Jigsaw

Jigsaw

“What I value in poetry, and find in Clive Watkins’s poems, is a faithful, accurate, attentive eye that is always focused on the subject at hand, a mind that is never self-regarding, does not strike postures, has no designs on the reader. (This alone would distinguish him from most of his contemporaries.) I am struck again and again by how many of the ordinary ‘things of this world’ get into his poems, and how extraordinary they are as seen through the glass of his language. He writes wonderful sentences, often complex and sinuous, yet utterly clear. And perhaps most of all I relish the richness and subtleties of the sound, the sound that says everything. He handles the verse line with consummate grace and ease, the sense inseparable from the sound, seemingly made of it. More than once, as I read this book, Frost’s praise of Robinson has come to mind, ‘phrase on phrase on phrase…and every one the closest delineation of something that is something’, and too, ‘that grazing closeness to the spiritual realities’, and I have thought, that’s equally true of Clive Watkins. Like very few contemporary poets, he can make a chill run up my spine, a little shock of recognition, a sense that the great mystery has, for a moment, been made articulate. I don’t use the word ‘great’ loosely – great poems are few and far between. But among the many good poems in Jigsaw, there are several great poems – I am thinking of ‘The Wagon’ and ‘Events As Things, Things As Events’ and ‘Abseil’ and ‘Green Chapel’ and ‘At Westerby’s’ and ‘Cherryburn’ and ‘Hilda and Eddie’s Place’ – and there may be others. If England has produced a better poet since Larkin, I can’t think who it would be.” – Robert Mezey

“Watkins is a poet’s poet, a masterful writer of metrical verse – rhymed and blank – but one whose free verse is as good as his formal, a rare achievement. The work is rhythmically powerful and unerring in its lineation, informed as it is by the author’s decades of teaching Shakespeare. At fifty-seven, Clive Watkins is a fully formed poet, and his first book cause for gratitude both to him and to the publishing house that brings him to us.” – Timothy Murphy

“Jigsaw marks a mature, accomplished, clear-eyed debut. It is a collection haunted with landscapes – real landscapes of garden and wilderness, and the unreal topographies of memory and dream – ‘severe and formal’ or edged with thickets and briars. (Even the letters of the alphabet hook together in one poem to become ‘thorns of black sound’.) This book has been a long time in the making, and Watkins’s reticence has paid off. Poem after intelligent poem is the fruit of ‘waiting patiently for the right season, for the right word’.” – A.E. Stallings

“‘Cherryburn’ puts me in mind of all those 18th-century poets who composed the landscape as in a Claude glass; but Mr Watkins is doing something else, and is altogether original. The poem’s transitions and architecture are remarkable. Its argument moves from the clarity of the actual scene in afternoon light to the reminiscent engravings of Bewick (first the ‘light’ ones, then the ‘dark’), and thence to the actual scene again as night descends upon it. A tractor, in stanza 2, enforces the presentness of the initial vision; ‘printed’ and ‘lines’ in stanza three, together with the stanza’s first line, make a transition to Bewick’s preservation of the place in art; ‘ash and oak’, in the dark last stanza, recall and reverse the ‘oak and ask’ of line 2. There is much art in [this poem], while at the same time it flows clear and easy.” – Richard Wilbur

News

For the second time, Verse Daily has chosen to make a poem of Watkins’s its daily choice. "Hilda and Eddie’s Place" was their choice for October 8th, 2003, and if you would like to read this poem, as it was featured, please click on the link below, which will take you to Verse Daily‘s archive.

http://www.versedaily.org/heplace.shtml

Reviews of Jigsaw

London Magazine, April-May, 2004
"This rare sense of human lives being lived from the past into the future is as valuable a gift as a poet can have these days, and I suppose if anything distinguishes the European, Watkins, from his American contemporaries it’s that he replaces their more orthodox religious views with his long view over time. It’s the difference between the misty time-heavy landscapes of Britain Watkins is so good at describing and the hard, bright light of the North American sun. This distinction becomes most obvious in one of the most arresting poems in the collection called ‘Events as Things, Things as Events,’ which gives voices to ‘ghosts in a life still to happen.’ In a paragraph on the back cover of Jigsaw, the American poet, Robert Mezey, writes of Watkins’s gift for making ‘the great mystery’ become, ‘ for a moment, articulate.’ There are many such articulate moments, and I found myself underlining them as I read: this description of North Wales, for example, in ‘Hedger’.

– England, 1924,

already two decades from Wales,
the hewn cloud of its mountains,

vernacular grit that remains itself
rinsing out of the leaden heaps as if

rain had turned to stone.

Or this Stanley Spencer-like painting of an old couple’s cottage overtaken by time and weather in ‘Hilda and Eddie’s Place’.

Here is the Cottage: an ancient thatch gone green,

Damp walls, distemper peeling. Unwashed plates
Clutter the stone sink. The stink of plumbing,
Of your three lean cats, survivors of their tribe,
Has settled on the place – on the rag rugs,
On the newspapers you will not throw away:
Two world wars and sundry lesser squabbles
Crumbling to dust under their dreadful weight.
I am not your child. From wire cages stacked
Beneath the cedar by the kitchen door,
Your prize mynah, glossy black and gold,
Screams out his single cry, telling the hour –
Eight o’clock, eight o’clock, eight o’clock – right twice a day;
And the blinded finches sing and sing and sing.

Watkins sometimes writes as if Robert Lowell were whispering to him, sometimes as if he were listening out for Wallace Stevens. Whatever his American influences, they have been absorbed and transmuted into his own visual and visionary language. This is the way he sees ‘Caldy Shore’ on the Wirral.

What dazzles and blinds is not the sun alone,
but light coming from afar to flash
off scalloped mud, off ruched water,
the rush of the returning tide:
illegible splendour, dark inwardnesses,
that cannot bear even the frail weight of the human.

Clive Watkins, former head teacher of one of the oldest secondary schools in Yorkshire, has wisely waited forty years to publish his first collection. His poems, immediate yet learned, well formed yet contemporary, English yet conversant with American, Classical and European literature, gently but firmly set standards for us all." – Anne Stevenson

Acumen, September 2003
"Clive Watkins was born in 1945, but is only now publishing his first collection: Jigsaw … The book does, indeed, display a striking maturity of technique and sensibility. He … can use traditional forms to great effect, but he is also very skilled in the way he employs freer forms. In both his short and long lines there is often a simplicity, even a starkness, of expression that has a distinctive power. Many of the poems articulate precisely, but unfussily, annotated observations; there are dream poems, and elegies for ordinary places and lives (as in the excellent ‘Hilda and Eddie’s Place’); there are accomplished translations from, amongst others, Heine, Rilke and Victor Hugo. He… can produce striking epigrams, as in ‘Una, Senecta, Viximus Multos Dies’ (from the Latin of Walter Savage Landor):

Old Age, we’re lived together now for years,
For years like friends have managed to get on.
If you should find a quieter place than this,
Whisper it in my ear – and then be gone.

Watkins deserves to find many readers for this belated, richly assured, first collection." – Glyn Pursglove