STEVE SPENCE: 'For the Living' (August 2006)
Terrible Work: go to either booksone or Archive and scroll -> Burns
TONY FRAZER, 'For the Living'
Shearsman 61, Nov 2004.
TONY FRAZER: 'British & Irish Poets A-G'
Shearsman Recommendations and scroll -> Burns
NORMAN JOPE: from 'Range and Resonance', Tears in the Fence, No. 42, 2005
'For the Living, the first of [a series of] Salt selections from Richard Burns' extensive output, includes a selection of longer poems and poem-sequences spanning almost four decades. The earliest, 'Actaeon', dates from 1965-66, when Burns was in his early twenties - the most recent, 'Vasilissa', from 1998-99. Some of them have appeared in collection form before, but others have not - this book, therefore, presents the most authoritative selection from Burns' longer pieces to date. For those who do not know his work, it's fair to say that it occupies a distinct niche - a niche which may account for its relative (and unjustified) neglect at the moment - and some contextualisation, by way of a beginning, is therefore in order.
The contemporary poetry scene has been defined, by many, in terms of two competing camps - on the one hand, there is the so-called 'mainstream', as represented (for example) by the 1994 New Generation collaboration and its recent follow-up, the so-called Next Generation (look out for the Generation After in 2015!) and, on the other hand, there is the so-called 'avant-garde', as collected in anthologies such as Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996) and Foil (Etruscan, 2000). This distinction brings sociological, political and personality factors into play as well as literary ones, and has long since become stale as expressed - there is, however, a valid insight behind it, in so far as, in 'mainstream' poems, the reader tends to be guided or directed towards an intended field of meaning whereas, amongst the producers of 'avant-garde' or 'linguistically-innovative' poems, the emphasis is on the reader as interpreter, decipherer and co-producer of text. Clearly, we’re talking about tendencies here, in so far as they can co-exist within the oeuvres of individual writers or, even, within specific poems – however, there is something at work, along with other relevant factors, that helps to explain the current scene.
A case can also be made for the existence of another polarity - between writing that foregrounds the spoken and written language of the present time, and writing that emphasises the (by now multiple) canons of the past. The first tendency, which is of increasing importance in the prevailing cultural climate – as historical context fades more and more from view - manifests itself in a number of ways, from Beat to rap to performance writing. The contrasting tendency - exhibited in what I believe to be Burns‘ most distinguished and characteristic work - involves an engagement with the manifold legacies of the past, in the hope of producing something that might turn out (who knows?) to be of value to succeeding generations. Again, I’m not privileging either approach (and, as before, these tendencies can co-exist at all levels) - but this distinction suggests a context into which Burns’ work, as collected in this volume, can be placed.
The legacies that inform the work come together in a distinctive way - as the back cover blurb puts it, “his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences“. As with other writers of his and my generation, the canon has become, potentially, global (largely through the medium of translation, although I assume Burns to be multilingual) - the traditions of English literature are important, but no longer hegemonic. This helps to avoid a slavish repetition of the tropes of that canon and to encourage fresh and distinctive blends - the newness derives, not from disjuncture, but from synthesis.
Each work (whether poem or poem-sequence) in the collection can be read in terms of influence, without at all detracting from Burns’ achievement. Modernists who were born at the beginning of the last century and achieved prominence in the twenty-five years after the Second World War - in particular, the Nobel laureates Octavio Paz and George Seferis – are evident sources, amongst others later and earlier in time.
‘Avebury’ (dedicated to Paz), is a poem, in the open-field style of much of Paz’s work, that deals precisely yet suggestively with the way in which the present re-traces and re-configures the past. It confounds initial expectations, in that the poem of place one might expect, from the title, strays from the Wiltshire Downs to range widely and quirkily over the globe - this, however, does not diminish its coherence. And, in any case (V):
I do not tell I say
The implication is that we can no more perform acts of separation on a territorial basis than on a temporal one. However, the only way in which we can express that vision of unity is by way of a medium - language - that defines and separates by its very nature. 'Avebury' deals with this paradox in a sophisticated and enticing way - thirty years on, it is still fresh.
‘Black Light‘ (dedicated to Seferis) explores terrain marked out by a comment, in Seferis' journal (17th June 1946), that “behind the grey and golden weft of the Attic summer exists a frightful black; that we are all of us the playthings of this black“. What Seferis, and Burns in his wake, means by this image of black light is not that easy to define, but it seems to relate to the obvious - yet skilfully-self-hidden - fact that all the beautiful life one sees, including one’s own, is black to the heart with transience. This brings two crucial, crucially-connected words in Burns' poetic vocabulary to the fore - two small words, 'love' and 'death', that one would expect any poet of ambition to deal with. ‘Black Light‘, however, resists reductive analysis, consisting of a series of poems - reminiscent of Seferis' own work without being in any way derivative - which explore the twin themes of desire and mortality within the distinctive context that Greece offers. In one, for example, ‘Cicadas (II)’, the cicada-voices that “will never stop” are, in fact, those of the human community as a whole, both living and dead alike, who, in their various voices, implore Burns to continue his attempts to penetrate the black light, to wrest transcendence from the tragic puppet show that life can so often resemble -
Without them, no sky, no sea, no land, no light.
no wisdom no madness no love no breath
without them no song or poem
No they will never leave me
Here, Burns writes (as in so much of his work) under the gaze of death to an extent that is remarkable, playing for high stakes in comparison with some more favoured writers. Whereas a great deal of writing about death, particularly in the contemporary 'mainstream', is actually about bereavement - the experience of separation and loss, in which one's own persistence is (almost as if) taken for granted - Burns takes the fact of his own mortality to heart, beats poetry out of himself with it, works through to a realisation of what is worth the living precisely because he has the courage to do so. This reminds me of the words of the songwriter, Peter Hammill, in his ‘Still Life‘:
by deliberately placing his writing under the shade of that threat, Burns is able to write more deeply. And the way in which death haunts, and deepens, his writing suggests artists and musicians as well as writers - Mahler being one such comparison that springs to mind, not least in the role that erotic love (for example in ‘Vasilissa‘) also plays.
‘Black Light’ introduces another side to Burns' work - amidst the free verse poems, there are two tight villanelles that suggest writers far earlier than Seferis. In fact, there are some shockingly 'traditional' poems in For the Living - shocking, that is, to anyone who believes that the old forms are discredited. ‘The Rose of Sharon‘, for example, is in iambic quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, and other poems, such as ‘The Voice in the Garden’ (an elegy for the Serbian poet Ivan V. Lalič) and the more recent ‘Croft Woods‘, work relatively closely within the 'confines' of the iambic pentameter. The point is that Burns makes these forms work, because he has the sophistication and skill required to do so - and that, in skilled hands such as his, their resonance remains undiminished. Because he isn't possessed by a desire to escape the 'clutches of the past', he risks a superficial assessment that would regard much of his work as 'regressive' – however, the mind-set that insists on making a break with the past at all costs (with the intention, usually, of seeking to lord it over the present) is arguably more regressive. It takes greater courage, perhaps, to stand on the shoulders of giants than to hack away at their legs.
© Norman Jope, 2005