Tom Paulin’s poetry, like his criticism, has been as much a questioning of national identity as a quest for it, a troubled Protestant voice finding its roots in a dissenting republican tradition, loathing and loving the kitsch Britishness of Unionist culture, admiring English literature even when exposing the less appealing politics which underwrite it. Paulin’s own position as a virtual expatriate from a region of ambiguous political status and his belief in a secular Irish republic leave him grasping for “an identity which has as yet no formal or institutional existence”. In “Before History”, writing from the bare, sun-scrubbed room of the isolated self, he describes the way “the spirit hungers for form”, and that hunger expresses itself as much in emetic rejections of the current political menu as in residual allegiances to “a gritty sort of prod baroque / I must return to like my own boke”.
The Selected Poems is a welcome opportunity to review this ideal home-hunting, particularly in the light of a Pauline shift from a critical unionism to a non-sectarian republicanism, dividing his first two volumes, A State of Justice (1977) and The Strange Museum (1980), from the later work. Before 1980, and the change of heart marked by a fierce polemic against Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paulin’s terse, economical work operated as a civil libertarian critique of Ulster as a police state. A Benthamite panopticon of surveillances was observed with a similarly cold eye; history was seen as “the tyranny of memories”, fuelling a popular justice which hideously transformed Portia’s ironic metaphor for juridical mercy: “A rain of turds; a pair of eyes; the sky and tears”.
“The politics of love”, a neutral civility, are threatened by “a metal convenience”, built upon, and separate from, their nature, and civilians and soldiers alike are reduced to mechanisms of the State; a maker of gravestones is “less a person than a function”. Paulin’s poetic voice often parodied this “public uniform”; otherwise he adopted a bleak persona of embittered provincialism, shy of the neighbours, inured to funerals, perfecting itself in the sterile isolation of Bleaneyesque rented rooms.
Admittedly, in “A New Society” Paulin expressed a vision of a communal ideal, in an epiphany so banal and materialistic that its beauty is all the more surprising; it is a vision, rising from a slum clearance, which shocks because its utopia seems so attainable. Other poems yearned for their own slum clearances; to shuck off that “autocracy, the past”, and emerge unencumbered by the fait accompli of existing situations, productively “plunging into history”, as he writes of Trotsky. The grid-locked immediacy of the early volumes was highly effective, albeit embattled; but the reined-in frustration still required a larger arena in which to express itself.
Liberty Tree (1983) began a more engaged and engaging process which was spectacularly developed in Fivemiletown (1987). The volumes display a greater preoccupation with Protestant identity, whether in European analogies or allusions to specific histories, even as they search for “a form that’s classical and secular” rather than “baggy, loose and British”. Unionism is often lampooned – “Manichean Geography” is perhaps a self-critical title as well as a satirical one – but it is also given a sympathetic hearing, speckled with Paisley theologies, forgiven for its reliance on an imported British culture. “The Defenestration of Hillsborough” is one of several poems responding to the “betrayal” of the Anglo-Irish Agreement; when Paulin writes elsewhere of “our state a jacked corpse”, the adjective oxymoronically invokes the British flag even as it implies abandonment.
With the dialectic freedom of the later work, came an increased employment of dialect words – roguish, vagrant, unhoused in legitimizing dictionaries – reflecting allegiances of a more local nature. Paulin had written various articles on the vernacular, as well as editing the Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, and the sudden granting of asylum to dialect words looks very much like a conscious political strategy; Paulin’s own sensitivity to the slightest political nuance in the writing of others demands a reciprocal sensitivity to his own impeccably careful deployment of language. In fact, these “homeless words” bolster a style which, in a traditionally Irish fashion, was already accentually controlled without obvious formal allegiances, and highly alliterative. Often onomatopoeic, Paulin’s slangy blend of registers had a singing warmth.
The poems were actually more exclusive and impenetrable in their cultural references, displaying perhaps the cosmopolitan sympathies of the Academy. “Mythologies”, for instance, is best read alongside Paulin’s critical essay on Great Expectations, which fulfils much the same function as the poem without expecting so much of the reader. “Under Creon” arguably derives much strength from Paulin’s reading of Antigone against Cruise O’Brien’s. Knowing that the lines “the subterfugue text / within the text itself” are actually a modified quotation from a text Paulin despises, does affect its reading. The long fugue of “The Caravans on Lüneburg Heath” is furnished with helpful notes; but like the apologias poets irritatingly trot out at readings, these can end up doing a lot of work which should have been shouldered by the poem itself.
Which said, Fivemiletown is an outstanding volume, generously represented here, and still chock-full of deserving pieces. Paulin often ditches the imperial dictates of punctuation (if you take that sort of thing seriously) to produce a jazzy monologue which flickers with articulate confusions, as in the delightful, crapulous “Calque”, or a swinging homage to Jackson Pollock. The love lyrics, with their doomed, cross-border trysts always carrying a tacit allegory, are affecting and hilarious: “Fivemiletown” itself, juggling its conditionals and tenses to leave its conclusion poised ambiguously between rapprochement and rift; “Breez Marine”, tenderly saying “we’ve rubbed each other up / a brave long while / that’s never love”; or “Waftage – An Irregular Ode”, fizzing with mockeries right down to the girlfriend’s unequivocal “Va-t’en” answered with self-serving pride: “Dead on. I chucked her then.”
For all the poignant, blocked stand-offs of his poems, Paulin has developed an endearing and effective vehicle for his political commitments, conducting an argument with himself and others with a wit, vigour and sincerity which sugar its occasional and necessary bitterness. Paulin recently described compiling his Selected Poems as “like drawing up a will”; but there’s no sign that he has exhausted his subject yet, nor, thankfully, that it has exhausted him.