In Pursuit of Poetry – A Personal Journey (as it has to be)

How many of us, I wonder, do justice to poetry? Perhaps it is the ultimate written form, striving to say so much with so few words in an ultimate distillation; invoking strange alchemies to achieve improbable and powerful evocations. However it can often be too much effort to unravel those cryptic complexities, feeling more like doing the Times crossword, and I for one have certainly struggled frequently in slowly developing a rewarding engagement with poetry.

That process seems though to have recently reached a tipping point, and I now find myself in an exciting and more comprehensive relationship with the work of a small but growing number of poets. To understand how this came about I’ve been tracing my history of engagement with the form, which you may care to compare your with own.

I have always loved the rural above the urban and, in my younger days particularly (but still somewhat), the wilder the better with hillwalking and mild mountaineering dominant interests along with the creative capture and interpretation of such places. Hence the landscape work of the late photographer Fay Godwin was an early passion, her stark monochrome images of the wilder parts of Britain making a significant impression. Collecting books of her work starting with the still magnificent 1985 volume Land, I subsequently picked up a cheap and unassuming earlier work Remains Of Elmet, only to discover I had inadvertently bought my first book of poetry. While full of Godwin’s atmospheric photographs of the harsh beautiful landscapes of the Pennines, it was also a book of strong uncompromising poems by Ted Hughes. But rather than Godwin simply producing images to accompany existing poems, this was a more intriguing joint project where Godwin first took photographs that captured the essence of the area as far as she could, and Hughes then wrote poems triggered by particular images that struck a chord with him. The synergy and impact of the joint representations and interpretations remains marvellously strong, and certainly strong enough for me on first encounter to register the power of poetry for the first time. Hughes raw, visceral lines (epitomised by titles such as You Claw The Door and The Sluttiest Sheep in England) were an invigorating slap in the face akin to being out on those moors lashed by gale driven rain.

 

In subsequent years my preoccupation was very much with exploring the Scottish mountains in all their splendour, seasons and weathers. In doing so it was impossible to avoid encountering the evocative poetry of the prolific Norman MacCaig, who provides a stirring, yet tender, thoughtful and relatively uncomplicated narrative to such hill-going activities. His work is a clear demonstration that poetry need not be cryptic or difficult, and that if it talked of the things that you were most passionate about, the motivation to engage with and savour the work regularly and fully was easily forthcoming. For the keen hillwalker there are endless gems such as Climbing Suilven and A Man in Assynt, but in truth MacCaig captures the whole of Scotland in every aspect, and much of the human condition besides, hence there are rich rewards for anyone with a love of the country or of life itself.

 

More recently I have found equal pleasure in exploring regions other than those with mountains, and an early affection in this new phase was South Devon which my better half and I visited repeatedly for a number of years. Exploring the exquisite coast, the rivers from estuary to moor, Dartmoor itself, and the bohemian atmosphere of Totnes were all special pleasures. And all of this proved to be a kind of preparation for the full appreciation of the mesmerising Dart, published in 2002 by young poet Alice Oswald. Dart is the unsentimental book-long poetic description of the River Dart, gradually moving from its source on the moor, through Totnes to the sea at Dartmouth. It reads almost like prose and makes frequent use of local characters Oswald encountered, both describing and quoting them at length to fascinating effect. Knowing and loving so many of the places described created a strong connection for me which again meant I was able, and continue, to draw much from it and revisit it often. There is even a rather fine recording available on CD of Oswald reading the entire work, which takes about an hour. Her slightly severe voice is perfect for it, and strangely and subtley reminiscent of Ted Hughes, to whom many consider Alice to be the natural successor.

 

And so, via rewarding encounters with better known poets such as John Clare and Dylan Thomas, to more recent times, and a new and unexpected connection that has taken my appreciation of, and engagement with, poetry to a new level. I know and love the countryside around Petersfield in Hampshire well, having previously lived in the town for several years, albeit without making any literary connections at the time. Last year I began revisiting the area since it is now once again within easy reach of home, and savoured the rediscovery of the beautiful varied landscape of both open downs and steep wooded hangers. A favourite walk has always been north up through Steep village to Ashford Hanger and down the far side to Hawkley, with variations extending to Selborne also. As I was enjoying this area on foot last year I dimly registered the Edward Thomas memorial stone on the slopes of the Hangers, and having done so realised that Matt Hollis’s recent prize-winning biography of Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, might be necessary reading. This was encouraged by the fact I had recently read Thomas’s book The South Country, a curiously poetic piece of prose of a kind I had not previously encountered, which while beautifully evocative of rural southern England and clearly written with great passion, was idiosyncratic in aspects such as the refusal to name the specific places he was writing about. Hence my initial failure to connect Thomas with the Steep area.

 

That Hollis’s work was required reading proved something of an understatement, for rarely have I devoured a book with such indecent haste. But more telling was that having realised Thomas’s greatest work was his poetry, and having picked up a volume of that work to read in parallel with the biography, I then found I consumed the poems from cover to cover in a matter of days, drawing deeply from them as I went, and which I have found hard to leave alone since. This is a new level of appreciation for me which seems to stem from knowing intimately the places he writes of, walking them via the same routes and with a similar regularity, and due to the deep insights into Thomas’s situation provided by Hollis (clearly benefitting from being a poet himself). For there is something almost mythical in the tragic story of Thomas that makes him stay with you; haunted by serious depression and financial insecurity despite being one of the most influential literary critics and prolific prose authors of his time, but only realising he could write poetry three years before he died in France at the battle of Arras on Easter Monday 1917. The outpouring in those slender years was however astonishing, and despite often being referred to as a war poet all his poetry passionately reflects the love of rural England and the folk within it that meant most to him. His work is tinged with a melancholy that adds a special power, a symptom of the overbearing war and his depressive nature perhaps, or a deeper recognition that when something is sufficiently beautiful or precious it becomes potentially heartbreaking – constantly at risk from mans stupidity or mortality.

And so, hopelessly hooked as I now am, this weekend I will again walk out to the pub with no name near Petersfield, have a pint in the Edward Thomas bar, look at the map, and decide which direction to head next. Thomas’s soulmate Robert Frost for sure, David Jones, Liz Berry perhaps? The possibilities (that work for me) are expanding…

And poetry has a wider definition after all, than its written incarnation. Is it not what we all reach for in some form, above and beyond the basic drudge of life?