1989 'Father's Garden'

A review by Cathy Courtney, Art Monthly September, London

Father's Garden

The design of Father's Garden reflects the tensions of the poem that is repeated throughout the book. The covers are stiff, every inch of their surfaces is taken, blocked in with colour - some of it delicate, some adamant. Inside, there are hardly any breathing spaces. The strict, upright pages are structured to provide a smaller, inner page whose boundary is limited by broader bar- riers of colour. In some cases the colour is trapped too, since it lies on the inside of the Chinese folds and is only partially visible. Bars recur through the book, sometimes acting as a shield to cover lines of verse. The bars also stand for the furrows in the garden of the title, a perfectly ordered enterprise. The father runs the garden with rigid efficiency, as if it were a ship. The ana- logy with the ship - presumably an allusion to his more active working past - is successful, emphasising the static frustration of a man at the end of his days hemmed in by physical limitations but with the same ambitions as he always had. His is an overbearing presence: 'One vision, his, stood stack stock still' but, nevertheless, 'Garden ship shape could never set sail'. The activity channelled into planning and tending the inevitably non-sea-crossing garden is mirrored by the decision to run the same twenty lines of verse (five four-line stanzas) all the way through he book. Because the whole poem is never revealed at one glance - lines break through when the bars covering them are assigned to the margins - the reader has an illusion of movement and of progress as the text gradually unlocks. Having surfaced, the lines are quickly buried as others are freed, not necessarily in consecutive order, so the effect is rather like watching different beds in a garden come to fruition and then fade.

The other presence in the poem is that of the son, needing to escape the confines of the father's world but nevertheless carrying the weight of his ancestry (his roots?) with him. Another garden makes an appearance early on in the book - the gates referred to are those of Jerusalem - opening up the landscape physically and culturally. But although the son does escape sub- mersion to some degree, the injunction at the end of the poem is 'remember home', setting up a (perhaps unintended) echo of Eliot's 'Consider Phlebas' in his 'Waste Land' adaptation of 'Full fathom five', an association reinforced by the connection with the sea and drowning. The battle for freedom - the son is absent without leave - however painful, is still tender and the softening of feeling is reflected in the colour and typeface which changes as the poem moves on. It begins in black sturdy type and moves into softer italics and the tones lighten to leafy green and end in harvest colours. The opening page has a crop of green plants, looser in form than the rest of the book, which are echoed in a border towards the end. (The poem in the last printing is com- pletely covered by the furrows but this page also has the only spacious white border in the book since the beginning.) At the same time as he is a suffocating weight, the father is a life giving force.

Perhaps it is only when the father himself is covered over with earth, that the son can look back with nostalgia to the vanished garden, his freedom be- came a kind of exile. On the last fold of the book another poem makes a shock appearance, the only part of the whole not fully integrated and prepared for from the beginning. Once more it juxtaposes nascent virility with a sense of ending, evoking the brevity of vigour versus the weight of the past and the waning of the natural cycle; the son moves closer to the absent father as he faces the same difficulties.

In tune with the dynastic subject, the book takes its place in line with Campbell's past work, utilising sections of rule to make up the borders. As before, gold and silver have been mixed in with the inks, and the pages are varnished to give them their glossy quality; the mottled effect of the garden surfaces suc-ceeds in creating the illusion of patchily covered earth, whilst the gate pages are more architecturally formed. Some of the richest spreads are those with- out any text at all, and a second voice runs parallel to the tale, a narrative which is expressed solely with colour. The formal design and the abstract shapes are needed to hold at bay the emotion of the poem, whilst the layers of overprinting accord with the complexity of the relationship explored as well as the geological and archeological references. There are quiet symbols of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and elements are economically re-used, so that, for example, the twenty lines covering the main poem are rearranged to form the portcullis which introduces the gates.

The last book dedicated to his father, 'Father's Hook', was bound in wooden boards, so although this one rests between stiff, elegant covers in a stout slipcase it perhaps represents a resolution. The book will be launched at the V & A (which has already bought a copy) in October.

Cathy Courtney

Art Monthly, September 1989