Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

PAUL HYLAND is an archaeologist where words are concerned. He excavates, digs deep, understands that language – like earth and those who inhabit it – is made up of many layers, that it has a texture, a colour and a music which sometimes lie dormant, waiting to be uncovered, waiting to be re-encountered. He is a poet whose prose - including his acclaimed travel books – exhibits the same care for words.

Born in Poole in 1947, the young Paul Hyland’s seaward horizons were Purbeck to the west and the Isle of Wight to the east. Fitting then, that his first two books of topography should be Purbeck, the Ingrained Island (Gollancz,1978, republished by Dovecote Press 1989) and Wight, Biography of an Island (Gollancz, 1984,
Dovecote Press, 1997). Since then, those horizons have continually spread and stretched – to Africa in the steps of Casement and Conrad and his great-uncle Dan Crawford for The Black Heart (Gollancz, 1988), to India for Indian Balm, (Harper Collins, 1994) and to Portugal, following Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon, for
the masterly Backwards out of the Big World (Harper Collins, 1996). Most recently has come Ralegh’s Last Journey: A Tale of Madness, Vanity and Treachery (Harper Collins, 2003), which John Simpson called “an absolute jewel.”

With Hyland’s travel writing, there is always a reason for going, and the reasonis usually to do with a personal connection, or a quest he requires of himself, rather than simply ‘another book,’ which is probably why so often the prose spills over into the verse; there is always something left to be said, that only a poem can say. Thus, in his collection, Kicking Sawdust (Bloodaxe, 1995), “The
Tradition of Discovery” has Portugal’s heritage of sea-bound searching and adventure caught in a snapshot – literally – of a young wedding couple posing in the water’s shallows.

Likewise for his Purbeck book, he created a series of poems which were both a commentary on themes, but also which built towards a sequence in their own right, later to appear as “Purbeck Poems” in his 1984 collection, The Stubborn Forest (Bloodaxe, 1984). These are poems which – appropriately, given their genesis – seem to be carved, hewn and shaped from the very stone, urgent, uncompromising and with a real sense of Place’s various existences, as in “Tubal”:

         Poised above open wounds, great diggers prey
         upon her grey-blue, blue-black, iron-bruised clay;
         as, coiled at clay-pool, the heron stabs down
         among white lilies, jerks flesh from toad bone.

How that last line continues to shock, taking us in an instant from flowersoftness to the reality of animal death. In the same volume is collected the sequence, “Domingus”, originally a broadcast work as was his dramadocumentary The Greatest Englishman and the play Dancing Ledge, toured as part of the Radio/Theatre ’81 Festival by Orchard Theatre.

Hyland read Botany and Philosophy at Bristol University, and the disciplines of observation and enquiry lace everything he does both on his travels and in his reflections upon them, just as in his 1982 Bloodaxe collection, Poems of Z (1982), time spent in Eastern Europe informed his skilful adoption of the persona of an
Eastern Bloc spy. The forty poems form a sequence but cumulatively also a moving narrative, interpreted on Radio 3 in an acclaimed performance by Maurice Denham. Paul Hyland is a skilful technician who understands form and its relation to content, and demonstrates the skill in every poem he writes. Which is why the aspiring or developing poet should at all costs possess and digest his
Bloodaxe handbook, Getting into Poetry (1992, revised 1996). This is friendly, warmly-written advice of the most practical nature – as if he is talking to us over a pint. Make no mistake, though, there’s rigour here, and an impatience with dilettantes:

    …The Muse helps those that help themselves, and is
    not amused by those who have the nerve to call themselves poets
    but are unwilling to read and learn.

Hyland has likewise been at war with the world of the vanity press and its exploitation of expectations of aspirants, and explains his reasons in no uncertain terms:

         In the world of books your reputation can only suffer from
    vanity publication. You pay for self-esteem and are despised for
    it. It’s worse than worthless.

Words to listen to and live by from a fine poet and a generous teacher.

He remains, despite his travels and the breadth and range of his interests, at one with and at home in his native Dorset, living these days in Dorchester. He is a memorable performer as a poet and – perhaps unexpectedly – as a conjuror; surprising perhaps, but the metaphor of sleight of hand is a persuasive one, and appropriate for a writer who can shift a mood so unerringly through emotions:

    Without madness what can man be
     other than a healthy brute,
     a postponed corpse that procreates?
                                             “Dom Sebastião, King of Portugal”

I have had the pleasure of sharing a microphone and a stage with Paul on a number of happy occasions; a long memory is that of recording him reading his ballad, “When Waves Give up their Dead” on location for Radio 2 on ChesilbBank, close to the spot where the subject of the poem, the Royal Adelaide, was lost to the storms in November 1872.

In the new century, Hyland has been collaborating with the artist, Brian Graham, firstly on the catalogue for Graham’s 2003 Hart Gallery exhibition, Ochre and Ice, and subsequently – extending that collaboration – to an exhibition and accompanying short collection at Bournemouth University’s Atrium Art Gallery entitled Evidence – What Lives Leave Behind (Atrium Gallery, 2003). In this, together
with another painter, Jemma Street, and myself, he has related Graham’s obsession with the landscape of the ancient past to his own practice as a biographer of Place, interested in layers of geology, archaeology, history and everything up to and including gossip.

Running through the years and the work, coming together in the publication by Bloodaxe this year of Art of the Impossible, New and Selected Poems 1974-2004, is the theme that has informed so much of his writing since he first looked East and West from the seashore at Poole as a boy – the interrogation of landscape and the human condition of occupancy in it. Crucial is a commitment and an
engagement through words to and with all the powers of crafting and shaping that the discoverer of the found object can bring to bear on the interaction between man and womankind and their habitation. Paul Hyland is the quintessential poet of Place.