> Does this mark a shift from the lyrical to the philosophical, though? I
> don't know and wouldn't want to say on the basis of so few poems, but I'd
be
> interested in how it seems to you, Robin, or others here who know Graham's
> work better (and know more of it) than I do.

Candice:

This is a rather lazy way of answering your question (or of avoiding
answering your question) but here's the review I wrote of _The Implements In
Their Places_ for _Lines Review in 1978.

It's a bit long (ain't OCR wonderful?) so some of you may want to leave now.

Incidentally, Tom Leonard wrote a long piece on Graham for one of the
Scottish Magazines in the early eighties -- does anyone (Matthew?) remember
where it appeared? I think I have it around the house somewhere, but where
...

Robin

THE IMPLEMENTS IN THEIR PLACES
By W. S. Graham. Faber, £1.95, paperback 85p.

Ahab to his peculiar Moby Dick, W. S. Graham continues his ambiguous pursuit
of language, an aesthetic and ascetic hunt for the great beast which
twitches and flinches beneath the skin of the tongue. In his latest book,
The implements in Their Places, Graham's quarry is still whiter, more
elusive, less easy to distinguish from the background snow which it ranged
in Malcolm Mooney's Land. There, at least, language was imaged as a definite
fauna, grammarsow and word-louse, the creature living on the other side of
the word:

I'll give the beast a quick skelp
And through Art you'll hear it yelp.

-"The Beast in the Space"

Right at the beginning of The Implements, the beast language has sunk into
the country of the word:

What is the language using us for?
Said Malcolm Mooney moving away
Slowly over the white language.

-"What is the Language Using Us for?"

-the white language which is "the frozen tundra/Of lexicon and dictionary."

In this snell word-weather, the contentiousness of language is bound up with
a complex sense of place: not just the obvious places of Greenock where
Graham was born or Cornwall which he now inhabits, but the place of words as
they are used in these very poems:

I stand in my vocabulary looking out
 Through my window of fine water . . . (p. 20)

Here I am hiding in
The jungle of mistakes of communication. (p. 22)

I am getting ready
To pull myself together and plot the place
 To speak from. (p. 22)

What I am making is
 A place for language in my life. (p. 12)

This sense of the artist speaking from the centre of his medium is what is
taught in "Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons," where Quantz/Graham says
that:

It is best I sit
Here where I am to speak on the other side
Of language.

-where Karl, the flute pupil/reader, is instructed to "Stand in your place,"
told to:

Blow me a little ladder of sound
From a good stance so that you feel the heavy
Press of the floor coming up through you and
Keeping your pitch and tone in character.

Flautist and reader and poet must learn the same final lessons -"You must/Be
faithful to who you are speaking from"- "Stand in your place/Before them."

The "Five Lessons" are Graham's most objective dramatisation of the
preoccupations of the book, preoccupations with the paradoxes of language,
how it sunders and unites, recreates or distorts, how it is spoken and how
it is heard. What powers the book is the pressure to speak across the
barrier of words, a barrier which is also a bridge, and to speak a truth
which will be heard by both the distant reader and the dead friend:

I want to be able to speak
And sing and make my soul occur

In front of the best and be respected
For that and even be understood
By the ones I like who are dead.

-''What is the Language Using Us for?

This image is bound into the structure of the book, in the elegies to (not
on) Alexander Graham, Bryan Wynter and Roger Hilton

-after all, the well-remembered dead are no further off than the never-met
reader. So in the final poem of the book, the writing of poetry has become a
training for the speaking to the dead:

Speaking to you and not
Knowing if you are there
Is not difficult.
My words are used to that.
-"Dear Bryan Wynter"

As speaking, so poetry is contentious, perhaps irresolvable. Throughout the
book, there are hints of the ballad form persisting like a ghost in our more
sophisticated present. The unrhymed quatrains of "What is the Language Using
Us for?" point to this, as does the Earl of Moray's presence in the 53rd
Implement; and the ballad exists at the centre of "Imagine a Forest," which
has as its core a presentation of a visored knight lying dead in the
greenwood of Ettrick Forest. But the ballad is skewed: the poem is not
located in Ettrick Forest but in the ballad-wood itself, and begins from
just this paradox:

Imagine a forest
a real forest.

The reader is placed "in a deep / Ballad on the border of a time / You
seemed to walk in before." In the shift between the first and the second
stanzas, reader becomes participant:

And he has taken
My word and gone .

The reader himself finds the knight, and delivers the coup de grace. In the
third stanza, returned to his own fireside, he is once more addressee and
not participant, leading to the moral power-fully made at the end:

You are come home but you are about
To not fight hard enough and die
In a no less desolate dark wood
Where a stranger shall never enter.

Here Graham is not refurbishing the ballad for our time but creating a
strange territory where the place is the ballad. The couplet repeated at the
beginning and the end of this poem points us towards the three poems where
Graham does indeed recreate the ballad, "The Gobbled Child," "The Lost Miss
Conn," and "The Murdered Drinker," where the grotesque deaths are raised
above melodrama by the economy of their narration. This new ballad form
involves a degree of firm organisation, in these poems of five five-lines
unrhymed stanzas with the last stanza a repetition of the first, and in each
case the culminating death appearing in the fourth stanza, as in "The
Murdered Drinker":

By Rhue Corner he stops
And leans on the buzzing pole
And undeservedly
A sick bough of the storm
Falls and murders him.

In these poems, the preoccupation with place persists-ballad-forest, or the
first phrase of the "recreated" ballads, "To set the scene," just as place
in its own right, whether Greenock or Madron, is an important element in the
book as a whole.

More than just poetry, representation itself becomes con-tentious in "Ten
Shots of Mister Simpson." The cameraman is poet, certainly, but he is here
stll cameraman, and it is not the word but the image itself which selects
ard distorts:

All I see from my black tent
Is on the shelf of your lower lid
A tear like a travelling rat.

If The Implements is sparser than Malcolm Mooney's Land, nevertheless, like
the lines just quoted, there is a salting of meta-physical frisson. The 6th
Implement-image of one of Graham's elegised friends or of Graham himself?:

He has been given a chair in that
Timeless University.
The Chair of the Professor of Silence.

-or the last two lines of "The Night City":

I sat like a flea crouched
In the stopped works of a watch.

The first impression which the language poems make-and coming as they do at
the beginning, they tend to define how we approach the book-is that Graham
is moving towards conceptual statement, eschewing tricks of image and
rhetoric. The very titles hint at this-"What is the Language Using Us for?
", "A Note to the Difficult One," "Language Oh Now You Have Me." But just as
the language beast has sunk into the word-world, so image has retreated
deeper into the fabric of utterance but is still, elusively, there, pastel
not poster. "The jungle of mistakes of communication" in "Language Ah Now
You Have Me" becomes a multi-focal jungle, real rain forest, Cornwall's
Madron, the room where the poet writes, metaphysical place where pleasure is
personified:

It is my home
Where pigmies hamstring Jumbo and the pleasure
Monkey is plucked from the tree. How pleased I am
To meet you reading and writing on damp paper
In the rain forest beside the Madron river.

In the richest poems in the book, as here, all Graham's themes run together,
and the final achievement is that, as do individual poems, so the book as a
whole knits together. Behind the local felicities, the individual way in
which Graham treats a general poetic and human preoccupation, past the
recreations of place and person, the curious narratives which intersperse
the poems on the nature of the word and the world, there is a true sense in
which the book is a single, interconnected object, all the poems reflecting
and deepening Graham's picture of the universe of the artist's word, Madron
and Greenock and the white wastes of arctic language, Malcolm Mooney ard
Bryan Wynter and the unknown reader and the poet himself, all bound up into
the same landscape, all using and being used by the same implements, all
finding their own individual places in the wider place of Graham's
imagination.