SOURCE: Laird, Nicholas. “The Poet's Ulcer.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5179 (5 July 2002): 5-7.

[In the following review, Laird offers a negative assessment of The Invasion Handbook, which he judges to be “a welter of misplaced aggression and blame.”]

Tom Paulin is an angry man. Like most converts, he has a zealous disposition. His opinions have frequently caused offence, most recently when he is alleged to have told an Egyptian newspaper that “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers in Israel “should be shot dead”, and on the BBC's Late Review when he said that British Paratroopers present at Bloody Sunday were “thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent people. They were racist bastards.” There is little vatic about Paulin. Fivemiletown, his 1987 volume, was a remarkable book that married his obsession with the vernacular (both Northern Irish and American) and the political in a shocking, brilliant manner: full of hard, gaudy fragments like smashed stained glass. After it anything might seem an anti-climax, and it has. The positions have hardened (“Zionist SS”) and any political subtlety or compassion has been subsumed by causes. The grey of the cover of Fivemiletown has been refracted through Paulin's mind and come out black and white.

This intolerant thought fits with a fascination with dialectal language: all exclusive fricatives and child-like onomatopoeia. Paulin's desire to include it in the poems means they may seem to have some yokel-ish Ulster interlocutor, a “header”, as Paulin might say, standing by them, ready with his fat mouth. There is a dialogue between townland and city, which means that the parts utilizing local dialect seem overlaid on the real poetic voice, rather than inlaid into the poetry. It is too oral a dialect not to be showy:

he shivers
delicate and brittle poor wee thing
as tinfoil.

Here the syntax reinforces the sense of an interjectory voice and appropriated speech. Paulin's poetry often has ghostly italics seeping through it, and reads as edgeless unreported reported speech.

Dialects diversify and come into their own in different areas. There may indeed be fifty words for snow in Inuit, but in Ulster concerns are more social: the idiom is good at weary exclamations, insults, general denigrations, synonyms for drunk, biblical dicta and agricultural references. But this can dictate the limitations of a poetry in thrall to local dialogue, and Paulin's poems can seem all harsh abrasion and spike, from what W. R. Rodgers, another Ulster-man, referred to as the “sea-scalded edges of the brain-land”. Paulin's poems can seem trapped in their trip-wired, short-tempered personality. He is always “banging on / like a be in a tin”. Pace Wittgenstein, the limitations of Paulin's imagination can seem like the limitations of his language.

Paulin misses what he claims for Huckleberry Finn, “vernacular authenticity that bonds the reader in an immediate personal manner”. He can seem more like the man Edna Longley has accused of appropriating dialect words in order better to despise the people for whom such dialect is first language. Look at the uncompromising bitter rhetoric of poems such as “Desertmartin”:

                                                                 I see a plain
Presbyterian grace sour, then harden,
As a free strenuous spirit changes
To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks
For the bondage of the letter: it shouts
For the Big Man to lead his wee people
To a clean white prison, their scorched
                                                                                                                                  tomorrow.

That “wee” contains as much condescension as it would in the mouth of any bigot. Derek Mahon's poem “Ecclesiastes” goes for the same target, but still reluctantly humanizes and explains, if only circumspectly, through description: “the heaped / graves of your fathers”. There is no space for compassion in Paulin. If his poetry is judged by Seamus Heaney's prescriptive phrase, the “need to find symbols adequate to our predicament”, then it fails; it is propagation, propaganda, an extension of his political personality and that lugubrious mocking drawl.

With The Invasion Handbook, an epic poetic history of the Second World War, of which this is only the first volume, he has found a subject adequate to his ambition. His poems involve knowledge, and this is a subject that needs it. This is history digested by a man with a stomach ulcer. Paulin takes the opportunity to sideswipe at the Royal Family as Nazi-sympathizers:

with due deference his secretary
—voice silky—
says your majesty I must advize
you that your majesty must not be seen
ever to take sides
(though you and I take them of course
and we must take the right one
which must be peace with Herr Hitler)

To describe the serpent-like courtier unctuously swaying the King as silky-voiced is stale, but writing advise as “advize”, with its echo of Aladdin's evil Vizier and a snaky hissing stress, is delicate. But this is still history as Disney cartoon, and the poem itself purposely gives way to nursery rhyme ingenuousness and artlessness:

we are so bold
'cos we must keep hold
of our lovely state machine
when we're old bones
you'll still not groan
for on us you're keen
—your King and Queen
you're terribly terribly keen!

Paulin concentrates on blame and guilt and their transference, but a less head-on collision with his subject-matter might have been more rewarding. His only doubt about his enterprise, or his approach to it, surfaces in the constant references to time: “later”, “much much later”, “six seven years later”, “What? Twenty years on”, “fifty-three years from now” “later—a tad more than a year”, etc. This is a tacit acknowledgement of his own privileged position of hindsight. His view is in some way summed up by the title of one of the pieces here, “Nostalgia for the Future”. But this doesn't temper the pieces with understanding. There is rhetoric: “how can you sing / a song of Belsen? // Oh God I share his anger / but how could I ever share it?” but none of the guilt and complicity Geoffrey Hill acknowledges in a poem such as “September Song”. Paulin is sure he is always on the side of the gods, and this lends him abrasion and flash but small truth. Occasionally he lights on a felicity:

he likes the way peace
flaps its wings above appease

—in which his zealous belief stretches to the lexicon, convinced that if a chancy rhyme can be made, something true must be discovered. He has a faith in etymology or vernacular connections, in the wisdom of the language itself, and that its internal connections are not arbitrary but ordained:

as if it was a man full
of drink—but as the sea
is also known as the drink
there may be more to this than we think

There is the expected criticism of the wartime leadership, but also of the detached bystanding intellectual or poet. When he writes, in “Poland Invaded”, that “we were the very last Romantics / —deeply foolish and heroic”, he is echoing Yeats's self-description, from “Coole and Ballylee, 1931”, “we were the last romantics”. The next poem features clippings from The Times of September 4, 1939, one of which reads like a description of Lady Gregory and Coole Park itself: “West Ireland—Lady with large house, own demesne, invites correspondence anyone requiring accommodation away from the war zone. …”

Before Yeats died in 1939 he was neither Patrick Pearse nor Erskine Childers, but had participated in public life more than any poet bar Neruda. The following piece, entitled “Male Poet Enlists”, talks of the poem as a punchbag that has to be banged and jerked by the poet. It takes in the “sarnt-major his mouth / full of muscle and cliché” who shouts “no way / you'll make a fighting man … and your lines they don't even scan!” The poems are jerked into life by Paulin's anger, but that ruthless doing-over can leave the poems voicing the sentiments of the punch-drunk. The following is partly addressed to a seven-year-old, but it may underestimate that level of sophistication:

as if in 56 you could
know that injunction write!
must now and then rhyme with fight!

Against all this, Paulin has style; his poems are five parts fascinating to two parts frustrating. It is an irresistible confidence that can make the First Lord of the Norwegian Admiralty discuss the losses sustained at Scapa Flow and say, “—we were unlucky / no we were stupid / we were scuppered”. When he writes without hostages, his lines sing, and though tenderness is a rare tone, he does it acutely, brilliantly and brutally. Descriptive passages also benefit from the absence of an agenda, such as this depiction of the surreal chaos of actual battle:

one soldier came ashore
playing a piano accordion
another carried a collie dog
another a dartboard
those oily bearded faces
helmets open like metal cabbages. …

This runs on to “we became ourselves again / ourselves alone”, the last line being the common English translation of “Sinn Fein”. The next four lines seem an ambiguous invocation to continue fighting for freedom, and it is hard not to read these in the light of the line before: “into the mosaic of victory / I lay a pattern piece / my only son / into thy hands”. These are very different fights being invoked, fought in very different ways, and Paulin's problem is his violent yoking of them. He makes unsuitable appropriations, and when these are appropriations of history, presenting fiction as fact, it can be a little more difficult to take.

In “The Yellow Spot”, Paulin invents a scene where Montgomery Belgion and T. S. Eliot are dining at the Ritz. Belgion was the author of an anti-Semitic review (of a book, The Yellow Spot) in Eliot's Criterion, which Antony Julius (in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, reviewed in the TLS, June 7, 1996) assumed was Eliot's own work. Valerie Eliot pointed out that had Julius wanted to check the authorship he could have seen from the Criterion's invoices that it was Belgion who had written the piece. Paulin's poem is an awkward, offensive mess. Eliot's anti-Semitism is a complex subject, and for Paulin to have Belgion and Eliot run through a conversation in which they seem to come up with the idea of the Holocaust is trite and insulting. Eliot says of Joyce, “I admire his well yes / his Jesuitical intelligence / but we must find some substitute / for that type of sense / it tends rather much to travel / though it could / of course be transported / to somewhere cold …”. Then they

… play a favourite game
and try to come up—yes come up—
with a rhyme for Ritz
no not Biarritz
murmurs Tom if we test our wits
there must be some place some name
far away to the east
—maybe you can tell me what fits?

This is a welter of misplaced aggression and blame. Tom Paulin has written some very fine poetry, but this is not it.