John Redmond reviews Local Honey by Robert Saxton

If we compared the range of ideas in Local Honey to a company workforce we would soon diagnose a problem of over-promotion — for, throughout the book, minor fancies have been elevated to senior management positions. A glance at the subject-matter confirms this sense of inconsequentiality — we come across low-pressure lines about low-pressure tyres and drawn-out doodles about doodling.  ‘Spring Motor Tour’ begins:

In the handbook there was no reference
    to the correct pressures for the tyres,
so judging the matter by eye I pumped them
    just hard enough not to bulge
any more, …

This is the kind of opening which makes the reader want to give the speaker a good shake while shouting, “So what?” It is far too slow. Meanwhile, doodling features in ‘Why I Never Write on My Hand’:

I can’t write in the books I read,
annotating like some needy autodidact.
     I just can’t.
Nor can I write on my hand —
a phone number, a recipe, a bon mot.
Better to take in information thoroughly,
     deep inside oneself,
instead of leaving it floating on the surface
     like quayside litter.

The first line is promising enough — one can imagine a fine poem (by Szymborska, say) evolving from such a premise. The second line, however, expands on it too loosely — the doubts begin: is the simile to any good purpose? Why mention a needy autodidact (does the speaker think all autodidacts needy or only those who write on their hands?) The third line is inoffensively chatty but redundant. Why not move straight from line one to line four? Passing on, we find examples adduced that are oddly unpersuasive — who writes a recipe or a bon mot on their hand? If the class of people is, in all probability, vanishingly small, what is the point of the speaker announcing that he is not a member? These various propositional blurs are not assisted by sonic raggedness. The conjunction of “in” and “information”, aggravated by the too-proximate use of “inside” (not to mention “instead”), is just sloppy. Saxton, like Auden, is attracted to fixed stanza-shapes which incorporate a variety of line-lengths, and this is understandable: such shapes have the advantage of allowing the poet to emphasise phrases without recourse to syntax or rhyme. But in such cases the author needs to ensure that the selected phrases are worth the emphasis. Here, the simile, “like quayside litter” — bland at the best of times — looks awkward in the stanzaical spotlight.

Saxton has taken nine lines to impart what could have been said in three, and the general impression of ‘filler’ conveyed by this poem pervades the book. In Manganese, Saxton’s last collection, Audenesque mannerisms proliferated but the poems had a buoyant charm. Here the same mannerisms return — fixed stanza shapes, colourful generalisations, plentiful references to groups and gangs — but the poems seem hastily assembled. There is a quite depressing satisfaction with the outward form of a poem — that is to say, the book has the look of Accomplished Formal Poetry, but little happens from line to line. The geological profile is promising but the wells are dry.

Patrick Kavanagh once said that there was something of the prospector’s luck about a great poet’s style, but I think this is wrong. Poetic styles are not lurking underground, like oil in Alaska, waiting to be discovered. It is better to think that we make workable discoveries all the time — of phrases, gestures, people — and that a poetic style, like a personality, is a willed rearrangement of these discoveries. The more energetic the rearrangement the stronger the style will be, and the stronger the style, the greater its level of (apparent) idiosyncrasy. Hence, in Auden’s style, his willed rearrangement of (from a long list) opera, mining, psychology, mumming, Lawrence, The Sagas, St. John Perse, is no mere accidental feature. It is a causal constituent. Strong interpretations of Auden (mostly American) differ from weak interpretations of Auden (mostly English) in that, while the former try to achieve Auden’s level of idiosyncrasy, the latter try to achieve Auden’s idiosyncrasies. In this respect, Harold Bloom’s model of poetic influence, for all its Heath Robinson-ish extravangance, is very instructive, because it lays so much emphasis on a necessary recoil from one’s precursors. A true admirer emulates Auden by not being Auden.

It is hard to say what Local Honey is about — one can choose between (a) the uneventfulness of middle age and (b) nothing much. Nigel Jenkins once jokingly described himself as a poet who writes “about the universals” which he characterised as “my garden, my cats, and me.” Saxton’s addition to this recipe is a characteristically English prospectus of cultivation — if he must write a poem about babysitting a bird, well, at least let it be a macaw. He is the kind of poet who can move in the same poem from a reference to the Oktoberfest to the exclamation, “J’arrive!”, who can begin a poem with the unfortunately Fentonesque, “The emu’s the Mazda of meat, olé,/ and the lion’s the chicken of choice”, who can intersperse his travels in Prague and Iceland and Bialowieza with references to “Malaysian shadow-puppetry” and “wild, Mongolian lay[s]”. As Clifford Geertz has written of the Polynesians, it takes a certain kind of mind to sail out of sight of land in an outrigger-canoe. It takes an altogether different kind of mind to find satisfaction in the very mention of Polynesians and their canoes. Unfortunately for Local Honey, only the first kind of mind matters.

Local Honey, Carcanet. £9.95, 1903039908

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.