On The Cliffs

Felt rather pleased with myself for finishing W.S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs whilst we were in Australia, though I also felt a bit silly about having taken so long to read it. I have it on a list of must-read material from May 2009 to give you some idea of just how long it's taken me. I think I made at least three false starts on it since then. Part of the feeling of silliness relates to the fact that once you get to the fourth of its seven segments the story becomes very easy indeed to follow and you are left wondering what was so difficult in the first place. Indeed, at times the poem is a model of simplicity in its language and even at the beginning the lack of punctuation was never a hindrance to figuring out sentence structure. In places there are many entirely monosyllabic lines, utilising direct, concrete vocabulary - this is, I suppose, the predominant mode of the poem.

So why the difficulty? I suppose the sense of obscurity at the beginning comes from being plunged into quite an alien world at the back-end of the main narrative strand. You are given a sense of important events having already taken place but can't quite make out the shape of these. It's the odd overall structure adopted by Merwin that creates the problem; the narrative, clear as it eventually is, just doesn't follow accepted structural conventions.

As to why Merwin does this, I'd hazard a guess that he is very much concerned with drawing the reader into the world of the indigenous Hawaiians and making the reader work at grasping the basics of the narrative is important to our surrendering to the world view that comes along with their way of life. It certainly worked in my case, eventually.

Curiously it seemed appropriate to read most of the poem in Australia with its occasional reminders of a displaced, marginalised native people. It was a reminder of the huge importance of the lives of those on the losing end of history and the price they paid for that which worked to the benefit of the world I come from.