A contemporary reading - notes

What follows are notes made during a first reading, a spontaneity of response as an attempt to evade the strict formal control exerted on and by these poems.

a diffuse, Protean, active God, ungraspable in any single form... metaphysical and 'real' or 'concrete' poems, the former often using very concrete, direct images within a more abstract flow, the latter with a metaphysical undercurrent... darkness, brightness, 'dramatised' or staged, ie words repeated, in new contexts, developed... the poem coming and going in and out of focus, within the steady formal precision... abstract, but with reference to the immediate, 'my ordinary coarse ground'... always an 'I' present, or returned to, the individual mind... immediate situation in the background, ideas foregrounded... ideas in things... ditto, atmospheric, but perhaps the idea is weaker, or has got lost... seems disconnected, abstruse... 'field mouse and unicorn', the real & tiny, the mythical & huge, presented in the same moment without differentiation... jaunty but unengaging, too clever... speed and simplicity (of syntax)... passion (secret, forbidden?)... again good opening but soon loses its direction... experiencing miracles is ordinary (part of their being miracles?)... visions, and bodily sensations... 'you', the reader, or a person (lover) known to the poet?... writing as an incomplete process, without God and the reader... like a dated 'symbolist' painting. Unconvincing overall, good individual images... future tense, a process intuited but not yet occured... 'you', another person (absent lover?), the reader, the summer, God?... observation -> speculation... importance of order ('gravity')... absence, transience, but the actuality, uncancelled, of what has been, he asserts... absolute particularity of the other. Significance of difference, rather than identity or 'match' - weakness or failure of metaphor. Individuality without solipsism, not 'private nowhere' but necessity/authority of 'the one law', truth & governance, solitude & connectedness, humanity's godliness - no absolutes or generalities other than those generated & realised by the individual according to universal (?) human principles. and to do this necessarily abjuring metaphor-!... 'immortal ordinariness', the divine as part/aspect of the human... observing the present, including the writing of this poem, acting in the future, with & without him, waving 'perpetual goodbye'... 'the one law' (does he ever define what this might be, or is it his substitute for God?)...human activity creating a sense of the divine, paradox that the former is transient, the latter not... 3rd person, relatively unusual. Direct, simple, effective. Solitude of creation, community of 'publishing'... his comments on the importance of the 'idea' in art (one wonders whether he appreciated conceptual art?!)... God and order, how are they defined / understood (moon and stars, immutable pulls beyond reason, have to be accepted (?) intuitively)...

© Ken Cockburn 2002

Norman MacCaig
The Sinai Sort