How to remain human and sane in an insanely violent world?The cover quotes: 'Thrones wilt whey they are not fed with blood, their vitality grows with the mass of wrongs committed, with life-denials, with the crushing of all that is perpetually different and that has been ousted by them.' Middleton comments 'I conceive of the basilisk' - which is both the cockatrice and a brass ordnance - 'as a monster, all ego, atavistic and implacable.' 'Doctor Dark' comes with an apparently charming performance for children. He turns a box of 'lokum' - Turkish Delight? - into a glowing moon that enchants the children: they think their bodies 'will measure heavenly perfection.' No, says Dr Dark. 'You see a rising moon, I see a Cyclops.'This garden incubates our grand collapse.Industrial wars will torch these fanatic empires;The children of your children will be cinderedThen, like a dancer, he bounds across the lawn, and disappears indoors. It appears he's both literally night and a prophet of global doom. There are other similar implications. But of 'Dead Friends' the persona asks:Who can they have beenIn that red carGoing by, so fast, and waving...So what of 'Paradise'? Well, '...Without paradise / There would be nothing at all to think of.' The legends are dismissed: 'it could happen to Anyone'.For everyone a garden to cultivate at leisureFloated from heaven; there would be leisureIn which to touch up the shrubbery, leisureTo scythe the lawn, so amiable ruminantsMight also have holistic fruits to chew.But something more literally mystical is evoked: 'The simultaneity of everything, such as Seferis saw / In a trance at Engomi...' This too is dubious, however: it may be 'a latent state of mind' - especially if simultaneity 'has to include the horrors'. 'After all it was a trance - / Seferis took one step, at once / Inside paradise and out of it.' The gate of Eden is guarded by something stronger than a sword: Anguish. Yet Paradise may be a glimspe of beauty - in a voice like woodsmoke, paradoxically announcing news of a car bomb. The theses and antitheses end with an elusive synthesis, starting with an ambivalent allusion and ending with an ambivalent conclusion:Go lovely rose into that vacuum.Anyone can dance away the night.Anyone can meditate on paradise.In paradise there might be no call formeditationThese two poems suggest a dialectic at the heart of the book.Christopher Middleton is of course a well-established polymath, a much-travelled linguist with out-of-the-way lore, and all this inhabits a poetry aimed at the intelligent and not intended to be too easy. These clever, oblique, two-edged, sometimes obscure, sometimes detached, sometimes enraged, sometimes beauitful, sometimes too cortical hundred and forty-odd pages are to be read slowly and pondered. Terry Eagleton says 'he uses the ordinary as a leaping-off point into some space quite elsewhere.' John Lucas says Middleton 'gives experimentalism a good name.' I don't find the poems partiuclarly epxerimental but I agree that 'he possesses a wit that flickers with almost graspable significance.'
