London Grip Poetry Review – W D Jackson

 

Poetry review – OPUS 1: Nicholas Bielby reflects on a substantial and highly original (but not entirely successful) collection by W D Jackson

 

Opus 1,
W D Jackson
Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2023, 
ISBN 978-1-915553-31-7
pp.241    £15,  

One can’t say Jackson is short on ambition! And in this world where too many poets are short of ambition, only providing us with multiple titbits, this is no bad thing! He sees his life’s work on a big scale, globally as a whole, publishing Opus 3 (approaching 500 pages, including Notes approaching 100 pages), in 2018, before Opus 1 (2023). (I’m not sure when Opus 2 might appear.) Opus 1 is 241 pages long, including 40 pages of Notes. Together his Opuses will constitute a single work, Then and Now. An ambitious project, claiming a unity in all its disparate parts representing a contemporary consciousness situated in the ambiguous cultural history of Europe.

Jackson is not short on high seriousness – as the Notes show, he takes his poetry very seriously, often in a very scholarly way but always making illuminating connections and commentaries on his way of working – and even including additional poems! (I like his version of Heine’s “Mich locken nicht die Himmelsauen” incorporated in a longer poem). The Notes are, he says, intended to complement and counterpoint the main text. His ‘high seriousness’ shows in his concern with what it means to be a human being in an overwhelming world where drowning is as likely an outcome as surviving. Both ‘Now’ and ‘Then’ are overwhelming. ‘Now’ is overwhelming in its materialism which allows no breathing space for the soul. ‘Then’ is overwhelming with its weight of culture, history and suffering. Together they have formed the disaffected modern man, ‘a White-Collar Worker’, his alter ego, rooted and rootless, who is both the consciousness and the victim of past and present – as he says in his “Author’s Prologue”, ‘We / are the victims – or not – of history.’

Opus 1 brings together work previously published in separate books, together with new material. The poems (including many translations) and the Notes show how deeply immersed he is in the tradition of European poetry. Indeed, many of his poems can be considered notes on the poems of other dead poets. His range and depth of reference is rather overwhelming. But, from the reader’s point of view, many poems and sequences are longer than they need to be and not everything earns its keep.

I don’t want to dwell on the less successful poems, but something needs to be said about them. For example, each numbered section in the book concludes with a sub-section called ‘Aesopean’, a collection of epigrammatic little animal fables, mostly based on those by other writers, of variable quality. In some the moral or irony is too obvious, in some too laboured, in some entirely missing (or else I missed the point). As elsewhere among the poems, sometimes the irony verges on the cynical. Too many of them, while ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic,’ are ‘amoral to the point of heartless’ (Jackson’s words about Aesop). Too many end with someone or something being eaten: for example, a monkey, being hunted,

	… caught the arrows which the Prince
	Let fly – snapped each in two.
	Ten bowmen aimed and shot. The mince
	Made them a right royal stew.

You read in hopes, but a multiplicity of such poems becomes tiresome. I’m not convinced they constitute a conspectus of Western wisdom. But what other intention could justify so many of them? A long sequence, “Thirty-Nine Songs (ca. 1250/2002)”, consisting primarily of pastoral and love songs and ballads, is often as limp and banal as some of the originals on which many are too closely based.

However it is the more substantial poems that are the most rewarding. A longer narrative poem, “The Bride’s Story”, based on folklore, is very readable and totally entrancing, disconcerting and entertaining in a traditional way very rarely found in poetry today.

One disconcerting characteristic of a number of the longer poems is that they start in a set form and then lose it. For example, the last poem, “Nathan the Wise”, before the final Aesopian group, actually calls itself a ‘medley’. Its narrative begins in jaunty rhyming quatrains; then, mid-quatrain, turns into an engaging free-verse dialogue which includes an intriguing parable, before resuming the third-person narrative in quatrains. This ends with a second mid-quatrain switch, but this time into prose – almost as if the poet had lost interest in the poetry. The reader has been on an interesting journey but the ending is disconcerting – a prose paragraph summarising the end of the last Crusade in ‘a mournful and solitary silence.’ Are we to read it as the form mirroring the substance? As is often the case elsewhere, the poem challenges expectations.

“In Lieu of a Manifesto: Heine’s Grave” is another large-scale poem. Heine is, throughout the book, a touchstone for Jackson and he seems very much at home with Heine’s ironic outsider view of things. His translation from the opening of “Deutchland: Ein Wintermärchen”, bears comparison with T J Reed’s excellent version of 1986, sometimes exceeding it. Jackson regards Heine as prophetic in the way he foresees the direction of our culture. The poem “In Lieu” begins in complex rhymed stanzas, telling the story of a visit to Heine’s grave in modern Paris and meditating on Heine’s predictions and the modern world. The second section is in somewhat randomly rhyming quatrains, discoursing on poetry and the literary world. The third section is again in quatrains, more regular in its tight rhyme-scheme, but now, in Heine’s disembodied voice, talking sardonically about Matthew Arnold as a poet and social critic. Occasional longer stanzas intrude among the quatrains. Then the final quatrain is rhyme-free before the poem concludes with a very lively, witty translation of Heine’s “Jetzt wohin,” in which the exile Heine, though tempted to return to Germany, thinks discretion the better part of valour:

Well, it’s true a firing squad
Seems a nasty way to snuff it.
And I lack the tragic mien
Which might tell them where to stuff it.

So he considers and dismisses various options of places to go and live as Germany would be too dangerous. He concludes that even in the heavens he probably would not feel at home, ‘(j)ust as I have gone astray / (i)n the sludge of human history.’ Despite the occasional quirkiness of form, the overall poem is engaging – as the expression ‘sludge of human history’ suggests.

Even if not everything feels entirely satisfactory about this book, it operates in a different league from most of what is being written today. Jackson is a craftsman of high seriousness, a prophet whose protagonist, like our culture, has lost his way, has lost his vision, but whose lost waywardness is itself, he shows us, an intelligent and enjoyable parable.