Matthew Sperling reviews Cracks in the Universe by Charles Tomlinson

At this stage in a poetic career as long and distinguished as Charles Tomlinson’s (career, 1a: ‘The ground on which a race is run…’), it can get difficult to tell the received ideas from the new ones, for a reader, and perhaps for a writer. Difficult, that is, not to think that who this poet is, and what he’s done before, and what he’s doing now, haven’t in some sense already determined each other. But one of the pleasures of Cracks in the Universe is how alert most of the poems are to the importance of starting afresh, from first principles.

The big received idea about Tomlinson is that he writes ‘like a painter’ – with a ‘patience in looking’, the blurb says – and that this derives both from his own practice as a visual artist and from his interest in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The poems try to register what it is to perceive as precisely as possible in words. John Kerrigan recently placed Tomlinson’s painterly work alongside that of Denise Riley and Oxford’s own performance-shaman Brian Catling, combining these seams of visual artistry and phenomenological exploration. And Tomlinson’s new book contains plenty of beautifully, strangely caught phenomena – I especially like the ‘strong woman’ of ‘Santiago de Compostela’, who ‘wrestles a live conger / out of its tub: / we watch it snake / slippery in her grip - / she lets it writhe until / we have looked our fill’. Which is a language perfectly plain-spoken at the same time that it’s strange and complicating and inward – slippery in the grip of a descriptive master.

But along with this mastery comes a suspicion about Tomlinson, as voiced by Sean O’Brien: ‘Whether his vast descriptive powers compensate for the lack of a human presence in his work is open to debate’. Ah, if he’d only spend less time on those still-lives, and more writing poems about his old man digging, or gobbing into the hearth, or giving him all the faults he had, and adding some etc… But then, nothing humans do is more ‘human’ than anything else, right? One of the strengths of the poems in this book is how they can range from thinking about painting or sculpture, to thinking about travel, about living in cities, about being alone with the phenomena of the non-human world, to fond recollection of being young, and all of this in a language which tries to make them real on their own terms, without lapsing into the rote categories in which we usually receive the world.

The two key-note quotes of the book refute this ‘lack of human presence’. First, in the fourth of ‘Four for David Smith’, the American sculptor, there is this:

The ballet
of steel
beneath
a winter sky:
it was a man
made these
bare boughs.

And then the refrain of these lines, in the book’s last poem, ‘Eden’: ‘There was no Eden / in the beginning: / …It was man / made Eden’. That sliver of difference between ‘a man’ and ‘man’ – the sliver that opens out to a vast canyon of significance – is characteristic of the precision with which Tomlinson’s poems limn their arguments. So is the powerful restraint of ‘November’ – another poem which does justice to ‘human presence’ even while it records the absence of its elegiac subject, Hugh Kenner, and takes pains to describe his achievement accurately:

The freeze sets in:
frost is returning
at three in the afternoon:
a seam of ore
opens at the valley head
under a single cloud. Kenner is dead –
the man who knew, saw, told
and clarified our seeing
privileged by his own:
requiescat in pace.

This is not to say that all the writing in the book shares this pitch of attention and surprise. There are certainly less compelling intervals. ‘Westminster Bridge from the Eye’ (‘written to be read in the Globe Theatre’, it warns us) takes in Wordsworth, Milton, the Globe, the London Eye and the city’s moderno-capitalist public architecture, condensing them into a sonnet’s-worth of edifying cultural pablum. It feels a little like being trapped in a lift with Alan Yentob. (True poets, of course, hate culture and are its enemies.) And when Tomlinson eases into his anecdotage (‘‘You’ll never ride a bike,’ my father said’), the attention of this reader, for one, starts to drift. But it would be wrong to begrudge the existence of such poems, and the charm of the delivery more or less justifies the poet loosening his belt a notch. Ron Silliman has recently suggested that Tomlinson’s capacity to write with ‘crystalline measure’ in one poem, yet to be ‘flaccid’ in the next, depends on the line-length he uses and at the same time his relation to traditional English poetry. There’s something in this: the reader senses a slight deflation, a lowering of pressure, when Tomlinson capitalizes his lines and writes pentameters. Things become a bit literary and mealy-mouthed: ‘That duty done, another must be paid / To parsimonious England craving coin…’, goes ‘Inheritance’. It’s impossible not to have mixed feelings about this. Whose England are we talking about? But then, one version of England is flaccid and literary and mealy-mouthed and parsimonious, and Tomlinson is faithful to that.

Inseparable from these reservations, Cracks in the Universe remains a book of genuine depth, talent and perhaps wisdom, with a number of poems and a larger number of passages to stick by and come back to.

Cracks in the Universe (Carcanet, 2006). £7.95, pp. 77, ISBN 1 903039 79 7

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.