London Grip Poetry Review – Mark Robinson

 

Poetry review – THE INFINITE TOWN: John Forth considers the poetics of Mark Robinson’s new collection (but sidesteps the philosophy)

 

The Infinite Town
Mark Robinson
Smokestack Books
ISBN 9 78717391730 8 1
92pp    £7.99

When Mark Robinson’s Horse-Burning Park landed on the mat in 1994 after apprenticeships served in pamphlets and magazines, we might have been forgiven for welcoming a new wild man of English poetry – unafraid to use and be an ‘I’ in various guises; happy to let abstractions spark against each other in ways ‘not done’ – an altogether refreshing challenge to tight-lipped formality that was already on the back foot. The blurb for How I Learned to Sing (2013), a New & Selected, stakes a claim to being ‘his first collection this century’ since a senior Arts Council job meant that he didn’t send any poems out (a caution against conflict of interest). In short, if you get that book with this one, you’ll pretty much see it all.

At first glance this second collection is shorter, weightier and more worried, if no less barbed. There are two substantial epigraphs from ‘Desert Islands’ by the French ‘geo-philosopher’ Gilles Deleuze outlining a distinction between ‘continental’ and ‘oceanic’ islands, each of which reveals ‘a profound opposition between ocean and land’ to support a claim that ‘humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents.’

Deleuze presented a mythological and scientific vision in which new islands and new humanity emerge from the opposition between land and sea. No review will dare to unpack the confluence of lit crit and philosophy in such a work, so we’re left to reckon how far the poems benefit from a brush with heavy-duty theory. For all their directness there is no direct allusion to Donne’s sermon, which nevertheless loiters firmly at the back of the mind throughout. In “Policy Announcement” from the first section, a sestina repeating whole lines and not just end-words begins:

We say the same things again and again.
We set out today new resolutions.
We cannot just save the world: it must change.
We have mapped every consequence.
We know the value of the human heart.
We take no road but the road of courage.

When it comes, the finale utilising all six end-words is a challenge:

Forgotten resolutions clog the heart,
their consequences a cleft of change,
courage cracked open, again.

And again, if we’re guided by the blurb on the back cover, we’ll be expecting ‘a playful & painful mapping of public spaces and private places under assault’. In fact, whatever begins in edginess ends in something like foreboding:

I know even my life was too long
to transcribe at normal speed
but if you run this world faster
than the pace of its happening
you shorten only the afterlife.
The conversation was rarely as 
urgent as all that, was it?
Let us take a second.
Let us all just take a second.
                                             (“A Message from the Recently Dead”)

The opening title poem “The Infinite Town” had been commissioned by Stockton Council, the author tells us: ‘If you’re ever in Stockton at 1pm, you can read it as an animatronic train made by Rob Higgs emerges, hooting and steaming.’ There’s a lot more or less than that going on of course. The phrasing is high-powered:

 ‘a slice of future’; 
‘fireworked skies’; 
‘the rasp of morning’ 

line up to precede a tranquil dream-like cadence of ‘somewhere to settle’ where we can ‘train ourselves to dream’. Read this alongside a poem near the end of the book:

One time we hired a bouncy castle
off a man with a van and a pump…
The kids squeezed in and bounced madly…
Well, that bouncy castle, that room,
that creaking and panting…
That’s the tinnitus I secretly cherish now.
                                                 (“In a Different Light”)

We never feel as if we’re travelling from A to B. If anything, the feeling is more like circling to arrive back where we started, but increasingly ill-at-ease. As in the opening short title poem, a number of projects were made to accompany or celebrate community events, even if, as another poem shows:

Restlessness demands a quiet story,
the old favourite where love and fear
wrestle for our desperate affections.
We are many, reading ourselves together.
                                                    (“All communities are imagined communities”)

There is a sustained awareness of ‘the old story’ and whatever it can mean in various contexts, where it often results in a kind of sad and sometimes angry resignation. Two poems from either end of the book show an ambivalent repetitiveness that is often exploited. Firstly, “The disappearing men…”

are folding themselves into
the corners of their silences.
They gaze from clifftops
while no one watches them,
contemplate the sea’s due care.
They hold their breath.

And in the fourth and final section of the book the darkly comical “Attempting to Leave” re-enacts a manic form of OCD as if it were perfectly normal behaviour: ‘He backed away into empty space, // a new stanza, // then another, // before a last check nothing was open.’

Most importantly, the lines preceding this finale take us through every resolute, often absurd step and re-stepping through anxiety. It’s painfully funny, indeed by now a Robinson trademark: we may be smiling but the sadness is never far away, and it’s never reportage – always re-enactment. Sometimes this ideal can be harder to reach. In a commissioned poem for the anniversary of a dance company, eight rhymed quatrains become somewhat strained even when the ideas look sound, as they do at the start:

If every step, leap, joke, twist and turn
became talk’s straight opposite, a way
of being and doing, a chance to learn
what our bodies could shut up and say…
                                                     (“Technique”)

The ‘if’, or the dream, is of fairness, justice and beauty but the strict rhymes are hard to sustain. I was happier with the feel of “Anniversary Aubade”, a shorter, tighter contemplation of outside:

Sun edges in around the blinds.
The clocks that twitched us out of dreams
joke about the waiting morning,
massing hours of work and duty…

There’s a universality about all this, especially when the repeated striving is found to be ‘not enough’. The old truism that a pier is merely a disappointed bridge is nowhere enacted more wittily or perfectly than in “Moving the Books”:

We are moving the books again,
the hard-working books.

They’ve reached that desperate point of ‘one in one out’ because once again, the dream is of maintaining ‘order and beauty’. All of the actions in the first half of the poem have their reversed mirror image in the second. I suspect there might even be a shiver of recognition triggered by ‘again’ at the end of the first line, one that gains intensity by the fact that we know where this ends:

We carry them down the stairs,
the ones we cannot save.
We hold them piled in our arms,
the exhausted books we do not want.
We have been moving the books again.

However many readers the poem will have, it might accidentally be enough to undermine Auden’s statement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – especially if we all glance at the chaos we’ve created and try our best to have another sort-out. It’s light touch but it’s not a comfortable read. No one, and least of all Mark Robinson, would want that. Yes, it’s playful enough, and there are moments of lightness and release throughout – but the music, even when it’s ambivalent, is seldom all that comforting. The photo-slot on the back cover of How I Learned to Sing (2013) shows a young man with a ukelele (a la George Formby, a la Frank Skinner) but the slot is empty in 2024. More gravitas, or less confidence? Just saying.