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Projects » Poets' Pub » Iain Crichton Smith

Ends & Beginnings

A contemporary reading

The book is in six sections, plus a prefatory poem, 'Poetry', perhaps too slight a poem to stand as a marker for the collection as a whole, but in many ways typical of Smith's work. It is discussed in some detail in Robin Fulton's review of the collection (see Select bibliography).

The first section opens with 'Lewis', about an old man on the island who has spent time in Canada but is now back home, 'holding at night in [his] bed/a dialogue with God'. The poem is at first addressed to, and then written in the voice of, the old man, suggesting on the part of the poet both a distance from and an identification with the character. As in many poems throughout the book, it is a bright autumn day. The sea around Lewis is contrasted with 'the lakes/and rivers of British Columbia', a contrast heightened by the speaker's concept of God's heaven as 'Your kingdom of fresh water'. In the opening lines, 'The waves/are perversely sparkling', presumably 'perversely', because the old man sees himself as a 'sinner', and because the Bible stories are 'more real to [him] than Lewis', so present delight or beauty is considered undeserved and anyway goes unperceived. At the end of the poem, rather than suggesting any hope of salvation, it is 'the tall magnificent spruce/[which] are climbing to heaven'.

The poem introduces the book's main themes in a concise and measured way: the perception of the natural world through a theological or, as Smith prefers to put it, dogmatic filter, as opposed to unmediated sensory perception, and the centrality of Lewis to his concerns, as a natural and theological landscape. The bareness of the landscape is equated with the bareness of its religious culture, an extreme form of Presbyterianism. Smith takes his stand against this, insisting that life can only be lived fully and meaningfully outwith its strictures, in a kind of existential openess to transience. The strong antagonism he feels against the Bible and its teachings is expressed unequivocally in the following poem, 'The Bible' which closes with the lines

And its victims have black faces and its saints have batons
and their diseased ethics are undazzled by rainbows.

There is occasionally a sermonising aspect in Smith's work which places him much closer to the tradition he is attacking that he would appear, elsewhere, to admit. Lewis is his touchstone; he gauges notions of beauty and freedom in relation their lack on the island. It is a negative touchstone, and leaves a certain ambiguity and tension at the heart of his work.

The tension is less problematic in the poems about teaching and academic life, in which Smith is able both to acknowledge the value of literature and warn of its potential to fog our perception of the world. The poems in section 4 are in many ways the most interesting in the book as a group, teasing back and forth the relationship of art to life, particularly the appreciation as opposed to the creation of art. 'The Scholar' presents a shabby figure undone by a belief in the unworldliness of literature, a figure who, like the naive students in 'The Young Girls', has gone on believing that 'poetry is about misty mornings', rather than integrating it with life in the present. The poem ends with his remembering a cafe which he liked to visit as an undergraduate, 'whose owner could talk knowledgeably about Proust'. This figure can perhaps be seen having found a certain equilibrium, living and working in the world while taking an interest, and gaining something from, literature. The successful academic of 'The Scholar Says Goodbye' fails to mention literature, yet he comes across as successful in terms of not just his career but of his life overall. Taking his farewells from those he has worked with and is obviously fond of, he is able to face the unknowns of the future with neither fearfulness nor complacency. The final lines compare him to a goose flying north in the spring, 'ungregarious guest of a new spring'. Smith is sensitive to the corroding effect caused by too deep an immersion in literature at the expense of interaction with the world, indeed as an excuse not to attempt such interaction.

Smith happily finds inspiration in the everyday: 'the constant music of the possible' (p.9), 'the random kaleidoscope of images' (p.105), 'multifarious glitter' (p.134). Poems in section 3 use various images of a vase to link the transient and the eternal. In 'The Theft of the Vases' two vases, stolen and assumed to have been spirited out of the country, are connected with Keats' Grecian urn, a kind of ideal form. This leads Smith to muse that 'Eternity exists in another place', a phrase humorous in its absurdity, which also underlines Smith's belief that it is only through our perception of the transient that we can begin to comprehend eternity. In 'Putting out the Ashes' the act of filling the bin at night grants the poet a sense of the limitless energy and bounty of things. In 'Waiting for the Ferry', the poet conceives 'a dead horse' made of the debris, real and imagined, in the filthy river, which speaks to call out for life 'on the shore... among buttercups'; an act of recycling, as well as an act of creative imagination. But there is also the constant battle against eternity, purity, death, which threaten to overwhelm the living messiness of things. This is perhaps most brilliantly realised in the poem called simply 'A Story', in which in taxi driver is forced to defend himself with a 'rusty rail' pulled quickly from a fence, when he is attacked by 'the madman' wielding a 'pure sword'.

The poems are written using a variety of stanza forms and line lengths, and from the metrically regular to free verse. Perhaps the most common form of stanza is the tercet, usually with an irregularity somewhere in the poem: a stanza split to form a single line and a couplet, a quatrain and a couplet instead of two tercets, etc. Edwin Morgan has written of Smith's work:

He wrote quickly, usually without revision, and with the risk (which he was aware of) of being careless and slapdash when he was not writing under good pressure. On the other hand, he gained in a sort of unstudied, often surprising lyrical quality which he couldn't have got any other way.

The work often appears slapdash, but usually repays further attention. The way images and ideas resonate off each other within individual poems, and within the collection as a whole, is striking, and it is interesting to note the range of poems which reviewers of the book refer to, as if each had been struck by something particular, rather than all agreeing on the 'major poems' within the collection and leaving the rest to their fate. Sometimes Smith's gamble does not seem to pay off: there are a number of poems in secion 1 which seem to add nothing new in terms of ideas or images; but overall the book offers a rewarding mix of 'natural' utterance underpinned by a density of ideas and images.

'The Spider' (section 3) spinning its web on (what else) 'a clear autumn day' is compared to the poet at work. Both are at the centre of 'a structure with nothing in it but itself', working 'a technique without ideas', and at the end of the poem the poet muses on why they should both still be doing what they do, after all

So much has been truly made,
the great responsible dead.

Smith seems to have moved beyond theology and academe, and is proposing poetry, all art, as 'a technique without ideas', something which will be made perfect by an absence of deliberate conceptual thought, and a consequent (it is implied) sensitivity to natural, inherent forms. Not that such forms are uncomplicated: the spider is initially compared to an 'astronaut', which works visually in terms of a being in space trailing a single line behind himself, but also in terms of the poet moving weightlessly in to the unknown, and the level of underlying sophistication making this act possible. There is an element of doubt as to why one should continue to attempt to make art, giving the achievements of the past, but Smith implies, comparing himself to the spider, that it is a natural, instinctive, central part of being alive.

This idea is explored later in the book in a much more problematic context. The book's final poem 'The Conversion' is written as the extended monologue of an Israeli soldier before and after battle. In it he thinks back to the deportation of the Jews to concentration camps in the 1940s. The Jews, like other characters through the book, were 'weighed down with the weight of [their] symbols', and their 'devotion to words/[has] clouded the world'. Their Nazi persecutors, on the other hand, were

... freshly-born

to the images of reality , to trains just as they were,
to guns just as they were, to the speechless landscape,

to the dew without sorrow, to the bouquets innocent of grief.

Here Smith seems to be testing his own belief in an non-ideological perception of the world against the nihilism of the Nazis, for whom 'History opened its gates, and all was permitted'. It's not clear what is to prevent his own existentialism slipping also into nihilism, that is, it is not clear what barriers he is erecting against such nihilism. The 'conversion' of this poem's title sees the speaker move from a belief in a righteous and vengeful God to an existential view that Death is the only transcendant reality, but in what way does this differ from the world-view of the Nazis, in what way guard against their nihilism? How do we live with and learn from the past without becoming trapped in 'a ruinous snare of history and books'? The poem offers a fine deconstruction of God to replace him with a 'final uncluttered pure humanity' which seems a rather vague and unconvincing notion to set against centuries of the persecution of the Jews, for example, and now the Israeli state's determined military measures against those it perceives as its enemies.

Smith's own example as a writer suggests not so much aetheism as the paradox or dialectic of struggling towards and celebrating an existential freedom while maintaining the intellectual touchstone of a longstanding literary and theological tradition, and perhaps also the geographical touchstone of a place of belonging.

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Poets' Pub

Iain Crichton Smith
Ends & Beginnings

Commentary

A note on the title

A description of the 1994 edition

The wider context

A contemporary reading

Select bibliography

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