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The Gardens of Onkel Arnold by David Jacobs.
Peterloo Poets, The Old Chapel, Sand Lane, Calstock, Cornwall PL18 9QX. £7.95; 66pp.

The Gallery on the Left by A. C. Clarke.
Akros Publications, 33 Lady Nairn Avenue, Kirkaldy, Fife, Scotland. £2.95; 20pp.

Evening Brings Everything Back by Jaan Kaplinski.
Bloodaxe Books. £8.95; 95pp.

This volume makes up David Jacob’s third collection for Peterloo and is divided into four parts: ‘The Gardens of Onkel Arnold’, ‘People and Places’, ‘Sport, Love and Miscellaneous’ and ‘Fatherhood’. The blurbist dutifully gathers comments about Jacob’s use of language: it is “straightforward and unforced”. A comment from Graham Mort of Poetry Review also seems appropriate: “The poet is an observer in a landscape where nothing earth-shattering will happen, but where his attention is ravished by the mundane.” Jacob’s “mundane” includes mildly comic use of language which is appealing, as here in the haiku-like ‘Snow Melting’:

The pond stays frozen shut.
Mother-of-pearl amongst
The shampooed shrubbery.

There is a kind of studied naivety in the poetry, feeding into the observations upon situations and people, well-exampled by poems such as ‘The Train Accident, Cannon Street’, ‘Mrs Bonavia’ and ‘The Night Porter’. All poetry editors and poets will smile at ‘We Thank you for Submitting the Enclosed But Regret We Are Unable To Make Use Of It:’

Sir,
You do not have what it takes.
Give up ideas of joining the elite.
Please leave our hard-worked editors in peace.

Finally, sir,
May we interest you in a subscription?

Jacob’s good humour is welcome – his aforementioned short poems
work well, make an impression, such as ‘Drinks’ and ‘Bookshop’, and the poems dealing with fatherhood are funny and touching – such as ‘I buy My Dad…’ and ‘Son Rising:’

6am. Over the bars
Of your cot your face
Rises like the sun.

By contrast A. C. Clarke’s first collection “Focuses on themes
suggested by works in art galleries and museums in Scotland and
elsewhere.” As in the previous volume these poems are enjoyable,
episodic. Some are set in Edinburgh, some in the Netherlands, others in Italy – dealing with familiar and unfamiliar Western art. Although Clarke keeps a comfortable rein on formal concerns in her work, such as the line breaks in ‘Music Lesson’ and the over-extended couplets in ‘Questions for Vermeer’ – she does not allow form to stultify the expression, and avoids dreary free-verse diarist confessionalism or anecdotalism. The poet-observer is objectively gazing hard and bringing comments and conclusions upon ‘this’, ‘they’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘you’ – only in ‘Cut Off ’ does Clarke say ‘me’, ‘I’, ‘you’. This somewhat modernist objectivity recalls our traditional and ingrained response to art, compromised by all the guessing and inferring about sexual links between the artist and sitter, the amusement that is generated by contextual timeslips and their ensuing puzzles of imagery and symbolism, the tendency to a personal response in the observer, echoing a personal response or ‘vision’ in the artist. A response which is often quietly internalised by the viewer or at least often supports the artist-as-genius romantic line deplored by such as the recently conflagrated Chapman brothers who think their teamworking skills are a new thing in art, and whose socio-capitalism subscribes to our museum culture. Clarke’s persona is the wanderer, obeying the impulses to look, within this confused museum culture. ‘Anubis’ for example is another bright, objective poem – the observer chasing the only sense we can make
from exhibits, that is we try to animate by observation, by individual/
shared ‘reading’. ‘Portrait of a Child’ (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) shows how we try to inevitably bring alive lost contexts, to humanise the horrible otherness (which humans don’t really like) which pervades art:

He clutches in a chubby fist
A pet bird, smiles almost
Like a child with simple joy
In his bright-feathered, breathing toy.

No doubt his mother also smiled
To see her baby in brocades
Portrayed with such ceremony,
Dreamed of the great man he’d be.

He left no name to history.
We know him by a forty-inch
Strip of daubed canvas: Boy with Goldfinch.

The ‘Seven poems after visiting the Vermeer exhibition at the Hague in 1996’, apart from demonstrating the continual popularity of Vermeer, again seem to yearn after lost contexts, between ‘doer as deed’ (‘The Milkmaid’), between sitter and artist – the social contexts that probably produced the art are leaned on heavily. The abstract responses remain beyond language. Our social responses enjoy pattern, light, narrative. Poetry sometimes helps as an approach to art criticism, which is often not rigorous enough or freezes up communication. Clarke’s ‘Nature Morte, (on a painting by Paul Cezanne)’ kicks against this:

Light gleams off reds and yellows
Shimmers from pools of shadowed cloth –
A busy moment spellbound. Any time
In the time we cannot see
A hand may disarrange, a living current
Set all once more in motion.
What does the catalogue call it?
Nature, dead.

Another good thing about poetry is that borders are crossed, dissolved, translated. Jaan Kaplinski’s book Evening Brings Everything Back seems to be such a document – Kaplinski himself seems to be such a composite individual. He reads and speaks like a major poet:

For me, the discovery of poetry was also the discovery of the magic of foreign languages. I fell in love with Lermontov and Shelley. Later I got acquainted with major modernist classics – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, TS Eliot – and still later with poetry in Estonian. And of course, I began writing poetry. I have written about 900 poems, about 20 stories and some plays, and translated verse and prose from several languages, including classical Chinese…My homeland is here in Estonia, but my spiritual homeland is the nebulous border region between literature and science, poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. I share this borderland with some Chinese literati of the past. I think these people, too, had an aversion to definitions and characterisations, and invented many ways to avoid them. Sometimes they called themselves yun-shui (“cloud-water”), stressing their affinity with things that have no clear-cut borderlines, no well-defined form. I like the ancient fuzzy logic of these Taoists, and feel at home in their company. (Guardian, 01.05.04)

Kaplinski’s book falls into three parts: from the domestic ‘Evening Brings Everything Back’, the autobiographical prose poetry of ‘Ice and Heather’ (“My poems…are also attempts to find a home”) and from ‘Summers and Springs’ in which the poet (like a rather decent version of Brecht’s Baal) reiterates his themes:

I don’t have a land or sky of my own.
I only have a little white cloud
which I met once, as a schoolboy
lying in the courtyard on a pile of twigs
looking into the sky. There were martins
and clouds: this one, my only one, too.
I would recognise it today too,
through all the transformations,
if only I had time to lie there
idly on a pile of twigs in the courtyard.

The work in this volume was translated by Kaplinski and Fiona Sampson – hearteningly the writer has a hand in presenting his own work – he comes through strongly as the ‘I’ in the narration. The poems are set in either what appear to be free-verse lines (“I write a poem every day,”), or in prose with frequently unfamiliar places and names included. This can put off some people – but Kaplinski’s work is never as dull or lame as the very usual kind of ‘translations’ inflicted on our readers. You know the stuff – it thinks that the word ‘translation’ confers a kind of literary glamour upon the result, usually roping in great writers from other cultures. Thankfully, Kaplinski is at the very least an impressive linguist whose observations on life, on poetry, give us clear, vivid English, full of natural imagery, metaphor, enduring issues and interests, and some natural-philosophical comment here, in a Wordsworthian vein:

‘But why do the willows exist?’
he asked, and it was difficult to find an answer…
But how can I speak for trees?

The book gives back much more than it takes from the reader – the poems are endlessly vivid and suggestive, they understate the ‘miracles’ that poets often try to force down the reader’s throat:

Spring has indeed come: the willows are in blossom and
                                  queen bumblebees
are looking for nesting places; fruit flies circle
over the bowl of sour milk; on the kitchen curtain
a big moth’s sleeping exactly on the red spot.
A mosquito flies into the cellar room and buzzes around my head.
For some time, sitting at the desk, I’ve been hearing
a strange noise from a plastic sachet hanging on the wall.
Finally I take it down and have a look: a spider
has fallen into it and is making desperate attempt to get out.

The first section of the book is especially valuable to poets as it contains several comments upon the nature and value of poetry for Kaplinski. ‘It’s already dark…’ is familiar territory to us. It combines lush natural imagery with the figure of the mower and the caterpillars, feeding at the Edenic source of poetry to inspire the poet and the poem itself:

I mowed
the whole afternoon; full of ash and elm,
of the cork tree, honeysuckle and the guelder rose
crowded with caterpillars who’d gnawed its leaves
into withering lace. What remained
of the flowering bush was only bare black twigs
on a green background. Almost like this poem here.

Kaplinski’s apparent poetic credo is set out in ‘I don’t want to write courtly poetry any more…’ Instead the persona values the wandering life, the life of the observer-poet, letting natural events wash over him – (a life oddly reminiscent of passages from James Thomson’s The Seasons,) quite at odds with much of the workaday mentality of (Tony) Blair’s Britain (which is ever suspicious of the unquantifiable). Later on in this section he also claims that ‘As we humans create literature / literature creates us, casts us in bronze / and puts us on a high pedestal: makes somebody a poet.’ Kaplinski is the most rewarding poet I have read for some time – he is a life-giver, not a diarist, not a cynic, not bitter (and considering his roots, he could be very bitter). Kaplinski is also a hospitable poet, he gives his readership space to relax and play, as here:

What is essential in poetry? Neither form nor content,
neither tradition nor innovation. Neither poetics
nor education nor its absence. You just have to keep in mind
the meaning of the word ‘inspiration’ – breathing in –
and its counterpart ‘expiration’ – breathing out.
Breathing: the beginning and end of meditation.
For some people it’s natural and easy
for some it’s not. Breathing from second to second
liberates you from spinning your mind – cittavrtti –
giving you back your body, your present and your present tense,
and the Big Lull where a hundred flowers and scholars burst into bloom
and a hundred poems, clouds and rivers are born.