|
|
After long residences
abroad, Geoffrey Squires is presently Reader in Education at the University
of Hull's Institute for Learning and leads its Educational Development Team.
His earlier academic publications focused on curriculum (1987-90), but since
1999 they have dealt mainly with the theorizing of teaching and other
professions. This will help explain the hiatus between the appearance of his
first three poetry chapbooks between 1975-80 and the next in 1996. To add to
the complication, those booklets and the extracts from his long sequences
published in magazines have been divided between Ireland and England.
Admirers of his individual writing will therefore welcome the publication of
what is in effect a selected poems, particularly as it brings together substantial
extracts from the three sections of his long and intricate 'Untitled'. This
is a big book in a generous type size and still allows lots of space about
the poems.
Squires' poetry limits itself to the perception of landscape. It cannot be
described as nature poetry since one is always aware of the human element,
of the interdependence of seer and seen. Indeed, the American critic Robert
Archambeau has described it as 'a poetry of immediate consciousness'. Later
on Squires became interested in Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception. This
argues, among other things, that since it is through the body that we have
access to the world, perception involves the perceiving subject, physically
and culturally, as s/he makes what is perceived intelligible. A study of the
nature of that perception therefore reveals the perceiver too. In Squires'
latest work, however, he seems to be striking out on his own again. The
operation of the senses brings him no certainty of an inviolable receiver of
their messages. Strong sunlight, heat haze and darkness rub away the outlines
of what he sees and become the metaphor of the seer's diminution. In his most
recent writing he seems to be approaching the radical scepticism of William
Bronk:
How little we
speak in the dark
almost as if
we were afraid
or that it
meant too much was
too significant
or that
someone was listening
as if we
could be heard
('Untitled
III', p.203)
Most of Squires' books have been extended sequences, several of them written
as if for alternating voices: the original script for three voices broadcast
by the BBC in 1971 from which 'Drowned Stones' was selected, for example;
'Poem for Two Voices',
broadcast on Radio Anna Livia in 1998; 'Untitled II', for which the present
selection provides performance notes for three voices. It is not SquiresÕ intention
that his writing should be in any way autobiographical. We are directed to
significant particulars from a succession of viewpoints -
local people
do not see
what we see,
landscape
is already
something
you are
outside of
('Drowned
Stones', p.15)
whereas figures in a landscape
eschew 'the big picture' in inhabiting it. But while this is so, at the time
his first three collections appeared there was little to indicate in which
direction Squires' poetry might move. The geopoetics of Kenneth White, the
social engagement of Jeremy Hilton, the contemplative quietism of Colin
Oliver (or myself, for that matter), were other available models that made
use of landscape particulars to create a sense of the moment, of observer and
observed creating their context as an organic whole. All might then have
subscribed to Merleau-Ponty's proposition, later used by Squires as an
epigraph: le monde est autour de moi, non devant moi - the world does
not confront but surrounds me.
What is particular to Squires is the sense of completeness given by his poems
in which just enough is said to impart the essential features and state of
mind evoked without need of further elaboration. The things he describes have
power over the writer. Rather than being exploited by him, it is as if they
force him into utterance. So strange is the satisfaction brought by these
brief relations that one has to read each over again to see how they were
achieved. The significance of these scenes and moments is divined but not
explored, perhaps because he feels he cannot go further and is marooned on
the outside of things.
This impression is strengthened by his similes, which are notable for comparing
function rather than visual likeness. Fuchsia's
millions of
tiny bells
tinkling
against
the dry-stone
walls
the sound
passed on
from rock to
rock
like a
rejoicing
('Drowned
Stones', p.15)
or 'clouds stacked up like a great speech' (p.37) are effects that can be
observed but which function independent of the observer. The observer's
previous experience provides the cultural context and is his mode of making
what is happening intelligible to himself; but at the same time he is shut
out from the occasions and energies he interprets. His is not the elation
signalled by the bells, for all he may share it; though he is part of the
audience, the eloquence of the clouds is not addressed to him. One almost
feels that what is happening here is the landscape expressing itself through
the poet, rather than the poet using the landscape as a means for
self-expression.
'Poem in Three Sections' originally appeared in the Irish University
Review in 1983 and was republished
as a chapbook by a London Press in 1997 on the heels of Landscapes &
Silences (Dublin, 1996). I imagine
it was these two books that brought Squires to the attention of a generation
more sympathetic to the new poetics and which associated him with the group of
younger Irish innovative writers who were just gaining recognition at the
time. In these works he has moved further towards giving the impression of
breaking in upon his own thought processes at the moment they rise to a
climax of observation. Each of the three sections of the earlier poem has a
single subject: trees in a wood; rocks down a hillside; the play of light
over city buildings. Not only does this allow the poet a whole series of
fresh takes but the variations and half repetitions he employs give the
impression of the mind reaching for more precise definition. In the third
section one of the pieces ends on
the play of
shadow on stone, the lengthening ridges
with their
right angles and sudden drops
like the line
of an argument
This is then elaborated in the following piece:
Each cut of
stone, each placing
in the right
place, angles and cornices
gables and
long high ridges
the slope of
roofs away from the sun
patterns of
brick and stone, angular or square
with the occasional curve between
or deliberate
hiatus
like a form
of thought set down
in the
buildings and the spaces between buildings
(pp.96-7)
By the time we come to Landscapes & Silences the focus has shifted considerably. What is
observed is now made the occasion for following the play of the mind upon it
and then passing beyond:
nothing moves
because nothing can
except for
the mind which moves over things
passing over
them like a light shadow
which darkens
them for a moment only a moment
and hardly at
all
(p.121)
The things he observes are as resistant as ever; in response the poet has
moved from studying them to the study of perception for answers. In fact,
applying himself to what was, in the light of the scientific advances that
followed it, a decidedly outmoded philosophy, eventually proved a bit of a
red herring and had an unfortunate effect upon his work. To my eyes 'Poem for
Two Voices' (published in The Journal, Dublin, 1998) is inert and unoriginal and reads more like a text
designed to illustrate Merleau-Ponty's thesis. As with Wordsworth and
Coleridge before him, philosophy takes over from the poetics. It is not so
much that Squires is throwing the baby out with the bath water as drowning
the poor little thing, diluting away the tang of the spirit in too much
chaser.
'Untitled' sees Squires returning to his previous luminous observations,
worrying as always at the problem of perception and its expression.
Consideration of the means of expression, avoided in his early work, is given
greater prominence as Squires experiments with hiatus, repetition, variation
and lay-out. The constellation of phrases that makes up the section from
'Untitled II' in the book,
packed every which way on the page in 10-point type, appears amateurish to
me. It doesn't even give a very clear idea of the effect Squires is aiming
for, despite his stage directions. Fortunately Shearsman used an extended and far more accessible selection
from this poem, which can be read at http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/back_issues/shearsman50/page5.html
Wild Honey Press also has a site which provides the selection it uses from
- http://www.wildhoneypress.com/geoff/untitled3.htm
. Stylistically it moves further towards lyrical hesitancy and dislocation,
but is interspersed with astonishingly perceptive illustrations:
There are
small places
not worthy of
a name
some outcrop
or hillock
the gap
between two fields
and no one
has thought to name them
give them
some name
which we
could know them as
remember them
by
(p.189)
However, in privileging the mental phenomenon over the sensual, Squires seems
to have lost contact with Merleau-Ponty's statement that 'the body is our
anchorage in the world'. Such preoccupations may have their place in
'Untitled' as the subject specially to be explored there. But if this
represents a new tendency and is followed much further, it threatens his work
with an etiolation bordering on anorexia.
© Yann
Lovelock 2004
|