Thanks for this, Robin - an excellent account of the book. Funny, I was only
thinking of those microballads today, wondering if I could do something
similar - they are remarkably original, I think, as well as being part (with
'Imagine a Forest' and the sections of 'Implements' you mention) of Graham's
last engagement with a form that preoccupied him all his life. 'Snell' is a
new word on me. The Tom Leonard article is in the Edinburgh Review special
Graham issue, number 75 (1987).

Best wishes

Matthew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 11:37 PM
Subject: Re: HG my name JG my game WS wont same


> > 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.
>