‘No Idiocy of Quietude’:

Landscapes of the Edge

In his poem ‘To the Snipe’, John Clare salutes that small brown wader’s knack of going about its business far from the haunts of men. In its secluded nests:

Security pervades

From year to year,
Places untrodden lie
Where man nor boy nor stock hath ventured near  
– Nought gazed on but the sky

And fowl that dread
The very breath of man.

Pursuing the comparison of poet and bird throughout, ‘To the Snipe’ builds to a visionary defence of the imagination working in isolation: the bird’s ‘calm and cordial lot’ teaches Clare ‘That in the dreariest places peace will be /A dweller and a joy.’ His confinement in asylums first in Essex and later Northamptonshire is well known, but ‘To the Snipe’ dates from his time in Northborough, in a cottage a few miles down the road from his native Helpston, and purchased for him by his London patrons. It was an early sign of his mental instability that he should experience this minor uprooting (one might have thought) as such a creative disaster, but as a poem of exile ‘To the Snipe’ succeeds wonderfully in turning the poem itself into a nest, a refuge, an ecosystem.  

As the editor of a 2007 selection of Clare’s work and noted poet-twitcher, Paul Farley has given a lot of thought to the question of the ecosystems inhabited by the contemporary poem. Co-authored by Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness is a timely study of England’s shifting landscapes today and the poetic opportunities they enable. The edgelands (the term derives from the cultural geographer Marion Shoard) are neither city not country but the undervalued spaces round the fringes of both, the business parks and motorway services stations, the builder’s yards and railway embankments. A donnée of the edgelands is that they are overlooked, never the easiest proposition in a country that boasts the highest density of CCTV cameras in Europe. ‘Most of it has never been seen’, Roy Fisher wrote of his native Birmingham in City in 1961: the intervening decades have taken these spaces from invisibility to the surveillance state without any noticeable interval of being merely there. How to fight back? Inverting our usual relationship of passivity towards our day-to-day surroundings might be a start. In 2007 London-based artist Manu Luksch made a film based entirely on CCTV images of herself obtained under the Data Protection Act, and Farley and Symmons Roberts too suggest all manner of subversive re-enchantments of their edgelands. They propose relocating Arvon writing retreats from the deep countryside to a ‘Touchbase’ Meeting Centre in Swindon and cause something resembling panic in the custodian of a yard full of pallets with their over-the-top enthusiasm for those giant wooden coasters.

A key to the edgelands is the clash between public and private. The Enclosure Acts of the early nineteenth century were one of the great disasters of Clare’s life, cancelling grazing rights on commonly held land and transferring over a fifth of the country into private ownership. The election that returned the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition forms a backdrop to Edgelands, and since coming to office the Con-Dems have feasted wolfishly on the public sector on a scale not seen since the Thatcher regime of the 1980s. Hundreds of libraries have been selected for closure and large tracts of public woodland earmarked for sell-off, though protests appear to have stalled the latter decision at least (for now). The Conservative privatisation of public spaces has a literary dimension too. When former Tory Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker published his Faber Book of Landscape Poetry in 2000, the volume came decked out in endpapers mapping its poets onto the landscape: Marvell in Hull, Wordsworth in the Lakes, Betjeman in Cornwall. This is landscape as birthright, with no place for meditations on the matter of Albion from interlopers or birds of passage such as Pound, Lowell or Ed Dorn, to list only Anglophone visitors. It does not take a Tory grandee to write poets out of the landscape, however.  Cultural amnesia does the trick too: Owen Sheers’ Poet’s Guide to Britain (2010), a tie-in for a BBC television series, offered a poetic map of the territory that finds room for first-collection debutantes but none for Geoffrey Hill and Basil Bunting. Where Farley and Symmons Roberts are concerned, amnesia is the message rather than the medium: the edgelands are delivered to us pre-forgotten, falling outside traditional categories of habitation, attachment and nostalgia. Perhaps they are an attempt to find romantically twenty-first virgin territory, with the role of noble savage transferring from the last uncontacted Amazon tribe to the homeless man sleeping under a motorway flyover.

On closer inspection, the concept of virgin territory has a habit of turning out slightly more second-hand than we were promised. Someone has always got there before us, leaving their own time capsules or graffiti tags. Or devoted his whole career to them, even, as Iain Sinclair has done in Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital and many other books in the same vein. It’s more than a little odd that Farley and Symmons Roberts don’t acknowledge this, though they direct an aside at the misanthropy of unnamed ‘psychogeographers’ who have ventured onto their patch. There is an unarticulated argument going on here over a different territory entirely, that of contemporary British poetry: Sinclair is a polemical opponent of the nominal mainstream in British verse, his radical alternative to which can be found in the 1996 anthology Conductors of Chaos. The term ‘mainstream’ has been eroded (biodegraded, even) beyond all critical usefulness in recent years, but a certain kind of British pastoral with its roots in Edward Thomas does persist in the work of a writer such as Andrew Motion, though lacking anything like Thomas’s darker edge. Farley and Symmons Roberts’ self-description as writers in the ‘lyric tradition’ places them on one side of this opposition, where the more jagged stylings of the psychogeographers are concerned at least (who are not confined to Iain Sinclair: other names would include Chris Torrance, Allen Fisher, Brian Catling and Bill Griffiths).  

The poets quoted by Farley and Symmons Roberts on their travels, from Larkin to Sean O’Brien, confirm their differences with Sinclair, though the laureate of Whitechapel would hardly cavil at their use of Anglo-Welsh modernist David Jones’s wonderful ‘A, a, a, Domine Deus’ as an example of prospecting for the sacred in unwonted surroundings (‘For it is easy to miss Him /at the turn of a civilisation’). Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns also feature, that archetypal modern raid on Albion’s myth-kitty, whose presiding spirit, the eighth-century Offa, King of Mercia, is described as ‘overlord of the M5’. The question is how to bed the mythic down in the contemporary, and how to negotiate the twin risks of cultic obscurity and the drudgery of signposted ‘relevance’. Sinclair’s compulsive mythopoeia often skirts self-parody, and an innocent South Sea Islander might be forgiven for forming the impression from his work that today’s Britain is peopled exclusively by art-school dropouts, radical film-makers and walking-wounded underground poets. But something is lost too in Farley and Symmons Roberts’ more user-friendly style, giving their book the feel of a documentary-in-waiting (and as a sticker on the cover reminds us, their book has already been ‘heard on BBC Radio 4’). References to ‘the poet Robert Frost’ rather than plain old Robert Frost are not confidence-inspiring; nor are the slightly too frequent uses of the book’s title, reminiscent of a student essay underlining the point a little too obviously at every opportunity. If the psychogeographer’s Gothicizing of his landscapes is distorting, the question is whether Farley and Symmons Roberts have removed one layer of authorial overlay only to replace it with another, and whether a landscape free of such projections is ever possible or even desirable.

A good test of this is the representation of the natural world. Whether offering tips on the best sewage plants from which to view Lapland buntings, or threading the names of wild flowers round those of well-known retail outlets, Farley and Symmons Roberts assemble a rich biosphere in Edgelands. If you want to see a fox in Britain today, try a city (one was recently found living on the seventy-second floor of London’s tallest skyscraper). The edgelanders finds stone curlews laying their eggs on the beds of working gravel quarries, and bee-colonies thriving on raggedy clumps of buddleia (as in the US, British bee colonies have experienced worrying collapse). Nature and modernity stage strange meetings: tech-savvy twitchers resort to ipod luring, using recordings of birdsong to lure their targets into the open. Human edgeland-dwellers are in shorter supply. This raises the spectre of another important Edgelands forebear, W.G. Sebald, who trail-blazed his baggage of historical melancholy through solitary rambles along the East Anglian coast in The Rings of Saturn but, no less than Farley and Symmons Roberts, often found ghosts and absentees more manageable than the merely living. For all his furrow-browed meditations on history and genocide, a more startling discovery to emerge from Sebald’s Rings of Saturn is that even large market towns in East Anglia are apparently devoid of inhabitants. The same might be said of another edgelander poet, John Burnside, whose response to the ring roads and retail parks of contemporary Britain has been to withdraw to a more mystically-tinged, auratic darkness than Farley and Symmons Roberts explore, out beyond the CCTV cameras. The trade-off is between glamour and habitability, the pregnant dark and the street lights’ antiseptic orange. It is an opposition that tells us much about the nature of place in poetry now, whether in British and Irish writing or beyond, and not one that Edgelands can claim to have resolved.

‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow’, runs the oft-quoted first line of Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ (Edgelands quotes it too), a poem whose unease with the concept of roots and attachment in the modern world sent its author down disused Peruvian mine-shafts in search of uncolonised spaces. The murderous toll of the Northern Irish Troubles provided an obvious incentive for this imaginative Wanderlust, and other early Mahon poems too abound in hermits (if hermits can abound), waste lands and deserts, while in more recent times he has relaxed into more welcoming locales, as in the West Cork ecopoetics of his Life on Earth. The depopulating temptation is not one Farley and Symmons Roberts have entirely resisted, and when the denizens of the edgelands do speak, the results are mixed and sometimes awkward (though I was sorry we never got to hear from the poet who fell in love with cooling towers). It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the edgelands are apolitical spaces, reservoirs of untapped melancholia where Farley and Symmons Roberts go to ponder their favourite Richard Billingham photographs and John Clare poems while elsewhere David Cameron gets on with politics-as-usual, the ‘greed /and garbage (...) too thick-strewn /To be swept up now’ that Larkin, that classic edgelands-poet, foresaw in ‘Going, Going’. When it gets its romanticising urges under control, this is a wonderfully materialist book, offering a primer in the stuff and matter of how we live now, with chapters on dens, wire, containers and sewage: a Parti pris des choses for the Google Earth generation. But what, finally, the politics of the edgelands are remains very much for up grabs. Protestors shivering under tarpaulin in treehouses make a picturesque addition to any edgelands genre scene, but as Farley and Symmons Roberts have implicitly argued, this is a landscape that can adapt pretty well to the palimpsest of a motorway extension or high-speed rail link.

Perhaps, then, the most authentic edgeland combat zone will remain on the page, in the fierce territorial disputes that range round landscape and ecowriting today. I was reminded of this recently when I posted an essay on poetry and birds on my blog, and was sent a copy of his text ‘Graphology 300: Against “Nature Writing”’ by John Kinsella, a full-on diatribe against the evils and imperialist designs of nature writing: ‘Nature writing equals the new racketeering (...) Nature writing is a departmental party trick.’ There is always the risk of the nature poet appropriating a landscape or passing flock of birds to his or her all-too-human purposes, reducing them to impotent tokens of our post-industrial alienation. But while examples of such commodification are easily produced (allow me to nominate Mary Oliver’s geese), it is no idle provocation to wonder how any one kind of poetry, no matter how anarcho-vegan-pacifist-avant-garde, can wholly escape the charge of treating nature as material, as an object for poetic use, a testing ground for literary mastery. We might want to substitute ‘opportunity’ for ‘object’, and ‘coexistence’ for ‘use’, but the question of artistic will-to-power is not so easily disposed of as all that. It is there in Shelley and Wordsworth, but there too in Oppen, Alice Oswald and John Kinsella. Oppen’s ‘Psalm’ strikes me as displaying a luminously ethical relationship towards its scene of some deer in a wood, down to the lovely ‘that’ in the line ‘that they are there!’ – giving us not just the deer, but the principle of their presence, beyond the poet’s personal investment in the scene. Yet none the less, the poet is there too, as surely as Lawrence watching his snake crawl to a watering hole or Bishop peering at her moose through the bus window, bringing the poem to the beautiful pitch of controlled simplicity from which it can then work to unravel our crudely anthropocentric view of the natural world.

The dilemma is nicely phrased by Peter Riley in a couplet from his sequence ‘Western States’: ‘We turn our backs and the deer /come to drink in the dark.’ Once again the elusive deer are there, but in the dark and only when the observers turn their backs; but here too there is a framing ‘we’, on whose approach and withdrawal the poem’s epiphanic payoff heavily depends. ‘Western States’ is included in Harriet Tarlo’s anthology The Ground Aslant, a volume that no less than Edgelands reports from a marginal zone, as summarized by its subtitle, An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Introducing the book, Tarlo admits to trouble with terminology: landscape poetry is not pastoral poetry is not ecopoetry. While the exact dividing lines are matter for debate, readers more use to the Kenneth Baker map of the territory will recognise immediately how far from the usual nature trail we have strayed when confronted by the work of Colin Simms, Tony Baker, Wendy Mulford or Helen Macdonald. These are poets who publish with Shearsman and Reality Street rather than the bigger commercial presses; in these circles the librarian poet called Larkin would be not Philip but Peter, of Warwick University not Hull, and the author of collections such as Terrain Seed Scarcity and Lessways Least Scarce Among.

Through its very existence alone, The Ground Aslant helps correct a number of widespread but groundless assumptions. The first is that British experimental writing operates in a realm either of rarefied abstraction or metropolitan indifference to anything beyond the city limits (though, in passing, it would be an amusing parlour game to work out who the most nature-phobic poet is: Elizabeth Bishop liked to twit Frank Bidart for his aversion to the countryside, and O’Hara’s distrust of even ‘a blade of grass ‘unless I know there’s a subway handy’ makes him a contender too). A second misconception is that landscape poetry belongs, anyway, to an organic tradition (that of Frost and Edward Thomas), onto which experimental writers trespass at their peril: if Pound or Olson or their British followers write about nature it goes against type, runs the argument, whereas Frost, Thomas and their contemporary heirs simply belong by river and tarn, in the natural order of things. A third assumption is that experimental writing proceeds from theory to practice, bypassing any individual sensibility and producing clone poetry much as urban planners now produce clone towns, when in reality Peter Riley is as different from Frances Presley or Nicholas Johnson as Gary Snyder is from Robert Hass is from Mary Oliver.

Active in the small-press scene since in the late 60s, Peter Riley is the most senior poet to feature in The Ground Aslant, and one whose frank emotional register (‘The entire brochure of love and all’) belies the terminal froideur associated in the public mind with Cambridge poetry. Influenced early in his career by T.F. Powys, Riley is no less a rugged individualist than the author of Mr Weston’s Good Wine, and a sceptical observer of British poetry orthodoxies, whether radical or otherwise. His oeuvre is a sizable one, and the ten-page cutting offered by Tarlo can’t help appearing short on breathing space, though anything that drives readers to seek out fine collections such as The Llŷn Writings, A Map of Farings and Alstonefield (among the most audacious of British long poems in recent years), can only be a good thing. Riley has always spoken up for the poets of the 40s, many of whom were swept aside by the astringent rationalism of the Movement years that followed, and in its omnium-gatherum capaciousness Alstonefield reconnects with the energies of 40s poets such as Nicholas Moore and Lynette Roberts:

Silence lines the horizon, glowing to a lost
nation, snow-brushed fields glossing the vein
to a hole in tense, a history of light
or moving pain to paper an agreement is touched,
that death shall have no choice.

Colin Simms’ ambitious and philosophical musings on pine martens and otters will remind many readers of late Robinson Jeffers, while Thomas A. Clark’s sequence The Hundred Thousand Places refines an idiom from which all traces of the first person appear to have been surgically excised. Here are fields unfussily algow with the landscaper’s gaze, summoning not just Clark’s North-Eastern Scottish seaboard but Beckett’s ‘Dieppe’, with its own echo of Hölderlin’s ‘Der Spaziergang’: ‘with measured steps /with deliberation /walk the quiet path /the between time /the grey fold’. Looking is no merely passive activity for these poets: ‘I can do more dangerous things /just with my eyes’, writes Zoë Skoulding. Written mainly in short prose paragraphs, Peter Larkin’s work too has affinities with Beckett, specifically the late Beckett of Lessness or The Lost Ones, using its pared-back syntax to mark off small defended spaces for the imagination:

Some livery to simplify a real shank through the wards, power-lines at a slope of conduction with rapid incomplete owing of ground. To blow with spreading on the grid some green flutter of smaller rigid body.

Helen Macdonald is among the most engrossing and distinctive writers in Britain today. Her 2000 collection Shaler’s Fish seems to me a small modern classic. A historian of science and the author of a cultural history of falcons, she writes poems that are not without talons of their own (she also lives in Cambridge ‘with her goshawk, Mabel’). Forgoing any kind of cosying up to the reader or scene-setting preliminaries, they plunge us into the beautiful and savage world of the raptors she describes with such scientific precision. Moments of sudden avian illumination (‘a spark that meets the idea of itself’) flare up amid an arcane lexis and dizzying torsions of syntax. Rarely are epiphanies of weightlessness more earned than in Macdonald’s poems, the moment at which they ‘let the wind renege & fields upturn to sky’ coming only after long, hard looks at the insuperable species divide between human and bird. ‘Skipper/Copper’ ends:

No idiocy of quietude brings it rolling over into ice
an embellishment crackling between the same fingers
paper refuses the body but the line moves out gently
breathing almost covers the whole of the sound
pheromones motion to close or disguise closer

mottled as paper but safer, rolled
like a Hartz bird & the mouth always closed

With their insistence on the bird’s closed beak, these lines take a stand against the tyranny of speaking-for and anthropomorphization, stressing the process of translation from the natural world (‘paper refuses the body’).    The refusal of pastoral equivalences between the human and the non-human is a running theme in The Ground Aslant. Contra Pound, ‘It won’t cohere’, argues Tony Baker; these are songs of the natural world tuned to the twelve-tone rather than the diatonic scale, Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux rather than Vaughan Williams’ ‘Lark Ascending’. But these are still recognisably John Clare’s fields, where peace can be ‘A dweller and a joy.’ As Elizabeth Bletsoe writes in ‘Here Hare Here’, ‘the gates are open /& all the paths are clear.’

Many modern poets, from Bishop to Ciaran Carson have pored lovingly over maps, to the point where the metaphor threatens to lose all meaning, but Edgelands and The Ground Aslant are both, in their different ways, field maps of territories still in a state of evolution and flux. What could be truer to poetic psychogeography than the ‘ground-truther’, as discussed in Edgelands, the private eye-meets-cartographer whose job it is to walk the ground and ensure that this lamp post, that garden fence really are where the map says they are? Many a slip is possible between landscape and map, with even the most reputable cartographers including deliberate mistakes on maps as deterrents to plagiarism. Excessive reliance in maps’ trustworthiness is never a good idea, in any case, as suggested by the sub-genre of contemporary news stories involving people driving off piers on being told to do so by their satnav. No less importantly, we must attend to the blank spaces on the map too, or the spaces we fancy to be blank, the nothings that are there as well as the nothings that aren’t, to invert Wallace Stevens. Several years ago, a quest to find Britain’s most featureless place ended with the coronation of Square SE830220 on Landranger map 112, in Ousefleet near Scunthorpe, lacking a ditch, a fence, a stream or anything else. ‘There has never been anything of great interest here’, commented a deadpan local, though in the paradoxical way of these things, to trumpet its obscurity is also to rob it of this very quality. I’ve been there, as it happens, and with its proximity to the Ouse, down the river from Kingston-upon-Hull, it is strongly redolent of Peter Didsbury’s ‘Three Lakes by Humber’. The vast, muddy Humber estuary produces temporary islands, some lasting decades, but destined to be swept away as the tidal patterns change. The dividing lines in British poetry that appear to mark Farley and Symmons Roberts off so sharply from the poets of The Ground Aslant follow cultural channels we also do well not to see as permanent. Philip Larkin, mascot of one poetic tribe and fall-guy of the other, knew all about the transience of our landscapes, whether in the aerial panoramas of ‘Here’ (another Humber estuary poem) or ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, with its beautiful dialectic of company and solitude, city and country, the familiar and the uncanny:

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

It hardly matters whether home exists or not, so long as the letters keep coming. But as these two books suggest, the bolt-holes of exile remain well-stocked with lively correspondents.   

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, Jonathan Cape, 2011. £12.99. 978-0-22408-902-9
Harriet Tarlo (ed.), The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Shearsman, 2011. £12.95. 978-1-84861-081-1
© David Wheatley, 2011

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.
David Wheatley is the author of A Nest on the Waves (Gallery Press). He lives in Hull.