Writing Landscape
Robert Gray: Lineations. Todmorden: Arc, £8.95.
Lineations is the rather dry title for this selection of recent poetry from the Australian Robert Gray. A painter as well as a poet, he seems to imply in his title the conception of both the provisional and the exact nature of his art. The older meaning of “lineations” – a division into lines – points to the unpredictable shapes of the poems. Much skill and care have gone into these shapes, constantly stimulating and original in the length of their lines, their internal and end rhymes:
The rain’s
unbottled glut
is cluttering
in the porch’s
corner [...] (‘Doodling’)
The current sense of “lineation” – the process of drawing lines onto, or marking something with lines – also applies. Many of the poems are attempts to catch landscapes, landscapes divided by their poems into lines.
I had two problems with this. Firstly, landscape cannot exist in a poem as it does in a painting. Dividing a poem into lines will, almost inevitably, involve narrative: poems have to be read downwards. However exact the images and phrases, the problem is how to avoid the poem reading as just one thing after another.
One solution lies in the poem’s ending, the last line or lines that will, as Sweeney and Hartley Williams put it, “flash a light back up a poem”. This works memorably in ‘The Hawkesbury River’, whose closing image of “that pale long procession of butter lamps” floats back into and lights up the long poem. In ‘Nambucca Heads’, the whole poem pours like a prayer into the daring last phrase, “O white Pacific” – a phrase which might be laughable at the start of a poem. Here the problem of narrative is transcended by the poem becoming a new form, which remains adequate to the reality it describes. Where this doesn’t happen, as in ‘On A Forestry Trail’ (ending “and all of us are/ a choir”), the poem remains a list, lined up but not translated. However lovely the content and proportion of so many lines, I felt this happened too often.
My second problem was of perspective. A landscape is not a fixed entity. It has to be arranged and its constituent parts are shifting all the time. Gray is aware of this. A table becomes an “altar/ to the Altering”. ‘A Sight of Proteus’ ends with the way the temporary flat façade of mountains “affects their form, and their locality,/ or it does seemingly.”
In ‘Illusions’, one of two poems which are essentially artistic manifestos, one illusion for Gray is that “it is not actual things we perceive, in their uniqueness and subtlety, and with such surprise, but representations of them only. (As if this distinction could mean something.)” His face is set firmly against postmodernism. The appearance of mountains might shift, but they’re still there. Where a Jorie Graham might attempt to do justice to both the protean nature of the world and the mind caught up in that world, Gray seems to have little problem with the objectivity of his perspective. Thus ‘A Testimony’, somewhat bizarrely described on the cover as “one of the truly remarkable poems of our times”, reads like a de-ironised Prufrock:
I am one of those who have watched their image in the hearth, where a fire was tearing itself to pieces [...]
This romantic conception of the poet results in appropriation:
Although I say this with grief for all those beings who are like shuffling, lumpy birds within a basket [...]
Overall, the split between observer and observed leads to aloofness. In ‘Wintry Evenings’, girls are turned into waterbirds and frail paper boats. Indians are described as “an acrid black smoke, adrift in the land”, in the bad-tempered ‘Malthusian Island’. I missed, in the poems based on walks, the dense texture of self-in-world of, say, Jaan Kaplinski’s ‘Through The Forest’. Perhaps Gray is simply doing justice to the vastness and loneliness of the Australian landscape. Another solution to the problem of landscapes becoming lists is one where the poet-figure can be made to merge with the landscape. My favourite poems here were the ones where this process is made to seem to happen:
It was as if it were the light which knew the light
on the overwhelmed grass;
as though
it were itself that smelled the dampness
in this perfume. (‘Acceptance Speech’)
There are many lovely short poems:
Under a cliff, stones
in sea-mist, and a stag’s bones
caging a butterfly, hung
blackly as blood and fluttering.
The meshing of sound and sense in that poem is typical. This book is full of exact, wonderful sight and sound, but for me the poet’s shadow either fell too heavily on, or was removed too easily from, too much of the scenery.
Page(s) 59-61
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