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At once robust and sentimental, diverse and sensuous, it is no wonder that Marc Chagall is the spirit presiding over this abundant and enriching new collection from Tom Paulin. Never ‘light’ or ‘lightweight’, the ‘weightlessness’ which Chagall embodies as an artist allows the poet a less jaundiced view of his past and present. Where Paul Klee dallied and made his mark in Walking the Line (1994), Paulin is still keen to employ the trope of the ex-pat artist, this time a Russian Hassidic Jew rather than a Swiss musician manqué, as arbitrator and instigator of vivid fictions and colourful streams of perception and reflection. Not only presiding, but literally ‘floating’ like the wind-dog, (a fragment of rainbow) itself, given that Chagall’s style is that of the magic realism of a deracinated romantic, an émigré surveying the new home with all the bright wonderment and bird’s-eye perspectives of an outsider. Are we meant to compare this to Paulin’s own experience? It won’t be too far off the mark to assume that the poet reflects on the playful strategies of Klee and the wistful reveries of Chagall as akin to his own practice.

Of course, what we have come to expect of Paulin is here - and more: the fierce emotional and linguistic conflicts, the viscous textual patterns, the tendentiousness that his poetry (though not his prose) can offer. He doesn’t disappoint, though at the same time he breaks no new ground. He confronts with his “dirty window-pane” of language. The no-nonsense pragmatism reverberates, but never obscures the aesthetic, the sympathetic and the domestic. He delineates places and objects - Oxford or Belfast or Vitebsk; doors, stairs, rooms - using the sharp plain colours of words, “a dull wet mouldy vegetable smell/like dead soup”, “anal mudflats” (Craquelure), or

Scrubbed like a bar top the roofs look tin
or moony zinc - upended - all angles
like baths and sinks in a plumber’s merchants
while out of pointy pencil chimneys
smoke - sinless - scribbles its 5s

(Paris Ink Sketch)

This is tactile poetry about innate forms. But Paulin is no Martian: his is a functional poetry, a challenge to the mind, the ear and the eye: “the ear is the only true reader / the only true writer” (Sentence Sound).

For this most ‘unUlster’ of Ulstermen (he was born in Nottingham after all, and left Belfast in his late teens), his English republican carnaptiousness (as Ulster people call tetchy contrariness) and crafted shapelessness is reinvigorating for a milieu snowed under by easily-consumed, media-slick poetry. The “fricatives, labials and peachy vowels”, the very crudity and apparent stutter of abrasive consonants - “their broken jagged tune” (Sentence Sound) - is Paulin’s revolution, the affront to the eye, the flaw in the canvas: “for to be clumsy in one light is to be deft / even graceful - graceful not slick - / in another’ (Stile).

Hence two oppositions are revealed: the poignant and sensual imagination of the dreamy exile, and the sure-footed language of the angry bookman who hasn’t compromised his learning by staying put - “Homer belonged nowhere / and Dante he’d to leave home / and as Tu Fu and Li Po / they did a flit through the smoke” (The Emigration of the Poets) - both attitudes summed up in the cover painting by James Dixon, the best of the Tory Island naifs, with its soaring over-arching vista and impasto swiftness of execution. It is a joy to see Paulin wander through, muse over, and circumnavigate syntax, raising juxtapositions which skew the prevalent postmodern lexicon, yet ‘writing out’ something entirely his own, without the whimsy of Muldoon, his Armagh contemporary and fellow exile.

And yes, it keeps coming back to the idea of ‘home’ - where it is, and how it can add to the art. Chagall borrowed all his long life from his experience of the shtetl. Klee was more of the moment, more organic and systematic, and therefore, I feel, more akin to Paulin than the ice-cream nostalgia of the Russian. However, there is a danger that Paulin begins identifying his life as a work of art, using his childhood shtetl off the Malone Road for that very purpose. Of course, such sentiment pervades too much of the new Ulsterish poetry: a childhood regained I exploited to find a refreshing vision, an oblique standpoint. But Paulin reinvents his youth, his home (wherever that is), without the wishful thinking of so many of his generation:

but what interests me
is my own unease
and the way that unease
is close to thinking
to a dull dreamless sleep
state of collapse
                                                (Cuas)

Poems, such as the Drumcree series, speak of his reactions to events as they unfold and what he was doing when he heard the news, as if, Kennedy-in-Dallas-like, they would sear the memory. He might be simply cutting a vine, or listening to the radio, but each snick and click speaks intransigence and rebuff, as the devout confront the social.

This distance and Paulin’s ‘alien’ status, as indicated by his busy media persona of stage Ulster mannerisms (venial bloody-mindedness, ‘protestant’ abruptness), his ‘enforced’ identity, home from home, have become manifestly more vibrant in his poetry. It is a home that perhaps never was until its articulation in the present. Less evident this time round, however, is the erotic. Always present in his poetry, Paulin has it seductive and explorative. In every sense it is ‘oral’, the use of the tongue, intrusive and arousing. Perhaps therefore the most obvious omission from the collection is intimacy and sexuality as a political subtext. This has been usurped by the homely and retrospective.

The poet’s Belfast adolescence is given a voice in such poems as Chagall in Ireland and The Wind-Dog itself, a youth which goes hand-in-hand with the finding and making of words, of literally making sense. Indeed, it is this phenomenology, language foregrounded as an experience in itself, which makes Paulin such a resilient poet. In The Wind-Dog he takes a journey back into his childhood and returns with steals from Frost and MacNeice, amongst others. The latter’s example points us to the blunt experiences that fill the poems, but mostly it sets out to grapple with how things are said, which, given we are talking Belfast, makes many diversions, autobiographical and literary, overlapping with the territories of Ciaran Carson and Michael
Longley:

and he said thhee dee
then showed me a little brass
little brass hexagonal
thrupenny bit
in the palm of his catholic hand
                                                   (The Wind-Dog)

But then, like the wind-dog itself, the fragments of experience and memory are never the whole story: it is how they are assembled, formulated and conveyed.

However, unlike that scrap of a rainbow Paulin is firmly secured, as always, to the earth of social intercourse and political action from which he draws his strength. His passion for language and how language can be rejigged and presented (note how punctuation is used sparingly but with full effect) from the standpoint of a particular cultural base is part of the revolution that his poetry can bring about. This collection brims with emotionally-charged details: that is, lived detail. He is not at his most innovative here, but he is at his most generous.