If you study ‘the vanishing point’ in The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci (to my mind, a paradigm for many of the poems in Stainer’s book), you may discern an alp, a high brooding mountain in mist. Rearing between intermediate cypress trees, dark with death, the effect is of a window onto the work of a Zen master. Mountain air is marvellous for ‘cleansing the doors of perception’.
Perhaps the intent behind the mountain in the painting was to associate the annunciation with breathing fine pure mountain air; and correctly so.
Pauline Stainer’s book opens with ‘Our Lady of Indigo’. A poet ‘working at the margins of the sacred’, generally Stainer interweaves motifs of the Virgin Mary, the crucifixion, light, water and a quasi-mediaeval bestiary through poems wide in locale and subject, the variety unimportant. The poems are bare, spare, musical.
Oddly like Buñuel’s 1969 masterpiece The Milky Way concerning two pilgrims en route to Santiago, from almost any point one keeps on flipping into some form of religious illumination or hallucination almost as an ‘annunciation’ of a truth. The blue of Mary’s robes is the dominant motif.
Perhaps an autobiographical note may illuminate the title poem, ‘Crossing the Snowline’. For most of their lives, my paternal grandparents lived a mock-Tudor mansion in The International Settlement in Shanghai, which they defiantly christened ‘Thornthwaite’. Even today, the Red Guards who appropriated the property are still scuffing the immaculate baize lawns of my grandfather’s billiards table. Worn out by the heat, rather than fear of revolution, they migrated (via Hampshire) to Pau, capital of the département PyrenéesAtlantiques. There has been an English colony in Pau since Wellington passed through with a victorious army in 1814. Many returned to live.
Architecture in central Pau is Swiss Calvinist. Each morning, my grandparents would walk the elevated Boulevard des Pyrenées and study a one-hundred kilometre stretch of the brooding, snow-capped Pyrenees and plan excursions. When I visited their old quarters last summer, the almost sinister Pyrenees were still snowcapped. The French call them the savage frontier, replete with brown bears, wolves and multiple birds of prey. The weather is notoriously unstable, a mist potentially fatal.
I had been to Pau before, en route to St-Jean-Pied-dePort and what became a terrifying, seminal experience up in the mountains. Eight kilometres from the Spanish frontier three main pilgrim routes converge at St Jean en route to Santiago de Compostela. Darkish mountains dominate the city. Every pilgrim is reputed to have left the Porte d’Espagne with a terrible sense of foreboding for the journey over the mountains, the struggle over the pass, the demons up there, circling.
Parallel to their route, one day I drove from there to Esterencuby and then on to narrow windy mountain-top roads up past Errozate, high on the border with Spain.
As I left the car to continue higher on foot, twelve griffon vultures circled overhead. High on a craggy ridge, I suddenly found myself looking down into a prehistoric dolmen or stone circle on a south-facing slope. At the centre was a grassy bowl, fern, moss, rivulets.
After a while, I started to sense spirits circling, ancient voices, even the idea of ‘being in God’ yet the spirits felt apart, pagan. Overhead, slowly the wind rose, the sky darkened, mist formed. I was being drawn in by the spirits to the place. They suggested it might be wonderful to stay, forever. So completely removed from ‘our time’, fearful, I got up, left.
It was then I understood the fear of the pilgrims leaving St Jean for Santiago de Compostela, and the idea that an apprehension of the utterly pagan is a precondition for ‘seeing God’.
This is all to say why I was fascinated by Stainer’s title poem, and her parallel poem (p 55) ‘Border Crossing’. Briefly, I understand how ‘the sculptors of Kilpeck / on the road/ to Santiago de Compostela…/ some never made it back/ through the wilderness / to chisel / a sleeping Christ.’ For, in remarkable lines they: …lie fallow under their larch ceiling as if amazed by the irrepressible light at the burial of the stars.
As if a continuation, the parallel poem starts: ‘Don’t look back. The dead thrum / through the marram grass / in search of a voice.’ Read on!
We are told Crossing the Snowline emerged as recovery from the death of a daughter. At times, it reads as if one is constantly turning a corner to encounter part of a Renaissance masterpiece and Stainer does provide many references to painters or paintings. Poems about paintings can be notoriously creaky and boring, but here the glimpses of paintings form part of a ‘lived vision’ and the book is prefaced by a quotation new to me from Simone Weil: ‘There is only one fault, incapacity to feed on light’.
This preoccupation is balanced by a poem such as ‘Waterspiral’. It is wonderfully non-didactic and illuminating.
Christopher Truman has built a web site for his line art.
His poetry has been widely anthologised.
Crossing the Snowline by Pauline Stainer, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset 2008), Pbk, 96 pages, £8.95, ISBN: 978185224 8123