Review: Jacob Polley's The Havocs

"Who says havoc is a vice of the young?" asks the speaker in the title poem of Jacob Polley's third collection, The Havocs. You'd be hard pushed to level the accusation at Polley, whose commitment to the nightmarish, creepy and unstable has intensified with each of his books, and tends to feed his best poems.

Polley's first collection, The Brink (2003), published while he was still in his 20s, was notable for a pared-back diction and descriptive flair. Its colloquial patter in poems of postmodern pastoral, father figures and secular spiritualism saw Polley combine the influence of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage in approaching his own vision. But the book also zoned in on nature's chaos and human malevolence. Here was a crow conjured from the biblical tale of Cain's murder of Abel, or the "floating knuckle" of honeycomb in a jar, "attesting to the nature of the struggle". A second volume, Little Gods (2006), gave this supple lyricism a more formal grounding. Melding an intense music with the transformative power of metaphor, its incantatory poems delved deeper into death, despair, disappearance and dismal weather, with Baudelaire as their presiding spirit.

The Havocs presents itself as a rangier book than its predecessors. Tripping through assorted rhythms, sonnets, end-rhymed quatrains and the looping lines of its centrepiece, it is as formally vibrant as the luminous letters that adorn its cover. A few poems even find Polley cracking jokes: in an attempt to define "havoc" by taking cues from Les Murray's "The Quality of Sprawl", the title poem frames our societal anxieties with a warped sense of humour. "As if I was a pencil and havoc sharpened me," scoffs its speaker, "havoc is committed to care for the elderly, education for all, and narrowing the gap between rich and fabulously rich."

Yet the comedy is spiked with obvious venom, just as the book's colourful cover images rise from a jet-black backdrop. Likewise, the poems' formal breadth belies those thematic concerns – death, love, work; fear, wonder, nature – and the persistent aura of unease that have dominated Polley's work from the start. Despite its handful of cosmetic changes, The Havocs finds Polley exploring his favoured territory in familiar ways.

Fluid boundaries between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, continue to flourish. "Hide and Seek" strings together earthy images in its definition of being by negation; in "Dark Moon", the Earth's rocky satellite is its "own VACANCY sign" when full, while in donning "the hood of night", it "can't be seen so can't be lost". The problem is not that the stock lyric symbolism of the moon and ominous darkness were dominant features of Little Gods; rather, it is that they reappear here to similar ends. The same must be said of water, or more specifically, torrential rain.

In Little Gods, rain was a biblical force, "the sound of the day undone"; in The Havocs, the poet buys "a book of water" whose "one page read disorder / in letters tall as rain". These poems may display an increased pithiness or impressively novel phrasing, but this offers little recompense to the reader already familiar with Polley's poetry. By the same token, several vignettes harbour a satisfying air of menace but, when not reading like fragments lifted from the work of Don Paterson, tend to suffer in comparison with the inventive brilliance of those from Polley's earlier books.

Yet, in spite of such repetitious moments, there is a good deal to admire in The Havocs. Its boldest poems reveal increased attempts to make sense of what matters to us most, even if they find the world frequently shifty and shifting, wriggling free from further understanding. Sometimes this is down to tired strategies, but it is also due to the poetry's serious ambition, committed to piercing through the deceptive realm of the habitual in pursuit of the near-ineffable and mysterious. The book's opening poem, "Doll's House", is an incisive exploration of the fragility of our familial lives, moving from the haunting description of "a table set with tiny plates" to gentle moral instruction: "Be brave. To live is not to fear / despite the scale of what's at stake." This desire for direction and purposefulness also surfaces in "Keepers", where the poet finds himself admiring beekeepers, envious of their cultivating "something / of substance, with a taste and use, obvious to anyone."

In this way, an Audenesque sense of poetry's social capacity, already traceable in Polley's earlier work, suffuses the more ambitious poems. "The News" adopts a punchy tetrameter in its jolting account of endemic indifference, while "The Ruin" modifies an Anglo-Saxon lament for a collapsed stronghold, imbuing the derelict remains with human presence and feeling. "It Will Snow Before Long", a beautiful meditation on childhood and memory, also deserves praise. But it is "The Weasel", a sinister ballad adapted from the well-known nursery rhyme, that is surely the most remarkable poem in the book. Devastatingly simple, its tale of lives and loves gone awry showcases the standout qualities of Polley's verse: deft concision, musical prowess, syntactic verve, and a voice that rings painfully true.

The Havocs may be an uneven collection that sometimes finds Polley treading water, but a handful of its poems are so moving and memorable you might just forgive him.



first published in The Guardian, Saturday 5 January 2013

Don Paterson

Just a snippet of news in that my critical perspective of Don Paterson's work to date is now up on the British Council's Contemporary Writers database, here.

A critical perspective of Simon Armitage's poetry, novels and translation will follow.

Five Houses Down

Praise be to The New Yorker, that most revered of American cultural magazines, and to Paul Muldoon, it's poetry editor, who recently appeared on The Colbert Report, reading his poem 'Tea' and indulging Colbert's gently mocking, wry brand of humour.

Why? Because I've just found a brilliant poem by Christian Wiman on the publication's website, which conjured that instant, wonderful sensation of lifting the top of my head clean off and smashing the frozen sea of daily routine, as Emily Dickinson and Kafka would have it. I seriously encourage you to read it.

And while you're there, take a look at Don Paterson's excellent poem 'Rain', the title piece from his new Faber collection due later this year. That's another which transports you somewhere else in its cinematic sweep - a welcome detour and distraction from whatever work deadlines are looming over you this afternoon. Humorous and seriously thought-provoking - you can't ask for much more than that.

Nothing and Everything: An Essay on ‘The Trace’ in Don Paterson’s ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’

Despite the title, it's not often that I overtly discuss Derrida and deconstructive thought on this blog, but as I've been working on a critical perspective of Patrick McGuinness' excellent poetry (particularly The Canals of Mars, a first collection which inexplicably missed the shortlist for the Forward Prize), I was pleasantly reminded of my undergraduate studies on poststructuralist thought and theory. So, forgive me if it's your idea of the epitome of tedium and/or you've heard it all before, but I've reproduced a short piece I wrote a while back below, exploring the notion of the trace and presence & absence in Don Paterson's textless poem, ' On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him'. Any thoughts welcome.

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Nothing and Everything: ‘The Trace’ in Don Paterson’s ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’


As a deconstructive concept, the trace is necessarily related to what Derrida coins différance: the constant play of each element of language within a system referring to other elements; calling forth differences between concepts and deferring any meaning a concept might be assumed to possess. In relation to the trace, then, this takes the form of the differences between, and echo of, each spoken or written sign within every other sign. Consequently, any concrete meaning that a sign might naively be thought to capture is permanently deferred, since each signifier constantly calls forth further signifiers in bearing the traces of them. Nothing within the linguistic system, then, is ever merely present or absent, as the presence and absence of concepts and meaning play out their differences, or, as Derrida states, ‘there are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.’

In relation to Don Paterson’s poem, ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master…’, the concept of the play between traces is particularly relevant. First, the textlessness of the main body of the poem turns the traditional prevalence of presence over absence on its head, as the poem seems to speak entirely from ‘the Other’: the traces of signs which would traditionally lie behind the present signs (within a text poem) seeming to hold the dominant voice. However, it is important to note that the poem does not completely invert this presence/absence hierarchy, nor could it: for one thing, the presence of a title causes the reader to construct the poem him/herself from the play and difference between the traces within it, and even if the poem were titleless, presence would emerge from its absence. Consider looking at a blank piece of paper, for example: its whiteness calls forth purity, perhaps the image of snow, or maybe absolute silence, but whatever you construe it to mean (and surely you must), some presence is borne out of its absence, and further traces come to bear on these; presence necessarily proliferating from absence. In occupying a presence, then, the ‘otherness’ of absence inevitably becomes the selfsame, and absence and presence are revealed to be necessarily tied-up in one another. This is the very essence of the trace at work.

Turning back to the poem as it stands, then, (textless but bearing its title), the potential play of differences and traces within it are seemingly infinite. What is the reader to make of the emptiness of the page? At first glance it may call forth the solitude of the narrator and surrounding mountains, or perhaps his silent contemplation at having not found the Zen Master. The pure silence conjured by the space where we expect the text to be, in turn, may even call to mind a pure Buddhist or Zen meditation. Furthermore, what are we to make of the narrator ‘Not Finding Him’? Initially, this would seem to be the narrator failing to locate the Zen Master in physical terms, but given that the search for him may be part of a spiritual or quasi-religious quest, the narrator may have been unable to ‘find him’ in a spiritually fulfilling sense; failing to comprehend the advice he perhaps sought from the Master. On a general level (returning to the idea of the poem speaking from ‘the Other’), the textlessness may also hint at the impossibility of writing a Western poem that could sufficiently deal with ‘the Otherness’ of the East. This is echoed in the traces of the written sign of the ‘Kyushu Mountains’ : initially signifying the physical concept of the mountains themselves, but simultaneously alluding to an area that is often considered to be the birthplace of Japanese civilisation. Indeed, ‘On Going’ itself seems to bear the trace of such a continual, and in this case futile, operation.

And these examples, it must be remembered, are just a handful of considerations. Any individual reader approaching this poem could potentially come to create an infinitely long poem from the traces which play out not only in its title, but also in the very absence of its text. In short, in containing nothing, Paterson’s poem contains everything. But all this is not to say that the concept of the trace allows for a text to mean whatever anyone might want it to mean. If anything, the inverse is true: in allowing ‘the Other’ within a text to speak, the critical analysis of the trace must listen to that which speaks before an act of reading begins; surely a difficult task. Nor is such a textless poem (as may seem the case) unique in this seemingly paradoxical potentiality. For in every single poem, in every piece of literature; in short, in every single instance of spoken or written discourse, différance and the play of traces are at work. Though I believe I have a firm understanding of the sentence I have previously constructed (and you may feel, as a reader, the same in your reading of it), it is nonetheless inherently unstable in its meaning and conceptuality, and as open to the constant fluctuations of meaning as those observed in Paterson’s poem. Everywhere, and as seen, in a seeming ‘nowhere’ or ‘nothingness’, there are only ever differences at play, and traces of traces proliferating ad infinitum.


Ben Wilkinson, 2006


For those interested in properly exploring deconstruction and its ramifications beyond my own half-baked thoughts, there are numerous texts worth looking at. Bennett and Royle's Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is a good introductory volume, and more specifically, Martin McQuillan Deconstruction: A Reader and Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction are both excellent. Where Derrida is concerned, the best of his ideas and his own most lucid explanation of deconstruction (which, given his propensity towards linguistic play, deception and deferral isn't always easy to follow) is contained within Of Grammatology. Paradoxically, it's perhaps best to approach the McQuillan or Culler before Derrida's work itself.

Harsent, Paterson, Seidel

The September issue of Poetry magazine has just been launched.

It includes, among other things, a new sequence from David Harsent, and two poems from Don Paterson's new collection Rain, published by Faber tomorrow.

It also includes a meaty review of Frederick Seidel's Poems 1959-2009 (a poet whose Faber Selected I recently bought and am currently enjoying) by Poetry regular, Michael Hofmann.

(ix) 02:50: Newtyle

Remember that poem right at the end of Don Paterson’s God’s Gift to Women (1997)? The last in the book’s muddled sequence of poems that take their titles from the defunct Dundee-Newtyle railway line, it comes a handful of blank pages – actual blank pages, just to be clear, not the blank-page poems Paterson has a proclivity for – after the notes, isn’t listed in the contents, and got up the noses of a fair few critics with its mid-parentheses, mid-sentence, ostentatious ending. Really, though, nothing can disguise its intrinsic revelatory weight and significance, how ever much the poet seems at pains to undermine any naïve, earnest hunt for intellectual or spiritual meaning: the white page of its printing likened to snow, which in turn becomes a deity’s “shredded evidence”, falling from the skies.

Well, for those who haven’t spotted this already, you might want to check the copyright page of Landing Light (2003), Paterson’s equally acclaimed follow-up volume (if one discounts the magnificent “spiritual portrait” of his Machado versions, The Eyes (1999).) Here, for those who, as “A Talking Book” puts it, “drag each sentence through their fine-toothed combs, / all set to prove the Great Beast lies at slumber / in the ISBN or the barcode number”, is the follow-up quatrain, just below that italicised bit about not lending, selling, copying, rebinding, or reading choice pages out to random passers-by like a grade-A nutter.

I’m not quite sure what I make of it, but despite its apparent sincerity and lyrical solemnity, it seems like Paterson is joshing here, specifically with the kind of person who he half-expects would a) notice this kind of thing in the first place & b) bother to link the two quatrains up and pore over ’em for a while (i.e. me), and what he/she might make of it all. I get the feeling that a part of Paterson reckons – and maybe on the whole, he’s not totally wide of the mark – that many a literary scholar lacks the requisite sense of humour when it comes to scrutinising poems to understand his point here, which is that, essentially, if you look hard enough into anything, you can in turn, if you like, see pretty much anything you want reflected back – maybe, say, your own straight-laced critical brilliance if you’re so inclined. But make no mistake, the poem suggests, you’re wasting your time, since such an approach does great poetry no service whatsoever. You might just as well apply your dazzling exegesis to the dullest of shopping lists and look forward to much the same result.

So the poem’s a bit of a joke, perhaps, but a joke that makes a serious point. Whether the forgivably naïve gusto and application of the serious undergrad, or the wasteful idiocy of brilliant minds who really should know better, looking for meaning as something already resident within any text, the poem suggests, is just plain wrong. The journey, the road, the natural process of reading for what the text might meaningfully generate, is where the interesting stuff happens; not at the oasis, a mirage of intrinsic transcendental meaning, where the tortuous, minutely scrutinised road meets its imaginary end.

This is, then, a defence of poetry as something which means – in that reified and wholly false sense – nothing at all, yet at the same time, far from meaning whatever you want it to mean, is charged with huge transformative power and an unrivalled sense of possibility. Though if you feel like asking why Paterson didn't just damn well say that, you might not be getting this.