To read this book is to enter the mindset of a late 20th century European intellectual – enter but not quite inhabit. The eclecticism is as dazzling and tantalizing as some cabinet of curiosities, a miniature museum, whilst the compression, the minimalism of form and style is controlled and austere.
Anthony Rudolf is a writer and an enabler of writing – poet, critic, publisher, essayist, translator and writer of a trilogy of memoirs. This collection brings together four decades of poetry and a number of short prose pieces. It represents, as the publisher puts it, 'a life's work severely curated'. Indeed, the book is the verbal equivalent of an exhibition, a tribute to European culture and an analogue to the art of painting, to which Rudolf, partner of a painter, frequently alludes with some envy. In 'You, Painting' the poem is words, the 'mind's eye', whilst the artist's painting seems more profound: 'water from/the well of presence'.
The title European Hours suggests not only time spent in Europe but, also, a religious discipline of ritual and prayer. Such double meaning is typical of Rudolf's methodology, in which the Bible and his own Jewishness underlie contemporary culture – or are, perhaps, replaced by it. The book opens with 'Invocations', a bringing to mind of 'ancestral Europe' through its cities and precious objects, like the azulejos tiles of Lisbon, Paris's 'Raft of the Medusa', the penitent Magdalen of Florence and Venice, where Henry James visited the Brownings. In a poem of the 1970s, 'Chagall', Rudolf describes the effect on him of a museum in Nice: 'Horizon/of remembrance/vault of childhood: his images/strike home, /old stories well up'. Jacob and the angel, Adam and Eve are 'clarified/in the burning/bush of memory'. Such images are fundamental and personally inscribed 'like a rock water/is struck from'. In Prague, 'dead centre' of Europe, the poet is 'alone on our roots'. In terms both of the Jewish Golem and the Christians' Jesus, Kafka is the 'stone which the builders rejected', now 'the cornerstone' of modern thought.
Rudolf's themes include, as one might expect from his Jewish background, memory and survival. Generally, though, his themes are not so easily abstracted from the poems as objects in themselves. Ted Hughes spoke of the 'new geometry' of each poem and this suggests well the stark and cerebral craft of this parsimonious poetry. Influenced by second wave modernists, like the late Pound, Basil Bunting and Robert Creeley, they espouse the 'objectivist' aim to present 'the thing in itself' without extrapolation.
The early poems in particular, evoke silence, luminosity and liminality. Other poems are reminiscent of Wallace Stevens in their intellectual complexity and play on words. One of the more situated and accessible recounts the effort of reading Stevens in hospital (as one does!): 'I read each phrase, each line, re-read/the one before, the next, one more/each time', the 'only way' to read it. Interrupted by his fellow patients, Rudolf concludes, 'It takes all sorts to unmake worlds'.
The play with words and their interaction with things is realized engagingly in the poem 'Ancient Beams', in which the mid-life Rudolf enters into a dialogue with the beams of a thatched cottage, an image of support 'as if I'm the wall/you, in your presence edge through'. He wishes he could see through himself the way the beam knows the wall it intersects, and see the world the way the beam does:
Let me (truly like one of
the beams) pray at my angle
to the universe, that the truth
shall ever be told aslant.
If this reads like an Emily Dickinson mantra for creative writing teaching, so be it. Rudolf's work is a tribute to writing and a vindication of it: the universe experienced and remade through language. In a tribute to Walter Benjamin, Rudolf invokes the elusive 'all-poem', to which writers aspire, in terms of the harmony the Messiah will reveal. Although such an absolute goal may be ever out of reach, as Rudolf says in 'Zigzag', a late poem based on his own courses, writing will always have its place: 'Writing/is the most intense/reading of the world'.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. Her poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies.