This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK; Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago but Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values.
In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both the ‘epical and the apophatic’. Thus, the writing is on a huge scale and yet it appears to steer away from the conclusions it offers. Well, in part that’s true. The writing contains huge gestures in ways which are often quite alien to the poetics of early twenty-first century writing in English. Where Don Paterson has complained recently that too many contemporary poets are ‘all show and no tell’, he need have no such complaints here.
In the depths of my soul
Opens a large
Flower of sorrow,
It scatters roses of sorrow
In me
And I rush no more
Towards anything
Or anywhere.
It’s possible that those who prefer their showing to their telling might be deeply put off by this. And it’s possible to open this book and find plenty of this kind of writing. Davoyan levers the reader away from his or her reality and rushes them into a place that is his and yet so abstract that it’s sometimes difficult to find any bearings at all. This is gestural writing that tells what and shows what?
However, if we turn to the next verse we find something of a slightly different kind:
The willows are oozing warm sorrow
Over the waters.
If I wake up from this dream
make me clothes from the clouds,
I shall ascend to the unknown
Sing this story has no beginning
Nor no end.
The willows are oozing warm sorrow
Over the waters.
These landscapes remind us of East European and Russian cinema, of the lingering world of Tarkovsky and Svygantsev. This is where the vast encodes huge emotion, and where the landscape is melded with the personal in ways that make Thomas Hardy seem like a part-timer. And while it is too crude to suggest that these poems are simply and simplistically haunted by the Armenian genocide and the Armenian diaspora, a national poet does not become so by not tapping into something deep inside the Armenia consciousness. By using the landscape and flora of Armenia in this way, Davoyan assumes that his reader has an imagination that can run with the pictures he paints. This makes the poems very different for his readers in translation. But it is very much to the credit of the translations, that Davoyan’s imagination is so available to new English readers.
Davoyan avoids the vatic that is present in Russian poetry, and what he offers is precisely that combination of the epic and the apophatic that W.N. Herbert lights upon. There is a magnificence and opulence here that plays on and with the mystic, in a way that is both joyous and deeply life affirming.
Ian Pople