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

     To judge by his critical writings, Tom Paulin is a man with a mission. A consistent champion of the Puritan imagination, Paulin admires the “energetic Protestant individualism” of writers such as Whitman, Lawrence, and Ted Hughes; “writing whose active, bristling openness to sensations and new ideas breaks down the barriers between prose and poetry”. Given his reiteration of these core values in his previous work in both genres, The Wind Dog contains few surprises. The punningly titled poem ‘Stile’ provides an implicit criticism of two great artificers and modernist icons, Donne and Yeats:

it must never happen
that something other than platonic form
or hammered gold or pure gold leaf
– that gold to airy thinness bate
should touch us or should warm
the playful serious wondering great
mischeevious child in most of us

     “[B]ate” and “mischeevious”, two words taken direct from Ulster dialect, indicate Paulin’s declared debt to and admiration of oral sources. His poetry is shot through with humorous, eccentric and strikingly onomatopoeic dialect words like “hinny”, “jum”, “sheugh”, “brangle” and the eponymous “wind dog” which we are informed is “a wee broken bitta rainbow”. No reader could fail to notice that Paulin is a follower of Robert Frost in his belief that “the ear is the only true reader”, but his obsessive mulling over the sound of words strikes one as oddly excessive, in places even hectoring. In a different light, it might seem as though Paulin is trying to convince himself, since the paradoxical nature of his enterprise surely cannot have escaped him. The central contradiction of his work lies in the fact that despite his declarations of loyalty to an oral tradition, everything Paulin writes labours under the dead hand of Lit.Crit. These poems reek of the study. This leads to some very unfortunate effects, one example of which occurs in ‘The Quinn Brothers’, a poem about three young children who perished in a Loyalist arson attack on their home. The inappropiateness of the image chosen by Paulin to describe the three white coffins has already been commented on elsewhere – he compares them to (of all things) small white boxes containing wedding cake – but their subsequent comparison to “the watering trough/ in Chagall’s L’Auge” goes one better (or worse). The unintentional preciousness of the reference to that arch-faker Chagall – a tutelary spirit in this volume as Paul Klee was in Walking a Line – is coldly tactless. And this is the poetry’s flaw: however deliberately honest and rough-hewn it attempts to be, it still sounds suspiciously like the name-dropping effusions of a practised cultural pundit. The closing section of ‘Stile’ informs us that “to be clumsy in one light is to be deft/ even graceful – graceful not slick –/ in another”. These poems are too often slick and not graceful. 

     ‘Man Walking the Stairs’ is about the eponymous painting by Chaim Soutine in the National Gallery of Ireland. Paul Durcan’s Crazy About Women (1991) was a collection based on forty-nine of the paintings in the Gallery’s collection, including a typically bathetic and affectionate poem on the Soutine, so Paulin is covering some well-charted territory here. The pervasiveness of references to visual sources in Paulin’s work  calls to mind Edna Longley’s cautionary comments in her 1988 essay on this phenomenon in Irish poetry, ‘No More Poems About Paintings?’: “possibly more poems about paintings than about almost anything else are likely to end up in a Pseud’s Corner column. Also, addiction to the practice (e.g. Wallace Stevens) can be a form of imaginative auto-eroticism”. Paulin is dangerously close to this in ‘Man Walking the Stairs’, and the main reason is that unlike, say, Derek Mahon’s best poems on paintings, Paulin makes the mistake of treating the painting as though it were a text. He speculates on the identity of the painting’s amorphous greenery in the first few lines:

these are wild poplars or beeches or chestnuts -– but
maybe the poplar that rubbery tree is most likely?
and from poplar to populace is only a short step
so the crowd or mob have elbowed their way in
which turns all those swirls into street action dustups

Despite Paulin’s reassurance that this piece of speculation “isn’t perhaps as farfetched as you might think” the attempt to “elbow in” historical context is clumsy and forced. From poplar to populace is a short step if you’re a card-carrying Derridean, but here it seems a touch facile and yes, onanistic. No doubt Paulin would claim this poem as an example of consciousness-in-process and declare that he has the right to be as whimsically associative as he likes. This is so, but in fact any sense of spontaneous response to the painting is drowned out by the overwhelming deluge of cultural references, verbal associations (“the ting tang tonk tunk of two slightly wrong notes”) and personal asides (“I’ve no means of knowing till I get back home/ and check it in the book on Soutine that my pal Jamie has”). The result is like sitting through a particularly boring and pedantic sermon, an effect directly at odds with Paulin’s declared aim of recapturing the freshness of vital speech.

     The suspicion that Paulin talks the talk but can’t walk the walk is confirmed the further one reads in this collection. The exhilarating improvisatory movement of Puritan consciousness he so admires in a writer like Emily Dickinson results largely from a steadfast evasion of definition, a refusal to over-gloss momentous events in consciousness. Think of a poem like ‘I felt funeral in my brain’ which ends when the speaker “finished knowing”, or ‘It was not Death’ where the experience can be approached only by means of negative definitions, or even Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’ (another poem explicitly evoked in The Wind Dog). These poems gain their weird power from recall and enactment rather than from an assured and belated explanation of psychological experiences. Frost even slyly raises the possibility of explanation only to push it further from reach: “Were he not gone,/ the woodchuck could say whether it’s like his/ long sleep, as I describe its coming on,/ or just some human sleep.” These are prime examples of poetry which resists the intelligence almost successfully, whereas Tom Paulin’s doesn’t even put up a fight. Many effective images are spoiled by Paulin’s maddening inability to stop worrying at them. I’m thinking particularly of the poem ‘Theta is Better’ when he compares pronouncing the Greek letter to “stubbing your toe”. A striking image, but instead of leaving well enough alone he continues:

– but no not quite
more like breath stubbed
agin your teeth
or a lapith 
kicking a marble centaur

He then re-uses the figure of the stubbed toe in a later poem to describe the effect of pronouncing “Vitebsk”. In doing so he loses the spontaneity of the initial image and the result is that both poems appear overworked and jaded.

     But what should be of most concern to Paulin is how artificial the acutely bookish self-consciousness evinced by his poetry makes his use of dialect words seem. Whatever numinous authenticity these words possess, they fail to infuse the poetry with any. Instead Paulin is in danger of falling prey to the same tendency he identified in MacNeice, that of commodifying and exporting his Ulsterness for overseas consumption. But perhaps this is of no great concern. After all, he once remarked that “Irishness is a sometimes clownish commodity which depends on being transported elsewhere”.