It’s good to find South African poets getting out of the country and discovering new, foreign vistas. This brings something fresh to our poetry, which has long been responsive to landscape, but usually the harsh (or, less frequently, lush) landscapes of our subcontinent.
Dan Wylie’s Road Work (Echoing Green Press) is a volume of travel or travelling poetry (poems perpetually on the move), ranging from South America to Greece, with a stretch along Southern Africa’s Great North Road in between. The press of consciousness against these scenes melds the external observation with the inner insight, and the business of journeying echoes the process of discovery. At the harbour of Rhodes, Greece, which the colossus once bestrode, the poet hears ‘the great ferries honk like hippos in pain†and mourns the absence of one to whom he will not be able, now, to describe what he sees. Travel to unfamiliar places (or return to old haunts) evokes absence, and death is the most intractable absence of all.
The sense of loss that informs these poems is countered by the gain in vision generated by such explorations, which also brings to them a sense of life’s preciousness — of what must be cherished. Life is ‘a miraculous alloy — atrocious, / unstable, unique, a cauldron / of waxen sadness, terror and awe, / tranquillity, crisis, azaleas and shame†a ‘shifting world†that ‘offers less than enoughâ€.
But the poet can also contemplate a sleeping child and wish: ‘For all of us, may the moon’s / renewable ploughshare / grow shiny with use.†Strenuous though this inner and outer travel may be, the poetry that represents it is muscular and filled with an exciting internal drive and sense of motion. ‘What is simple is that we die; / It is not that the world should too,†writes PR Anderson in Foundling’s Island (UCT Writers Series), where ‘The dead are Demeter’s people†— not just the cropped corn but its fertiliser, too, pushing up from beneath the earth. Elsewhere, the ‘Judas goat†leading sheep to the abattoir, ‘in front of deathâ€, bleats ‘like a poetâ€. Death and loss thread through these poems, as they do Wylie’s, and the penultimate poem in this collection is also a travel poem, as well as being the longest (stanzaless) and longest-lined in a book of largely very condensed utterances.
The journey here, though, is cyclic: the many train trips traced and landscapes traversed by the poem (The Passing World) represent not a direct line between departure and destination but a suspended, interstitial space, a ‘parenthesis†that says more about life’s ongoing business than do our determined, teleological movements from point to point.
The poem’s length (six and a half pages) and long, rhythmic lines invoke the sound of a train moving on its rails, while the names and references, like De Aar, are arteries as well as ‘junctions†that are also ‘juncturesâ€.
Such careful wordplay is characteristic of Anderson, whose poems have a crystalline compression where maximum meaning is built into the fewest possible words. They are formally tight and often allusive, referring to classical models such as Horace’s odes or Propertius’s elegies; Anderson even essays a villanelle. But the poems themselves are not unnecessarily tricky. Several find themselves in foreign landscapes, particularly Italy, while others focus on human interactions with a wry sense of frailty but also abundance. They celebrate friendship, love, discourse and memory.
Stephen Watson too remembers Horace, ‘weary of Rome†and ‘longing — for a small villa in the countryâ€. This is a stock trope of classical poetry, but one sympathises. Watson has always yearned for natural spaces as the source of wonder and renewal, and found it there. This sense of the numinous is contrasted with his meditations on human relationships, usually regretful in tone. This contrast is common to most of Watson’s volumes.
Perhaps it is by comparison with Wylie’s muscularity and Anderson’s taut density, but Watson’s latest poems often feel slack, wordy and long-winded. One of our master poets, he seems in The Light Echo (Penguin) to have achieved such an ease of style that the style feels all too easy. His exceptional rhythmic facility is doing a lot of work here (not to mention those poor, overworked commas), with the result that sometimes the poems feel like repetitive tunes without much melodic development. Take this stanza from Words in Mitigation:
to have been brought, thus, face to face
with all we are, are not, with all
we cannot do, but must, must go on doing
even as we are half-undone, consumed by it
For me (and I admire Watson’s earlier poetry a lot), too many poems in The Light Echo feel like a retread of older works — the extended remix, so to speak. Watson just seems to get ever more Watsonian. Of course any writer can only write as he can and write as he must, but Watson’s landscapes seem overly familiar and the paths through them well trodden; or maybe it’s not the place but the pace that has palled.
That said, there are plenty of superb lines here, and many beautiful poems. I’d single out From A Natural History, His Only Way (with its Larkinian echoes) and Notes from Another Side — all these are poems of personal pain rather than paeans to the natural world. I particularly liked Wind Chimes (it should represent Watson in anthologies) and The Art of Solitude, with its reflections on poetry itself.
Still, the overall effect of the volume as a whole is one of monotony. When Watson breaks the tonal mould, as in the bitter Masque, one is drawn back to an earlier work on similar themes, Back Pages in Presence of the Earth. While such urban satires feel a little forced, Watson has shown in his editorial work (A City Imagined) that he has an extraordinary sensitivity to the ambiguous, shifting spaces of city life, especially the weird mix that is his home town. Perhaps this Horace should stay in Rome.