Charles Tomlinson is one of Britain's most admired poets, and one of her most prolific. His [Collected Poems] represent four decades of intense poetic activity; yet his has never been a household name, and even among his admirers, he is still regarded with some suspicion. Readers, perhaps, are discomforted by the inclusiveness of his verse, which ranges over vast geographical and intellectual landscapes. He describes a familiar English pastoral, the rural West Country, in a decidedly modern setting; but he is also the poet of New Mexico and New York, Arizona and Maine. He delves into the past, be it his own childhood in a Midlands industrial town, the rituals of American Indians, or the echoes of history which resound through a particular dwelling. He is a fine—and underrated—comic poet; but he also has mystical tendencies, moving from the immediately visible to the mystery beyond. He speaks with a clear, contemporary voice, yet he has a traditional interest in the natural world that sometimes recalls Georgianism. Tomlinson's poetry, then, is difficult to place. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern a common concern running through the ten volumes that make up Collected Poems, and that is Tomlinson's perennial fascination with places.

The publication of the Collected Poems has given us a broader perspective of Tomlinson's achievement. [In Eight Contemporary Poets, 1974] Calvin Bedient once remarked that the poet was "too strange an amphibian, too Americanized, too peopleless to be trusted." It is difficult to know what Bedient means by "Americanized," but an overall view of Tomlinson's work shows that his poetry has by no means remained "peopleless." The idea of the community, in the familiar images of the village and the city, has become one of Tomlinson's central concerns; while it is true that these images are by no means a new aspect of his work, the sociological interest attached to them is. Tomlinson shares interests with the planner and the social worker: he is concerned with how and where people live, exploring the relationships between people and places, and between our natural and our created environments. To these he adds a poet's concern, the relationship between our perception of the community and its reality. These concerns, as I hope to show in this [essay], are directly related to the poet's increasing preoccupation with the idea, and the ideal, of "Eden."

It is interesting, but presumably coincidental, that Bedient's observation on the "peopleless" quality of Tomlinson's verse should appear in the same year—1974—as The Way In, a volume which did a great deal to answer that complaint. The title poem of the volume introduces a section called "Manscapes" (though this sub-heading is not retained in the Collected Poems), and describes the evidence of change as the poet drives through an old residential area of a city: the "Kerb-side signs / For demolitions and new detours, / A propped pub, a corner lopped." Such sights have been familiar enough in British cities during the last decade or so, as urban re-development has flattened old communities to make way for newer and more impersonal slums. While he focuses on a particular social concern, Tomlinson regrets that "Bulldozers / Gobble a street up" not because of the street's intrinsic worth, but for itsfamiliarity: "I thought I knew this place, this face / a little worn, a little homely," he laments.

For the poet, the ideal community is marked by its urbanity: it is a place civilized and humanized by contact with people, whose perception is part of its development. But this city is now deprived of "the look that shadows softened / And the light could grace"; the congruency that existed between the inhabitants and their habitation has been destroyed, symbolized by the old couple who are moving out, hauling their belongings with them:

These are the archetypal Adam and Eve, cast out of an urban paradise—or, rather, leaving a paradise that has disintegrated around them. Tomlinson looks ahead to what might replace that Eden, the penultimate stanza discussing whether the redevelopment will furnish a subject fit for poetry. He decides that it cannot: others, concedes the poet, might "find that civility I can only miss," but his conclusion is scathing: "It will need more than talk and trees / To coax a style from these disparities." Indeed, the phrase "talk and trees" suggests the disparity, echoing the proverbial incongruents, "chalk and cheese." Tomlinson realizes that the relationships that meshed and defined the community have been lost, and the poem expresses the pervasive contemporary anxieties, rootlessness, and alienation.

In an interview published in Contemporary Literature in 1975, Charles Tomlinson has discussed "The Way In" in the context of his new concern with myth. He notes that he "first worked out of a suspicion with myth, trusting sensation," but acknowledges that his recent poetry has involved a mythical dimension. "The nearest I come to myth," he says, "is that word 'Eden,' which I can't seem to get rid of and which fits what I'm doing with its implication of primal things, fresh sensations, direct perceptions unmuddied." More specifically, he remarks on the fugitive old couple in "The Way In" that here is "a use of myth in so far as I see them as Adam and Eve long-banished from Eden, but I wouldn't want to expand the thing to Wagnerian proportions." Wagnerian proportions or not, Tomlinson's comment indicates a tendency to view the community mythically, aware of its potential to become an Eden, but conscious, too, of the limitations to such idealism. It is a tendency that has surfaced often in his recent volumes.

Tomlinson draws a close parallel between the destruction of a place and the decline of relationships among people: both are aspects of the lapsed Edenic community. In another poem from The Way In, "Dates: Penkhull New Road," there is an idealistic nostalgia for a place the poet knew in his childhood, a place of little privacy, but where the daily routines of work and leisure were closely integrated, where there were close bonds between and within families, and where there was a sense of a traditional stability. He contends that this social fabric had survived intact from the time of the street's construction, in 1860, until his own childhood. The Victorian terraced street, he recalls, was essentially "a civil place," in which it was acceptable

Tomlinson's vision of these Victorian streets is still rather unconventional, though the architecture and social fabric of the terraced house and street are currently of much interest among scholars, and it is profitable to read Tomlinson's poem (and others in the "Manscapes" section of The Way In) with reference to Stefan Muthesius's authoritative book, The English Terraced House. Tomlinson voices no familiar protest against the dehumanizing effect of the industrial revolution, nor against the ugliness of the urban landscape it spawned. Rather, he sees the Victorian age as introducing an era of community spirit, and of a sense of belonging; Muthesius, too, defines such streets as "places for communication, for promenading, or just for looking at what was happening." But for Tomlinson, the street parties that celebrated peace in 1945 were the last expression of this era, for the end of the war ushered in a new age; his poem continues with another date, and a change of tone:

The poem closes with a statement of Tomlinson's changed aesthetic—he can no longer uphold his earliest poetic attitude, that "seeing is believing":

It took time to convince me that I cared
For more than beauty. I write to rescue
What is no longer there—absurd
A place should be more fragile than a book.

But fragile these places are, subject to time, to the whims of planners, and to changing taste. Tomlinson finds it increasingly difficult to locate communities which are based on an Edenic balance of people, place, and time, for the merest tremble in history upsets this balance, anticipating the collapse of Eden. The contemporary sociologist of the community must talk, as Lyn Lofland does, "about the massive growth of population and urbanization, about increasing spatial mobility, about the growing numbers who put down their roots not in a place, but in a profession." It is now clear, Lofland continues, that "what was once an environment of personally known others is becoming … a world of unknown others." These broad historical trends are filtering through society to affect every community, and they have proved dynamic enough to take Tomlinson out of his accustomed poetic themes.

This is not to say, of course, that there is no foreshadowing of such a development in Tomlinson's earlier work. There, in the pastoral paradigm, the poet turned to the rural world to discover a balance of people, place and time—the idea that country people live lives closer to their environment is a persistent one. "Winter Encounters," a poem from Seeing is Believing (1960), is replete with reconciliatory language, emphasized by the balanced decorum of the opening lines:

Intricate relationships bind every aspect of the scene proposed in this first stanza. The house does not merely fit into its site; it also "reposes" as part of the farmland community, "meshed / Into neighbourhood by such shifting ties." Similarly, in "At Holwell Farm" from the same volume, there is a further thoughcomplementary insight into

Here, Tomlinson's vision of Eden is part of the tradition of English poetry, finding the ideal existence in the interaction of people with a rural landscape.

But Tomlinson is a poet who has persistently tested his insights against new experiences, and his early travel poetry has taken up his preoccupation with Edenic places in Britain. In particular, he has turned his attention to the United States, publishing a volume called American Scenes in 1966. In a country that represents contemporary culture almost exclusively, Tomlinson has found its anxieties of rootlessness and alienation thrown into sharp relief. The clash of cultures which has inevitably resulted from America's diverse heritage forms the basis of several poems: there is the shifting between English, Spanish, and slang American of the speakers in "Las Trampas U.S.A." for example. And there is the sadly comic "Mr Brodsky," who, in his absurd desire to become a Scot, arranges a Burns Night gathering in New Mexico, complete with "the Balmoral Pipers of Albuquerque," who "play in the haggis / out of its New York tin."

"At Barstow," however, is the most complete analysis of a particular place in the American Scenes volume. The poem depicts a community which is not a fallen paradise, as Penkhull New Road in a sense was, but a town that has never attained the civility that should characterize a community. The problem with Barstow is that it has no sense of stability, because people belong there only briefly, if at all:

Nervy with neons, the main drag
was all there was. A placeless place.
A faint flavour of Mexico in the tacos
tasting of gasoline. Trucks refuelled
before taking off through space. Someone lived
in the houses with their houseyards wired
like tiny Belsens.

References to the holocaust of Nazi Germany use hyperbole to underpin the idea of the failure of civilization. The poet notes that Roy Rogers once stayed at a motel in Barstow, and tries to imagine the scene:

No relationship can exist between this created place and its environment, or between the place and its inhabitants. The present is not conjoined with the past; no culture has grown out of the environment—indeed, there is strong parody in the juxtaposed tacos and gasoline. Finally, the brash lighting ensures that night is merely a "never-final twilight," so that even the natural stability of time is disturbed.

America is portrayed more favorably in Charles Tomlinson's later poetry, however. Notes From New York and Other Poems, published in 1984, still shows an interest in the cultural complexity of America, in poems like "Ice Cream at Blaunberg," with its opening anachronisms:

The restaurant serving Char-Broiled Meats
Flavored in Flame, Welsh Farms Ice Cream,
Stands at a four-way stop between
A Dutch cemetery and an antique shop.

But there is a different interest in this volume, too. Tomlinson's developing focus on people enables him to discover that overtones of Eden can exist in what might seem to be an inhospitable community. In the first poem of the sequence, "The Landing," New York is viewed with an unusual perspective—from an aircraft—which contributes to the idealizing of the city:

The poet's view of the city has the quality of a mystical apprehension, in lines like "we / In our circling the only ones to see / The total and spreading scope of it," and the exuberant tone combined with the light imagery gives New York the aura of a heavenly city.

This attitude is difficult to sustain except by distance, although Tomlinson does succeed in celebrating the city in several of the New York poems, even as he is aware of its failings. In "What Virginia Said," a poem that cleverly intertwines dialogue and narrative, we see the city from two perspectives: the poet notices "the drunks, the sleepy / addicts, the derelicts," while Virginia talks about how much safer she feels in the crowd than in the quietness of a college town. The poem, then, suggests that the way we feel about a place is more significant than the reality: it is a deception that sustains the relationship between people and place. The same idea, that our attitude to the city can rediscover a lost Edenic existence, is suggested by another poem in Notes From New York, "On Madison." It is true that the opening description stresses alienation by the mist, together with forgetfulness of the city's true condition—the unseen homelessness, the loss of community in its most extreme form. But the poem is nevertheless a celebration:

"On Madison" thus discovers a precarious, fragile Eden to counter the sense of alienation that prevails in the modern world. But Tomlinson's problem is one that he shares with mystics—how to reconcile the "instant" of insight, when the Eden image is glimpsed, with the flux of time that destroys that image.

The passage of time is seen by Tomlinson as a subtle destroyer of the relationships and cultures upon which a community depends. The poet does not wish to transcend time, however, but to come to terms with it: in a poem called "In Arden" from The Shaft (1978), he describes the Forest of Arden—"Arden" being a variation of "Eden," as the opening line, "Arden is not Eden, but Eden's rhyme" makes clear—as a place that reconciles time and eternity. The poet recognizes in Arden's springs

In "Hay," from his 1981 volume, The Flood, Tomlinson returns to the countryside and its rituals, to discover a close relationship between time and eternity. The poem has a Keatsian richness of language that is unusual in Tomlinson's work: "The air at evening thickens with a scent / That walls exude and dreams turn lavish on." The scent of the mown hay seems to dominate the scene symbolically. It suggests not only the sacramental significance of the harvest, but also the permanence of its value, for it "hangs perpetual over the changes." There is, too, a sense of order in the reaped field's "parallels of grass, sweet avenues." The yearly repetition of the harvest is itself a means of translating time into stillness, imaged in the final "huge deception," The reapers' activity, sanctified by time, brings forth a sense of their prehistoric ancestors, who celebrated such seasonal rituals in the building of stone circles; by nightfall, the reapers have created a "henge of hay-bales to confuse the track of time." And it is of no consequence that the scene, dependent on a trick of the light and a suggestive similarity of shape, is really a deception. For, as he says in "Mushrooms," from The Shaft (1978), "realer than a myth of clarities / Are the meanings that you read and are not there." In this poem, Tomlinson's rejection of the "myth of clarities" is really an adaptation of his early belief that "seeing is believing." "Mushrooms" outlines his new conviction: "A resemblance, too, / Is real, and all its likes and links stay true / To the weft of seeing."

Tomlinson, then, will not attempt to impose meaning on what he sees, finding that perception itself is a guarantee that meaning will emerge. Thus, like a mystic, he puts his confidence in the moment of insight, and so can be confident that Eden is recoverable, even if only briefly and in an attenuated form. This idea was put forward as early as 1969, in "Eden," from The Way of a World: "I have seen Eden. It is a light of place / As much as the place itself; not a face / Only, but the expression on that face." The opening movement of "Eden" stresses the sense of relationships, particularly in a correspondence between earth and sky, and suggests the civility of Eden, where the "avenues of light" are "copious enough / To draft a city from". The poem states that "Eden / Is given one," though warning that "Despair of Eden is given, too." Recovery of Eden, then, depends on an attitude:

It is apparent that Tomlinson's early countryside poems contain within their depths mystical overtones; "Eden" demonstrates how these have become more and more explicit as the poet has explored the Eden theme. With The Way In of 1974, his idealism is given more concrete expression: in "The Greeting," for example, Tomlinson suggests that perception of a scene is not enough in itself to discover an Edenic significance, as some sort of relationship between perceiver and scene must exist. The poem describes someone glancing "idly" at a scene, and proposes that

Space and its Eden
of green and blue
warranted more watching
than such gazing through:

but the far roofs gave
a "Good day" back,
defeating that negligence
with an unlooked for greeting.

The perceiver, then, suddenly becomes aware of a relationship between the external scene and the inner self, and it is significant that the final vision of "space / one whole without seam" results from a glimpse of "far roofs," signs that people are integrated with the environment. For whether it is in a rural or an urban landscape, the basis of the Edenic community is a sense of civility.

But Tomlinson's recent work shows that his attitude toward the countryside communities, the subtle relationships of which he described in early poems such as "At Holwell Farm," is now deeply ambivalent. The celebratory tone of "Hay" is challenged by "Hedgerows" (from Notes From New York and Other Poems), which laments the disappearance, in some areas, of the hedges that are so much a part of the rural English landscape. "Once they begin to disappear / You see what an urbanity hedgerows are," says the poem; "they contain, compel as civilly as stanzas". The words, of course, are carefully chosen; for Tomlinson, urbanity and civility—signs that a place has been humanized—are hints of Eden.

But the first two "other poems" in the same volume press home Tomlinson's ambivalence in even greater measure. If the poet has been most inclined to search for Eden, or to recognize a lost paradise, in a social setting—the image of the community, "From the Motorway" and "To Ivor Gurney" explore the value of an unpopulated or empty Eden. These two are companion poems: both take as their starting point a scene glimpsed from a motorway. Complaints about the motorway designers' contempt for aesthetics have always flourished, and Tomlinson's "From the Motorway" takes up these complaints, but with a fresh perception. He notes how the building of a junction isolates an empty triangle of land. Its separation from people is stressed; it is "never to be named: / No one will ever go there," and even the road-builders are an unidentified, depersonalized "they." Tomlinson initially laments a loss: "How / Shall we have it back, a belonging shape?" he asks, lamenting, too, that "it will breed no ghosts" suggesting a pattern of procreation and mortality now denied to this land. The sense of loss undescored by the final image of the lights' "sodium glow on winter evenings / As inaccessible as Eden" recalls Tomlinson's horror, in "At Barstow," at the power of artificial light to desecrate the natural processes of day and night. What the poet glimpses from the motorway is a lost paradise, its inaccessibility a sign that it has been denied to humanity.

"To Ivor Gurney" in part balances this lament. Tomlinson is travelling north through countryside that would have been familiar to Gurney, the composer, though the poet is detached from the landscape. He describes the hills he views from the road as "Edens that lay / Either side of this interminable roadway" the use of the past tense suggesting a paradise that has failed since the lifetime of the composer (Gurney died in 1937). The poet identifies this failure implicitly with the building of the road and explicitly with the intrusion of artificial lights. "You would recognize [the hill shapes] still," he says, "but the lanes / Of lights that fill the lowlands, brim / To the Severn and glow into the heights." However, the beauty of the image belies the lament and strengthens the ambiguity: "night is never to be restored / To Eden and England spangled in bright chains." Here the diurnal pattern has been replaced by the more positive spiritual connotations of perpetual light, and the "lanes of lights" have become, in their ordered beauty, symbolic of a recreated Eden. There is, in these two poems, a tension between the movement of the poet travelling on the motorway and the stasis of the landscape through which he travels. This new perspective allows a fresh insight into the idea of Eden, developing what might be called the aesthetic of inaccessibility. Although a more optimistic poem than "From the Motorway," "To Ivor Gurney" nevertheless finds a form of Eden in a landscape devoid of people.

Tomlinson's glimpses of Eden, then, are qualified by its elusiveness. The poet cultivates the aesthetic of inaccessibility because it is precisely in those inaccessible areas of his consciousness that he recognizes an urbane balance of people, place, and time—in a wasteland glimpsed from a motorway, in a street that exists only as a childhood memory, in a community laid waste by the blight of town-planning. He explores the same theme through various personae—displaced characters like Mr. Brodsky and Virginia, or those, like the speaker of "Jemez," who lament a lost community. Tomlinson is harshly critical of what we have made of our world and as such has a strong moral to impart. But he also emerges as a poet with a quest: how to realize more fully those occasional glimpses of Eden which only reveal its inaccessibility. Tomlinson's poetry is both the record of a search and a response to the world the poet sees around him. The search is inevitably idealistic, and as we consider Tomlinson's aesthetic of inaccessibility, we are inevitably reminded of Calvin Bedient's complaint that Tomlinson is perhaps "too peopleless to be trusted". The poet's tendency to idealize the landscape by denuding it of the human is one that many readers, I suspect, will find disturbing.