Signs in Harmony


In the 'Introductory Afterthoughts' to his collection of essays The Pursuit of the Kingfisher (1983), Christopher Middleton defines poetry as 'a cross-coded music of signs'. When poets make large statements about the nature of poetry, they tend to be describing their own. Middleton's definition is no exception; it captures something essential about the remarkable poems he has been writing for well over sixty years. Though massive, the present collection actually represents a winnowing of verse published between 1948 and last year, together with 'work in progress' and a small selection of translations (from Catullus, Rilke, and Robert Desnos) - the work for which, somewhat unfairly, he is best known. Now, with his Collected Poems, his genuine distinction as an original poet in his own right can be seen.

Middleton is sometimes described as an 'experimental' poet, but that seems a misnomer. True, he has written at least one 'calligraphe' (Birth of Venus, a suggestive funnel of Vs) and indulged in dadaistic 'sound poems', such as Armadillo Cello Solo (with the yodelling refrain 'didl dodl dadl'). In an interview with the poet Marius Kociejowski, Middleton remarked that 'the capacity to be surprised' is fundamental to good poetry, and he is as likely to surprise us with a classical elegy in impeccable couplets as with 'microzoic nonsonnets'. Indeed, the ballads, odes, rhyming quatrains, and other traditional forms on display here (however cunningly camouflaged) quite overwhelm the 'experimental' verse. Still, it would probably be wrong to force this most restless of poets into any narrow category. As with the question of his poetic 'nationality', such considerations appear beside the point. Born in Cornwall in 1926, Middleton has lived and taught in Texas since 1966 - though always (as if to vex categories definitively) as a 'resident alien'. His best poems draw their inspiration from foreign places: Austin and Abilene are as familiar to him as Paris and Vienna, or the rocky hinterlands of Greece and Anatolia. Unlike, say, Thom Gunn, who worked hard to accommodate his hard-won English style with a rougher and more free-wheeling American manner, Middleton seems at home everywhere. He makes wherever he alights a native place. His landscapes, however exotic, are always intimate.

The 'music of signs' is audible throughout. When Middleton describes the marble altar of a cathedral in Vaison-la-Romaine, he speaks of 'sinuous ligatures close-packes as wheat'. These are not Baudelairean 'correspondences' - glints of transcendence in the world's façade - but signs which disclose their significane only in harmony with other signs. In Middleton's work, it is such 'ligatures' - what he has called the 'little unspectacular conjunctions' which create the music. This doesn't always work. The otherwise enchanting Prospecting in Sicily, April 1787, in the voice of the young Goethe, is marred by the clogged music of its final line ('Ego agonized recall gravity dragging its Wurzel down'); fortunately, such discordant notes are rare.

The 'cross-coding' too is much in evidence. Middleton's vistas tend to be encypted with hints, as in the brilliant Skaters in the Luxembourg Gardens, 1909, in which an old photogtaph of a blowsy Parisian skating party, seen eighty years later in Texas, captures a moment of lost insouciance - a 'lull in a bubble' - overshadowed only by awareness of the trench warfare soon to come. But foreboding alone doesn't account for the poem's power. The glass over the print is 'webbed with hairlines'. The past it frames, that 'secret place' we might yearn to 'tunnel back' to, as to some Eden of the ordinary, has changed in our hands, and now 'the scratches hold their accidental ground'. This is what in another poem (Still Small Voice) Middleton calls 'braiding the split fires of time'.

In Some Words about Some Silence, he evokes the shadow of a buzzard over a city where 'people / Have lost interest in that sort of thing'. The last stanza runs:

I should tell them how free with silence it is,
When such a shadow crosses throngs of leaves
And when the leaves, moving to no measure,
Catch at the shadow, though too late,
Too late, for look, a breath, and it has gone.

In the Collected Poems, birds and other winged things occupy pride of place; bird-song itself forms a recurrent motif, serving as a natural counterpoint to the artifice of verse. (In a similar vein, Middleton points out in a note that the claw-marks of turtles 'scuffled on wet sand' bear an unexpected resemblance to the 'flush and indented lines of Roman elegiacs', a genre at which he excels.) In this stanza, the bird's shadow and the 'throngs of leaves' which catch at it pass each other by. It is the slightest of signs, a vanishing semaphore. But one wouldn't have guessed that a second of silence could be so musical.