Collected Poems
Donald Davie
ed Neil Powell
634pp, Carcanet, £14.95
Donald Davie's new Collected Poems is the fullest so far; it is an illuminating record of the poet's range. In his early "Tiger at the Movie-Show", Davie identifies someone who will "stand by Art, with no farrago / Of decadence, and no wish to be clever / Or a superior person". One of the likeable things about him is that he has no poet's persona - no bardic presumption, no ordinary blokery, no "farrago / Of decadence" or aesthetic coat-trailing. He writes as himself; his work is neither jacked-up nor dumbed-down.
Neil Powell has drawn together about a dozen early pieces for this update of his poetic oeuvre, and added small groups of overlooked later ones, mostly from magazines. The result is an enormously various collection of poems - various in style, genre, inspiration, length and quality.
Any admirer of Davie's work has to accentuate the positive by emphasising his openness, his searching after new approaches, his readiness to imitate and creatively read from other cultures. Martin Dodsworth put this well when speaking up for Davie's "vulnerable risk-taking art". But the downside is that his poems may be wounded by risks that show as risks because they don't quite come off. In the foreword to his first Collected Poems (1972), Davie is not "complacently happy about every poem" but will "stand on my record, such as it is". Fair enough.
The previously uncollected "Cowper's 'Yardley Oak': A Continuation" evokes Defoe's most famous character: "a new unthrift Crusoe casts off, / Bound for who knows what waiting, watching headland!" Davie returned more than once to this restless adventurer in the years leading up to his transatlantic move. "A Conditioned Air" drags him in to make a contrast with the wind in Barnsley: "No odorous cloud-cleaving / Typhoon of Crusoe grew upon the West / To satisfy your hunger for afflatus". But his interest is most fully aired in an attractive poem that conceals the connection. "The Blank of the Wall" (after Saint-John Perse) is a partial translation of "Le Mur", second of the "Images à Crusoé", with prose made over as verse:
The blank of the wall is over against you; which
Is the conjuration into a circle
Of reveries. The image none the less
Emits its cry. An aftertaste of rich
Fats and sauces furs
The teeth your tongue explores
Inside the uneasy head which you have set
Upon the lived with, the familiar
Upholstery of a greasy chair; and yet
You think how clouds move purely on your island,
The green dawn growing lucid on the breast
Of the mysterious waters.
In seeking equivalents, Davie deploys a measured, flexed, and responsive English. So "fauteuil gras" becomes "greasy chair", smartly twisting the homely "easy chair". Yet already the poet is interpolating. His 'uneasy head' adds an internally rhyming adjective to Perse's "La tête", and "Upon the lived with, the familiar" is not in the original.
"Images à Crusoé" has Robinson back home and nostalgic for his island so as to occasion Perse's memories of the Antilles when "exiled" in France. But the island in Davie's poem, when read without knowledge of its source, will seem a British one. The poet's condition finds a returning cry in the imagined restlessness of a Robinson longing for an island which, in this case, is also the England of Davie's own imaginative investments.
"C'est la sueur des sèves en exil", begins Perse's fifth paragraph - which is where Davie veers off to make an ending of his own:
And it is
The sweat of exiled juices and
There on the hearth the snapping spar,
Split from how cheap a crate, secretes
The resinous stands of all of Canada.
The need is lived with, that this answers to.
"The Blank of the Wall" might have ended at "Canada" - a word perhaps prompted by the line-end words "and" and "spar". But then comes his last line, not lyrically attached and depending on the "lived with" echo for a place at all. It sounds like a failure of nerve. He seems just too inclined to nudge his readers - stopping their imagination dead in its tracks. The emitted cry of the image is muted by the inclination to point a moral and adorn a tale.
Davie's verse frequently suffers from this kind of one thought too many. Powell comments that his author "is a writer whose poetry is dense with ideas and information rather than with description", and one who follows examples that "are alive with intellectual urgency rather than placid with expansive evocation".
While the repeated "rather than" is itself a tribute to Davie's relentlessly dividing mind, why take these for the only alternatives, or think the poet intellectually urgent "rather than" evocatively placid? Davie is never placid, but he can be urgently evocative too. His work is at its best when (as the 1964 title Events and Wisdoms suggests) the poet's feelingful, considered responses are prompted by lived-with occasions.
Floating the idea that a "poet as approachable as Larkin" might be quarried from Davie's many more pages, Powell still calls it a pointless exercise - and doubtless admirers of his work asked to produce such a selection would all come up with a different book.
There is no substitute for the record, and Davie's editor has performed a service by assembling so full a file, by reprinting the poet's own notes from the 1972 edition, and adding a handful of informative passages from his autobiography, These the Companions. He has also done some reordering, placing Davie's last poem - which, on its debut in Poems & Melodramas (1996), sat inexplicably among pieces addressed to Charles Tomlinson - where it should be.
"Thomas and Emma" of July 1995 is occasioned by a walk along the "shadowy belvedere / At Shaftesbury". There Davie hears the voice of Hardy denouncing a "levelled, levelling culture" in which his elegies of 1912-13 would be inaudible. He then hears Emma Gifford objecting that the poet's hyperbolic and posthumous praise for her would rightly be discounted by a "truthful culture".
Yet, the poem continues, "I heard both voices falter. / Hyperbole, analogy, allusion / Build up what is no lie, although so wishful: / Conspiratorial, conjugal collusion." Now widower and wife are all but left behind, supplanted by an implicit homage to the poet's own marriage and more: "I took another turn along the grass / And gravel of the rampart. Overhead / The boughs soughed something. It was not: 'Alas'." That seems the right note to end on.
· Peter Robinson's most recent book is The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems
