Aside from a handful of close family members, novels are, without question, the things I love best in the world – so I was surprised to find myself struggling to name a single one from which I walked away with a feeling of hope. Joy, delight, satisfaction, comfort, solace – yes to all, in spades. Hope? Nope.
Why the omission? I’ve been turning the question over and the answer, I think, is this: novels are inherently temporal. Within the compass of their pages, they construct a facsimile of life as we experience it – of the forward motion of hours, days and years – but with the crucial difference that, as readers of the lives of others rather than participants in our own, they grant us knowledge of the end. “Endings,” said the novelist Sarah Moss in a recent interview, “are one of the great consolations of fiction,” and I think she’s right. Part of the attraction of novels is the reassurance of their narrative arc; the impression we get, reading them, that A leads inevitably to B and that, crucially, it does so for a reason.
But the inevitable flipside of this is that novels, with their definitive conclusions (quiet at the back, modernists), leave no options open: they’re closed worlds, entire unto themselves. Characters have no future, only a present, in the moment you’re reading of them and, once you put the book down, a past. Hope, on the other hand, exists only in the future. It’s the jam-tomorrow of emotional states; as soon as it’s realised, it ceases to exist. Once you’ve finished a novel, you know everything that’s happened. What is there left to hope for?
Poetry is different. Unlike novels, poems are not, by and large, in the business of narrative; rather, their aim (and I’m generalising wildly here) is to capture a moment – a thought, a feeling, an image, an atmosphere – and deliver it. In doing so, poetry, it seems to me, shucks off temporality and steps into a world of pure potential, where even death has no dominion. “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” says Shakespeare, at the end of Sonnet 18, “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” It’s fair to say he knew a thing or two.
Don Paterson’s third poetry collection, Landing Light, came out in 2003 to a rapturous reception; it won him the Whitbread and TS Eliot prizes, and cemented his reputation as one of the UK’s foremost living poets. “These poems,” wrote Helen Dunmore, “shine a light into crevices of feeling that amaze the poet as much as they move the reader”; Philip Hensher declared: “I couldn’t get Don Paterson’s brilliant Landing Light out of my head.” When the Guardian ran two of its poems in the Review section I was so bowled over by them that I bought a copy and read it through in one sitting. Then I turned back to the beginning and read it through again.
The poems in this book aren’t hopeful in the greetings card sense; they don’t stick to cheerful subjects or offer bland aphorisms about rainbows and rain. There are poems on death; poems on the death of love; on betrayal; on failure; on shame. But through all of it, in every poem, there is cause for hope. Set against depictions of the wrongs that we do to one another and the endless ways in which it’s possible to come up short are moments of gladness and revelation; glimpses of redemption. The light of the title threads its way through the collection, suggesting the possibility of salvation.
In The Landing, a multilayered, metaphysical poem towards the end of the book, a man (a version, perhaps, of Orpheus, complete with lyre) finds himself halfway up a flight of stairs, poised in the “half-shade” between “the complex upper light” and “the darker flight / that fell back to the dead”. As a metaphor for midlife it seems, at first, bleak and pitiless – until the moment the speaker sees “the early morning sun / send down its golden ghost.” The benevolence of this light – not metaphorical, but actual; warm and glowing – cuts through the speaker’s torpor. Its presence reminds us that, even when we’re in the grip of personal crisis, the world keeps turning; life goes on. Where there’s life, of course, there’s hope.
And nowhere is the life-force more powerful than in our children. At the emotional heart of the collection are a pair of sonnets, Waking With Russell and The Thread, in which Paterson describes the arrival in the world of his two sons. As poems, they’re pared-back, unadorned – and deeply, breathtakingly, heart-catchingly hopeful. In Waking With Russell, Paterson describes coming to, face to face with his newborn child. “His four-day-old smile dawned on him again,” he says,
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran …
The image of the child rescuing the father, guiding him out of the dark wood, is one that brims over with hope: Paterson’s hope for himself, and for his son – whose feet are flight and, he believes, well-directed – and the hope we all have that the next generation will do things better; that they will realise what we have failed to.
If The Thread opens on an equivocal note, its conclusion is, if anything, more uplifting still. “Jamie made his landing in the world / so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth,” the poem begins. “They caught him by the thread of his one breath / and pulled him up. They don’t know how it held.” But hold it did, and the poem switches focus to the father and his two sons playing together,
roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill
and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving
every engine in the universe.
All that trouble just to turn up dead
was all I thought that long week. Now the thread
is holding all of us: look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.
Once again, it’s the parent who is lost and hopeless and the child who, simply by being, saves him. The poem ends on an image that’s frozen, but simultaneously trembling with the power of barely harnessed motion: it contains within it both the intense joy of the present, and the sense of a wide-open future. Unlike in a novel, the image stands in isolation, as fresh and present every time I return to it as the first time I read it. There is no conclusion here; the two-year-old will always be running down the hill to his mother, who will always be waving. We are left simply with endless possibility, and boundless hope.
