The Structure of Feeling

European Hours: Collected Poems by the British writer and critic Anthony Rudolf gathers fifty years of work from 1964 to 2014. It is divided into five sections of poems, and a sixth composed of short prose pieces. Embedded in every page are Rudolf’s extended explorations into memoir, fiction, criticism and translation, with a concentration of contemporary French poets like Yves Bonnefoy, Edmund Jabes and Claude Vigee. Publisher/editor of Menard Press (which George Steiner called “Indispensable”) for forty years until it closed shop in 2009, Rudolf championed writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, George Oppen, and Octavio Paz, among others. The 2013 publication of his Silent Conversations: A Reader’s Life, constitutes a six hundred page love letter to literature as a source of reflection and meaning that has drawn him well beyond the boundaries of his native England, and even those of Europe. Given this range of resources it is not surprising that Rudolf’s poems share more with American objectivist George Oppen in their spare, almost minimal quality, than with Philip Larkin’s formality, or Donald Davie’s emphasis on “pure diction.” Rudolf achieves an intensity of affect with an image in suspension, or with condensed narrative reminiscent of another American poet, James Wright. I am thinking of Wright’s last line in “A Blessing,” a poem that describes two ponies in a field along the highway to Rochester, Minnesota: “I think / that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom.”

So, too, for Rudolf. His poems reach for the apprehension of what underlies them. Something that wants to “break into blossom,” or yield a liberating insight. Desire for clarity rings true even where the objective seems for the moment unattainable. He parses this pursuit in a poem that clearly states it as a theme early in the collection, “The Structure of Feeling.”

Each waits for the other to come near.The hurter cannot make the first moveSince the silence of the other saysThat he has not yet been forgiven.

Relationships that form the structure of feeling are often layered, and call for the language of archeological exploration, as in “Land of Ancient Moons”: “I disinter your bones / you enter into / the spirit of my ruins.” Relationships between poets and painters may require another kind of exploration, one that accommodates contradictions through desire. In “Le Lecteur,” Rudolf addresses Cavafy through the persona of a mysterious E. J. (Edmond Jabes?) in:

(E.J. speaks to Cavafy, Alexandria, 1930)…write a poem on Caligula,A Kaddish for the Jews he killed in pogromsHere. This is no city for young men.I live between your lines. Old man, I love you.

Relationships as Rudolf defines them involve psychological and esthetic positions that are at odds with each other but in that tension produce a third position that transcends rational boundaries. Something bursts into blossom in the last line of the poem to Cavafy, crowned by the words, “Old man, I love you.” The desire for such an ending survives even where the poem is redolent of abandonment, “Late at Night”:

Dismember the lines of your beautiful poem,Like a limb in a terrible experiment.

The cathode swallows Cagney like a whirlpool.A car squalls in the back end of the garden.

Silent ghost, the humid night bears down:The motel bed will vibrate for a quarter.

The creative impulse rooted more in the painter’s eye forges another key element in the Rudolf’s structure of feeling. In “Chagall,” the painter’s miraculous images are located effortlessly “in the nature / of things, / like a rock water / is struck / from.” One might say the same thing occurs in “Balthus” where the portrait of the young Therese dreaming in a chair finds her “thighs are open to / ‘the world.’” She is simply there, this child/woman, another form in the nature of things, self-evident once seen. The painter Paula Rego, to whom the book is dedicated, may well be the subject of “You, Painting...