A Minor Freshness

Peter Larkin, Terrain Seed Scarcity: Poems from a Decade. Salt, 199 pp, $20.95 Cdn/$15.95 US/£9.95, 1-876857-08-0.

The published record suggests that Peter Larkin started late as a poet; his first book, Enclosures, appeared from Galloping Dog in 1983, when he was 37, and the bulk of his poetic output is contained in this new volume, which collects most of his work of the 1990s. In the two decades since Enclosures there has been strikingly little response to his work, even in those quarters of the poetry world that take an interest in difficult small-press poetry. Reviews are extremely scarce; though published a year & a half ago, Terrain Seed Scarcity has so far only received a brief commendation in Shearsman & a passing sneer in the TLS’s N.B. column. To date the only substantial published response to his work has been Anthony Mellors’ idiosyncratic but useful essay on Enclosures in fragmente 3 (Spring 1991).

The opportunity that Terrain Seed Scarcity presents for taking in Larkin’s work as a whole is welcome and timely, even if the bulky paperback format is less satisfying than the elegant presentation of the original books, most of them printed by Larkin’s own Prest Roots Press or Paul Green’s Spectacular Diseases. The typical Larkin book is published in a large (A4) format; its cover is blank except for the almost inevitably alliterating title: Seek Source Bid Sink, Scarce Norm Scarcer Mean, Parallels Plantations Apart, Whitefield in Wild Wheel. The effect of the book-design is, a little disconcertingly, halfway between monumental austerity & self-effacing modesty. The titles of many avantgarde poetry books float ambiguously or suggestively over their contents; by contrast, Larkin’s titles are like compact seeds from which the text grows. The keywords and subjectmatter set forth in the title (& sometimes augmented by a brief prefatory schema) are developed with a formidable and sometimes exhausting tenacity. Whitefield in Wild Wheel, for instance, is thirty packed pages whose every paragraph addresses the “figure of wheeling” (the sequence was prompted by the author’s habit of walking around rather than through a plantation named Whitefield Clump). With a few exceptions, the sequences collected in Terrain Seed Scarcity are formally of a piece: a series of brief, extremely dense prose paragraphs, separated by large stanza breaks. Occasionally a prose passage breaks into verse, though the terse, verbless notations and almost arbitrary linebreaks (often mid-word) have a texture closer to open-form marginalia than polished lyric utterance.

Larkin is a Romantics scholar (with an especial affinity for Wordsworth) and a student of contemporary philosophy and postmodern theology. He is indebted to a variety of contemporary poetries: the experience of reading his work can recall both one of Coolidge’s densest prose texts and Zukofsky’s most difficult poetry, but he is also indebted to Prynne, and to the minimalism of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Thomas A. Clark. His writing can also be seen as part of that hybrid contemporary discourse dubbed “ecopoetics.” The reader can follow Larkin’s exploration of this territory in TSS via both the poems and the framing prefaces and postfaces; the latter do not function in any simple way as “explications” of the poetry: they are parallel inquiries, substantial essays that are no less intricately worked than the verse.

The sequences in this book are written under the sign of “scarcity,” a term that requires some comment. Like many practitioners of ecopoetics, Larkin is indebted to the thinking of Heidegger, but he works at a distinctive tangent to it, with a vocabulary and method of proceeding very much his own. Larkin’s poetics of scarcity eludes ponderous Heideggerian evocations of Being, and instead proposes a speculative poetics at a slant to an orthodox dialectic of presence/absence. His introduction is worth quoting at length:

. . . for me pronouncing a scarcity in what is needed to sustain life both physically and spiritually has been firstly a poetic argument, a way of getting something to appear and ramify in poetry. Such a scarcity is exploratory and speculative simply by being the lesser result or diminished arrival of what is, nonetheless, expected and recognised by us, but it is not a fixed term of mourning. If a thing is scarce it’s there, rare for contemplation and happening for praise. Perhaps it might be the natural or spiritual world answering human desire with some offer of its own, one which feels slight because it must be taken up. And if that offer of belonging (within a manner of scarcity) to a world desired can’t be written out as an absence, then it must be opened up to by means of an array of lesser differences. To be insufficiently with what is given to us is not to be detached from it: it may be a token by which to experience the unbrokenness of roots (along a specifically historic etiolation) through and towards a common landscape.

“Scarcity” rather than “absence,” then: Larkin develops this path of inquiry in his poetry by insistently reworking an array of keywords: nouns such as insufficiency, slightness, frugality, thinness, reserve, fatigue; adjectives such as thin, slight, lesser, minor, poor, shallow, impure, finite. These keywords are packed one after another into the sentences of his poems. Perhaps the development of this theme is related to the shift in focus over the course of Terrain Seed Scarcity from forest to slighter and less picturesque territory: plantations, which often consist of little more than beleaguered, scraggly patches of trees.

This preoccupation with scarcity and slightness seems to me related to other aspects of Larkin’s diction. One is a habitual swerve into negation, not as a flat inversion but as part of a more complicated chain of balancings and attachments which often requires double and even triple negatives. The diction is also heavy with coinages and rarities; Larkin is in particular fascinated with how prefixes and suffixes act on and react to their base words. They contribute substantially to the texture of the verse, busy with intricate linguistic negotiations; again, the swerves of direction are often made via negation: un-, de-, dis-, in-, ex-, non- are favourite prefixes. Every sentence reads like the result of continual intricate and rather obscure internal recalibrations, often involving an interlocking series of negatives: e.g., “A clearing may not edge a forest it has not yet depleted, its nurture at a covered ledge should not be as unspent as it is.” At its densest and most rebarbative the result looks like this:

Where an aporetic non-possible is going to be left out itself, if not for the accomplished impossible of disburden: so it falls that the mediation has no virtual dissemination outside of the assignment’s being pipped at gift. The scatter can only borrow a heavy affordance.

Here – one stanza from Attached, Assoiled – the reader may well feel bemused by, for instance, the distinction between the “non-possible” and “impossible,” & the contradiction of “accomplished impossible.” It must be said that there are many similarly knotty & puzzling passages in Terrain Seed Scarcity, though they may seem less outlandish and intractable once the reader has spent some time with the book. Larkin’s careful weightings & counterweightings, deflections & negations do however lend themselves naturally to the modes of epigram and apothegm; the best instance here is the remarkable Landscape with Figures Afield, a Thomas A. Clark-style series of sententiae written in response to a book on the aesthetics of 18th-century English gardens: “Art’s exuberance chastened by silence: this is not art reducible to an avidity of no noise.” “An unsolitary world does but transliterate other worlds.” “Not to concede a probable nature, so as not to exceed a parlous one.” Such compact & effective phrasemaking isn’t confined to that sequence (which both thematically & stylistically stands at some distance from the rest of TSS); here, e.g., are two ponderable phrases from the sequence Three Forest Conformities: “no dwelling without reinforcement”; “the edge of forest exacts a fine trespass.”

More typical, though, of this writing at its best is where the constant reworking of a set of keywords and analogies makes it hum with internal activity:

A place too savage for invalid aligning. Wayside cutaway at an infringement raggedly besetting edge, the motive holds shelter fielded a strip of error. Wandering is for the same overly things. Take a furtherance of rest where a grove guides uninsular at rewordable link: the groundless pause at groove.

Fibres are not hung out as garments at forest fringe: the very succulence draws in danger, human-indemnified in havening texture. The edge-lock’s uncrushed lack.

A hem torsion than meeker switching things, perforant thicket to sustain the stab as maps go over sides, ontolerant healing of an effrayed inbled sill.

We are put to tree behind prompted verdure. We environ the mean kernel of nature, do what it has lost to do, or can fringe scarce-everywhere a rule of ex-exalted, -exhausted horizon.

In passages such as these (the opening of Three Forest Conformities), the reader is (paradoxically) at once slowed down drastically – each phrase is almost overstuffed with matter – and pushed along briskly by a syntax owing much to the idiom of aphorism, in which the effect of memorable and concise utterance is achieved through leaving key parts of the sentence to be understood. (As can be seen here, Larkin tends to elide main verbs and connectives, and sometimes to leave idioms dangling, as in the appearance of “than” without a matching comparative in stanza 3.) Given this strategy of ellipsis it’s perhaps most useful to avoid getting too hung up on parsing out an overarching argument or syntax, & instead pay attention to local effects. I have no idea, for instance, what exactly it is that is “the same” in this sentence: “Wandering is for the same overly things.” What instead catches the eye is how trees, which literally overhang, are “overly things,” and the range of conflicting meanings for this rare adjective in the OED are worth pausing over: there’s a possibility of a religious or Romantic sublime (“supreme” would push the line down a religious pathway, with “Wandering” a pilgrimage of sorts), but the word can also point up the friction in the meeting of nature and culture, as an index of social snobbery (“supercilious, imperious, overbearing, haughty”) or artifice (“superficial”). The sentence’s crux is perhaps the peculiarly unidiomatic “for,” which elliptically combines the idiom “to search for” with the thematic of dedication which much preoccupies Larkin. It’s thus just possible to see the sentence as a compact Wordsworthian statement of dedication to the healing power of returning to the same particular spots over time (“Wandering is always for [towards?] the same overly things”). This might in turn be read next to Larkin’s interest in the “static” (109) & his distrust of what TFC’s “Postface in Paratext” calls “innovation-hunger which pushes extremity towards the (uncuringly) different.” This exploration of stasis is broached, characteristically, from multiple directions within his vocabulary: the “Postface” first offers “Predictability” as a term, & then suggests that the text might offer “the sport of a regularity, of a conformity.” The pejorative social & religious sense of “conformity” is present here, & in the title of this sequence (Larkin in correspondence indeed will sometimes self-mockingly call his work “quietist”), but these texts work to complicate one’s sense of the divisions between stasis and action, internal and external activity. One might gloss his sense of this “stasis,” & also his poetic style, via a phrase from one of his prefaces: “a residual mingling of supplement and impedance, of universal boundary with (or within) local flow.”

That last phrase hints at the intense & idiosyncratic exploration of boundaries and divisions in Larkin’s work. It is commonplace enough to counterpose the orthography of human divisions of space and the wildness of nature: “A place too savage for invalid aligning.” But for Larkin boundaries aren’t simply lines to be transgressed, but places of an extra thickness and complication: hence in the stanzas quoted from TFC the deployment of images of suturing and hemming taken from the spheres of sewing & surgery (actions that uncannily blend harm – puncturing, stabbing – with healing). Larkin’s italics push a pointedly awkward coinage straight at the reader as if fending off the word “intolerant”: “ontolerant healing of an effrayed inbled sill.” Just as scar tissue is built “on” the site of wounding, a hem is a “torsion,” a turning-back of fabric on itself.

The final stanza here might be read as a fairly straightforward mourning for the inversion of the relation of nature and culture, so that culture environs nature rather than the other way around; the pun on “rule” (both “law” and “line”) is well-put, as is the shift from “tree” to a sense of manicured “verdure.” The passage stands out a bit in TSS for its explicit ecological lament; the theme of “scarcity” in Larkin’s writing is, as he puts it, “very much available to a mourning for environmental degradation” (p. 152), but as the passage quoted earlier notes, “it is not a fixed term of mourning” (my italics). In many ways this is poetry that goes against the grain of one’s expectations of an ecologically informed poetics, both in its bold reappropriations of the languages of technology and science (I once described Larkin’s work to a friend as “an instruction manual for operating a forest”), and in the self-imposed limits of its evocation of the natural world: there’s no fauna named in the poems and almost no plants except trees. Such restriction of focus seems in part due to the demands of the scarcity project, & this book concludes by stepping off into a rather different project, Spirit of the Trees, that admits some of the stylistic & thematic material absent from the earlier prose texts. Its title is taken from a 1947 poetry anthology. Each of Larkin’s poems is seven lines of seven syllables, its vocabulary entirely drawn from one poem in the anthology. The original poems often memorialize the unkind fates of trees, felled by man or laid low by winds; this somewhat maudlin traditional lyric modality is sharply diffracted & complicated by Larkin’s Zukofskyan compression (& these are poems of especial interest to fans of 80 Flowers). The original titles are retained: sometimes Larkin’s poems are variations on the original theme, sometimes pointed replies. “A Hollow Elm” is an example of the latter, unlocking a buried warmth & wisdom from the fustian bitterness of Edward Shanks’ poem of the same title (see Georgian Poetry 1918-1919 or find it online here):

Soft-riven wood not cheated
not withstood, a tempest stands
in you unmocked, gapes warm op-
en pollard, with first light lives
so hollow: transience sweet-
ened ancient sides, new sun sent
stiffly out at soft spring’s beck.

The poems of Spirit of the Trees are much closer to the conventions of lyric poetry than anything else in TSS, & it’s tempting to end this review with that quotation, as a sample of Larkin’s writing at its most approachable & appealing. This would be a disservice to the book, though. Despite my hesitations & uncertainties about this often very difficult collection, it gives me a firmer sense of the importance of what Larkin’s doing in a way that encountering his individual chapbooks never did. The presentation is not ideal: I would suggest that readers begin their reckoning with TSS by skipping to Three Forest Conformities, since the first two or three sequences are some of the book’s toughest sledding (the incomplete presentation of Scarce Norm Scarcer Mean is also problematic). Larkin himself is sometimes almost painfully modest in his claims for his work – at one point he says it hopes to achieve “a minor freshness” (82) – but for this reader Terrain Seed Scarcity was one of the genuine discoveries of the past few years.

Nate Dorward

Published in The Gig 12

Since the publication of this review, The Gig has produced a set of three Peter Larkin chapbooks.