Any day now, I shall receive advance copies of my new book, Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems. They may already be waiting for me, in the cluster of mail-boxes just up the road, opposite my local, grim-visaged viticulteur, who has just lost 70% of his harvest due to unseasonal frost. But I hesitate to go and see, not for fear of meeting my bacchic creditor, but because I am myself not yet sufficiently in order to receive the new book. Much is on historical record about the writer’s rituals, the identical daily constitutional beforehand, the smell of orange peel from under the desk, the standing up at a lectern, or even the required dose of laudanum… but these things refer to the act of writing; this is about a different act, that of receiving the published book, and the solemn, concomitant moment that Paul Valéry called ‘the supreme return of the mind over its work’.
Set Thy Love in Order contains, as the proof of the back cover reminds me, a selection from thirty years of work. From thirty years of my life. That alone gives me pause. Of course, in all that time I have not set my love in order, and may never, but I could perhaps at least set my house in order. The way Rafael Nadal arranges his juice and water bottles between sets is not more precise than the way I like to arrange my writing materials, and my soapstone figure of Ganesh for good luck, and the jug of freshly cut garden flowers that must be in a certain place on the writing table. And then there is the equally present exhortation, to set my books in order. It is as though, to follow my neurosis through, I cannot receive the new volume until all my volumes are present and correct on my shelves, and all of literature, from Homer to Hill, forms an ideal and simultaneous order in my bones.
The result may well be paralysis, and I am all too aware of the meagreness of my output recently. So does a writer obsess more about the form of his book, the less he or she has produced? The older I get, though, the more I am convinced that, in this art of poetry most particularly, less is more. Perhaps this is to lay flattering unction to my breast, and I cannot help thinking of poor Baudelaire, and his perfectionist compulsion, close to hysteria, as he corrected and re-corrected the positioning of punctuation on the proofs Les Fleurs du mal, effectively the sole volume of poems he published in his lifetime, only to have it seized and in large proportion destroyed on publication. My editor at Carcanet, Luke Allan, has been saintly in his patience, as numerous covers were proposed and then discarded, typeface and spacing altered, precise tints of colour tinged in and filtered out… I have every confidence that this book will be a beautiful object. It will possess ‘French Flaps’; I have dreamed for years about the (faintly erotic) prestige of ‘French Flaps’.
The poem itself, says Robert Frost, is ‘a momentary stay against confusion’; and though it is certainly not for me to say, I should like to think in my more sanguine moments that here is a record, or a series of ‘stays against confusion’ that has punctuated the ongoing chaos of these thirty years. But disorder, like the ivy and the nettles, soon takes over again. ‘Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely’, says the Prince of Denmark, and I am always haunted by the speed of that process.
So a space must be cleared, or at least a surface, to receive the new book. Just as a space was cleared, presumably, and a blank sheet (or a new Window) prepared, at the very beginning of what has now become this book. And so the process comes full circle. The two photographs included here, of my two adjoining work spaces, may illustrate what I mean by Order & Disorder, and how they are objective correlatives for a state of mind. Though one can inhabit an ordered space and have a mind in chaos, and the contrary is also true. Let some clever analyst of muddle like Adam Phillips unravel all this.
For now, and writing this piece has brought it closer: the moment is almost ripe to go out and collect the new book.
Stephen Romer
PS: This is a story with a happy ending...
Stephen's new collection Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems is available here.
He will also be launching his collection on Wednesday 12th July at Enitharmon Press, alongside Alan Jenkins. For more information and to book tickets go here.