James Lasdun’s Elusive Identity  

Before attending my first class in the Graduate Writing Program at NYU, I did what many students do: I bought a book written by the instructor. The teacher was one James Lasdun—a writer I knew little of at the time—and the book was Delirium Eclipse (1985), his first short story collection. The stories brimmed with strange, lush, and at times disconcerting imagery: waste in the Ganges turning to gold dust in the sunset, rubies like cherries on a grandmother’s withered hand, bubbles filled with smoke. No surprise, then, to discover Lasdun was a poet as well as a fiction writer. But what did startle me, on the first day of class, was the youth of the Englishman who appeared—he was in his early thirties, barely older than a number of his students. He seemed accomplished beyond his years, if somewhat boyish in demeanor—clearly a complex individual. As the semester unfolded, he proved to be both lucid in his criticism and sensitive to the touchy dynamics of writing workshops. Many years later, I can still hear his comments, at once dead-on accurate and diplomatic: ‘This character’s not fully imagined yet,’ and ‘similes should be used judiciously.’

In the years since, I’ve become much more acquainted with the full range of Lasdun’s work. Reviews often describe his books as urbane, elegant, and witty, but they’re not just the bon mots of a drawing-room intellectual—there’s a grittiness, earthiness, even morbidity to his writing. He specializes in moments of social humiliation, and revels in images of excess and decay. His work jarringly combines the contemporary and the classical, lacing the mix with modern political and moral dilemmas.

And while his poetry has been less visible than his prose, one can hardly say it’s been ignored. He’s earned accolades from critics on both sides of the Atlantic, with figures such as Charles Tomlinson and Anthony Hecht singing his praises. ‘He seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous,’ Hecht observed in a blurb for Lasdun’s second collection, Woman Police Officer in Elevator (1997).

Since his days at NYU, Lasdun has continued to teach in various prestigious writing programs, and he’s published three more story collections, two novels, and a memoir. He co-edited the anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994) with Michael Hoffman, and co-wrote two screenplays with the director Jonathan Nossitor. He also collaborated with his American wife Pia Davis on guides to ‘walking and eating’ in Tuscany and Provence. Enough work, one would think, to fill a couple of decades, but Lasdun has also penned four poetry collections, and his Bluestone: New and Selected Poems appeared in May, 2015.

The physical circumstances of Lasdun’s life are clear: he was born in London in 1958, graduated from the University of Bristol in 1979, and, in his late twenties, travelled to the U.S. to teach. After marrying, he moved to upstate New York and acquired dual citizenship. But psychically Lasdun seems to have perpetually defied easy situating. In ‘American Mountain,’ a poem from Landscape with Chainsaw (2001), he reveals how his family routinely disconnected themselves from any obvious identifications:

James Lasdun is no stranger to grand, writ-large artistic struggle. His father was Sir Denys Lasdun, the renowned and knighted modernist architect who designed the Royal National Theater among many other prominent buildings. As the son later recounted in his memoir Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (2013), he repeatedly passed by examples of his father’s work in London: ‘They were part of the geographic, almost the geological, foundation of my own existence.’ Denys Lasdun’s vision impacted the architectural landscape of London, but if his creative presence loomed everywhere, his family history was obscure. Two years after his father died in 2001, Lasdun published a personal essay in the Guardian, relating his background:

… his origins were such a strange, sketchy, fantastical mixture of transnational comings and goings, of the bohemian and bourgeois, the cosmopolitan and the provincial, the English and the “foreign”, that he had never quite pieced them together.

Lasdun goes on to say that his father ‘was Jewish but not really, having been brought up with no sense of Jewish identity.’ Though he never explains why, one can guess that in a world of pervasive anti-Semitism and persecution it must have seemed easier for the family to repress rather than own their Jewish heritage. 

Throughout Lasdun’s poetry and prose, we find the circuitous quest for identity, and its ultimate elusiveness. We sense how easily this search is sabotaged—taken over, even—by unknown parts of the self. Lasdun, however, makes the most of this sabotage. He often seems willingly possessed by the shadowy parts of his own psyche, and the surfacing complexes that reward him with odd and exotic material.

Lasdun’s wide geographic wanderings—London, Portugal, Paris, the Loire Valley, New York, and Washington D.C.—provide the settings for the poems in his first collection A Jump Start (1987). In this book, hetouches on major loss, aging, and death, as well as the more youthful obsessions with seductions and soured love affairs. His subjects range widely, from the transformative powers of music to the mysteries of the natural world, with botanical and zoological references threaded throughout. Many poems in A Jump Start traffic in the social and the sumptuous—an atmosphere of the decadent 80s pervades. ‘This Feeling,’ tuning into the times, evokes the nightlife of Paris and a flirtation with dissipation:

This food imagery, grotesque in its over-richness, merges into a portrait of erotic satiation. As in so many other poems in A Jump Start, appetites go seriously awry.

Allusions to the Midas myth recur throughout, and images of gold and precious gems multiply, along with evocations of cold and ice. Where there’s luxury there’s also potential violence or disaster lurking; the elite, and their indulgences, both attract and repulse the young, politically left-leaning Lasdun.

As W.H. Auden famously said, ‘poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,’ and we often see Audenesque internal debate playing out in Lasdun’s poems. In ‘Mr W. H.,’ a poem from his 2012 book Water Sessions, he appoints Auden, though with characteristic modesty, as his poetic forebear. He then goes on to reveal several biographical similarities between the two of them: both attended the same prep school, St. Edmund’s in Surrey, both became expatriates and men of letters in America, and both taught in Vermont at Bennington. Lasdun also mentions their shared ‘penchant for comfortable rhymes,’ and we see this penchant in poems like ‘Buying a Dress,’ which unfurls in heroic couplets, imparting an air of exaggerated romantic comedy:

There’s an abundance of rhyme in Lasdun’s work whether ‘comfortable’ or not;

slipped-in slant rhymes and internal echos often provide a subtler music. One poem may conform to a strict scheme, while others start with a regular pattern that shifts or dissolves by the end. While he obviously has the technical chops to write in strict form, he seems just as interested in departures, throwing his own moves into the old dances—or in the case of his freer verses, dispensing with them completely.

True to its title, A Jump Start is never dull.Melting ship’s bells, billowing sleeves, and an iridescent self—these renderings enthrall, yet the cumulative effect of so much lushness in language, tone, and subject matter can be saturating. Taken in small doses, though, these poems evoke a world of heightened illusions, stretched taut and always on the brink of collapsing.     

Many of Lasdun’s formal strategies and playful variations resurface in his 1997 collection, Woman Police Officer in Elevator (released in England, in 1995, as The Revenant). The parties are over and the glittering surfaces give way to poems of travel, metamorphosis, and darker examinations of human violence directed either toward nature or fellow man.

Lasdun also turns from portraits of failed relationships to more archetypal conflicts between the sexes. Male guilt and culpability shudder through the title poem, in which the speaker finds himself riding in an elevator with a uniformed ‘female housing cop.’ The claustrophobic space, and the speaker’s proximity to this woman, fills him with an erotic discomfort, and he’s overwhelmed by thoughts of

Many poems in Woman Police Officer in Elevator reflect Lasdun’s enthusiasms for the work of Ovid. In the mid-1990s he’d co-edited, with the poet Michael Hofmann, an anthology of new poems inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Their introduction to the volume argues for the contemporary relevance, high drama, and furious forward motion of Metamorphoses—in short, its cinematic effect. The two works Lasdun himself contributed to the anthology—‘Plague Years’ and ‘Erysichthon’—both republished in Woman Police Officer in Elevator, are indeed as graphic, propulsive, and imaginatively awful as anything we see on the silver screen. ‘Erysichthon,’ narrated with a cheerful irony that belies the poem’s gruesome outcome, recasts the King of Thessaly as a greedy, present-day developer. When he mows down a sacred grove with his chainsaw, the goddess Ceres inflicts ‘Hunger’ on him and he ultimately devours his own flesh: ‘Deranged, blood-spattered like a bear / Savaged by wolves—himself both victim / And pack of predators tearing at each limb—.’

This visceral and fantastical streak of horror tends to break through most often in Lasdun’s myth poems, or in his portrayals of a toxic modern world, where ‘the masculine / Criminal salt’ expands to taint the entire American panorama. Not that Lasdun is merely a cranky expat griping about his adopted country—one suspects that wherever he happened to land he would metamorphose into a social critic, bearing witness.

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Lasdun’s poems become more transparently personal over time, and in Landscape with Chainsaw (2001) we can see a new American directness, even a confessionalism reminiscent of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman—three poets he particularly admired. While Lasdun’s poems still resonate with the cadences of his ‘Queen’s English,’ as he refers to it, they also incorporate elements of vernacular American speech. Some probe into the darker recesses of his past, while others dramatize his experiences as a newcomer to rural upstate New York.

‘Returning the Gift’ unfolds like a comedy of manners, with a wary Brit landing in the hardscrabble realm of farming, amidst abandoned bluestone quarries and red maples taking over his property. This bumptious seven-page narrative is told in envelope-rhymed quatrains that reinforce its wry and slapstick humor. Metaphorically, its hero functions as a kinder if clumsier Erysichthon, felling red maples rather than an epic oak; or as an incarnation of Adam destroying the Garden of Eden with a little help from his wife ‘Eve,’ who supplies the Makita chainsaw. When he tries to return the ruinous machine, the salesman subjects him to a barrage of hyped-up sales patter:

This moral question—the necessity of the chainsaw, verses its destructive powers—recurs obsessively throughout the book. By the time Lasdun gets to ‘Chainsaw II,’ a shorter lyric referencing Rilke’s ‘Gesang ist Dasein,’ it has evolved from an annihilating machine to something that roars like the song of existence itself. Landscape with Chainsaw is packed with poems that ask what am I doing here? How do I fit myself into this unlikely geographical identity? And how is it possible that I actually like it here?

‘American Mountain,’ a free verse exploration in three parts, finds Lasdun musing on a wonderland-like journey to the Catskills. Before he leaves England, he’s self-negating, even disembodied: 

He proceeds to integrate his forebears’ story into a chronicle of the Catskills’ history, detailing the legacy of its immigrant settlers and their agricultural and industrial labors. He then imaginatively transplants one set of ancestors, ‘glassblowers, // Bohemians mostly,’ into this world as if, in a surreal reverse of reality, he can create his own personal history there.

When branches get ‘lopped off’ family trees, and ancestors’ religious or ethnic identities are obscured, parts of the self is amputated too. Many of the Landscape with Chainsaw poems seek to remedy this, to supply Lasdun’s own version of his ancestral background and what it means for him to be Jewish. Apostasy, predictably, is a recurring motif, as well as his experiences with marginalization and anti-Semitism. The horrors of the holocaust are in the background of such poems as ‘Deathmeadow Mountain,’ in which the philosopher Heidegger fails to explain to the poet Paul Celan why he collaborated with the Nazis.

Quotes from the Talmud and Genesis weave and unravel through ‘Woodstock,’ the bizarre acid-trip of a poem that combines disparate elements of Lasdun’s past and present biography. Legendary British figures like Sir Gawain make cameo appearances, along with Jimi Hendrix whose guitar-axe ‘proceeds to slash apart the Star-Spangled Banner…’

‘Woodstock’ is a wild, irreverent ride, but some of the longer, associative poems in Landscape with Chainsaw make harsher demands on the reader with their indulgent obsessiveness. Charged surfaces in a work like ‘Patrol Car, Bear Mountain,’ give way to esoteric depths that require caffeine-fueled concentration to plumb. (A crash course in Kabbalah is in order.) Generally, though, one finds an intricate, underlying structure of meaning that justifies the effort, unlike the subjective scattershot of much contemporary American poetry.

Carving out this inner landscape with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw must have been exhausting. In ‘Happy the Man,’ the volume’s final poem, Lasdun declares that he’s renouncing poetry to devote himself to the agrarian life and the simpler manual labor it entails. ‘And if I write, it’ll be with a seed-drill; / a quatrain of greens per bed, no sweat.’ He finishes with a haunting, wistful goodbye: ‘sometimes at night you can hear / unearthly gabblings: Bear Mountain’s coyotes / closing in on a kill. Pure poetry.’ Creativity, as in so much of Lasdun’s work, is an agile, dismembering act.

Eventually, Lasdun’s elusive muse must have returned. In 2012, he emerged with a new volume, Water Sessions, published only in England. At fifty-three pages, it’s only about two-thirds the length of his previous two books, but it’s still substantial. Now fully ensconced in rural America, Lasdun weighs in from the perspectives of husband, parent, and ardent gardener, the struggle to adapt to country life seemingly safely in the past. A more acute reckoning with mortality and loss, however, informs Water Sessions, making it his most moving book—conflicted, yet flowing toward moments of solace.

In ‘Bittersweet’ Lasdun writes elegiacally of his father: ‘In your book, success / was a dirty word, wealth / even dirtier, fame / not to be uttered; / the work was all that mattered.’ The stresses on success, wealth, and fame reverberate like the drumbeats of his father’s fierce admonitions. The poet wishes to emulate Lasdun senior, ‘to create art: high serious art,’ as he tells us in his memoir. His life, however, is too full of uncontained forces like the Bittersweet, a tenacious vining plant he cannot ‘extirpate’ from his garden.

Interestingly, the poems themselves in Water Sessions are less contained than in his other works. Metrics and rhymes have mostly fallen away, and other mannerisms come to the fore—dashes, ellipses, semi-colons, colons, and enjambments vaulting from stanza to stanza all provide rhythmic structures in their pauses and suspensions. In poems such as ‘Blues for Samson,’ the lines swell and contract, infusing the lyric with melancholy:

Just as the chainsaw roars through his previous book, various permutations of water imagery flow through this fourth collection. The ‘sessions’ mentioned in the title are therapeutic ones—captured in three discreet poems strategically scattered through the book. Spun in edgy, off-balance tercets, they consist purely of dialogues between analyst and patient.                    

‘Water Sessions I’ opens with the speaker recounting an argument between himself and his significant other: ‘ – We had a fight. She threw her water at me.’ This act holds particular resonance for Lasdun. In his memoir he characterizes it as

… a recurrent gesture in classical mythology that might be termed the gesture of the offended woman. This consists of the splashing of water or some other liquid into the face of the offender, to drastic effect.

Drastic, indeed. The speaker’s unconscious floods through ‘Water Sessions I’ and ‘Water Sessions II.’ He cerebrates on dreams, myths, and analyzes himself as the therapist tries to return him to his present dilemmas. ‘Water Sessions III’ finally brings reconciliation, and as the couple walks together to a lookout, the water imagery from the speaker’s unconscious merges into the spring thaw:

Though the situation resolves here, female rage is at the center of several other Water Sessions poems. This is not a new topic for Lasdun, but definitely one that was on his mind from 2007 on, when a former female student falsely accused him of sexual misconduct and of stealing her writing. In his memoir, Lasdun describes her relentless cyber attacks as an ‘electronic tsunami,’ a tide that just kept coming and coming. Though never referring to this electronic assault, Water Sessions may have been a book Lasdun needed to write in the course of a trying and turbulent time.

This was also a post-9/11 world, falling apart in a new way. America found itself simultaneously threatened by terrorism, and in reaction, inflicting its own forms of terror in places like Abu Ghraib. In ‘The Question,’ when Lasdun’s six-year old son asks him if America is ‘good or bad,’ he finds himself unable to answer. He thinks to himself, ‘… That depends / on what you mean by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ / or for that matter ‘America’…’

Here it is again, that Lasdun-like resistance to any easy definitions or answers to questions of personal or national identity. In some ways he remains unlocatable, as if all his erudition, intensity, and effort have put him both everywhere and nowhere. No simple categorizations apply to him as a writer, but in spite of all the other genres he’s worked in—or more likely because of them—Lasdun has quietly made a considerable mark as a poet. In his poetry we find a place of orientation and a touchstone, not only for his own life but for the times we inhabit.     

‘Stones,’ the last poem in Water Sessions, returns us to essentials. Here Lasdun meditates, in blank verse, on the laborious process of constructing a garden path from the bluestones scattered around his property:

Lasdun needn’t fear. His readers know he’s passed through many places, within and without, and made full eloquent use of them.