Welcome back, our poet of deadlock

Where has Tom Paulin been? There have been periodic nostalgic frettings on social media in recent years, especially for those long-gone days at the turn of the millennium when Paulin and others (Germaine Greer, Mark Kermode, and Allison Pearson among them), could discuss culture – high to low – with critical zest, for a TV audience, on Late Review. Paulin, with a distinctive Northern Irish accent and a pugnacious, politically-inflected contrarianism, was sufficiently famous then to be a favourite of impressionists such as Alistair McGowan. But he has been very quiet for a long time – Namanlagh (recently shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize) is his first new book of poems since the well-received, ruminative collection Love’s Bonfire, more than a decade ago.

Paulin was a poet of the Troubles, and always a highly interesting one, fascinated by the Unionist culture he hailed from, even as his politics – Left-leaning in almost every particular – seemed in tension with so much of it. In his criticism – whether of aspects of Ulster Unionism or a new Blur album – Paulin was given to vehement assertions and startling provocations; but, as Yeats remarked, “out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry”, and Paulin’s poetry is hesitant rather than strident, as he worries away at his subject, tracing, retracing, leaving in what he might have erased; it’s sometimes as if the labour of the making of the poem is worked back into its texture.

Namanlagh itself offers an explanation for Paulin’s relative silence over the past decade: the early poems speak, with ironic eloquence, of depression and writer’s block. “Nothing to Be Said” – a consciously Larkin-esque title – recalls a week alone in a rented room, hoping to reignite the poetic fire, and failing.

What’s this like? I asked myself.
And the answer coldly came back at me
– it’s like losing your job
or retiring from the one that,
though it died on you way back,
at least filled your days with something to do.

But subsequent poems chart a recovery, and that flattened tone opens out into the unmistakable gritty music of his best work, as in this description of the adulterous liaison of a couple reunited after decades apart:

… a tummy-tucked Eve
and a slap-headed Adam
whose state of déshabillé
made them feel both used and ashamed
like two écorchés
rising from the dissection table

Not all of these poems are strictly new. Two were first published in the Guardian as long ago as 2000. “Recht” – with its line “here I am stepping into the same poem twice” – is reprinted verbatim from “Marked Already” from Love’s Bonfire, and “The Detainee”, likewise, is a very minor revision of “The Wait” from that book. Nor are the political references recent – “Portadown”, for example, is a highly affecting poem about an intra-loyalist atrocity from 1996; “Direct Rule” seems to have been written in 2002, when Martin McGuinness was education minister.

Paulin was one of the earliest academic enthusiasts for the work of John le Carré, and it might be argued that, just as le Carré struggled after the end of the Cold War, so Paulin has been somewhat stymied by the (relative) peace in Northern Ireland. “Nothing to Be Said” contains the slightly prosaic reflection that “Looking out, I felt much less / of a person than I did before / but knowing this new island / was better, far better, / than all that went before it”.

For decades Paulin was the laureate of deadlock – lovers at odds; policed borders; blockage, obstacle, standoff. Namanlagh contains a few of Paulin’s translations of poems by the Palestinian poet Walid Khazindar; analogies between the Northern Irish and the Palestinian situations have long been evident in the competing flags of Belfast’s neighbourhoods.

But even if it mostly revisits familiar ground, Namanlagh nonetheless reminds one how good Paulin is at rendering movements of mind and eye and memory – flickering via jazzy associations of sound and shape – and how well he conveys first the materiality of ordinary objects, and then the associations they carry with them. “Edge of Town” describes a path surrounded on each side by metal railings, which first remind him, in “an image I’ll never draw or paint”, of “two vast armies / of abstract soldiers eyeball to eyeball”.

He fiddles with the image – “thin hoplites with jagged spears / like poster art but solider / almost Bauhaus I guess” – before “the image flies / out of sight – I mean out of my inner eye”. It’s all there – the little chimes (“soldiers”/ “solider”); the oscillation between material detail and metaphor; the philosophical musing; and behind it, but not spelt out, the political history implicit in that image of two armies facing off. The best pieces in this collection make one very glad that Paulin’s distinctive, enlivening voice has not fallen silent.