Layton's Quarrel
Layton's Quarrel
Reviewed by Russell Brown
REVIEWING A NEW BOOK OF POETRY by Irving Layton is a challenge of a certain kind. Reviewers have so often fallen into scolding the man that someone who knows him only from what has been written of him in the last decade might not recognize his stature as poet and as the creator of some of the most striking lyrics that we have. Indeed, the same sort of reproofs have been directed at him with such regularity that Layton now anticipates his critics and subverts them by providing his own review in one of the closing poems of The Covenant, the review we even sense he somehow longs for : In this book Layton has stripped away all the trappings of restraint and decency and has revealed himself to be the uninhibited megalomaniac iwe always suspected he was. . . . this rowdy silly tortured tender feisty outrageous posturing egotistical and somewhat pathetic excuse for a poet. If we do sometimes feel that Layton's poetry is, if not precisely all of these things, often dominated by the postures of its creator, the question we must ask ourselves is why then we read each new book that he offers us, their appearances coming at a frequency which at times seems to bespeak a genuine ferocity. The answer, of course, is that, since the very first published volumes, we have been accustomed to approach his steadily- appearing collections as sites in a poetic quarry: a great deal of rock lying about, some shale to be mined, perhaps, but always the promise of precious stone that makes the endeavour worthwhile. E. K. Brown said it for us long ago: "Mr. Lay- ton, it is clear, has been one of those poets who has to write too much in order to be able to write at all." Although he has not included it in his self-review, probably Layton would himself give assent to such a statement. Unfortunately, however, it is difficult not to feel that in The Covenant, as with the companion volume that preceded it {For My Brother Jesus), we have come to a particularly rocky part of Layton's quarry, one where the rewards for our labours are much rarer. It is easy to suggest that it is the argu- mentative nature of both books that makes so much of their content less than successful as poetry: that Layton's eager- ness to display his iconoclastic and at times willfully sacrilegious arguments against Christianity, to show it impli- cated for the blood spilt in its name, to remind us that it spawned the attitudes that led to the German atrocities against the Jews — that all this seems to out- weigh the poetic structures invoked to give these arguments voice. And it is hard not to quote Yeats against Layton, reminding him that "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." However, even as poetic rhetoric, much of The Covenant does not work; the field of its language is so entirely that of common speech that even the most elemental of oratorical devices, much less poetic, would be welcomed. Instead Layton seems often to have given away his whole bag of tricks, willingly writing like this instead: Every unbelieving Jew puts another nail in our Lord's cross; you're all guilty for his death each one of you, now and always So the young Anglican priest told me, fresh out of the seminary his features clean-cut but severe and his frank Anglo-Saxon eyes loving and clear. It does not seem to be merely that Layton has deliberately chosen to deny himself the traditional range of his craft, either. Instead his mind seems, at times, simply to be elsewhere than on his poetry. Here, for example, is the conclusion of one of the more lyric poems in the volume: a leafed twig taps on the windowpane and when I turn my head the world moves into it on panes of green light. The repetition in "windowpane panes" is not effective, but still the lan- guage has some of the old attraction. The vision is familiar, perhaps a little too much so. But what is most troubling is the vague way that "it" in the next-to- last line functions. Is it twig, window- pane, or head? The ambiguity is bother- some, not poetic — in fact, surely not intentional. A poem created out of reflex, the poet's attention wandering. Ultimately there is such a sparsity of poetic language in The Covenant, that we are in danger of overvaluing the few vivid or picturesque moments that Layton gives us, as in lines about "yellow butter- flies/ weaving invisible mends/ between hedge and hedge." Although there is here a kind of reappearance of what might be called the "insect vitality" of certain earlier poems, there is lacking still that magnificent language that we know Lay- ton capable of, the kind of powerful imagery he gave us long ago in "Portrait of Aileen" where, Though an incredible wound in the air the bowl of apples on the garden table sustained itself with simple being. Still there are some successful poems in The Covenant,poems that repay reread- ing, like "Sylvia," or "The Tamed Puma," or perhaps "The Bald Tartar." And there is, besides, an energy under all the posturing, perhaps derived from it: an obvious enjoyment of the gestures made that may speak well for the time when Layton resumes his arguments with himself. In "The Bald Tartar" Layton pauses to threaten us: I'll roll the sights I see into a hard pellet and with it knock out your eye you must see what I see or not at all you have one more chance and one more eye. But in the last lines of The Covenant Layton makes a less coercive promise, one we should like to hold him to. He has turned his poems into weapons, he acknowledges, but, When I have a large enough arsenal to protect me from the murderous goons springing up everywhere around me I shall start over again and write a simple joyous lyric extolling my love's black eyebrows. It is not necessarily that we would wish to limit Layton only to poems about his love's black eyebrows, but clearly there has been a loss of an earlier vision that seems to have left these latest poems deflated and unmusical; in consequence we are ready to see Layton "start over again." His real quarrel in The Covenant is, after all, not simply with Christianity, but with the God of both Christians and Jews, and with the created order that He must take responsibility for: this is the quarrel that Layton has always engaged in, but what is missing now is his old defiant challenge to this life-consuming universe — that absurd but wonderful affirmation that the poet will therefore be "the worm/ who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin."
来自:http://canlit.ca/reviews/laytons_quarrel
Reviewed by Russell Brown
REVIEWING A NEW BOOK OF POETRY by Irving Layton is a challenge of a certain kind. Reviewers have so often fallen into scolding the man that someone who knows him only from what has been written of him in the last decade might not recognize his stature as poet and as the creator of some of the most striking lyrics that we have. Indeed, the same sort of reproofs have been directed at him with such regularity that Layton now anticipates his critics and subverts them by providing his own review in one of the closing poems of The Covenant, the review we even sense he somehow longs for : In this book Layton has stripped away all the trappings of restraint and decency and has revealed himself to be the uninhibited megalomaniac iwe always suspected he was. . . . this rowdy silly tortured tender feisty outrageous posturing egotistical and somewhat pathetic excuse for a poet. If we do sometimes feel that Layton's poetry is, if not precisely all of these things, often dominated by the postures of its creator, the question we must ask ourselves is why then we read each new book that he offers us, their appearances coming at a frequency which at times seems to bespeak a genuine ferocity. The answer, of course, is that, since the very first published volumes, we have been accustomed to approach his steadily- appearing collections as sites in a poetic quarry: a great deal of rock lying about, some shale to be mined, perhaps, but always the promise of precious stone that makes the endeavour worthwhile. E. K. Brown said it for us long ago: "Mr. Lay- ton, it is clear, has been one of those poets who has to write too much in order to be able to write at all." Although he has not included it in his self-review, probably Layton would himself give assent to such a statement. Unfortunately, however, it is difficult not to feel that in The Covenant, as with the companion volume that preceded it {For My Brother Jesus), we have come to a particularly rocky part of Layton's quarry, one where the rewards for our labours are much rarer. It is easy to suggest that it is the argu- mentative nature of both books that makes so much of their content less than successful as poetry: that Layton's eager- ness to display his iconoclastic and at times willfully sacrilegious arguments against Christianity, to show it impli- cated for the blood spilt in its name, to remind us that it spawned the attitudes that led to the German atrocities against the Jews — that all this seems to out- weigh the poetic structures invoked to give these arguments voice. And it is hard not to quote Yeats against Layton, reminding him that "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." However, even as poetic rhetoric, much of The Covenant does not work; the field of its language is so entirely that of common speech that even the most elemental of oratorical devices, much less poetic, would be welcomed. Instead Layton seems often to have given away his whole bag of tricks, willingly writing like this instead: Every unbelieving Jew puts another nail in our Lord's cross; you're all guilty for his death each one of you, now and always So the young Anglican priest told me, fresh out of the seminary his features clean-cut but severe and his frank Anglo-Saxon eyes loving and clear. It does not seem to be merely that Layton has deliberately chosen to deny himself the traditional range of his craft, either. Instead his mind seems, at times, simply to be elsewhere than on his poetry. Here, for example, is the conclusion of one of the more lyric poems in the volume: a leafed twig taps on the windowpane and when I turn my head the world moves into it on panes of green light. The repetition in "windowpane panes" is not effective, but still the lan- guage has some of the old attraction. The vision is familiar, perhaps a little too much so. But what is most troubling is the vague way that "it" in the next-to- last line functions. Is it twig, window- pane, or head? The ambiguity is bother- some, not poetic — in fact, surely not intentional. A poem created out of reflex, the poet's attention wandering. Ultimately there is such a sparsity of poetic language in The Covenant, that we are in danger of overvaluing the few vivid or picturesque moments that Layton gives us, as in lines about "yellow butter- flies/ weaving invisible mends/ between hedge and hedge." Although there is here a kind of reappearance of what might be called the "insect vitality" of certain earlier poems, there is lacking still that magnificent language that we know Lay- ton capable of, the kind of powerful imagery he gave us long ago in "Portrait of Aileen" where, Though an incredible wound in the air the bowl of apples on the garden table sustained itself with simple being. Still there are some successful poems in The Covenant,poems that repay reread- ing, like "Sylvia," or "The Tamed Puma," or perhaps "The Bald Tartar." And there is, besides, an energy under all the posturing, perhaps derived from it: an obvious enjoyment of the gestures made that may speak well for the time when Layton resumes his arguments with himself. In "The Bald Tartar" Layton pauses to threaten us: I'll roll the sights I see into a hard pellet and with it knock out your eye you must see what I see or not at all you have one more chance and one more eye. But in the last lines of The Covenant Layton makes a less coercive promise, one we should like to hold him to. He has turned his poems into weapons, he acknowledges, but, When I have a large enough arsenal to protect me from the murderous goons springing up everywhere around me I shall start over again and write a simple joyous lyric extolling my love's black eyebrows. It is not necessarily that we would wish to limit Layton only to poems about his love's black eyebrows, but clearly there has been a loss of an earlier vision that seems to have left these latest poems deflated and unmusical; in consequence we are ready to see Layton "start over again." His real quarrel in The Covenant is, after all, not simply with Christianity, but with the God of both Christians and Jews, and with the created order that He must take responsibility for: this is the quarrel that Layton has always engaged in, but what is missing now is his old defiant challenge to this life-consuming universe — that absurd but wonderful affirmation that the poet will therefore be "the worm/ who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin."
来自:http://canlit.ca/reviews/laytons_quarrel
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