Although she herself complains self-deprecatingly in her letters that she is merely an iambic ‘umpty-um’ poet, Elizabeth Bishop scholars like to talk about her frequent drops into ‘prose-rhythm’. Victorian literary criticism took prose-rhythm seriously as a positive criterion, something active and different from poetic rhythm, but this kind of American critical discourse assigns different qualities to it:  there’s a sense of democratic inclusiveness, of an open-ended thing-y particularity, about ‘prose-rhythm’ as manifested in the work of Bishop, Moore, Whitman, O’Hara and others.  This kind of poetic voice is determined to let us see, as poems usually don’t, the prosy groundwork which leads up to the moment of lyrical transcendence. Unlike traditional lyricism, which takes the earnest intensity of every word as a given and asks of the reader a complicity with its procedures which occasionally appears unearned, this style approaches uplift, recognition and beauty gradually, through a responsible distilling of prose sense.

Such a style is always going to be vulnerable to the accusation often levelled at bad free verse, that it is ‘just prose’ – like ‘just sex’, this is a facile reduction, but that doesn’t stop it being a commonplace. What would be wrong, after all, about poetry which was ‘just’ prose with linebreaks? (Anne Carson’s work has made much of such a concept.) Prose has rhythm too.  And yet, in an unsympathetic review on this website of Robin Robertson’s previous book, Swithering, Jeremy Noel-Tod takes the poet to task for his ‘shaping prose imagination’; in a complex sentence, it is stated that Robertson’s  ‘line-breaks do not break with – or across – prose-rhythm or sense’.

 I do not believe this to be the case, and I think that the poet’s latest collection, The Wrecking Light, contains many fine poems which prove the assertion to be untrue.  Certainly, the exhaustive long line of ‘Leaving St. Kilda’ seems to tauten and grow urgent as it’s suddenly clamped short, risking prosaic line-breaks. Here is a description of fulmars:

Out on the ocean, they ride the curve of the wave; but here
in the air above their nests, in their thousands, they are ash
blown round a bonfire, until you see them closer, heeling
and banking. The grey keel
and slant of them: shearing,
planing the rock, as if their endless
turning of it might shape the stone –
as the sea has fashioned the overhangs
and arches, pillars, clefts and caves, through
centuries of close attention, of making its presence known.

It is useful to quote at such length, for it seems that the poetry demands such extensive quotation if we are to appreciate the subtle, yet persistent rhythms at work here – the shaping intellect like that of the sea or the fulmars. There aren’t that many poets recently published by the big mainstream presses who take risks like this with the poetic line – risks which some, of course, are going to find fatuous and uninteresting.  This may be because, writing in this way, the poet’s voice, or poetry itself, isn’t ‘making its presence known’ so overtly as is normal; lines fall into place – ‘in the air above their nests, in their thousands, they are ash’, ‘as the sea has fashioned the overhangs’ – when they see fit, without any sense of a template rigorously enforced, a job stringently done. But this doesn’t mean that such writing cannot have a stringency, a fine balance of its own.

In his best poems, Robertson reveals how much music can indeed be got out of what may look like prose merely broken up into its clausal sense-units.  It is all about the rhythm of the perceptions, and out of the commonsense sound of prose his writing seeks to evolve a freshness and energy not unlike Bishop’s. Consider this use of her characteristic line-opening dash in ‘The Great Midwinter Sacrifice, Uppsala’:

Fires sputter here and there but there is little light
and the ground beyond the square
is frozen hard as iron.
I pass what looks like a well in the darkness
– the sharpening wind playing over it
as you would blow on the neck of an empty bottle.

The off-rhymes and assonances of this passage could be spelled out tediously – suffice it to say that despite the prose look, the verse has a limber sensitivity which, while recalling the casual prose of a friendly letter, or a joyous pointing-out in person, still justifies itself on the page, as poetry to be cherished with both the eye and the ear.

The award-winning ‘At Roane Head’ is especially impressive. Robertson starts with the friendly familiarity of the ‘normal’ free verse line – ‘You’d know her house by the drawn blinds – / by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall’ – then modulates into his preferred variable, prosaic line as he describes the weird sons born to his female protagonist:

Her husband left her: said
they couldn’t be his, they were more
fish than human,
said they were beglamoured,
and searched their skin for the showing marks.

 Neither fish, flesh nor fowl, this is certainly ‘more’ than prose, though unostentatiously ‘beglamoured’ – note how fine that line-break on ‘more’ is, how there’s a whole idea packed in about the husband’s insecurity before this bizarre offspring, truly in some sense ‘more’ than himself. Such ‘showing marks’ appear repeatedly in Robertson’s writing to offset such criticism as Noel-Tod’s; he is an alert writer whose use of the poetic line risks embarrassment but ultimately sets its own standards, and creates, as Wordsworth put it, the taste by which it is to be relished. We read him without strain – indeed, with something of the lessened effort, and the easier readerly economy of prose – then are less startled than enlightened when the style’s once level plain starts to show its contours. Robertson’s fine poetic ear – his far from ‘prose imagination’ – is revealed by the number of such passages which admit of mimetic close readings, which appear, under close inspection, to unify sound and sense, and to reflect not just on their overt subject, but more reflexively on the very process of poetic composition.  Hence the first verse-paragraph of ‘Dress Rehearsals’:

On the final evening
headlights swarm down the hill like lava
making brief beds
of moving embers you can almost hear
the night extinguishing.
Darkness slides over itself, drawing down
each of its blinds, then, hours later
– even more slowly –
opening them, and the world returns
as a slur of ash and rumour, birds
calling out their names to themselves,
repeating their lines in their grey and hidden rooms.

 Robertson’s variable verse-lines are like those ‘brief beds’ which ‘you can almost hear’ – before they’re extinguished. They don’t provide a template for perception, but allow its natural ebb and flow to condition their sliding movement. If they don’t aspire to a monumental permanence – the regularity of line, if not truly rhythmical regularity, which most mainstream British verse cleaves to – this doesn’t preclude their development of a richly sensate acoustic that is all their own.

© Vidyan Ravinthiran

Robin Robertson, The Wrecking Light, Picador, 2010.  £8.99. ISBN 978 0330515481

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.