Alan Gillis reviews On Purpose by Nick Laird

The first poem of Nick Laird’s debut collection was called ‘Cuttings’. On Purpose, his second collection, includes a piece called ‘His Scissors’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cutting and scissoring are key to his style. In On Purpose,the list of ‘The Search Engine’ creates a cut-and-paste montage effect (splendidly). But mostly his cuts and shifts are less overt. Most poems are continuous wholes riven by gaps and lacunae, strange overlaps and layerings; many turn on the juxtaposition of images and registers. Often the shifts and ellipses are swift and furtive: modulated feints and slips of connotation. There’s a snip-snip-snip of intercutting sound and sense within a snaking syntax. Sometimes dramatically, sometimes slyly, Laird’s poems are continuous wholes with a hole at their heart.

For example, ‘Holiday of a Lifetime’ opens matter-of-factly:

Your ex transferred
            a photo
to a jigsaw. Years later,
            underneath a shelf,
you find a centre piece.

Laird uses the second-person often and deftly: as a mode of speaking to oneself, to a specific other, or to the reader. At some level, all three are always implicated. The tone of address in these poems runs from the intimate to the formal, from the declarative to the qualitative. At his best, Laird can shift mid-poem with fluent guile.

Here, one presumes the photo was of a ‘Holiday of a Lifetime’, yet we immediately cut to a scene of writing (Sit at the desk. It’s mid- | November’). We are told of cigarette smoke, and a study’s walls ‘strung with hoops of light | thrown by a glass | of water’. It appears we are in this study to attempt to capture the moment:

How close will you get?
            Introduce it
as a mood composed of pauses,
            water, glass and light,
the sound of distant

traffic passing and someone
            burning leaves
somewhere, close by,
            smoke shrugging
over fences, hedges,

as if to say that everything is
            temporary,
as if you might have momentarily
            forgotten,
you with ash on the sleeve
of your best blue jumper.

The moment to be captured would seem to be the present moment of writing, but could also be the moment of the photo. Immediately, the poem scissors back to the jigsaw piece with which it began:

            The jigsaw piece
is also blue, as an eye,
            one of yours,
though what you will do

for the rest of your years
            is to try,
repeatedly, to identify
            that blue as sea,
maybe, or sky.

The present moment and the memory converge through the effort to capture them; and these, in turn, converge with a sense of self, since the jigsaw piece of the photo-portrait is your eye—your ‘I’ (or, at least, one of them).

But what’s notable is how the repeating imagery of water, glass, light, smoke and blueness swirl and sift through the poem’s various frames. Syntactic fluidity over the long / short line stanzas creates a spiral in which past, present, and self partake of one another, in a manner both natural and uncanny. There’s a duality of poise and precariousness: the final dissolution into the elements is both fragile and expansive. Hanging over the ending is that other eye (‘I’), which implicitly belongs to another centre. The poem thus gives us finality and indeterminancy, depth and range through the economy of eight crisp stanzas. Some might demur that the Eliotic ash on sleeve is misplaced; but this poem displays formal skill, sharp intelligence and emotive intuition, easefully fusing in a probing lyricism.

Throughout On Purpose, interior worlds and the exterior are equally discombobulated. The excellent opener, ‘Conversation’, tells us: ‘I’d point out what we talk about we talk about || because we speak in code of what we love. | Here.’ The idea of speaking in code of ‘what we love’ provides another keynote of Laird’s poetic: a mixture of pride and vulnerability pitched perfectly in-between emotional articulacy and its opposite. But the ‘Here’ that is spoken of ‘in code’ swiftly segues from natural beauty and local bustle to terror, so that ‘what we love’ turns inexorably to

How someone … was nailed to a fence.
How they gutted a man like a suckling pig
and beat him to death with sewer rods.

Malevolent historical reality erupts into the ‘Here’ that we love, or home. But also, this gives a sense that home simply containsviolence and negation as a matter of fact. Intriguingly, this also lightly chimes with the troubling insight of Mahon’s ‘Ecclesiastes’: ‘God, you could grow to love it …’.

In any case, home, here, and self are always troubled in Laird’s poetic: the terra firma is fault-lined. And from such shaken foundations he writes a poetry of mid-flight and exile. Hotel rooms, comings and goings, moments before and just after: these are the scenarios, cast in-between a fierce individualism and a fierce longing, from which Laird’s poems deliver a bracing dose of melancholy, transience, guilt, disempowerment and anxiety—all poised against subtle intimations of, and hope for, the embrace of benevolence and grace. As such, Laird’s Northern Irishness is almost by-the-bye (almost, but not quite): he is an authentic poet of the contemporary, more broadly.

At their most distinctive, these poems are moulded with craft to deliver a sting in the tail; or else they turn to a more amorphous but redemptive apprehension of the nowhere of now. Alongside the two already mentioned, ‘Statue of an Alderman in Devon’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Light Pollution’, ‘Lipstick’, ‘The Underwood No. 4’, the first and last sections of ‘from The Art of War’, and ‘The Hall of Medium Harmony’ are particularly excellent. More generally, there is a greater consistency throughout than in his first collection: more freight and more buoyancy.

Laird’s reception elsewhere provides a troubling snapshot of a crisis in the state of poetry reviewing. With honourable exceptions, he’s either been dismissed out of hand or else buttered-up with hyperbole, with minimum attention to his poems. One common fallacy is an automatic assumption that it’s a bad thing to bear the influence of Heaney and Muldoon. But in On Purpose these two aren’t undue influences: there’s probably more George Herbert than Heaney; and there’s as much Marvell and MacNeice as Muldoon. But more importantly, the narrow-minded, block-eared and tasteless option would be for Laird to avoid their influence in the first place. Of course, there’s the problem of being swallowed whole by them and producing mimicry. But to accuse Laird of that would be ludicrous. One hopes and expects his poetry will expand and develop. Critics might argue On Purpose remains a little poker-faced; that it could do with more meat on the bone. But through the sparseness and compression, Laird generates a haunting trove of subtle and enriching tonal orchestrations. There’s no doubt a beguiling, compelling voice is sounding itself out, and the best poems in this book are the business.

Nick Laird On Purpose.  Faber,  £8.99.

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.