Books / Hidden meanings

Lasdun’s Water Sessions

The passing of author James Lasdun’s father in the years since the release of his last book of poetry, Landscape With Chainsaw, has softened his tone somewhat. Instead of wondering how and why he is a Woodstocker now, and what this country and age means to him, and the sense of soul and aesthetics inherited from his architect father, he’s both looking at legacies and accepting what is.

“I wasn’t planning on writing another book of poetry,” the Columbia University and New York Writers Institute professor and Woodstock resident said on a recent afternoon at Joshua’s Upstairs, nursing a cup of tea. “But then this came together. It’s not really the right size for an American book of poetry.”

Lasdun — whose current reputation is based on two successful novels and a growing stream of short story collections — as well as an upcoming nonfiction work about his experience being stalked by a former fan, due out this winter — was apologizing for the fact that his latest poetry collection Water Sessions is only available in the United Kingdom at present. Where, it should be added, it’s been receiving nothing but rave reviews.

“We are eating outside with our friends,/Woodstock Buddhists; our kids and theirs/are lighting sticks on citronella candles/to throw them at the woods like burning spears;/the Rainbow Family of Living Light/are drumming in Magic Meadow; I’ve drunk enough/that all I want to do is close my eyes,/when a voice rings like a summons from the darkness:/my six-year-old son asking: ‘Dad,/is America good or bad?’ the poet writes in “The Question,” near the start of this slim but packed collection that starts with a piece, “The Skaters,” that catches the split between Woodstock and neighboring Saugerties with ethical perfection.

Later, Lasdun sets himself up as the inheritor of W.H. Auden’s mindfulness and sharply controlled lyricism. It’s a perfect and successful assumption…and yet this poet is as modern, now, as Auden was in his day (while simultaneously maintaining his part in a constantly watched and tendered history of such modern-ness). He gets at the ways in which our sexuality, and by inference our male and female souls, are affected by the fleetness of so much we experience, including attraction and lust…and arguments whose causes we can never really know. While haunting everything is this sense of a dead father, a looming presence being made amends to.

He adds it up, succinctly, in the poem “Anchises,” subtitled “after Virgil:”

Your ghost, father,
Always before me,
Led me down to this place;
My ships are tugging at their anchors,
But give me
Give me your hand
Let me embrace you
Don’t draw back, father…
Tears brimmed in his eyes, spilled over;
Three times he threw his arms round his father’s neck
Three times the shade slipped through
Into thin air like a dream.

In Landscape With Chainsaw, Lasdun was wrestling with understanding his new home here in Woodstock…and America, as well as his new life in a rural setting, a new form of manliness and maturity.

Now, in Water Sessions, he is learning to accept and speak in the language of fluidity and acceptance, albeit not without struggle, or trepidation.

In this work’s dense final piece, “Stones,” he talks about “trying to solve the problem of the paths between the beds” in a garden he’s built in the forest. He speaks of all he’s tried and failed at, and then describes his lessons from working with rock. He admits how, “I like the drudgery; I seem to revel/in pitting myself against the sheer/recalcitrance of the stones.” Like struggling with the exactness of poetry over the more fluid elements of prose and narrative, be it fiction short or long, or non-fiction.

“As if it mattered, making some old stones/say or be anything but stone, stone, stone;/as if these paths might serve some purpose/aside from making nothing happen,” he writes at poem’s, and book’s, end. “As if/their lapidary line might lead me somewhere –/inward, onward, upward, anywhere/other than merely back where I began,/wondering where I’ve been, and what I’ve done.”

Lasdun says Water Sessions can be ordered online through his publisher in London, Jonathan Cape (www.vintage-books.co.uk). And that come this winter, he’ll be reading, and fully participating, in the annual Woodstock Writers Festival.