Tom Pickard's Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)

Tom Pickard’s Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)

This isn’t a review: I want to celebrate this book because it is the most enjoyable new poetry I’ve read in a long time.

My test of a slim poetry book (78 pages) by a single author is can I live with it for a week? Can I read and then reread and not feel the urge to read anything else. And then if I put it aside and come back to it, does it still hold my attention? Most modern single author collections of poetry fail this test, miserably.

I bought Winter Migrants as soon as it was published and I’ve been rereading it ever since. In terms of my test it’s an excellent book.

It’s split into three parts: two sequences: Lark and Merlin, and from Fiends Fell Journal and a third section made up of individual poems.

Pickard’s poetry has almost always been the record of one intelligence moving through time and recording what he encounters in precise language.

a wren

perched on a hawthorn

low enough to skip the scalping winds,

sang a scalpel song.    

This first poem from Lark and Merlin is a good example of an elegantly spare, stripped-down or stripped back poetic. It belongs to what Donald Davie once celebrated as ‘a poetry of right naming’. The poet works to find the best word to describe the world he lives through.

When Alice complained to Humpty Dumpty that he was making the words do too much work, he boasted that he paid them extra for their efforts when they turned up on a Saturday for their wages. Presumably there's a small queue at Pickard's on a Saturday and he is also paying them overtime.

While I was rereading Winter Migrants I was also reading Baker’s The Peregrine. Both books have the same detailed observation of movement and light, landscapes and their wild inhabitants. Ruskin would have approved of both writers’ honest attention to detail. However, while Baker’s prose overloads the reader, Pickard’s poems have the advantage that everything unnecessary has been left out. What I envy most is his ability to capture the effects wind has and describe its movement over a landscape. In this he’s as good if not better than Ruskin at his best, though he also has the added advantage of brevity. 

Sometimes minimalism doesn’t leave much for the reader to do except admire the poet’s skill. The Sequence solves this problem. Lark and Merlin might be a record of a relationship. There’s a she/you and an I. But the subject is absent. There’s no biographical context (factual or fictional) to distract from the poems. And I don’t understand how this works, but the absence of the subject creates the space which holds the sequence together.

It also allows for the complexities of shifting power within a relationship, the confusion as well as the celebrations:

She asked about my heart,

Its evasive flight;

but can I trust her with its secrets?

and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey,

tell the fleeing lark it is enamoured of its song?

or the singing lark turn tail

and fly into the falcon’s talons?

Fiends Fell Journal mixes prose with poetry. The blurb describes it as a Haibun, but the alternation of Prose and Verse you find in medieval Welsh and Irish texts feels more appropriate to the wild landscape. It is the record of an intelligence moving through that landscape and taking careful note of everything seen, felt and heard. It might sound like a strange compliment, but it’s a very honest poetry and prose which doesn’t fudge itself by pretending to ‘poetic thoughts’. It would be easy to do the prose badly as poetic pose but he avoids this.

The final section of the book contains an assortment of poems on a range of subjects and in a range of styles, from the effective satire of ‘Whining while dining oot’ which puts the boot into a certain type of regional poet, to lamenting a death, ‘Squire’; to expressions of frustration with his contemporaries, the marvellous ‘To Goad My Friggin Peers’.

At the end the book returns to the sparser tone of its beginning with ‘At the Estuary’ and ‘Winter Migrants’ both short sequences.

Nothing I’ve just written does real justice to the pleasure of reading Winter Migrants. Which is really what makes Pickard stand out. He’s very very good, but he’s also entertaining and thought provoking, and enjoyable.

He reminds me what poetry was probably like before it was turned into a ‘pedant’s game’: it was worth reading.

(And as a PS. As someone who has often grumbled about the absurdity of blurbs on poetry books, the paragraph on the back of this one is a model of how a poetry book could be treated.)

 

Ruskin, Davie, Graves: a ramble inspired by the AAWP conference 'discussion of process'.

I read Ruskin’s “On Modern Painters”, especially the section “of Truth of water” ( Vol 1, section V) where he castigates landscape painters for  throwing a blob of color on a canvass and exploiting a tacit agreement with the viewer that that blob means: ”Water; with or without reflections”…Ruskin said it looked nothing like light on water, and went out with a notebook and pen and carefully described what he saw. [1] It’s a powerful antidote to modern theorized claims about the Prison House of  Language or the slippage of the signifier. Starting with the admission that no one will ever manage to paint the sea, he then praises those who get closest. Nice metaphor there. 

As Ruskin says about painting the sea (Vol I part two, section v, ch1 point 5), it’s impossible, it can only be suggested by means of ‘more or less spiritual and intelligent conventionalism’(Vol 1 page 355). 

 A poem is a conventional literary category, and so there is a general sense of what a poem is and should do, and while that obviously varies across different versions of ‘poetry’, there are dominant assumptions about what a poem should be: in terms of diction, subject matter, and treatment despite the various movements over the past two hundred years.  In fact, given the lyricization of poetry over the past two centuries, we have fallen such a long way since Chaucer could write about everything and anything. Put against the works of the great medieval poets, most modern poetry seems flat and anemic.  

These often unspoken definitions, internalized over the years, exert a significant pull on the writing of any piece, they are part of the way in which I recognize that I am writing a poem,  so the paradox arises that to write a poem one must adhere to the conventions, but I want to avoid the conventions, but if I avoid too many of them is it still a poem.  

And that had merged with a distinction Donald Davie makes between two types of poems[2], one of which he calls “literary” but which I think of as the ‘Poetic Poem’: it’s the one where the poet is being self consciously ‘poetic’ ticking the right boxes,  and having poetic thoughts which no one,  let alone the poet, has ever had during the experience it purports to describe. Done well it can be interesting.  Done badly , which it so often is, the poem is the verbal equivalent of Ruskin’s blob of color…we accept that  someone is having a poetic moment and don’t enquire too closely about the truth of it.  We respond as well trained seals, especially if the subject matter is about some kind of individual trauma. We parade our sensitivity by responding to poems which invite us to sympathize with the poet and which don’t challenge us ot consider our assumptions or values.  

Whatever happened to the "Affective Fallacy"? Or, as Sir Geoffrey Hill put it in a discussion of Owen, "The Poetry had better not be in the Pity'.

That’s another issue. Robert Graves made a simple but useful distinction in poetic Unreason. If we ask if a poem is successful then there are two answers: successful for the poet, and successful for the reader.  Far too much poetry may well serve as therapy for the poet, but offers the reader nothing except the opportunity to wear his or her politics or ideology on their sleeve or to parade their own sensitivity.  Come to think of it,  I.A Richards called these  “stock responses” though I don't think he was talking about ideology. There is, somewhere, a fine poem by Thom Gunn about this all.

It may make sense one day. 

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[1] I don’t claim to have read all six volumes of Modern Painters.

[2] In Under Briggflatts (1989) ‘One fertile in associations and analogies , that may be called ‘literary’; and another , that goes immediately into prosody, to be called poetic’. (128)