Ian Brinton reviews
by
Laurie Duggan
In
an 1851 lecture on ‘Walking’ Thoreau suggested that he had met with ‘but one or
two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking…who had
a genius, so to speak, for sauntering’. Thoreau considers two derivations of
the verb to saunter: there are those who ask for charity under the pretence of
going to ‘la Sainte Terre’, the Holy Landers, and there are those without land
or a home, sans terre, ‘no more
vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking
the shortest course to the sea’. Laurie Duggan’s latest collection of 29
‘Allotment’ poems possesses that marvellous quality of sauntering which allows
the poet and the reader to recognise the small details which accumulate to
provide a whole picture.
In
the opening poem, sitting in his local pub, Duggan’s range of meditative reflection
moves him from Ken Bolton to Paul Blackburn, Australia to
New American Poetry, whilst his eye roves around:
the hops
dangle, as hops do
from
the dark wood
(not the ‘dark wood’)
the
light gone by four
a gent reads the Daily Telegraph
(‘the
darkness
surrounds us’)
This
is not Dante confronting his mid-life crisis in ‘silva oscura’ but a wry glance
at locality. The range of literary reference throughout this little sequence of
poems is enormous as the poet weaves from Charles Olson to Donald Allen, Rimbaud
to Camus, Susan Howe to Philip Whalen and from Robert Frost to the sly brevity
of ‘Allotment 9’ with its glance at Keats and Eliot:
the small gnats
have
ceased to wail;
dogwood’s
leaves lost
red
branches bared
If
at first glance this handsomely produced little volume, with its cover by Basil
King, gives off the breath of the whimsical then a closer look at how language
works as a medium of contact and loss soon asserts itself as I find myself
drawn back again and again to the compassionate tone which informs the
tightness of the verse:
Allotment 21
slight airs on sea,
short
waves,
the
sound of talk from 1979
through
rumble and tape hiss,
a
conversation almost,
of
import once,
distant
voices consigned
to
the unintelligible
Although
the opening words here initially suggest the outside (a seascape) the pun on
‘airs’ takes us forward to the musical references of ‘rumble’ and ‘hiss’,
themselves bound down to reference to a tape-recording of voices which have now
long gone. The ‘short waves’ bind together not only the initial seascape but
also a reference to the radio, itself a temporary conveyance of human
interaction, whilst at the same moment nodding at the familiarity of a
valedictory hand-sign: not one that lasts long! A conversation from thirty-two years ago,
‘almost’, had an importance ‘once’ before being consigned to the unintelligible
as waves themselves melt back into the ocean and one is left merely with
Matthew Arnold’s ‘breath/Of the night-wind’.
The
sharp edge of this saunterer’s gaze wonders how many people will turn up for a
poetry reading in the William IVth pub in Shoreditch and notes ‘Cameron’s
Britain’ in ‘dark shapes beyond double-glazing’:
an imaginary space
where imagination is redundant
In
the chapter ‘Where I lived, and what I lived for’ in Walden, Thoreau rejoices in the moment:
Morning brings
back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito
making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest
dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any
trumpet that ever sang of fame.
The
imposing seriousness of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist is, in one
sense, a world away from Laurie Duggan’s allotment. However, in another way,
they share a similar eye and ear:
a
man in a shapeless coat
enters
and exits
a
spectre
with vivid carry-bag
ghosted
photographs
I
was/wasn’t here
now/then
the
v-necked staff, maybe
didn’t
notice
I can’t
position
myself in history
so
easily.
As Emerson put it in Nature (1836) ‘We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands.’ Like any allotment Laurie Duggan’s book
is a delight to return to time and again.
Ian Brinton is reviews editor for Tears In The Fence; a poetry critic and scholar. He reviews regularly for Eyewear.
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