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| Against High Moor and Brambles New Collected Poems by Marius Kociejowski Matthew Francis has seen through the press
the most complete edition to date of W.S. Graham’s poetry. As to
whether this was advisable is a question I will return to at the
end of this article. As it stands, the book is impeccably edited,
contains a useful glossary, informative notes, a bibliography, and
a list of people, among their number, under Montgomerie—“William
Fetherston-Haugh Montgomery (1797-1859), physician who described
the changes in the follicles surrounding the nipples in the early
stages of pregnancy”—and a further list of places. (This is no daft
exercise: Graham’s poetry, even when it moves into ‘the constructed
space’ of his imagination, is rooted in actual people and places,
not all of them easily identifiable.) Douglas Dunn’s Foreword is
written in a fine and sober voice, while the editor’s brief but
elegant Introduction makes me curious to hear what more he has to
say on the subject. The book is unlikely to be surpassed in scale.
Above all, it serves to keep afloat a reputation, which, at times,
during the poet’s lifetime, had all but vanished. There was a poetical
dark age, between the publication of The Nightfishing (1955) and
Malcolm Mooney’s Land (1970, when people did not even think to ask
if he were still alive. Cornwall was probably further away from
the London brain than San Francisco; a Scots poet living there was
not likely to be remembered north of Hadrian’s Wall either. It was
only in the last decade of his life, when, against the adversities
of alcohol and ill health, he produced some of his best poems, that
he acquired a small but faithful following. The majority of poetry
readers, however, pitched their pup tents elsewhere. Graham has
always had to survive one fashion or another, and I suspect he will
continue to weather the vicissitudes of popular taste. Only a few
months ago, his 1979 Collected Poems, which, unbelievably, was still
in its first printing, was remaindered, presumably in order to make
way for this one. That earlier volume is still worth reaching for. If Graham was, to some degree, a “poet’s poet”, he had little recourse to other writers and certainly none to academe. The conclusions he arrived at, regarding language and what lies beyond it, had nothing to do with fashionable literary theory, although often he swam unawares in the same intellectual current. The position he chose, in the wake of Dylan Thomas and the poets of the New Apocalypse, was to disturb, even torture, the language. As might be expected, given his appetite for the pure, it would take him many years to arrive at his stated goal “that I burn bright enough to see out through the window which my poem is.” This last is from a letter he wrote, in 1943, to the poet Edwin Morgan. What I find most striking about his earliest letters, published in the The Nightfisherman (Carcanet, 1999), is the degree to which they demonstrate a critical intelligence already far in advance of his actual poetical practice. The problem was in getting there. The circuitry of his early verse is too overloaded at times. Some of the poems are so dense as to be unintelligible. As he approached the end of his life, however, the poems became increasingly finer. If many of them have to do with language, “the beast in the space”, and the near impossibility of communication, the manner of his poetic exploration is throughout bold and passionate.
It would be a mistake though, to seek to categorise him or to place him in the Forties because he was a poet who, in my view, still belongs to the future. The poetry stands at the crossroads of the highly sophisticated and the primitive. Should the reader be led into thinking Graham researched his themes, the truth is quite the opposite—he drew from whatever crossed his path. One must be forever grateful to Ruth Hilton who, when she came to visit Graham in 1976, had with her a copy of Johann Joachim Quantz’s On Playing the Flute (1752) because Graham’s chance reading of it was to give rise to a masterpiece, arguably the finest dramatic monologue of our times. “[Quantz’s] prose steered my verse,” he wrote to the poet David Wright, “It helped my imagined gestures.” A man who had by now earned his right to “disturb the language”, Graham dared to turn arpeggios into “the joy of those quick high archipelagoes”, making of pure sound a physical landscape. Shall we ever again hear the like? The identification of musician and poet is magnificently achieved, particularly in the connection made between them and their common opposite, which is silence. It is the closest one gets to an ars poetica in Graham’s verse.
The final lesson, aimed perhaps at our celebrity-driven
times, lies in the poem’s last four words, which ought to be writ
large above every writer’s table: “Do not expect applause.” Our age is not conducive to love poetry, perhaps because there is an inherent distrust of the aesthetic beauty that is usually its source. Nevertheless Graham wrote at least two great love poems, “I Leave This At Your Ear” and “To My Wife at Midnight”, this second which, as a love poem written to another in old age, is perhaps incomparable in our literature. As in the 1979 edition, the three-page poem is here accorded a section of its own, as if it were meant stand in perpetuity upon its own plinth.
There is in that poem an extraordinary movement of the waking mind which drifts back to the Battle of Culloden (1746) where the poet lies “sore-wounded” peering into the future where his wife, not even aware he is gone, lies alone: “I’ll see you here asleep/In your lonely place.” It is a masterly performance and, despite it being shorn of any trace of sentiment, difficult to listen to with a dry eye. And the love that was the difficult love he had for his friends is again given voice in several brief elegies, the finest among them, perhaps, being “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch”.
The publication of New Collected Poems raises a problem, which I feared would be the case, when I first heard the book was in preparation. Admittedly I was greedy for more, a cache of hitherto undiscovered verse, while at the same time I knew this was unlikely. The problem is this: what actually comprises a poet’s oeuvre? Should it be what the poet himself wishes it to be, or, after his all being fed into the critical machine, is it for others to determine? The answer, it has to be said, is not always clear. We have had instances of poets, Virgil among them, being rescued from the impossible standards they set for themselves. And then there are poets, Vernon Watkins, for example, who have never been accorded their rightful due. We have moved beyond those areas of slackness and rescue into a rather more brutal regime. There is virtually no delicacy where there is a quick buck, or even a critical reputation, to be made. And such are the pressures in publishing and academe that even those with the best of motives make their errors in innocence. We have already been through this with Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems the publication of which would have had him turning in his grave. In the case of Graham, the answer to the above question is, I think, clear. When, as Francis rightly points out, Graham defended his early work as being “other objects with their own particular energies” surely he was defending only those youthful poems that he wished to preserve. After all, he did live to oversee the publication of his Collected Poems when he was already close to the end of his writing life. The few poems he had yet to produce were later gathered in Uncollected Poems (Greville Press, 1990) and it is this slender pamphlet, published under the guidance of Graham’s widow, Nessie Dunsmuir, who I remember as a fine critical intelligence, that most truthfully extends the oeuvre. My doubts began to set in with the publication of Aimed at Nobody (1993), containing work that Graham would have declined to include in any collection. The New Collected opens with The Seven Journeys, originally published by Poetry Scotland in 1944, and which one contemporary reviewer described as “a forgery of the poetic currency”, and it ends with the abysmal “With the Dulle Griet in Canada” which, at best—that is, if one is feeling particularly charitable—could not have been anything other than notes towards a poem. Graham, in his Collected wisely did not include any of the poems from The Seven Journeys nor did he come even close to whittling down “the Dulle Griet” to the four or five lines of poetry that might have been embedded there. Should a poet of his considerable worth be bracketed so, between the indigestible and the execrable? What this collection does is to throw the balance and at a time when Graham, one of the finest poets of the second half of the twentieth-century, has yet to be accorded his rightful place. I speak with the unease of one who wonders what he would have done in Francis’s shoes. The damage, if damage is what it is, can be undone at a future date. I would much rather that any future collected, or even meticulously selected, poems (with, of course, a CD recording tucked in at the back) ended with the delightful “A Walk to the Gulvas”.
Sadly, when Graham wrote those lines, he would have been physically incapable of such a hike. Marius Kociejowski’s is a regular contributor to Books in Canada and Maisonneuve. His most recent collection of poems is So Dance the Lords of Language (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2003). He lives in London, England.
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