Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, and: Sono, and: Space Walk (review)

What begs translating may not require it. Gang aft a-gley, for instance. Lead off with even a curtailed paraphrase of Robert Burns's lines, The best laid plans . . . , and most English speakers can complete the idiom more or less accurately. Things often going awry is universal stuff, and we trudge in the shoes of Burns's farmer, who unceasingly turns the soil, excoriating himself for his past and fearing for his future. Three new books by Simon Armitage, Sarah Arvio, and Tom Sleigh all wrestle with the unreasonable expectations and well-meant gestures that feed the law of unintended consequences, the word "blueprint" appearing in all three as they cycle through the disappointments and terrors of hindsight, and the "helium feeling" in the face of still-impending disaster. Far from merely asserting the "recuperative, restorative powers" of poetry that the blurb on Sleigh's book claims, each poet riffs upon Armitage's clever aside from his second book, Kid, fifteen years ago: "Language, / we know, is less use than half a scissor." The plow turns our verses, still we fret and agonize.

These three collections overlay this impotence of language with the legion crises of middle age in a post-9/11, post-colonial, post-everything world, a world in which an eerie sort of stability comes in inhabiting the space of the intermediary, the oracle, the translator. Sleigh and Armitage pull ancient texts into the present, Arvio works as a translator at the U.N., each culling together the "fragments of a greater language," as Walter Benjamin called them. Their poems are powerfully governed by collision and collusion of personal history with History, at "a moment of danger" called to give account for the past, knowing that even with startling gestures of reconciliation, accession, and sympathy, "even the dead will not be safe."

In the Introduction to his recent radio script, Mister Heracles, an adaptation of the play by Euripides, Armitage notes, "There are many reminders of ourselves: dreams, intuition, appetite, lust, language, but violence is one of the most potent, opening up a direct channel between what we have become and what we originally were." Indeed, his latest collection, Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid, is rife with acts of violence—murders, a pedestrian killed by a careless driver, war, the "fanatacised heat" of a terrorist's suitcase bomb. Where is true heroism in all of this? Armitage's authoritative response begins on a political note, with government-issued instructions for properly washing hands (step by step increasingly difficult to picture and manage), dedicated i.m. Dr. David Kelly, the whistleblower whom many in Britain felt was hounded to an early death by government inquiries. Then onto an excerpt from his BBC Radio script of The Odyssey, book 9, the blinding of Polyphemus, rendered so masterfully—"and when the eyeball burst we were soaked in ink, / and the lens crunched and cracked like splintering ice, / and the lashes and eyebrows flared like burning grass." I'm led to paraphrase Robert Lowell on Milton's Satan: who or what is Odysseus? He is not ultimate good, wiles being his identifying trait and his fight here a kind of asymmetrical insurgency, but he also appears to voice the dilemmas of Anglo-American policy in Iraq:

          And if we'd have known the chain of events we'd set in place, the cruelty and agony that stretched ahead, year after year, the horror and terror and sadness and loss still to come—who knows, perhaps we'd have chosen to die right there, in the black cave, out of sight of heaven and without sound.

Armitage gets similar mileage from a unique translation from the Bayeux Tapestry, that history is apparently written by the victors ("History is mine"), but History itself, not William the Conqueror, has the last word. Whereas elsewhere in the text parenthetical inclusions seem like the filling of lacunae...