           As I turn this hand-held stone 
                                 under the lens, it’s so close
                                        that the smell of Wenlock limestone
                                                 catches, acrid, in the throat.   (XV) 

Beyond the universal and varied interest of the subject matter (remote locations, a stand-off with an Amazonian Black Jaguar, a shipwreck) there are the larger questions of ‘what exactly is the direction of this writing?’ The poet aims to understand Wallace ‘from the inside out’, using his own written memories: in bed as a child, hearing “some creature with huge wings …The winged image, prophetic”; fishing with an old pan in the Usk, “A silver twist of young lampreys / carried in the current, taps / so lightly, tugs on the metal”. The man emerges from the child, his sense of awe paramount when finding new specimens: “ ‘I felt / much more like fainting / than I have done / when in apprehension / of immediate death’ – / all day afterwards, / ah, how his head ached”. 

But the poet / biographer is as present in these poems as protagonist and, sometimes, devil’s advocate. Wallace’s work may, in fact, be as hard to understand and justify as ‘the tenuous job of the poet’. One of the issues confronted is: can our human curiosity, which involves exploitation of nature, really contribute beneficially to the survival of the planet? What did Wallace, ‘a delightful blend of determination, modesty, open-mindedness and a quite unshakeable love of life’, achieve? 

Understanding this dramatic ‘live debate’ in the poems helps us place the one or two poems here which make none or little reference to Wallace’s life. The final poem in the book, for example, is about an ancient artefact, the so-called Venus of Vestonice. The last stanza offers a partial resolution of so much that has been explored in the previous questioning poems:

I see how the tiny figure, 
    four and a half inches high –   
in a pouch at someone’s belt,
    at the sacred tribal site, 
               by a restlessly dreaming head –
might sow the seed of continuance. 
    An impulse towards survival. 
                 Desires to hold in mind  
                          through the flux and reflux of ice.