access to the silenceTom Leonard, access to the silence, 136pp A5, ISBN 1 901538 47 8. £9.50. etruscan books, 28 Fowler’s Court, Buckfastleigh, South Devonshire TQ11 0AA. Tom Leonard’s new collection is subtitled “Poems and Posters 1984-2004”. With the recent republication by etruscan books of Leonard’s earlier retrospective collection, Intimate Voices, the full range of this remarkable poet’s work is available in print for the first time. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of Intimate Voices: no book of poetry has done more to articulate the experience of working, thinking, simply being in the languages of working-class Scotland in the last fifty years. My experience is that you don’t meet people who have read Intimate Voices, you meet people who know Intimate Voices. Leonard’s early poems, mostly in Glasgow speech, speak so precisely and with such a fierce, analytical wit that they transcend their status as poems and become part of the shared apparatus we use to think with. I don’t know any other contemporary poetry of which that is so true. The first thing to notice about access to the silence is that it contains no essays. Leonard’s larger collections have always included prose which helped to set the poetry in its larger contexts (I first read about William Carlos Williams and the sound-poet Bob Cobbing in an essay from Intimate Voices). While Leonard has continued to write critical and polemical prose (you can find some on his website www.tomleonard.co.uk and much more in his 1995 book Reports from the Present), its absence here seems appropriate to the book’s title and themes. The poems are often grounded in the quest for a fundamental level of self which is either pre-linguistic or extends the concept of “language” to include the entire range of gestures and tics by which a person is known. Words are sometimes fragmented (as they often are, if you listen) or accompanied by paralinguistic signs to be interpreted in performance (the sequence “HESITATIONS: monologues for dancing” includes lines and arrows which Leonard embodies, in performance, as silent gestures). The unclassifiable “ACH CALEDONIA” is “notes to accompany a performance tape” — not a description of the tape itself, but of what Leonard did while it was playing: holding up placards and delivering a fragmentary monologue on the politics of linguistic difference. One whole sequence, “Nine Variations on Larry’s Poem”, contains no words by Leonard at all, communicating instead through relineated and non-linear versions of a four-line poem by Larry Butler. Leonard’s voice comes through here as surely as personality subsists in a loved one deprived of their speech: the last, wordless, variation has just the bracketed ( ) ghosts of words, deployed on the page like the notes of a silent music. It’s incredibly moving. These poems hold the smallest parts of language up to the light, words like “the” which might be passed over as ethically neutral and are anything but. Leonard wrote an essay called “What I Hate about the News is its Definite article”, and one of the poster poems here paints a thousand words: AN Leonard once quoted Frederick Coplestone on the philosopher Duns Scotus and his use of the word haeccitas, “thisness”: It is, as we have seen, neither matter nor form nor the composite thing; but it is a positive entity, the final reality of matter, form and the composite thing. A human being, for instance, is this composite being, composed of this matter and this form... it seems to be implied that a thing has haeccitas or "thisness" by the fact that it exists. “Chinweizu, Rothenberg, Duns Scotus” (available online at www.tomleonard.co.uk) These are, I think, the concerns behind the beautiful poster-poem “Blessed Trinity”, which, in a review, I can only approximately map as THE is the father this is the holy spirit a is the son THE: the paternal authority of classification. this: italicised, the protean specificity of person, spirit, breath. a: one among many, the condition of being human in the world. A print of the poem hangs on the wall in front of me as I write this review. It says a lot about Leonard’s range that, having established himself as the finest poet that Glasgow speech has ever had, he quietly went away and wrote his best poem in English. The sequence “nora’s place” moves into and out of the voice of Nora, “just a human being / totally representative / as anyone is / outside the self // (and in it)”, following her through a day of shopping, cooking, drinking and politics. On the way it manages to say things about the painful mundanity of distress that I don’t think have been said before: that thing about people can tell when you’re surprised and a bit hurt a bit hurt: in this collection the quiet humanity, the empathy that comes from being a husband and father, and from having been a child, is as much to the fore as the polemic (though that’s good too): to feel part of the silence that is part of that which shares you and not-you to sense being as not being deprived of being to sense the it as being something that includes all of your being from the time you were born (listen to the music of that: Leonard’s poetry has been deeply influenced by the rhythms of classical music). Printed on heavy paper with the kind of care for the “thisness” of the text that only the smallest of presses can muster nowadays, access to the silence is a joy. This review appeared in volume 94, issue 4 of Poetry Review. Return to Miscellaneous writing. Return to |
