(This essay was first given as a talk at the launch of Flight Patterns in Prestatyn. Subsequently it was published in Poetry Wales 31.1 (July 1995) pp. 29-34.)
John Davies's poetry is the poetry of a man who thinks. Unwilling, or unable – since poets rarely have a choice in such matters – merely to drift though the world, registering its qualities with his senses, luxuriating in it, he must investigate it, interrogate it, compel it to divulge its patterns and render up its meanings. Conscious that poems are made out of language, and that language can be devious stuff, he nevertheless shows little sign of allowing himself to be persuaded that words can only talk about themselves, about their tenuous black lives in white paper.
In a poem called "A Letter", which appears both in the pamphlet The Silence in the Park (1982) and the collection The Visitor's Book (1985), he offers a sentence that gives a clue to what's going on in his poetry:
This light cooling through lives that moistly stir,
and which seems not always sharp or new, must go
to make metaphors framing what I just half-know
not only about myself till I gradually see it clear.
He begins here with a natural phenomenon – "light cooling through trees". Interestingly it isn't the light of full illumination, but something ageing, tired, familiar. His task as a poet is to press this unpromising, perhaps reluctant medium to give up as much of its essence as he can elicit. The "metaphors" in which knowledge is to be framed he declares to be "not only about myself": they constitute, that is, attempts to seize the objective universe of things.
This movement from sense-perception, from experience of natural objects and processes, to the making of metaphors, to the distillation of knowledge about those objects and processes, has a long-established poetic pedigree. It was the innovative, experimental and – as we now call it – "romantic" practice of Wordsworth and Coleridge at the end of the eighteenth century. Understood in this way, the writing of poetry is a mode of discovery: making metaphors out of what you "half-know" about something enables you to "gradually see it clear". There is a circular activity going on here: first you observe something; then you think about it; then you shape words about it, coming in the process to "see it" better than you did the first time. The verb "see" of course here has its common double value, meaning both to perceive and to understand. It's true, however, that no two people see a thing in quite the same way, so that there is always a subjective element in perception. There is no absolute objectivity. That judicious phrase "framing what I just half-know" in fact reminds me strongly of a passage from "Tintern Abbey". There Wordsworth writes
of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, – both what they half-create
And what perceive...
Wordsworth was well aware that seeing involved an act of collaboration between perceiver and thing perceived, in which the nature of the perceiver affects the way the thing perceived presents itself. The poet's act of seeing, then, of perceiving and understanding, is individual and unique: but if the poet's sensibility is sufficiently open and generous, and the poet's language sufficiently lucid and supple, that individual and unique act will give back to the reader or listener some part or parts of the world as he or she has always known it.
Some passages from Davies's most recent collection, Flight Patterns (1991), will illustrate what I mean. Here, first, is an extract from a poem called "Wings". This is a poem about a newly widowed woman. In the early part of it, details are carefully chosen to suggest the repetitiousness and uneventfulness of her life in a house by the sea:
Careful, afternoon measured
the estuary where tides weighed logs
then put them down, where hours drowned like clouds.
That image of the tide lifting and weighing logs, then putting them down again, memorably captures the pointless obsessiveness of certain natural processes. My second example is "Barry John", a concise and witty poem which offers a series of metaphors from a variety of sources – sailing, film-making, parachuting – in its effort to capture the elusive genius of its subject. It begins: "Barry John / who tacked like a yacht / through breakers, / tidewreck where he'd / been"; and works towards the fine paradox of the conclusion:
Then he'd crossed
their lines, parachuted
in, pass master
of the national art,
straightforward veering.
That pun – "pass master" instead of "past master" – is one of two in the poem and illustrates the presence of what is – for me – a particularly welcome quality in Davies's poetry – his humour. This humour is an aspect of the thinking poet. Still more accurately, it might be called wit – wit as it was understood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was greatly valued in a writer. "Wit" then was a synonym for "intelligence", and intelligence revealed itself in mastery over language, in the ability to manipulate word-ideas at will. Davies possesses that wit which is intelligence, and it's invaluable.
Reviewers have sometimes found his poetry a quiet poetry, and I suspect he thinks of himself, as he sits in his workshop carving birds out of wood and silence, as a quiet man, a man who flourishes in withdrawal from the world, who is at home with aloneness. Flight Patterns, however, is likely to strike the reader by the frequent strenuousness of the writing. It's my impression, in fact, that his poetry has got more strenuous the longer he's gone on writing. This is an interesting phenomenon, as practising poets often become more facile and mellifluous as they get older. They are settling down with the Muse, of course: she's no longer the exciting creature she was when they first met her: she's getting to look a bit long in the tooth herself. But this isn't the case, I think, with Davies. Some of the poems in Flight Patterns are both tough-minded and dense. A reader is made to experience the effortfulness that has gone into wrestling with an idea, a problem, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to resolve it. The English poet C. H. Sisson has said that the proof of a poem – any poem – is in its rhythm. That this is true one can see when reading a poem such as the title-poem of the collection. Here are the opening lines:
Staying, moving. Both versions
claim the coast, illusions
of choice steep
depths here and beyond keep
prompting: packed in redoubts,
hiders watch runners wearing out.
Our hill, to us a giant cast
in rock, eyes at sea sail past.
But nowhere special's lee
is also where ships are mostly,
and although smudged by tides,
here is a lifetime wide.
Reading through this – and I read it several times before I began to feel comfortable with it – the mind's eye can rarely settle down to ease, to anything approaching metrical regularity. Rhythmic expectation, encouraged by the visual appearance of couplets on the page, is continually defeated. The blunt, awkward rhythms, now rushing, now relaxing, now tumbling again, the jerked gear-changes and abrupt applications of the poetic brakes, signal a half-exasperated, half-amused, but always closely engaged and always honest response to the real difficulty of pinning down a shifting, elusive subject. Certainly we arrive at endstopped, sharply-pointed rhymes, but with little sense of relief at having come safely to harbour. Full stops are merely pauses in a series of tense and incomplete negotiations with a reality that's rich with paradox and in a continuous state of flux. The poem's subject is belonging – or not belonging – our relationship with place, always uncertain and never finalised: especially if we are emigrants. The poet concludes by saying that he can never be "Elsewhere-at-home", but this is a truth to which the poem's rhythms as much as its discussion have led him, since its rhythms throughout refuse to negotiate with the notion of settling down.
The style of "Flight Patterns" is, as one might expect, a style for thinking in – or better still, for thinking through. In this it's characteristic. Davies's style is flexible, responsive, agile. It enables easy and rapid transitions from outer to inner, and vice versa, from perception to cognition and back again. It has often the look of colloquial speech, but in the end it's a compromise, a literary language with the gestures and flavours of common idiom. We don't all speak in quite the same way, of course. When, a few years ago, I asked Davies if he thought that he writes as he speaks, his answer was revealing. He wrote:
I think so but I might be wrong. I've always spoken too fast, when fully engaged in conversation – the result, I've assumed, of having been brought up in a family of seven: get in, say your piece and get out before you're interrupted – and often have to make a conscious effort to be intelligible.
This testimony has the ring of truth about it. I'm not convinced, however, that Davies writes as he speaks: the language of a poem such as "Flight Patterns" is too dense, too complex, too studied to be spontaneous. Responding to my sense of the effortfulness of some of his poems, he was again revealing:
...the poems go through a lot of drafts and I suppose I'm driven by my sense of the blunt crudity of earlier versions, their undeveloped possibilities and 'poetic' vagueness. Possibly wood-carving is an influence: it's only in the last hour of a thirty-hour job, after one has smoothed and polished into brownness what has been an ugly, dusty, pale thing, that it seems worthwhile. The rest is an act of faith. I scrap a lot of poems and carvings.
This analogy is persuasive – the more so because Davies has written some excellent poems about wood-carving: words, no less than woods, are there to be carved and honed and polished, and in this respect Davies is very much in tune with a prominent strand of the English-language Welsh poetic tradition.
The context of Davies's remarks, however, relates to the creative process, not to textual qualities to found in the finished article. Davies's work in recent years has been neither easy nor comfortable. And here one strikes an interesting paradox. While he's drawn to formal explorations, to confining words in sense-condensing cells of rhyme and stanza, he refuses to supply those qualities which normally go along with formal writing: smoothness, mellifluousness, iambic regularity. His language can be lumpy, clotted, his rhythms as rugged as a beach buggy bumping its way over a series of irregular dunes. The last thing one would be able to say about Flight Patterns is that its author is a graceful or elegant poet. He may well admire elegant poets – Richard Wilbur is a case in point – but he has no use for elegance himself. I remember being taken by him once to see the sea at Prestatyn. When we got there, having negotiated a jumble of winter-abandoned clapboard shacks, it was to find the tide in and lapping greasily at the long tarmacadam shelf that covered what in a state of nature would have been sand. It was a disconcerting prospect. Some of the less reader-friendly passages in his poetry (in Flight Patterns see, for example, "Utah" and "Mormons") recall that black macadam and its refusal of softness to the questing tide.
A thinking poet's poetry will always be about something: it will never be words for the sake of words, for the sake of symbols or the sake of music. It's true to say, I think, that Davies is still pursuing the theme he declared central to his first collection, Strangers, published in 1974:
I hadn't realised just how many of the poems measure the distances between people, especially people in towns: such distances have fascinated me for as long as I can remember… the fate of many old people illustrates this apartness most explicitly of all. After childhood, we move further and further away from each other and freeze…
These distances have always between notable, but in Flight Patterns they loom greater than ever before. As Davies has gone on writing, his experience of America has taken on increasing significance. There was a handful of poems about this experience in his first full collection, At the Edge of Town (1981). Then, in 1985, a third of The Visitor's Book's three sections was given up to America. Now, in Flight Patterns, America moves to the forefront of the poet's attention: the first of the book's two halves consists of American poems. The third poem in the book, "Flights", sounds the theme that the collection will keep coming back to, like a dog to a favourite bone. Here the distance investigated is that between an ageing American duck farmer and his wartime experience in England as a pilot. The duck farmer asks his son, who is off on a trip to England, to look up a wartime flame of his in Dawley, The son fails to find her. He buys a hat with a pigeon feather to take back across the Atlantic, and the feather stands as an emblem for how bird, and time, have flown: the teasing residues of memory are all that the past will allow us.
A characteristic line in a later poem from the Welsh section of the book could have appeared in any of Davies's books:
What we travel from also moves from us...
Often the poet himself is on the move, and restlessness is built into his explorations. One poem, "Tracks", consists of three stanzas. The first considers Utah and its huge spaces and distant horizons: here all roads lead away from human habitations. The second stanza considers Holywell. Here, humans have a much longer history. Here the poet associates space with ruins – ruins in which lives once converged and still may. The third stanza situates us in a signal-box on a railway line, a location between alternatives, of uncommitment and even rootlessness (the displaced poet, nowhere – or everywhere? – at home), but he
turns and standstill cover's blown where sea
scrapes distance clear where the mute tide, plunging,
detonates with one surge what the other has given.
"Standstill" is an illusion: one has to move:
He lives on lines leaning in then out, gleams
of tall ladders you want to climb both ways.
We are left imagining distances in both directions, distances that the poet himself has no option but to travel, taking us with him.
Flight Patterns, then, is about travelling, about moving and staying and returning, about belonging or not belonging. But if it's concerned with flight, as its title tells us, it's also concerned with patterns. These patterns are in the most obvious sense patterns of human behaviour, human movement. In a scarcely less important sense, however, they are the visual patterns – half-abstract, half-concrete – that words make on the page. "Tracks" declares the equality of three ideas – the idea of Utah, the idea of Holywell, and the idea of journeying – by giving each of them a stanza of exactly nine lines. Utah and Holywell balance one another exactly, like the charged pans of a scales, and the signal-box of the third stanza constitutes the fulcrum which lifts them into the pure air of the poem.
Poetic form is a much misunderstood matter nowadays. Sometimes one reads, in the blurb of some poet's new collection, of his or her "sense of form", only to find a disappointing shapelessness in the free verse between the covers. Form has to be formal; so-called "organic form", as the critic Timothy Steele has persuasively argued in his book Missing Measures, cannot be shapeless, it must have pattern and symmetry like organic life – like a tree, a human body, or a DNA molecule. Form has to do with a writer's perception and control of stanza or paragraph, with the way in which individual blocks of words express and weigh ideas (rather like that tide we encountered earlier, picking up and putting down logs), and the way in which these blocks relate to one another in whole poems. Davies's interest in form has always been apparent, and in Flight Patterns it seems to me that he is often at his best where his sense of form is quite explicit. I'm thinking, for example, of "Decoys", in which alternating stanzas pursue two separate narratives – the outer and enclosing one about carving birds, the inner one about hunting them. Most poets would have settled for a simple contrast between the two pursuits, and seen them as creative and destructive respectively. But Davies treats carving and hunting as two kinds of "stalking", parallel as the poem's form implies. They are pretexts for emotional satisfactions too elusive for words to nail down.
I'm thinking also of "Burying the Waste", which is a sequence of six sonnets. Davies has always been attracted to the sonnet, and all his books have contained examples of the form. The sonnet seems particularly suitable for his taut explorations, for his play with paradoxes and opposites, for his drive through statement and counter-statement towards resolution. Whilst he happily accepts the curbs and chances of rhyme, however, finding it a stimulant rather than a narcotic, he has never been enamoured of the tick of the metronome, and his sonnets are as characteristic of his style as his free verse poems are.
To conclude, then. The characteristic strengths of Davies's writing all point back to his being a "thinking" poet – his concern with ideas; his commitment to exploration, discovery and definition; his frequent rhythmic strenuousness; his wit; his abiding concern with form. At his most effortful he lays down a challenge to the reader, who must then try to match him. To sign off with one of his own favourite metaphors, some poems measure their readers. John Davies writes such poems.
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