The Wind Dog
Tom Paulin
Faber, 96pp, £7.99
There's no doubt, in Tom Paulin's sixth collection of poems, that the going will be rough; ever since his early experiments in Fivemiletown, dispensing with punctuation, regular syntax and the maintenance of a line of thought, his work has been jazzier, the lines bitten short, worrying at words, wallowing in the onomatapoeic qualities of dialect and slang. He made it seem as if the poems were being written on the hoof, that he was thinking, slightly uncertainly, out loud; and the passionate, political, domineering tones that one sees in his criticism (whether from the Academy or on Late Review) were rendered in big, boundless splashes on the canvas of the page.
This approach has as many problems as virtues, and in The Wind Dog, Paulin is beginning to show an irritating defensiveness regarding his chosen aesthetic. In "Stile" (something of a pun, that title), the second poem, he comments that "most critics they're vexed / by what's clumsy or naif", and in the work that follows he deliberately adopts a childlike relish for the sound of words as much as their sense, sometimes delightfully rendering a synaesthetic approach in which the tastes, textures and sounds of his childhood are linked to the words of his childhood Ulster.
He appears, at points, to be worming his way back through the accretions of language to a primal, almost original and innocent mode of expression ("the lingo-jingo of beginnings"), though, as ever, is astute enough to see the dangers in such an endeavour; the imperialism in that word "jingo", for instance, and the early, self-correcting line "with a certain - no not native flair", which rejects the nationalism that might attach itself to a search for origins.
The fact is, though, that this is not "clumsy or naif" - it is faux naïf, carefully clumsy. It allows Paulin a licence that is not always poetic. Constantly, throughout The Wind Dog, Paulin is having his cake and eating it. The most startling example of this comes in the poem "Fortogiveness", which has no aesthetic merits, and is a pre-emptive apologia.
Paulin has made Ulster his territory poetically and morally. (He once dismissed Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha for not mentioning the Troubles, and it had to be pointed out to him that the novel was about a 10-year-old boy in Dublin whose parents were divorcing and who might, therefore have had other things on his mind.) It has not escaped anyone's attention that Paulin, born in Leeds and educated in Hull and Oxford, has had a professional career almost entirely in England.
In a poncey poem about doing a poetry reading with Hugo Williams (for heaven's sake), Paulin sarcastically asks forgiveness for his expatriate status; after all, he says, he's had to work for a salary, unlike lucky Hugo, the freelance writer. And, yes, maybe he is "affecting the dialect", maybe his vowels have got "shifted or faked". This would all be quite sweet if it weren't actually so fraudulent; Paulin is not asking forgiveness, he is assuming there is nothing really to forgive; and forgiveness, after all, is not a quality he would admit into his own criticism.
Paulin's trenchant moral and political criticisms of his literary subjects are well known; at times he blazingly and brilliantly situates other writers in a political or historical context, at others he merely slings vulgar judgments at them for their politics or mores. It is no surprise to see his hobby-horses trotted out in the poems - his verse has always been easier to understand when read alongside his journalistic criticism - and so, for example, the recent kerfuffle over T S Eliot's anti-semitism is prosaically yanked into a meditation on Chagall:
". . . quite a few critics
choose
either to forgive or forget
those bits of verse
and one piece <BRof coldly sinister prose
that're about
his hatred of all Jews"
This is not coldly sinister, but it might as well be prose, and is a dismayingly simplistic form of criticism.
The phrase "wind dog", we learn, is an Ulster word for a fragment of a rainbow. This happily leads Paulin to the image of a broken covenant, either between God and man, or between Logos, the transcendental signifier, and what is referred to - hence the nagging qualifications of words as soon as they are employed, as if every statement is necessarily an approximation, and every word has nuances, even politics, that must be explored. Paulin takes this stance in various directions, some exciting and novel, some spurious or suspect. His connective phrase "this means" - which he has employed in numerous poems - becomes a way of yoking together his disparate ideas, and is sometimes nakedly opportunistic. Likewise, he justifies these diversions as a liberation from linear, teleological thinking :
as if the only direction is towards
some naff goal
as if there must always be a link
from this to that
with no room ever to tinker
soodle or dander
- no it can be lazy your mind
and thrum on nothing if it so desires
absolutely nothing
Indeed it can, but there is no reason to suppose anyone will benefit from hearing that lazy thrumming.
The Wind Dog is, in some ways, a triumph for Paulin. He can unload his academic and artistic allusions to claim credibility and authority; he can put in all his political and moral pieties with the slightest excuse; and he can justify the slippery, unargued, ill-thought and unstyled passages in between as a brave attempt to go childishly (or mischievously, as he puts it) wandering and wondering. There are a few good, sweet and complex poems in this collection, and the language is excitingly foregrounded and squeezed for music and meaning. But too much of this book demonstrates Paulin at his most self-indulgent. At this point in his career, there's every chance he will get away with it.
