from my Kindle book, Parameters:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Parameters-Michael-Murray-ebook/dp/B07893LB8Z/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1513428648&sr=1-1&keywords=parameters
A Gregorian Peace
What were settings in the early poems, now become things in their own right; the world has been stripped down to its constituents. It is interesting to see how far Kopland has travelled when we compare this poem from 1993 with his earlier work:
AMONG CATTLE
And when the summer had come back again after all
And so we were sitting once more, drinking by the river.
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
……………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………….., but the sun went down the same.
And he went to sleep. Because the world went to sleep.
Black he sat by the river, black hole in the prospect.
Now deeply versed in our human myths of living, our hopes, fears, equivocations and failures to measure up: the tonal and emotional ranges these lines weave, and weave between, are immense. The language and imagery now is scrupulously placed.
The human being becomes as much an object of the world as any other of its constituents parts. And as such just as subject to its laws of natural science.
Kopland uses the image of a ‘patient instrument’: “we were made by an impartial attentive/patient instrument, the same/ that breaks us down again.” (: YOUR BACK). It is also an image for language, and by extension, our ability to comprehend everything, whether by reason or instinct. He examines with it the human dimension. Patient, in that it enables him, by the complex employment of the medium, to look calmly at our extremis: dementia, ageing, death. He sees an aged one’s back, he wants to see the person, not just his own response, or his version of that person; his instrument shows him, not love: “love is a word for something other /than what I was seeking…” (ibid), it shows him the commonplace that everyone ages; he also sees, through his training, profession, a medical anatomy chart. All these have their part, all are acknowledged.
Language, our distinguishing feature, also distances us from that of which we speak or write. Can it also bring the world to us:
there must be something now the word morning
slowly lights up and it becomes morning
that held us together and lets us go
as we lie here like this.
( from IN THE MORNING) ?
His instrument‘s distancing effect allows him to see fables in our existence. His Message from the Isle of Chaos (1997) sits very well amongst Seamus Heaney’s fables in The Haw Lantern, and their background in the east European writers (Holub, Herbert in particular).
These examinations of ways and means, of what language allows us, bears extraordinary fruit in THE LATEST FINDINGS:
experts
have searched in human brains
…………………….
they recorded:
“Night fell through the windows of our institute
moonlight stroked across the young breasts
of our female experimental person
…………………………………
We are still searching feverishly for formulae.”
Desire, human warmth, love, still escape the limits of our study.
More pertinently, the most important human apprehensions continue to fall outside the scope of our microscopes:
because happiness is a memory
it exists…………………….
the reverse is also true
I mean this: because happiness
reminds us of happiness it pursues
us and therefore we flee from it
happiness
must exist somewhere at some time because
we remember it and it reminds us.
: WHAT IS HAPPINESS? For a fuller discussion of this poem, see:
https://michael9murray.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/what-is-happiness-wat-is-gelik/
Richard Pool, reviewing for ‘Poetry Wales’ wrote of Kopland’s “existentialist poetry”. I find the writing more Phenomenological. Based on Husserl’s work, the present-day Phenomenologists present the experience of mind as a series of recursive mental events: echoes of echoes looping back and forth through our brain’s maps of world and body, that create an impression of one’s self. It is as though we continually restructure our maps on a daily basis, as the pattern at play in the brain changes.
The extra ingredient, the rider, is a sense of on-going pattern making.
Here we have Kopland’s exploratory template as he explores and objectifies in his writing. There is an increasing sense of wonder, openness, what Belgian critic Herman de Coninck called the “Gregorian peace” of the later work (timeless rivalries: how the Catholic south never forgave the north ‘s breaking away, or abandonment of them… the wry dig of allotting a Gregorian peace to a Calvanistic northerner).
We now encounter titles like, Until it Lets Us Go (1997), even the title of the Harvill collection, Memories of the Unknown, or the recent book, What Water Leaves Behind. All of these exhibit, I would argue, a Phenomenologist sense of numinous wonder, where the world of objects is found to be the one reality, and our response to it is the possibility of happiness, love, desire, all the human responses. These objects are, as Phenomenologist professor Dan Lloyd called, ‘the insensible dimensions that constitute reality.’
See https://commons.trincoll.edu/dlloyd/
In one of his last poems he wrote:
CONVERSATION
She gave me a questioning look
you’re so quiet she says and what about
………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………….
I’d like to say I am quiet
about myself as I don’t know
who that is.
Here is Husserl, and Sartre: consciousness is interaction, thought is in intention, movement. The ‘mind’ does not exist, except when in involvement with the world.
This is all belief, of course; this is all proposition.
It is always best to let the writer have last say:
A GARDEN IN THE EVENING
Things are happening here and I am the only
one who knows which
………………………………………………………….
……………………………………………………………………………………………
and what you don’t hear and don’t see – the places
where we dug holes
and filled them up again, weeping
I tell you this because I do not want to be alone
before I am.
Postscript
The story goes that ‘Rutger Kopland’ .was involved in a bad car crash in 2005: night driving, a tree, a write-off. He acquired a bad head injury; so much so he was unable to speak for a while, became frustrated, violent even. The story continues he ended up for a period in one of his own locked wards.
His doctor prescribed plenty of exercise, so he bought a bicycle: but, You don’t realise how often it rains here, he said.
Rutger Kopland died in 2012
For further and more modern work by Rutger Kopland, see:
http://www.gedichten.nl/schrijver/Rutger+Kopland
There is a translation facility.
michael9murray 