Just as words recalled can make us think of fragments shored against the ruins so in a letter from 1977 to Milton Hindus, the editor of Charles Reznikoff’s poems, the American poet George Oppen recalled lying trapped, wounded, in a fox-hole in France during the final days of the Second World War ‘with no apparent means of escape’:

 

I waited, I think, some ten hours, and during those hours Wyatt’s little poem…‘they flee from me’…and poem after poem of Rezi’s ran thru my mind over and over, these poems seemed to fill all the space around me and I wept and wept. This may not be literary criticism, or perhaps, on the other hand, it is.

 

I am reminded of this moving memory as I leaf through W.D. Jackson’s OPUS 1, with its subtitle ‘THEN AND NOW’, a work-in-progress focused upon the individual and history. I am also prompted to recall David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country, a powerful account of the relationship between the present and the past in which he suggested that the past is everywhere:

 

All around us lie features which, like ourselves and our thoughts, have more or less recognizable antecedents. Relics, histories, memories suffuse human experience.

 

Although both what has gone and what is yet to come are alike inaccessible and beyond physical reach they are integral to both our imaginations and our recollections: our reminiscences, thread their pathway through every present moment.

          The Prologue to OPUS 1 sets the scene for the two-hundred pages of Jackson’s poetic sequence and the forty pages of notes which are essential to a reading of the whole:

 

Reader, it’s never all in the mind,

But since art’s what we make of what we find,

And since we also see what we say,

I’ve tried to make these fragments fit

Into a pattern – hardly a song.

 

In an unpublished note from the author Jackson suggested that the many verse-forms which haunt this magnus opus are ‘a variety of quotation, of which there are many others with all of them taken together making up the intertextuality of the writing in question’. This intertextuality ‘is an intrinsic part of its meaning…’.

          In the final pages of OPUS 1 there are quotations adapted from the writings of Chuang Tzu (369-286 BC), a philosopher whose writing possesses the style and stylishness of a poet, a thinker whom Jackson suggests ‘may have been the first Chinese writer to formulate and elaborate on the Taoist way of thinking’. It is entirely appropriate therefore that the final twelve poems of the Jackson’s sequence should focus upon what might be termed the transformation of things:

 

          A swallowtail settles, and Chuang Tzu dreamed

He was the butterfly,

So pleased to be free! When he woke, he seemed

(Without yet knowing why)

 

To be the fluttering butterfly still,

Dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

So what was the difference?…Needing to fill

Its belly, a fat toad knew.

 

One reason for the Chinese philosopher-poet’s work being found so difficult throughout the ages is that ‘he has no interest in explaining how one is to achieve the enlightened states of mind of which he speaks’. As Jackson puts it:

 

He states his conclusions, rather than how he arrived at them, which can leave one feeling distinctly lost or out of one’s depth. In some respects, the stories or parables which are scattered throughout his writings – and which resemble Aesop’s fables in their humour, if not in how they see things – are the most approachable sections of them, and it is on these that the sequence concentrates.

 

The subtitle of the whole book, ‘THEN AND NOW’, is given powerful validity in the third of these last twelve poems containing a brief account of a conversation between an oak-tree and a reed. As Jackson points out this idea is taken from Aesop and of course it also nods gracefully to the poem from the Fables of La Fontaine, ‘Le Chène et le Roseau’:

 

          From his superior point of view

An oak condoled with a reed:

 

My dear, why don’t you try to grow

Closer to me? My shade

 

Would help you to withstand the sun,

My strength the wildest storm…

 

A great gale split the oak’s thick trunk,

But the reed regained her form.

 

This poem reflects upon the arrogance and pride which share company with an  ignorance based upon a complete lack of self-awareness and these truths of human nature are linked together with both good-humoured irony and an unquestionable sense of quiet resolution.

In an article written by Ezra Pound for the magazine New Age in1911 he referred to his translation of the Old English narrative poem ‘The Seafarer’ in terms of ‘Luminous Details’, words as the ‘transcendentals’ in an array of facts, not merely significant nor symptomatic in the manner of most facts but capable of giving one ‘a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law’. These patterned integrities both prompt and permit our recognition of the ‘THEN’ to be perceived in the ‘NOW’. In his monumental volume The Pound Era Hugh Kenner wrote about Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Seafarer’ and suggested that ‘The poem is not its language’ before going on to refer to Pound’s advice to translators that they should let go the words and focus upon the ‘energised pattern.’ That idea of an ‘energised pattern’ threads its pathway throughout OPUS I: the sequence of W.D. Jackson’s work is a significant journey.

To a certain extent Jackson’s creation of a new Hamlet tale is a little reminiscent of this world of translation and in section 3 of the book, subtitled  ‘Interpretations’, he presents the reader with some genuine insights into the mind of the Shakespearian character. The eight pages of this section are forwarded by two epigraphs; the first, naturally enough, is a quotation from the original play and the second is from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a book first published in a German-occupied Paris of 1943:

 

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a

King of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.

Hamlet II.ii.254-256

 

Man is the only being by whom a destruction can be accomplished…

[Storms] do not destroy…they merely modify the distribution of

masses of beings. After the storm there is something else. [But] to

posit otherness there must be a witness who can retain the past in some

manner and compare it to the present in the form of no longer. In

the absence of this witness there is being after as before the storm—

that is all.

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, I.1.II (‘Negations’)

 

The nine pages of Jackson’s ‘Hamlet in England’ offer the reader a Prince who has left the government of his country in the hands of Laertes, with whom he has become reconciled, in order to return to England along with his wife (the daughter of the King of England) and his daughter. In a mode of reflective meditation Hamlet sits in the study at his writing desk to stare out through an open window into a garden of fruit-trees and roses:

 

Still out of joint

My thoughts withdraw

Sometimes for hours

To Elsinore.

 

The foolish people

And cloud-capped towers

Of that solid castle

Were a prison to me

 

Whose confines, wards

And dungeons weren’t real

But still make me feel

Like some sort of vassal,

Bounded, unfree…

 

This is ambitious writing which explores some aspects of Hamlet’s state of mind but does so in a style which could have missed the target were it not for Jackson’s intelligent understanding of the echoing sounds of words. Using the word ‘withdraw’ at the end of the second line conveys a slowness of movement that, followed by the long third line’s assonance, ushers our entrance into the recollection of long-serving imprisonment. Those ‘confines’ of Elsinore, a place in which Hamlet has been bound down in order to prevent his return to his studies in Wittenberg, were not only physical but were a reflection of emotional subservience prompting him to see himself as a ‘vassal’. The word itself is taken from the Medieval Latin vassallus to signify a retainer, a servant, a man whose freedom is wholly dependent upon the landowner within whose grounds he is confined. Jackson’s poem presents us with Hamlet’s ‘mind’s eye’ preoccupied with the ‘ghosts of that place’ from which, in a real sense, he can never escape and in which he remains ‘Lost in the maze’ of his mind, the ‘Then’ reigning over the ‘Now’:

 

          How should I make

A decision to go,

Or not to go? –

As, then, to be

Or not? How free

Are our in / decisions,

Our revised revisions?

 

The echo here of Eliot’s Prufrock’s whose infernal revolving of indecisions has no end brings out an interesting interpretation of the bleak-black comedy which threads its pathways throughout Shakespeare’s play and brings to my mind the comments made by George Steiner in his book of ‘an examined life’, Errata: 

 

However pedestrian or exalted, however routine or re-creative, a translation is always a primary thrust of understanding. The translator is also called the interpreter. He strives to transmit the sense of the source. A mirror looks into a mirror, exchanging what it can of light.

 

This section of Jackson’s sequence of poems is aptly called ‘Interpretations’.

There has been a well-worn notion of course that one can translate a poem but not the poetry of the poem. However, the contemporary French poet Yves Bonnefoy, who himself translated most of Shakespeare’s plays, turned that idea on its head by proposing that poetry, the very thing we cannot grasp or hold, is the very thing we can translate because, unlike the fixed nature of the poem itself, the poetry is unfixed. Bonnefoy suggested that ‘You must realize that the poem, unlike poetry, is nothing and that translation is possible – which is not to say that it’s easy; it is merely poetry re-begun.’ And in an intriguingly ambitious manner W.D. Jackson traces throughout his OPUS 1 a poetry re-begun.

          Section 5 of ‘Interpretations’ is subtitled ‘Thirty-nine Songs’ and it contains lines loosely based on anonymous poems written from 1250 onwards as well as translations of Heine and Goethe. In his notes Jackson points out that many of these poems by Heine, including the first one ‘On the sands a girl stood sighing’ (‘Das Fräulein stand am Meere’), were set to music by Romantic composers including Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn. In his notes Jackson’s statement of intent concerning these translations reflects a concern with the sound of language that sits easily beside Pound’s early versions of Heine which he had originally published in Canzoni (London, 1911):

 

I have tried to get as close to the sense and sound of the German as was compatible with writing an English poem.

 

One of the Medieval poems that Jackson adapts in this section of OPUS 1 is ‘Westron winde, when will thou blow?’ and he notes that the song’s popularity has been recognised since its central use in John Taverner’s ‘The Western Wynde Mass’ for 4 voices from the 1520s:

 

          Western wind, when will you blow,

                     And when the small rains rain?

 

          —Christ, if my love

                     Were in my arms

 

          And I

                     In my bed again!

 

In terms of sound, and this is quite central to much of Jackson’s poetry, it is worth recalling what Charles Olson asserted in his 1959 Totem Press publication, Projective Verse. Using the Western Wind Medieval poem as an example he stressed that syllables are the ‘king and pin of versification’:

 

I would suggest that verse here and in England dropped this secret from the late Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, lost it, in the sweetness of meter and rime, in a honey-head…It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose.

 

I think that W.D. Jackson has caught what Olson was referring to in his own version of these lines. In the second line the simple monosyllabic ‘rains’ seems to extend its vision to ‘rain’ in the form of an echo: time stretches out.

In his opening poem, ‘Author’s Prologue’, Jackson had referred to the fragments fitting into a pattern and had followed that statement by addressing his reader directly:

 

I wonder what you’ll make of it,

As we make or ‘read’ our world – translate

Its sounds and signals.

 

In his note to those lines he quotes Borges’ conviction that ‘a book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader…This dialogue is infinite…A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships’. I have only hinted at some of the many ‘relationships’ to be found in OPUS I.