Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews Swithering by Robin Robertson

‘Robin Robertson is a master of the poetic line,’ writes John Banville on the back of Swithering, Robertson’s third collection of poems. There is no reason to suppose that the winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction does not know what he is talking about – it is not necessary to write poetry to appreciate it. But there is a vagueness to the praise which makes one wonder: what poet, worth reading, is not a master of ‘the poetic line’? Poetry – leaving aside prose poetry, which Swithering does not include – is lines. To reverse the tautology: ‘John Banville is a master of the prose sentence’ – a prose sentence unlikely to make many book jackets.

By ‘poetic’, then, Banville presumably means a particular kind of writing, for which Robertson’s verse-lines are an effective vehicle – not unlike, perhaps, the kind of prose writing which has often been called poetic: John Banville’s (‘poetic’ – The Guardian; ‘poetic’ – The Independent; ‘overly-poetic’ – BBC News). The opening paragraph of his most recent novel, The Sea, is frequently quoted as evidence of this quality. Here is one sentence:

All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes.

This is English itself rising to unheard-of heights – heights, that is, rarely heard outside of books. It is thought ‘poetic’ because it enhances every perception (‘swelled and swelled’) with specifying adjectives (‘milky’, ‘small’, ‘parched’, ‘very’), ominously animising verbs (‘creeping’, ‘lapping’), and a quaintly redundant grandiloquence of construction (‘that for years had known no wetting save for rain’).

It also helps that Banville’s scene is laid at the seaside, generally considered a poetic place to be beside. Robin Robertson goes there frequently in Swithering:

Waves trail in, darkening with height and depth,
almost black before they turn
and crush themselves white:
the rocks milking the wave to a froth of sea-foam
blown two hundred feet up
onto this cliff-edge
to join the bog cotton.

Stylistically speaking, the main difference between Robertson’s sentence and Banville’s is that the former is in the present tense, the latter in the story-telling past. A less significant difference is that Robertson’s is broken into lines. This is because his line-breaks largely coincide with the steady descriptive prose measure by which such a sentence builds up its image. The word-picture trails in, wave by wave, surging half-way into grandiloquent redundancy: ‘the rocks milking the waves to a froth of sea-foam’. The result is a nerveless ‘free’ verse, conducted with a freedom that is illusory, because its line-breaks do not break with – or across – prose rhythm or sense. Even the way that the waves ‘turn’ at an enjambment or break at a ‘cliff-edge’ only underlines how prosaically literal the verse technique is here.

Paul Valéry called poems a ‘prolonged hesitation between sound and sense’. This hesitation (which according to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben is created by ‘the possibility of enjambment’) is the drama of lyric verse: speech which would sing its own meaning. But in most of the poems of Swithering, prose meaning comes audibly to predominate over any enjambment, so that the only drama left is a temporary hesitation between sense and sentiment. Here is a single-sentence poem, ‘The Catch’:

The tick you hear
is the heart valve’s catch,
holding back the wrong
traffic of blood;

this click is the notch in a run
of iron, and love is a ratchet
that slides only one way
and cannot return.

The little drama of the third line’s ‘wrong’ enjambment is apt, and the quickening density of sound-patterning running over from the fourth into the fifth demonstrates the undeniable neatness of Robertson’s ear. But when that line hits its moral, there is no turning back: love is a ratchet, and a ratchet is a thing which slides only one way, and so (by definition) cannot return. The redundancy of this cannot be unconsciously obtuse: Robertson knows that the reader knows what a ratchet is, but continues anyway in a soliloquy of helpless realisation at the full horror of the simile. Yet in doing so, he effectively admits that the fullness of poetic speech – its full hesitation – has been traded for a deflationary prose irony.

I don’t mean to suggest here that there should never be any ‘redundancy’ in poetry – in fact, rather the opposite. These poems do not exhibit enough of the redundancy which characterises poetic language; there is only a prose redundancy, which elaborates the meaning but not the song. Versification creates the emotional redundancy of song within rational speech. Robertson himself quotes, as an epigraph to Swithering, a stanza from a classic of poetic elaboration, the refrain-ballad ‘Lord Randal’. The repetitive ballad stanza has always been a poor vehicle for anything but the bare bones of a prose narrative; what it really does is flesh out the telling of a story into a memorable emotional speech (in the case of ‘Lord Randall’, the dying words of a young man poisoned by his lover). In a couple of set-pieces, Swithering approximates to something like a balladic chant, but at the same time seems to forget that there are adults reading (‘meet me / under the witch’s spell / meet me / tonight, in the wishing well’). A more sophisticated memory of the ballad quatrain occurs in the opening lines of ‘Entry’:

A buzzard works the fields
behind the harvesting:
the slung bolt of her body
balanced in the wind

Here the sentence digresses to notice (with the buzzard) a rabbit, returning to a freer quatrain in conclusion:

and she’s holding,
holds still
till her wings fall away and she drops
like a slate into snow.

The breathless doubling of ‘holding, / holds still’ bespeaks a speaker’s excited involvement in the scene, which has developed from the balanced sketch of the opening lines to a keen immediacy of perception: the fine second simile cuts quicker and further through the mind than the ‘the slung bolt of her body’ (where the second half of the line is arguably also a prose redundancy). Technically, the effect is comparable, albeit at lower power, to the first eight lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet ‘The Windhover’, which delights in the straining, reined-in redundancies of its sprung verse to convey the excitement of the speaker at the ‘mastery’ of the bird.

At the point where Hopkins turns away to develop his paradoxical allegory of divinity humbled and glorified in the Incarnation – the bird’s stoop to its prey – Robertson keeps his eye on the rabbit:

The wounds feather through him
throwing a fine mist of incarnation,
annunciation in the fletched field

These lines approach an interesting, if somewhat unearned, intensity, seemingly mixing memories of depictions of St. Sebastian’s martyrdom (incarnadined with arrows) with Hopkins’ revelation. But then:

[…] she breaks in,
flips the latches
of the back, opens the red drawer
in his chest, ransacking the heart.

This anti-quatrain performs the same closing defeat of poetry by prose as ‘The Catch’. Where Hopkins increases the lyrical concentration of ‘The Windhover’ with an extravagant sestet triple-rhyme (‘-illion’), Robertson drops into a more laconic mode to elaborate an ironically melodramatic allegory (buzzard as vengeful ex-lover, letting herself in via ‘the back’). What began as poetic speech ends as a novelistic vignette, as the lyric voice shifts to that of an implicitly self-pitying narrator. The ‘beast in space’ that, as W.S. Graham described it, poetic speech is between poet and reader, has been substituted for its stunt double, a potboiler’s rabbit. It is a sentimental loss of nerve which only looks like bravado.

In a few poems here this verse-prose switch is reversed to more lyrical final effect. ‘The Glair’, a short, rather solemn piece about either sex or masturbation, works up to its most concentrated expression: ‘the lumbering storm / and the white bolt, the bright rope, on / and on and on’. But Robertson’s shaping prose imagination remains audible everywhere, even in flights of fancy. (The translations scattered through the book suffer from it too: the word ‘ancora’, for example, in Montale’s incantatory ‘The Custom-House’ – a common, light word in Italian, meaning, here, ‘still’ or ‘yet’ – is homophonically transmuted into a deadweight of awkward metaphor: ‘A strand is still anchored in me’.) For this reason, Swithering may be as well written as Booker-Prize-winning prose, but it is not a masterclass in poetic lines.

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.