Poetry:For a while now, the debate in poetry has been a contest of form versus substance: the polished petit rien against less finished, but more expansive work in which the poet aims for a spontaneous, immediate and appropriately fleeting impression of the world.
Contrary to some opinions, this has nothing to do with economy (as the best Imagist works demonstrate) and is not as often a matter of craftsmanship as the neo-formalists pretend. There are thousands of tight formal verses out there that, even on their own terms, fail to engage, while much of what formalist (or, perhaps more accurately, Mannerist) critics happily dismiss as "free-verse" harbours a subtle and variable music that they have simply failed to register.
No: the question here is not one of form, but of spontaneity, and a generosity of spirit that, when it succeeds, allows the artist to actually say something that is worth saying about the world. Camus's La Peste recognises this problem in the character of Dr Grand, whose egotistical desire to win a reputation as a stylist prevents him from completing even the first sentence of his projected novel, while Henri Cartier-Bresson defined one paradigm of spontaneity in art in his concept of "the decisive moment". Meanwhile, Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems provide an exemplum of that balance of improvisation and order, of the free line and an innate grasp of form that, in Montale's words, gives art "the courage to speak words that can go back into the street again".
Harry Clifton's project is not O'Hara's and, unlike some contemporaries, he knows that "the street" is about the complexities of history, rather than the simplifications of social studies. His is a poetry that engages, but it does so with no agenda, other than the world itself, and the most striking aspect of these Paris Notebooks is an informed, yet improvisatory feel that, by constantly qualifying that engagement, places itself firmly in the European humanist tradition.
Time and again, we are reminded of the "old Europe" that in Anglo-American culture has been so derided; time and again, we are compelled to revisit that great humanist tradition and consider the miasma with which it has been replaced. Thus, in what might be taken for what Mandelstam calls "homesickness for a world culture", but is equally a project of renewal and reassessment, Clifton conjures up such maverick figures from our cultural history as the painter Fabritius, (who died when his studio, along with most of his oeuvre, was destroyed in the Delft arsenal explosion of 1654), the poet René Char, a Resistance fighter during the second World War, the once-renowned, now seriously neglected French novelist Pierre Loti (whose mania for collecting is commemorated here in a touching and philosophically charged sonnet), and, in the beautiful and moving final poem, the Romanian-French poet Benjamin Fondane, killed in the notorious death camp at Drancy, in 1944:
I see a Paris street,
Old letterbox, a drop-zone for the infinite
In a leaf-littered hallway, where a publisher long ago
Went out of business, and a young man searches
In the sibylline mess and the over flow
For a few lost words - my own soul-sister, my wife
Till death us do part, in the Eastern Marches . . .
And that, my friends, will be the afterlife.
Here are not fragments shored against ruin, however, but the twin faces of elegy: regret, or longing, for what has been lost, and the recognition (and, sometimes, celebration) of the new life that takes its place, even if that life is not one's own:
Storm, or no storm, in a hundred years
Of idle chatter, stones spat out the window,
Someone, picking his way through heat and ruin,
Would start again in a plot of olive trees.
Secular Eden is full of figures in transit - freedom fighters in the forests and fields, travellers and refugees, even the lovers in the breathtakingly beautiful title poem - because transit is the very stuff of history: nothing in the world is constant, other than change, and Clifton gives himself over to this Heraclitean flux in poems that are both well-crafted and spontaneous, necessarily doomed attempts to capture the fleeting show.
Yet this is not the end of the story because, though change is the only constant, the best art reminds us that change happens so that the world itself may continue:
Not once but many times
Do we enter the same river,
Conjuring each other's names
Feeling the old fever
Of the ancients under everything.
John Burnside is a poet and novelist. His most recent books are Gift Songs, a collection of poems, and The Devil's Footprints, a novel, both published by Jonathan Cape
Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks, 1994-2004 By Harry Clifton Wake Forest University Press, 201pp. €11.50