14:50 Rosekinghall by Don Paterson

[David Mascellani]

14:50 Rosekinghall (http://www.orknet.co.uk/oar/roseking.htm) by Don Paterson (http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,12887,1127482,00.html)

[Empty Chairs]

That's brilliant! I want to live in those places!

[sarahkelley]

Someone,

Please, please, please help me here. I've seen poems like this before. It looks like a list. What makes this a good poem? I really, really don't understand. I'm not trying to be obtuse, or difficult. I want to understand.
Help,

Sarah

[Empty Chairs]

Hey Sarah,

Calm down.

It's always tricky to say what makes a "good poem." Read the names of the places carefully. They're funny, and they're imaginative, and we can all relate to taking the train and seeing great lists of places we've never heard of. The poem takes an ordinary situation and makes it surreal, sort of like a parallel universe.

That's why I like it, anyway. Hope that helps.

[David Mascellani]

Sarah,

I came across this poem by while I was searching the web for other things.I read it, found it interesting and 'enjoyable" (there is a tinge of sadness to it) but I couldn't tell you why.I just did. The only things that came to my mind was that it probably had something to with Paterson's use of sound, white space, and punctuation (dashes). I mean I can hear and see the train as it travels along.

So, I decided to a search on Don Paterson to find a little bit more about him.I learned that he has won the T.S. Eliot prize twice and he was the poetry editorfor Picador-both pretty impressive
achievements.

I also came across an essay by Anna Crowe which discusses 4:50 Rosekinghall by Don Paterson and,among other things,explains the 'sad tinge' that I felt.



14:50 Rosekinghall - Anna Crowe

Railways and trains are everywhere in Paterson's work, and at first glance the poem might be read as an elegy
for the passing of a rural network. A quick look at the map, however (O.S. Landranger 53 and 54) will show
that only a quarter of the place-names are actually on or near a railway, dismantled or in operation. Clearly, Paterson is organizing these names along a different theme, and the Forfarshire Division of the subtitle nudges the reader along a fruitful track. Division suggests a military unit, and the lay-out and shape of the poem resemble that of a village war-memorial. In 14: 50: Rosekinghall Paterson mingles names which mean something with names whose sounds suggest a meaning the words do not normally have. He skilfully juxtaposes names in order to build up further layers of significance. The whole poem has a shape and progression, from the sunny pastoral of the names of the first four lines, hinting at seasonal order and stability, to the chilling names at the end of the poem, as though the shadow of war were creeping across the Forfarshire countryside.
Don Paterson is not the first poet to use place-names without other parts of speech to achieve a semantic
effect, and I am grateful to Ian Higgins for drawing my attention to a poem by Louis Aragon, written during
the Occupation of France, and published in La Diane Française by Seghers in 1945. In ‘Le Conscrit des Cent
Villages', place-names like Sommaisne, Sommeilles and Sommerance inevitably call up the ghost of the Somme;
while Angoisse, Adam-les-Passavant, Passefontaine and Treize-Vents suggest, in Ian Higgins' words, the ‘life
of a fugitive or a Resistance courier, hunted, afraid, elusive, constantly on the move.' (‘Tradition and Myth
in French Resistance Poetry' by Ian Higgins, Forum for Modern Language Studies vol.1 no.1, January 1985, pp.
45-58).

Don Paterson's poem, too, has a strong forward movement, but his place-names hit the ear like the tramp of
infantry. After names that hint at bucolic dalliance in l. 4, the first suggestion of war, of military gear
being taken off the shelf and cleaned, is neatly conveyed in Dusty Drum. More Drum names are used further on
to suggest the sounds of infantry and cavalry on the move. The other three names in line 5 suggest the disorientation and discomfort experienced by the new recruit, while Red Roofs might be the barracks, or else the last, heart-wrenching glimpse of home. Arrival in Egypt is immediately followed by the first casualty, in the ominously juxtaposed Formal/Letter, while the lyrical euphemism of Laverockhall is immediately exposed by Windyedge.
Paterson paints a whole scene by ordering a sequence of names. From Framedrum to Clatteringbrigs we hear the
army moving off then being held up by a laden and reluctant horse, and we hear its hooves as it is coaxed over the bridge; in the Outfield to Roughstones sequence the poet relies on his readers' knowledge of an Old Testament story while simply giving the key words, Jericho and Horn. The reader must make the necessary associations between Outfield and Roughstones, and then sees the encircling army and the collapsing walls of the city. While Egypt and Jericho would almost certainly be Biblical names, Smyrna might derive from an actual incident in the First World War. Embedded in the fabric of the poem, such names lend exotic colour, forcing the reader to imagine actual landscapes and colour them in.
Loak - Skitchen - Sturt, which have no obvious meaning, are nevertheless harsh and explosive, and Oathlaw
gathers the line into a string of oaths from a hard-pressed soldier. In the last five lines, the names grow
ever grimmer, redolent of the cruelty, pointlessness and degeneration of war —Wolflaw - Farnought - Drunkendubs
— while a name like Goats conjures up soldiers dying like cattle; dying in shell-holes like Dummiesholes;
killed by a sniper's bullet —Slug of Auchrannie; drowning—Drowndubs; crawling The Bloody Inches, but able only
to get Halfway, and die with a Groan. It comes as a shock to remember that these are all names of villages,
farms, hills, or other landscape features in Angus, so completely does Paterson shape them into a hellish
landscape of the imagination. But then, when a country goes to war, there is scarcely a village that does not
afterwards have names of its own to remember.

****

Thanks for the comments, Empty Chairs.

[sarahkelley]

Empty Chairs,

Thanks for your explanation of what you got out of it. Sorry if I came across manic. Sometimes not 'getting it' really bothers me.


David Mascellani,

Thanks very much for posting that essay. I'd rather be able to read like Anna Crowe than write like Don Paterson. I'm not knocking Paterson. But to be able to get so much from what looked to me to be so little--it's a definite skill.
Thank you too, for posting the link in the first place so I could ask the question and get the answer. I'm sure I haven't 'gotten it' yet. But think I see an outline anyway.
Best,

Sarah

[romac]

The poem comes from Don Paterson’s collection “God’s Gift to Women” which won the 1997 T.S. Eliot prize. It’s clever and sounds good. Some of the place names are fantastic. There are several poems with similar titles to do with train times strewn through the collection, most of which are more conventional. It’s a theme to give cohesion to the book.
I’m currently reading his latest collection, “Landing Light” which won the last T.S. Eliot prize – Paterson is the first poet ever to win the award twice. I would recommend this book. Paterson combines formal mastery with technical inventiveness and surreal imagination. He is one of my favourite poets.

This is the opening poem:

Luing

When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,

I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever – sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?

Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.

Don Paterson

And he’s Scottish! Yaaaaay!

Rob

[HowardM2]

Here are two fine sonnets from Landing Light which were published in the Guardian last fall:

"Waking with Russell"

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.


"The Thread"

Jamie made his landing in the world
so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth.
They caught him by the thread of his one breath
and pulled him up. They don't know how it held.
And so today I thank what higher will
brought us to here, to you and me and Russ,
the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us
roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill

and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving
every engine in the universe.
All that trouble just to turn up dead
was all I thought that long week. Now the thread
is holding all of us: look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.

· From Landing Light by Don Paterson, published by Faber and Faber, price £12.99.


Alas, Landing Light doesn't appear to be available in the U. S. as yet, at least not through Amazon.com.

[romac]

I just found this interview (http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=479285) with Don Paterson and thought people who have been following the thread (and some who haven't) might find it interesting.

Rob

[earthshoes]

Alas, Landing Light doesn't appear to be available in the U. S. as yet, at least not through Amazon.com.

Well, phooey. This is some of the first stuff to catch my eye since January.

Thanks for posting these pieces guys.

I especially like "The Thread".

[SarahJF]

Thank-you for posting those. I've very much enjoyed reading them.