I’ve slowly been making my way through the stack of books I bought at the poetry fair I mentioned a few weeks ago. One of my favourites so far is a collection by the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, Comme un léger sommeil (Paris: José Corti, 2009). Chappuis’ poems are all very short — none run over a page — and they reminded me of one of my favourite living English poets, Gillian Allnutt, so I’ve been revisiting her work too. Both Chappuis and Allnutt write what we might describe as brief, meditative lyrics. I’ve been reading a lot of sixteenth-century Latin epigrams these last few weeks, for work purposes, and I found myself turning to Allnutt and Chappuis as a sort of palate-cleanser from all that focused and intensely social wit, word-play and invective.
The Chappuis collection begins with this poem:
Eau parcimonieuse,émouvante et glacée.Qui coule clair au fond de la cluse.Engourdie, se rêve absente.
Here’s a word-by-word translation, with some alternatives indicated:
Water sparse [or sparing],Moving and ice-cold.Which flows clear at the base of the gorge.Numb, dreams [or imagines] itself absent.
This is, however, a pretty unsatisfactory version. Water is a feminine noun in French, so the suggestive series of terms describing it here are all accordingly in the feminine form: parcimonieuse (‘sparse’, ‘sparing’), émouvante (‘moving’), glacée (‘iced’), engourdie (‘numb’, ‘paralysed’) and finally absente (‘absent’, ‘distracted’) all have a final e which indicates that they are feminine adjectives. There’s a very delicate but cumulative sort of personification here which only comes into focus at the verb se rêve (to dream or imagine oneself): water can quite naturally coule (flow), but it is surprising that it se rêve. The effect is pretty impossible to translate: to put in a she or a herself in the final line would be to exaggerate the effect; but sticking with dreams itself is also unsatisfactory.
The poem is as sparse as the water, but it also sounds lovely, with the lingering chime — some way off a rhyme, but very pleasing — between parcimonieuse and la cluse. (I translated ice-cold rather than icy to catch at something a bit similar between cold and gorge.) This is typical of Chappuis’ pieces: they are mostly about landscape (water, mountains, snow and trees are the commonest themes), usually untitled, and of this kind of length. (There’s a central section of prose poems, too, but they are also all kept to a single page.) It’s very hard to pull off this sort of thing and equally difficult to analyse what makes it work when it does: but I think the aural precision of these pieces is a large part of their success.
I only have one of Gillian Allnutt’s collections with me here in Paris, and that’s her 2018 collection Wake. There are several points of contact with Chappuis: these are also all short poems (very few spilling over a page), with a similar meditational feel and driven by one of the best ears in the business. Here’s one of the shortest:
My seventeenth-century heartwhereinno hoardbut Godwhose bare upholsterywhose throne of wood.
The sequence of sounds here — heart, hoard, God, wood — is the kind of technique Chappuis often uses, too, to hold his poems together.
Allnutt’s range is wider than Chappuis’ — there’s more variety here in diction, in subject and in form. Perhaps my French is not good enough to notice, but I don’t detect in Chappuis the sort of self-consciously antiquarian language that Allnutt sometimes uses, and while I think it’s obvious that Chappuis’ verse is driven by something like meditation, it doesn’t use overtly religious terms or references as Allnutt quite often does. In the poem below, the very first word — withal — is not current standard English, and an endnote tells us the italicised Lord, Lord refers specifically to Matthew 7.21:
IgnominyWithal I know the lovely lone laboriousness of beinglike cloud in the making.I stand, alone, mistakenin undress.The crows erupt, like words, around me —Lord, Lord —
with all their raucousness.
The landscape of Chappuis’ collection is largely unpeopled, whereas Allnutt’s collection is busier and less calm. Her poems, though never merely anecdotal, are filled with others — relatives and friends, but also other poets and other poems, with allusions and incorporated quotations from Brontë, Hopkins, Yeats, Hardy, Eliot, medieval English verse and (especially) the Bible. I don’t think I have enough French poetry in my head to be sure about Chappuis — if any readers have a sense of his allusive range and reference, I’d love to know, especially at the level of diction (do any of his words sound old-fashioned as some of Allnutt’s do?) — but my sense is that there is much less of this; there are certainly many fewer people, and no real hint of the personal (even if we do gather that he went for plenty of country walks). Some of Chappuis’ poems are single images, sort-of stand-alone similes with the subject indicated at the bottom right in small italic type, a kind of key:1
À l’allure du vent,voilages,rideaux de serge écrus,se referment sur le jour.La pluie bientôt sur nous,engrisaillés.(horizon bouché)At the wind’s speed,sheer curtains,drapes of plain serge,close upon the day.The rain upon us soon,turning to grey.(obscured horizon; uncertain outlook)
I think it’s fair to say that the sort of brief lyric Chappuis and Allnutt both — in their different ways — do so well is a lot more fashionable in contemporary poetry than epigram. There’s a lot of poetry around in magazines and collections which aims at something like what they are doing. It’s very hard, though, to do it really well, and most poetry I read that’s broadly of this type I find unsuccessful — and often rather boring and pretentious too. What distinguishes Chappuis and Allnutt from the rest?
I’ve mentioned their aural precision already: these are lyrics which sound lovely, and in which the sounds have been crafted as carefully as the observations. I very rarely read anything of this aural quality in magazines. I think a sense of restraint is important, too: these all feel like poems which are short because they have been pared down to essentials, not because they have been dashed out one after another. And they feel profoundly rooted in their tradition: Allnutt’s most obviously (to me), because her range of literary and historical reference, though lightly borne, is broad and deep and draws largely on material I also know well. I am aware I’m less sensitive to this in Chappuis but in his poetry, too, I sense a rich underwood: you don’t start a collection of short lyrics with a small, cold stream, an evasive version of the fountain of the Muses, without a shaping sense of literary history.
There’s something important about the cumulative effect of these books too, perhaps especially for the Chappuis where the individual poems are overall more like one another than in Allnutt’s collection. In general, I’m a bit of a sceptic about the modern obsession with the arrangement of a verse collection. Poets seem to worry a lot about this but with the exception, obviously, of verse novels or narrative sequences, the order of a collection seems an odd thing to worry about it. I might read a poetry book through in the given order the first time, but who really cares about first readings? All that should really matter for a poet is how (and that) you are re-read, copied out, underlined, perhaps even memorised; and it is very rare in my experience that this has anything much to do with the place of a given poem in a collection. So I don’t think it’s really the order of the poems that matters, but they are made more powerful by being put together: this gives us the sense of a consistent vision, the coherence and ability to sustain the form and allow the sounds and images of many very short poems to resonate with one another.
But most of all, unfashionable as it might be to say so, these collections matter to me because the contemplative or philosophical elements of the work aren’t a pose, they seem real and hard-won. The beauty and coherence of their poems arises not only from superb technique, or observational originality, but also from something like wisdom. And what do we read poetry for if not for that combination of beauty and truth, utile dulci as Horace would have it.
Engrisaillés ! Such a beautiful word! Seems impossible to translate... How about "greyified"?