Voluntary<\/i>, by Adam Thorpe. Jonathan Cape. 70 pp. \u00a310.00<\/p>\n
Long sentences subtly inflected by metre and stanza pattern are characteristic of Adam Thorpe\u2019s style and essential to what he does. He\u2019s a poet of complex, nuanced reflection, a poet who weaves things together rather than isolating them, who makes you feel whole sequences of ideas taking light from, generating and collapsing into others. The deepest pleasures and illuminations of his writing are to be found in following these long tracking movements of feeling and thought.<\/p>\n
Take this from \u201cThe Swimming Pool (Kinshasa, 1968<\/i>)\u201d:<\/p>\n
Our gardener would rake its gloom
\nlike a patch of ground, stirring it<\/p>\n
to a distressed, even darker core
\nof the almost-living and the nearly drowned:<\/p>\n
scooped with a net for the rusty bucket,
\nhe\u2019d pour them out in the no-man\u2019s-land<\/p>\n
before the proper bush: each night\u2019s haul
\na sprawl of drunken guests, bristling<\/p>\n
with feelers and sodden legs, still
\nin a rush to be free: capsized hulls with oars,<\/p>\n
tiny nests of torment …<\/p>\n
This is brilliantly precise, vivid description of the remembered scene, with the division into couplet-length stanzas holding a magnifying glass of attention over the details even as the syntax and punctuation insistently pull us on past them, even at a point (the colon after \u201cdrowned\u201d) where we might have been allowed to stop. The alertness of the language makes itself felt at every level, in the immaculate pacing of syntax and line-ending, in the patterning and expressiveness of sound, and in the depth of resonance in individual words. There\u2019s a wonderful imaginative energy behind the passage\u2019s metaphorical transformations, particularly, for me, in the transformation of overturned bugs into capsized hulls with oars.\u00a0 The mere presence of such imaginative energy in the description of suffering creates frissons of cruelty and perversity which both suggest the fascinated horror of the child staring into the pool and (later in the poem) turn to sharp compassion. But of course much more is going on than just description of an African swimming pool, or even the reliving of a haunting childhood memory. Ripples of analogy carry our imaginations through a range of human indignities and catastrophes. These obviously include the catastrophes of Africa, particularly of the Congo, and of Europe\u2019s relation to them. Kinshasa was Leopoldville, the administrative heart of King Leopold\u2019s murderous exploitation of the Congo and its peoples, chillingly investigated in Adam Hochschild\u2019s King Leopold\u2019s Ghost<\/i> and the inspiration for Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/i>. The very phrase \u201cheart of darkness\u201d seems to be recalled by \u201cdarker core\u201d. 1968 is only a few years after the horrors of the first Congolese civil war. Several phrases within the passage glow with a particular heat in the context of the Congo\u2019s prolonged sufferings. Later in the poem it\u2019s easy to associate the boy\u2019s helpless compassion for the insects with the ineffectuality of Western aid in that region. Crucially, though, the flow of suggestions is never stilled or hardened into allegory or into a single set of metaphorical relations. The poem keeps moving on, one idea keeps turning into another.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Swimming Pool\u201d illustrates key strengths of the volume as a whole. None of Thorpe\u2019s poems stay where they start; all move through wide circles of association, most gathering a considerable weight of implication and reflection on the way. A number involve striking quasi-Metaphysical conceits, like \u201cSubtraction\u201d, a poem set in the Carthaginian quarry, which begins \u201cEl Haouaria, where they hollowed out \/ Carthage, is now a vaulted omega of absence\u201d, and explores this thought and its implications for another 22 lines. In a sense a Metaphysical conceit is very abstract in that it uses a concrete vehicle to define abstract ideas. What is impressive in Thorpe\u2019s poetry, though, is how much the intellectual and abstract returns to the concrete. In my last quotation, an abstract idea is given a wonderful physical presence by language. Equally important is something I\u2019d relate to the fact that Thorpe is a novelist as well as a poet. Ideas in this book are always developing out of and returning to richly evoked experiences, to situations and stories \u2013 in this case the actual experience of visiting the quarry, the imagined experience of the slaves who worked there (\u201cBeneath the silence you can hear the moans\u201d) and Thorpe\u2019s concern for his own children.<\/p>\n
Parents, children, hollowing, absence. There\u2019s a powerful group of poems on the death of the poet\u2019s father in which the hollowing out of the father and his absence after death are strongly felt, and generate subtle thoughts about the emptiness underlying all life. This group in the middle of the volume perhaps forms its imaginative core. And yet these pieces, and the book as a whole, are anything but depressing. Poem after poem glints with wit, sometimes darkly sardonic, sometimes humorous and warm, sometimes both at once. \u201cNiagara\u201d \u2013 a beautiful expression of wonder at nature\u2019s power \u2013 includes a description of the sudden vanishing of the river\u2019s flow \u201cas if God were suddenly to come across \/\/ His own absence, or that human trick \/ He\u2019s never quite fathomed \/\/ called letting your hair down, \/ called letting everything go.\u201d Look at the blending of tones there, the subtlety of the theological humour, the rueful yet resilient acceptance of mortality, the impossibility of separating the downbeat from the upbeat, the sophisticated poise, the lightness of touch and, at the same time, the groundedness suggested by the colloquial expressions. Voluntary<\/i> richly repays reading and rereading for the range of its subject matter, the sensitivity and depth of its feeling for life and the way it enlarges one\u2019s sense of the possibilities of poetic expression.<\/p>\n
This review appeared in Acumen 74 and I would like to thank Acumen’s editors for their permission to post it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Voluntary, by Adam Thorpe. Jonathan Cape. 70 pp. \u00a310.00 Long sentences subtly inflected by metre and stanza pattern are characteristic of Adam Thorpe\u2019s style and essential to what he does. He\u2019s a poet of complex, nuanced reflection, a poet who weaves things together rather than isolating them, who makes you feel whole sequences of ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-thorpe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1359,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions\/1359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}