{"id":3197,"date":"2014-11-10T14:14:25","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T13:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3197"},"modified":"2018-01-02T14:19:04","modified_gmt":"2018-01-02T13:19:04","slug":"poetry-by-austin-smith-and-robin-robertson-reviewed-by-lucy-burns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3197","title":{"rendered":"Austin Smith and Robin Robertson, reviewed by Lucy Burns"},"content":{"rendered":"
Austin Smith, Almanac<\/em> (Princeton UP, $12.95)
\nRobin Robertson, Hill of Doors<\/em> (Picador, \u00a314.99).<\/h5>\n

Austin Smith’s debut collection with the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets is an impressive testament to rural life in north-western Illinois. Almanac<\/i> is arranged concentrically around the family dairy farm and its surrounding landscape, reaching as far as Virginia, South Dakota and Nazi Germany. Smith manages to plot an impossible chain of events onto the Midwest landscape: there is a sense that the “Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants” or Emmet Gowin’s photographs (“Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970”) are having some sort of real-time or retroactive effect on Smith and the farm. At the root of all this is a sense of Smith’s responsibility to continue to return to this landscape \u2013 either literally, geographically, or by plotting wormholes around it.<\/p>\n

I’ve been called back
\nto describe the trembling light
\nthe granaries can barely contain[.]
\n(“Mission”)<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

The task Smith sets himself: attesting to the memory of the farm he was raised on, is as present in the exacting details of Smith’s father and grandfather (“Wake”) \u2013 as it is in Smith’s sense of duty to a poetic tradition, or \u2013 more accurately \u2013 the poets Smith encountered as a young man on the farm: a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet<\/i> (as if it had been saved by the Nazi soldier for<\/i> Austin) and Frost’s “Directive”:<\/p>\n

I was living
\nin my parents’ barn, obsessed with what
\n“Directive” means. Perhaps I was looking too<\/p>\n

deeply into those lines. Here are our waters
\nand your watering place. Drink and be whole
\nagain beyond confusion<\/i>.
\n(“Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips”)<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Perhaps he was. It’s hard to tell just how serious Smith is about returning to this farm \u2013 since he has at heart, our getting lost. Almanac <\/i>then, manages to establish a strange topography of the farm based on misdirection: the “invisible pillar” of “The Silo”; “The Pit” in the woods, “too deep […] to fill,” and “The Trencher” “no one | ever explained.” For Smith, these holes are a kind of landmark that exact a knock-on effect on the rest of the landscape and the community, in ways that become increasingly difficult to gauge. The reader is increasingly forced to make a series of paranoid connections between all the events in the collection: Smith’s father’s careless use of carcinogenic herbicide in “Thistles” is followed in the collection by the night Smith’s mother finds a lump under her breast (which turns out to be “something harmless”). Smith gives the impression of having the whole thing figured out.<\/p>\n

The poems enjoy the drama of an almost biblical cadence, set against a direct, well-timed speech: moving between a kind of Puritanism (the piety of the farm and its daily rituals; Smith’s austere, uncompromising voice) \u2013 and a violent, lawless mysticism that “flooded the New England town depicted on the wallpaper” (“Bingo”). If there is some kind of larger scheme or forecast at work here, perhaps Smith is at its mercy.<\/p>\n

Robin Robertson’s Hill of Doors<\/i> seems at first to enjoy the same kind of bold mythmaking as Almanac<\/i>: there are four Ovid versions; four Dionysus “retellings”; four “farewells” (or elegies, even) and, the glossary tells us, there’ll be some Fra Angelico, Tiepolo and Goya. Robertson’s collection is thoroughly punctuated by the worlds of the classics and the old masters. Where in Almanac<\/i> we hear the measure of the Bible against Smith’s cutting, throwaway lines, in Hill of Doors<\/i>, Robertson’s language undergoes a kind of decay that manages to incorporate both the tones and moods of the classical and<\/i> Robertson’s world. Hill of Doors<\/i> starts then, at the heights of the “Annunciation,” and finishes with “The Key”:<\/p>\n

The door
\nto the walled garden, the place
\nI’d never been,
\nwas opened<\/p>\n

with a simple turn
\nof the key
\nI’d carried with me
\nall these years.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Rather than speculate what’s going on with the blank page at the back of the collection where the last poem listed in the contents should be…or is (“Robertson’s Farewell”)…what I think is more interesting is how successfully Robertson manages to shift, or level-off the tone in what seem to be two very different halves of a collection, marked by “The Halving”:<\/p>\n

Halved and unhelmed,
\nI have been away, I said to the ceiling,
\nand now I am not myself.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

How is there space enough in the collection for a poem like “The Key” alongside, or after “The Ghost of Actaeon” and “Dionysus and the Maiden” \u2013 let alone two Robertsons? While there is something to be said against the tired and tiring language of reeds, cups of wine, nymphs in garlands, hares in streams, and so on (and Robertson is guilty of a few, here) \u2013 he avoids the temptation of a complete overhaul, and instead manages to let the mood of a poem like “The God Who Disappears” slip into a poem like “Second Sight” (or, perhaps it was the other way round) \u2013 unavoidably altering our starting point for a poem like “Partytime”:<\/p>\n

You were quite the vision last night
\nI remember, before my vision went.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

My failed attempt to split the collection into ‘Robertson poems’ and ‘classical\/mythical poems’ (and try to avoid the latter) is demonstrative here \u2013 since although I will admit to skipping a line or two of the Nonnus (they still stand as pillars in the collection) \u2013 what they lend to the sound and feel of the ‘Robertson poems’ is important. Hill of Doors<\/i> manages to avoid the trap of either running two different registers against each other (the classical in translation versus the ‘modern’) or of thoroughly modernising the classical. Robertson’s skill then, is in presenting the modes of language and associated narratives of the classical, the autobiographical, and the lyrical as constitutive of each other.<\/p>\n

Lucy Burns<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Austin Smith, Almanac (Princeton UP, $12.95) Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors (Picador, \u00a314.99). Austin Smith’s debut collection with the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets is an impressive testament to rural life in north-western Illinois. Almanac is arranged concentrically around the family dairy farm and its surrounding landscape, reaching as far as Virginia, South Dakota and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nAustin Smith and Robin Robertson, reviewed by Lucy Burns - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3197\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Austin Smith and Robin Robertson, reviewed by Lucy Burns - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Austin Smith, Almanac (Princeton UP, $12.95) Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors (Picador, \u00a314.99). 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