{"id":2159,"date":"2019-06-02T11:31:28","date_gmt":"2019-06-02T11:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2159"},"modified":"2019-06-02T11:34:47","modified_gmt":"2019-06-02T11:34:47","slug":"ruth-padel-salon-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2159","title":{"rendered":"Ruth Padel, “Salon Noir”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a remarkable poem. You can link to an earlier version of its text than the one in Emerald<\/em> by following this link<\/a> to the praccrit.com website, where there\u2019s also an interview with Padel.<\/p>\n

The poem opens \u201cWhen we went down into the cave \/ this summer\u201d. I\u2019ve had a nagging sense of something oracular and dramatic lurking behind those breathless rhythms and it suddenly hit me what it was \u2013 the opening of Ezra Pound\u2019s Canto I:<\/p>\n

And then went down to the ship,
\nSet keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
\nWe set up mast and sail on that swart ship<\/p>\n

Random association on my part? I doubt it. This canto, the translation of a translation of a passage in Homer, describes Odysseus\u2019s journey to the underworld to take counsel of the dead Tiresias. He meets many ghosts, including that of his mother, so there\u2019s a very close thematic similarity between it and \u201cSalon Noir\u201d. I think the hinted counterpoint between Pound\u2019s bardic declamatory style and the intimately personal tone of Padel\u2019s opening is an example of her skill in invoking and overlaying different voices, in this case by allusion. From the beginning we\u2019re being subliminally primed to see the journey into the cave as a journey to the underworld. We\u2019d soon be seeing it like that anyway, of course, but I think this first planting of the seed in our unconscious makes the imaginative identification seem that much smoother and more inevitable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the speaking voice of this first section that I\u2019m most interested in, though, or the dramatic contrast between the voice of this first section and that of the second, beginning \u201cTake nothing\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0said the guide\u201d. Something that particularly impresses me in Emerald<\/em> is Padel\u2019s skill in modulation, making quite radical changes of tone, style and rhythm seem to happen in a smooth, natural and integrated way. I\u2019ve called Padel\u2019s rhythms here breathless. That\u2019s one thing that creates a sense of intimacy and immediacy. Another is the low-key diction, another the way the poet seems to be taking for granted that we\u2019ll know who \u201cwe\u201d are, who \u201cboth of them\u201d are, who \u201ceveryone\u201d is, as we might in a conversation among familiars. She seems to speak from within a situation, under immediate emotional pressure and to people who\u2019ll share an understanding of that pressure. What she says largely comes out as a series of associative gulps or gasps in the plainest of plain language. Any of the following could be imagined as literal transcriptions of exclamations in response to what someone else has said: \u201cBoth of them dead within six hours!\u201d \u201cOn the same night!\u201d \u201cA hundred miles apart!\u201d \u201cMy mother and my aunt!\u201d The lack of punctuation increases the sense of a flustered, unstructured flow in which the facts that matter leap out naked and essential, choosing themselves, not chosen by an organising mind. But of course what\u2019s there and how it\u2019s presented has been chosen and organised by the poet. This organisation seems subtle enough in the version published on the praccrit.com website, but tiny changes in the version published in Emerald<\/em> refine it still further \u2013 the removal of \u201cin the Pyrenees\u201d from the second line and of \u201cwe all loved\u201d from \u201cin the family house we all loved\u201d, and some changes of line break. The language draws complementary strengths from utter plainness \u2013 \u201ceveryone upset\u201d \u2013 and from very poetic phrasing, of the kind you might imagine as flowing from Yeats\u2019 pen \u2013 \u201cour gentle\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 daring\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 painter\u201d. That leaps out and seizes the mind because of the way its unrestrained lyricism contrasts with the starkness of the phrases surrounding it, but it fits in too \u2013 punctuated purely by spaces, it reads like a series of gasps of private discovery, not the outward-facing declaration of something already decided that it would have seemed if it had been punctuated by commas.<\/p>\n

Spacing is vital to movement within the section. It also helps bring out the architecture of the whole, making it easier to see how firmly the first sentence is supported by its beginning and end: \u201cWhen we went down into the cave \u2026 we were each a little afraid.\u201d Between that beginning and end we have a flow of parentheses suggesting the bubbling up of ideas whose life in the moment is independent of the larger argument, whose importance, in other words, is purely intrinsic. And in the three short sentences that follow we have examples of the book\u2019s easiness of transition between intensity and comedy (\u201cThe young\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 apparently\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 were thinking of vampires\u201d) and a down to earth realism that earths the poetry (\u201cFor me it was breaking an ankle\u201d).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the next change of gear that\u2019s truly magical, though \u2013 the change from the fluttery, flustered movement of the first section to the musical clarity and authority of the second. Here we draw closer to Pound\u2019s epic and oracular voice, but with a crucial difference. There\u2019s something comically self-important about Pound\u2019s speaker, and the strenuous affectation of his language gives a taint of unreality to everything he says, threatening to tip its dramatic power into melodrama. Padel\u2019s remarkable achievement is that while she makes the guide\u2019s words echo with myths of the descent to the underworld, she does so with a simplicity that seem to me part of the profound humanity of her poem. The sheer ordinariness of the words is crucial. It gives the poetic moment its modesty. It grounds it and its mythical resonance in simple reality, a reality reduced to bare essentials. So much is easy to say. It\u2019s also easy to say that the change of tone from the first section largely depends on the shift from a seemingly unstructured flow to a series of terse, tightly organized direct and indirect commands in a series of three-line stanzas. What I can\u2019t pin down or describe is the music<\/em> of the section, although that\u2019s the very feature that gives it its extreme beauty, that makes the contrast with the previous section so moving and disturbing, and that has made me come back to trying to comment on this poem! It\u2019s something I can only feel, whether in a soaring of the spirit at the very sound of the phrase \u201ca girl \/ from the green hills of the Ari\u00e8ge\u201d (the line end pause after \u201cgirl\u201d is crucial to the effect) or in submission to the stony fall of what follows:<\/p>\n

Take nothing \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0said the guide\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a girl
\nfrom the green hills of the Ari\u00e8ge
\nwho knew every centimetre of the caves.<\/p>\n

Leave behind
\nall bags and mobile phones.
\nYou\u2019re not allowed to take pictures<\/p>\n

and you\u2019ll need your hands.
\nThe path is slippery
\nbroken \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0rough.<\/p>\n

You have to crouch
\nyou\u2019ll be carrying a heavy torch
\nbut don\u2019t touch the walls<\/p>\n

if you stumble. Even your breath
\neach in-and-out of oxygen
\ndoes a little destroying.<\/p>\n

Thematically, that soaring of the spirit at the mention of green anticipates the beautifully poised ending of the whole poem, in which acceptance of death and loss brings a sharpened joy in life:<\/p>\n

We came back changed. We saw black rock
\njagged round the entrance\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the golden eye
\nof afternoon. Those who came before
\n…….<\/span>the dancers \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0the mothers \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0were gone into the hill.
\nBut the mountains \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0rising one behind the other
\nwere herds of green bison\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 drifting away into the sky.<\/p>\n

Who knows, I may come back to it. Emerald<\/em> is a book to reread endlessly. However, I\u2019m fairly sure that my next post on it will be a review written some months ago and due to appear shortly in The North.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a remarkable poem. You can link to an earlier version of its text than the one in Emerald by following this link to the praccrit.com website, where there\u2019s also an interview with Padel. The poem opens \u201cWhen we went down into the cave \/ this summer\u201d. I\u2019ve had a nagging sense of something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ruth-padel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159"}],"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=2159"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2167,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159\/revisions\/2167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}