Arrivals of Light by Robin Fulton Macpherson
Shearsman Books (2020)
A Review by Chris Powici
When a poet has been plying their craft for half a century or more, they could be forgiven for resting on the laurels of a volume of collected poems. Not Robin Fulton Macpherson. His collected poems, A Northern Habitat, was published in 2013 to wide and well-deserved praise. Here is a book of new poems. And so many of them! Arrivals of Light contains over 150 poems. Many of these consist of just a few lines but they’re suffused with a remarkable keenness of eye and, especially, freshness of thought and phrase. The very title – Arrival of Light – speaks to a sense of continuing revelation, or more accurately revelations.
If there is a thread that unites these poems, it’s that of time, of how we make sense of it and of how, sometimes, we need to question the ways it seems to make sense of us. An uneasy sensation of being thrust into the future or, indeed, thrown into the past, crops up again and again. In the opening poem, ‘Crows and Heron’, the speaker confesses to a feeling of befuddlement as to why birds move in any given direction ‘while my own landscape hurries me forward.’
In ‘Rooks, and Others’ (Macpherson likes his corvids) the palpably memorable world of people (‘the drifting tobacco smells/of wartime adults’) is contrasted with the apparently memory-less world of birds who, the poet speculates, may regard their every cry as the saying of something new.
Out of this sense of the perplexity of existence, Macpherson forges a poetry that touches so memorably on its ‘big’ theme by being so grounded in lived experience. It’s a way of looking at the world that isn’t blind to hurt and heartbreak. Sometimes language itself signals our separation from a wider, more-than-human reality:
The word for cloud tries to hide the cloud.
The word for eye tries to hide the eye. (‘From a Very High Window’)
At other times light illuminates what has been lost, what time has ruined:
neglected backyards, dumped tractors,
dried willow-herb stalks from last year (‘Cloud Mastery’)
For all that Macpherson’s outlook may be unflinching, it isn’t bleak. We may feel an urge, even a compulsion, to revisit the past, but any pain involved is balanced by a refreshing awareness of what can’t be nailed down in time, nor given the ambiguous weight of a name:
The wind that ruffles my hair today
can’t tell the time and can’t tell the year
and doesn’t know which island we’re on.
Without it, I wouldn’t know where I am. (‘Far Away is Here’)
If the distinctions between past and present, here and elsewhere, aren’t as certain as they appear, then the same fluidity holds true for culture and nature. A quartet playing Beethoven ‘becomes a wide forest…The leaves breathe as one.’ (‘String Quartet’). A November evening spills so much ‘indigo and scarlet’, it resembles an Emil Nolde landscape, ‘leaving no room for/everyday light, everyday dark.’ (‘November Dusk’).
Ultimately, reality may not accord with our common-sense view of things, but imagination and insight take up the slack left by our workaday assumptions:
my eyes are too big
to see eightsome reels
whirled by particles
in the solid rock
I think I stand on. (‘Some Things Great and Small’)
Nor does the sheer out-of-kilter oddness of human consciousness mean that we are compelled to feel cut off from the larger life that links atoms to stars by way of birds and trees, rivers and oceans. The universe may be vast and (with new insights provided by cosmology) getting vaster but the sheer familiarity of a crow or a beech tree is a kind of saving grace: ‘Such neighbourliness, centuries deep,/protects us from the empty light years.’ (‘Neighbourly’). All we have to do, as Robin Fulton Macpherson notices so deftly, is to step outside – outside the house and outside of the hurrying-forward landscape of human chronology – where stars and streetlamps feel as close and as far away as one another and
The night universe sweeps me with a freshness
As of a quiet wave breaking in sunlight (‘I Step Outside, Late’)