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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
2:10 PM 1st May 2019
arts

The Naming Of Birds: Noctuary By Niall Campbell

 
Niall Campbell
Niall Campbell
You couldn’t be sure that Niall Campbell intended his poem, ‘Tightrope’, to figure as a metaphor for both the fragility of human affairs, and the delicacy with which we are obliged to approach them, but the tenor of this exquisite octet yields a precise measure of the presence of danger, of venturing into the unknown.

A ‘noctuary’ is a nightly contemplative journal, and if our darkest reflections unfold in the small hours, it is often because they slip the day’s circumspect chains. The tightrope walker’s leap of faith is a stepping out, in hope, over an abyss of terrible possibility:

‘  to cross above
the panic, even if just once –
guided right, and making it
on one-third line and two-thirds air.’


Many of Campbell’s fine poems are ruminations on the difficulties and rewards of new fatherhood. And, to shamelessly plunder a much-overused critical conceit, they are irresistibly luminous, which is to say that they give off a steady light in introspection. A city-dweller originally from the remote Hebridean island of South Uist, Campbell perceives relationships through the kaleidoscopic glass of landscapes current and remembered. Looking out through nocturnal windows, he finds the handmaiden to a kind of pristine solemnity in the presence of paternal focus:

‘No curtains should be open at that time
but ours weren’t drawn – and the cold world looked in;
three years into his life, come to the window,
sleep hadn’t found my door, again – so up

I watched the morning’s morning open out,
the frosted ground, clean as an envelope.’ (‘Good Night’)


The cold air breathes on the imagination, casting us into a dawn world, rendering us as guests in the moment, as eternally present as a voyeur in Rilke. The child figure is tangential to the poem but integral to the poet’s purpose, shaping mood and immediacy of apprehension in a narrative of becoming. The father is watchful, observant, unhindered by the narcosis of insomnia, and essentially focussed. The walk of faith we encountered in ‘Tightrope’ is prosecuted without a harness, and there is no preparation, beyond forbearance, for the unique circumstances of parenting.

Which seems to be the point: this entirely new form of emotional engagement brings with it a change in perception; the narrator’s vision is clarified and enhanced by his strangely labile awareness. There is a symptomatic mutability to the contexts of Campbell’s contemplations, as though the overwhelming emotional impetus of his new situation is disabling processes of differentiation. The result is a natural impressionism in which landscapes are ad hoc and indeterminate, terrains indistinguishable; unsurprising, perhaps, in an inherently rural sensibility caught in the wheels of the city.

The view, then, is skewed and dream-like, punctuated with a tentative setting-down of markers befitting a wading into unknown waters. Expressed in the form of a diptych, the dialogue between addresser and new father in ‘First Nights’ resolves into a melding of familiars which underwrite a sustaining sense of continuity:

‘So, go on, tell what you hope for, young father.
Not sleep – not day, not company – just let
snow fall, light burn, glass shatter, let things slide,
let the new change be unlike the old change.’


The shattering glass and sliding artefacts introduce a fragility which is, at the same time, cautionary and inherently natural. The beautiful, and very affecting, short poem ‘First Illness’ finds verisimilitude for the child figure’s vulnerability in objects which manifest frailty in delicacy of appearance:

‘Little boy, my little cornstalk boy
shaking through your fever;
little silver coin, my little silver coin
in a pocket full of papers;
little shaking chest, little shaking lantern’.


The dislocation of daily objects from recognisable landscapes seems integral to a métier grounded in uncertainty. Identifiers are constantly picked out, foregrounded, by a narrative imagination whose self-imposed myopia obscures the wider arc, and encourages a heightened awareness of Campbell’s shifting inventory of signifiers in the lambent small print.

The ‘thousand tailwinds rising’ on a windless night in ‘Moth’ are the needful focus that co-exists with the, again, insomniac, narrator’s overwhelming emotional charge; the wind’s paradox is no more explicable than the power of unspoken paternal bonds. And the need to bolt, to be alive in the moment, is precipitated further by this new awareness, if only vicariously and in the nature of a dream.

Campbell’s great strength is to make unlikely physical urges, at least in the context of emotional anxiety, seem entirely reasonable:

‘I have not run – but long to be the runner

if only to gift myself those same commands.
I am so tired, so tired, so young – Heart, keep on;
the air’s so still – Lungs, burn hard, burn long.
’ (‘A New Father Thinks About Those Running Home’)


In truth, there is so much of enduring value in Noctuary that the reader struggles to climb out of the amniotic water. We are immersed in suggestion, in the infinite tenderness of expressions of unconditional love, in a learning process to which we become party. And it is great credit to Niall Campbell’s humility and sincerity that he allows us to be absorbed in a tentative interior dialogue whose markers probe for a way forward. The poet is learning as he writes, not least, about the meaning of simplicity: in the exquisite syntactical delicacy of ‘Cooling a Meal by the Outside Door’, which demands full transcription here, the narrator finds harmonious resolution in a blending of thought objects:

‘Devotee of, what, if not small actions,
I stir heat – and, this one good life
run away with me, I pair things up:
the moon with this tree, the streaming clouds
with my child’s bowl – the small works of love
and this dim porch. The night sky opens
and, here, the meal is cool; the meal
is cool and, here, the night sky opens.’


The swimming of objects and ideas into Campbell’s ken is profoundly childlike, his openness to the pleasure of apprehension is as limitless as a child’s but infused with quiet solemnity in place of drama.

The narrator’s sense of purpose, mitigated throughout by confusion as to what engaging with children, with life, means, resolves at point of reflection. Definition, as we find in the fine poem ‘From the Spanish’ suggests, need only be a semantic consideration: what matters is the trial, the error, and the uniqueness of being in the moment:

‘So now, what does it matter if
the translation, again, isn’t right
and Cada loco con su tema

means Each madman with their own way;
and my way travelled past the point
when one truth discounts the rest:

earlier I left his dark bedroom –
but still, it’s true, I’ve never left;
and look, he isn’t in my arms,
and yet he’s all i’m carrying.’



Noctuary is published by Bloodaxe Books
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/noctuary-1207