poems are interchangeable. Here is March11: Green Waters Blue Spray Grayfish
Anna T Karen B Netta Croan
Constant Star Daystar Starwood
Starlit Waters Moonlit Waters Drift
One’s immediate response to Finlay’s lines and phrases is to read it as an Imagist nature poem: the four-three line stanzas invoke natural phenomena, from “Green Waters” and “Blue Spray” to “Moonlit Waters” and “Drift.” “Star,” furthermore, appears four times and “waters” twice. But who are “Anna T” and “Karen B,” much less “Netta Croan”? And how do these proper names relate to “Constant Star” and “Starwood”? The fact, as the use of capital letters throughout hints, is that Finlay’s poem is a catalogue or proper names. If we read it against related texts of the sixties, we soon see that these are indeed the names of particular fishing trawlers from Lowestoft, Aberdeen, and other ports. “These names,” Stephen Bann tells us in his commentary, “are a given material, derived intact from the real world… [they] lose the inertness appropriate to their strictly functional role. The poem restores their intrinsic delicacy.” Or rather, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, one might say that the context transforms all the words and phrases, showing how variable the process of naming is, ranging as it does from proper names with initials like Karen B to names that pay homage to the watery world in which the trawlers live. One is even named Drift. And further: note that the same combination of phonemes—ar—ra or at—ta—recurs, that “spray” rhymes with “gray” and “day,” and that “drift” echoes the it sound of “starlit” and “moonlit.” Bann calls this poem a found text but the designation is not quite accurate. Finlay, after all, chooses his trawler names for their visual and sonic values and their semantic potential. The September poem ho / horizon / on, which takes the form of a pyramid discovers new words within its title; in the May poem broken / heartbroken, the cliché of “heartbroken” is redeemed by the use of letters and spaces: we see the heart being “broken,” losing a letter one step at a time and emptied out into a mere “h t” space. But then the word “broken” is put back together and finally becomes a whole word again, defining the empty heart. Is a broken heart the same as being heartbroken? Or does it make a difference whether heart comes first or second? In the July ring of waves, Finlay takes ten monosyllabic nouns, printed in green, and permutates the relationship of noun (in green type) to prepositional phrase, where “of” is always blue. The “ring” can be one of “waves” or of “nets” or, finally of “light,” the rhyming “string” is first a “string of lights” and then a “string of fish,” and so on. One would expect the instances of “of” to form 11 See Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, 86.
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