Edited by Merle Bachman and Anthony Rudolf. Carcanet (Manchester). 2018. Pbk. 128 pages. £11.69.
It would be impossible to review this volume, Nameless Country by A.C. Jacobs, without referring to its Jewishness. The collection is edited by two writers, Merle Bachman, an American academic, and Anthony Rudolf, a friend and fellow poet, who are also Jewish and it is clear from Bachman’s Introduction and Rudolf’s prefatory note that Jacobs’ poetry speaks to them through that shared context of Jewishness. The question non-Jews will ask is whether these poems can also speak to them.
This book is made up of selections from published and unpublished work. Jacobs was a translator of Hebrew poetry and his knowledge of Hebrew literature, past and present, as well as his grounding in Jewish and Talmudic writing necessarily inform his original work. Jacobs is not a religious writer, as he makes clear in ‘Supplication’, one of his Glasgow poems: ‘Lord, from this city I was born in / I cry unto you whom I do not believe in: / (Spinoza and Freud among others saw to that).’
His poetry can sometimes seem rather lugubrious, but this one, like a number of others, contains a wry humour both welcome and surprising. Here he ends his prayer for a new Sinai ‘on a handy summit like Ben Lomond’ with the plea: ‘Can we have less of the thou-shalt-not?’ A darker example of this dry wit, perhaps as Scottish as it is Jewish, is found in ‘Immigration’ about his grandparents’ arrival in England. He explains that they had really wanted to go to America but ends laconically: ‘However it was, when Hitler went hunting, / We found that luckily / They had come far enough.’
His Jewishness is cultural, historical and ethnic and it forms the sensibility by which his poetry is shaped. It makes him an outsider, a wanderer, an observer and a pursuer of answers. He writes of his upbringing in Talmudic studies ‘It’s all asking. / Though I’ve forgotten much / Of the debate and ritual, / The rhythms of learning, / It’s still in me to ask and ask.’ This way of approaching the world could equally be that of the poet, as he recognises when he quotes Tsvetaeva in another poem: ‘All poets are Jews’.
It is this continuing restless questioning which gives Jacobs’ poetry value for all readers, whether Jew or Gentile. He has a beautiful poem about spring in the English suburbs: ‘Indrawn brick / Sighs, and you notice the sudden sharpness / Of things growing’. However, he turns from this being-in-the-moment to a subtle reflection on the history behind this comfortable picture and to the wider world of the ‘cold diasporas’ – perhaps Scotland, perhaps just everywhere beyond NW2. The ability to question is reflected in his attitude to Israel where you can see changes in perception from the early poems to those he wrote after his experience of living there for a few years. The longing for a place which will actually be home appears in a number of poems, such as ‘Region’ set in Scotland, from whose last lines the book takes its title: ‘it is a nameless country / That could be mine.’
The initial romance of Israel in poems like ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Tel Aviv 3.30 am’ gives way to a more critical awareness of the violence and unresolvable conflicts on which the country is founded. Jacobs addresses these conflicts in poems like ‘Over there, Just here’ and more directly in ‘Israeli Arab’. And forcefully in ‘To a Teacher of Hebrew Literature’: ‘God, girl, your Israel is a ghetto / Narrower and more firmly surrounded / Than any we have known.’
However, he is rarely a shouter. His poetry is subtle and beautifully cadenced, his language expresses plainly ideas which are complex. The more I read in this collection, the more it grows on me and the more I find to say about it. I will close with Jacobs’ own words on writing, in ‘About Making’, sound advice for any poet: ‘It is as well to be careful, / To pare down statement, / To keep close / To the unsayable. // But also to bear in mind / There is deliberate silencing, / To speak up against it / To make oneself heard.’
Kathleen McPhilemy’s poetry collections include A Tented Peace (1995) and The Lion in the Forest (2004), both from Katabasis (London).