Micrographia by Robert Dickinson. Waterloo Press 51pp. £9.00
‘Micrographia’ is a medical term for the abnormally small, cramped handwriting often associated with Parkinson’s disease. Yet the word also suggests ‘Micrography’, a technique of building up pictures and designs from minute letters. It’s an apt title for a collection which takes the small, cramped details of our lives and builds them into pictures of lasting beauty and real insight.
And in much the same way as the beauty of a piece of micrography only emerges when you step back, it can take a while for the full subtlety of this collection to register; it is the smallness and crampedness that come across most immediately. Indeed, an atmosphere of threat permeates Robert Dickinson’s work. He is interested in the loners and losers: the ageing addict who will “half cook / something frozen. / But I’m clean, she says / as the rooms fill with dust” (Blind forty); the superannuated skinhead with the tattooed knuckles who “twists his hands as he talks, hiding the words” (Love and hate, 1977); the man in the Iron Maiden T-shirt feeding coins into the quiz machines, “searching for the pattern, / the underlying sequence of the world” (Eschatology).
To quote another of his poems, these “brief and bitter lives flare like night fires.” But from the first line of this remarkable book (“Where does it hurt? In Battersea”) you know that you’re not in for a straightforward trawl through contemporary lives. Dickinson’s poetry draws on European surrealist traditions while shaping them to a modern British audience. The result is invigorating, exciting, occasionally bizarre, as if Miroslav Holub suddenly popped up playing a small time hustler in The Bill.
Undoubtedly the highlight of the collection is the long sequence ‘Biopic’. This imagines a major figure of 20th Century European thought watching the shoddy TV adaptation of his life. There are enough clues to suggest that Dickinson had Einstein in mind (references to Brownian motion and “that catchphrase formula / about movement and light”). I think I also detected a hint of Freud – “If only they’d heard of the unconscious / and its buried discontents” – but this may have been a slip.
The inspiration is less important, though, than the way in which he builds up a three dimensional portrait out of scattered images: childhood – “a woman I’ve never seen / reaching down in soft focus”; an upbringing among “small town intellectuals / minding their ps and qs / in roomfuls of approved classics”; fumblings with girls in “unfamiliar, period dress / designed to restrict precisely this movement.” His insights into the structure of reality are brilliantly described:
… But I say
the universe is like a tablecloth
on shifting sand. The world
is the possibility of the world
the chance of it happening.
Dickinson knows his physics. But he also knows people, understands the frustrations of aging. “Look closely at my hands. / However much they tremble, they are young” – the close of ‘Biopic’ trades poignantly on the ambiguity of the old man watching the young actor playing himself as an old man. Later in the collection he gives us a series of subtle, assured poems on dementia – a rare achievement in itself given the topic’s knack of bringing out the worst in poets.
But then this book is full of rare achievements: intellectually satisfying, it is also accessible; wryly funny, it finds time to be moving; sweepingly ambitious, it paints a world in the cramped writing of a Parkinson’s sufferer. Read it, you’ll see.
….reviewed by Ross Cogan