In The Anti-Basilisk Christopher Middleton, in the spirit that impelled Shelley to write The Masque of Anarchy, reveals as crooked the apparently straight and sees what's coming round corners with a clarity that dazzles. Bruno Schulz in 1937 made an observation that might stand as epigraph to this collection: 'Thrones wilt when they are not fed with blood, their vitality grows with the mass of wrongs committed, with life-denials, with the crushing of all that is perpetually different and that has been ousted by them.' Certain dilemmas in such a prospect are implicit in the shady figures of 'Saul Pinkard' and 'Doctor Dark'.The Basilisk of the title is a sort of monster, all ego, atavistic and implacable.
The poems fall into five sections, the first and fourth twenty-poem panoramas, the fifth a gathering of translations

About the Author
Christopher Middleton, born in Cornwall in 1926, is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zurich and King's College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in 1998. His Collected Poems appeared in 2008.

Reviews
How to remain human and sane in an insanely violent world?
The cover quotes: 'Thrones wilt whey they are not fed with blood, their vitality grows with the mass of wrongs committed, with life-denials, with the crushing of all that is perpetually different and that has been ousted by them.' Middleton comments 'I conceive of the basilisk' - which is both the cockatrice and a brass ordnance - 'as a monster, all ego, atavistic and implacable.' 'Doctor Dark' comes with an apparently charming performance for children. He turns a box of 'lokum' - Turkish Delight? - into a glowing moon that enchants the children: they think their bodies 'will measure heavenly perfection.' No, says Dr Dark. 'You see a rising moon, I see a Cyclops.'
This garden incubates our grand collapse.
Industrial wars will torch these fanatic empires;
The children of your children will be cindered
Then, like a dancer, he bounds across the lawn, and disappears indoors. It appears he's both literally night and a prophet of global doom. There are other similar implications. But of 'Dead Friends' the persona asks:
Who can they have been
In that red car
Going by, so fast, and waving...
So what of 'Paradise'? Well, '...Without paradise / There would be nothing at all to think of.' The legends are dismissed: 'it could happen to Anyone'.
For everyone a garden to cultivate at leisure
Floated from heaven; there would be leisure
In which to touch up the shrubbery, leisure
To scythe the lawn, so amiable ruminants
Might also have holistic fruits to chew.
But something more literally mystical is evoked: 'The simultaneity of everything, such as Seferis saw / In a trance at Engomi...' This too is dubious, however: it may be 'a latent state of mind' - especially if simultaneity 'has to include the horrors'. 'After all it was a trance - / Seferis took one step, at once / Inside paradise and out of it.' The gate of Eden is guarded by something stronger than a sword: Anguish. Yet Paradise may be a glimspe of beauty - in a voice like woodsmoke, paradoxically announcing news of a car bomb. The theses and antitheses end with an elusive synthesis, starting with an ambivalent allusion and ending with an ambivalent conclusion:
Go lovely rose into that vacuum.
Anyone can dance away the night.
Anyone can meditate on paradise.
In paradise there might be no call for
meditation
These two poems suggest a dialectic at the heart of the book.
Christopher Middleton is of course a well-established polymath, a much-travelled linguist with out-of-the-way lore, and all this inhabits a poetry aimed at the intelligent and not intended to be too easy. These clever, oblique, two-edged, sometimes obscure, sometimes detached, sometimes enraged, sometimes beauitful, sometimes too cortical hundred and forty-odd pages are to be read slowly and pondered. Terry Eagleton says 'he uses the ordinary as a leaping-off point into some space quite elsewhere.' John Lucas says Middleton 'gives experimentalism a good name.' I don't find the poems partiuclarly epxerimental but I agree that 'he possesses a wit that flickers with almost graspable significance.'
Shifting strands:
Sarah Crown finds hidden depths in Christopher Middleton's complicated collection, The Anti-Basilisk.
Reading The Anti-Basilisk is like swimming across the surface of an ocean: beneath the playful shift and glitter of the poems themselves is a deep supporting reservoir of thought and learning. Skipping through space and time from subject to obscure subject (the 'minotaurine paisano voice' of Catalan composer Federico Mompou, the 'paradox' of the legend of St Jerome and the lion), brimming with esoterica and academic allusion, above all these are sly and riddling poems, united by a reluctance to yield up their meaning easily.
This willful tricksiness begins with the collection's title. Just what is an anti-basilisk, anyway? Rather than providing a definition, Christopher Middleton makes us work for one, scattering frequently contradictory hints throughout the collection. After opening the second section, also called 'The Anti-Basilisk', with two (conflicting) dictionary definitions of 'basilisk' (a fabulous serpent, whose breath, and even look, was fatal or a large piece of ordnance, generally of brass?), he then muddies the water by confiding on the back page that 'I conceive of the basilisk as a monster, all ego, atavistic and implacable.' The bemused reader is left to cobble together a composite definition - which then must be turned on its head to produce a picture of what an anti-basilisk might be.
Within the poems themselves, further clues emerge. Halfway through the collection, an important piece of the puzzle falls into place when the title is recycled again at the top of a poem in which, at last, the dictionary definition and Middleton's own converge. The 'anti-basilisk' of the poem is a real-life anole lizard - quite the opposite, in its zooological exactitude, of the dictionary's 'fabulous'. A chameleon, able to "blend / With a brown or green her modesty settles on", the lizard's habit of fading into the background also suggests a reticence that is the antithesis of Middleton's egotistic basilisk.
The lizard's obscurity is established in the first line of the poem, where she is identified by her lack of identity ("Some locals now don't even know her name"), and confirmed by glancing, doubtful descriptions ("Perhaps the dark torments her ...") which suggest the poet's unwillingness to strip away her camouflage by bringing her too sharply into focus. Even the pride she might have taken in her modesty has been eroded; while it was once "a thrill to vanish, now it is old hat".
This quest for a point where "self evaporates into the cries of birds" is the defining feature of Middleton's highly intellectual, experimental collection. The basilisks he seeks to defeat are all ego, so he counters them with a poetry that is infinitely empathetic, in which the stories of people just as obscure in their way as the anole lizard are told with painstaking care. Anonymous individuals (a "barkeep ... fingering a coffee spoon"; a girl in a restaurant, "hairclip a semicircle of imitation tortoiseshell") appear alongside long-forgotten historical figures.
When famous faces do crop up, attention is deflected from them, as in a poem on Henry V, in which not he but the kitten he discovers "paw sinister lifted / Haptic on a hollyhock pod" is the focus of the poem. In "A Species of Limbo", in which Middleton considers "these old Turks who sit on the terrace", the delicate precision of his portraits of the minutiae of their lives - the way "they sit, hungry for / Music, exchanging an amiable nod / With a neighbour, who calculates the extent / To which the other has washed his nose" - is so intimate that it feels, almost, like a form of love.
Despite his democratic approach to history, however, there are points when Middleton's poetry strays into impenetrability, giving it an unwelcomingly exclusive air. His tendency to pile subclause on top of subclause at times produces sentences so convoluted that three or four attempts are required before sense can be wrung from them.
But such baffling moments are outweighed by those when Middleton's subject matter and supple language come together. Listen to the glory of the final verse of 'Prospecting in Sicily, April 1787', another of Middleton's obscure first-person poems, in which the speaker appears to be a scientist, examining rocks in the crater of Mount Etna. He wakes suddenly in the night and wonders
Had the roof been blown away? What otherwise
Woke me? Overhead I saw the best
And brightest star. Of flowers, thick on the road,
A whiff remembered? Grit needling a shank?
Daybreak: the roof intact, I descried a hole in it;
And scooping Chance into some not indescribable
Design, that starlight, me in total dark, I reckoned,
Had passed through my meridian, a rotary design
Which, come the day, with pen and ink, I'll plot.
The 'plotting' in fact occurs in the final sentence itself, "a rotary design" if ever there was one. Precise, almost scientific punctuation echoes the sense of the lines; the wonderful delayed gratification of the structure combining with the feeling of possibility that daybreak brings. Typically for this author, even that sense of boundless potential is subtly complicated by the fact that just two months after the date given in the title, Etna erupted with devastating violence, destroying much of the island.
In this collection, Middleton makes no secret of demanding from his reader the same dedication to his work that he himself has given. These are poems not so much to be read as studied, requiring serious attention and numerous rereadings. Many readers may choose not to bother. Stick with them, however, and you will find that they give up just as much - far more, in fact - than you put into them.
My initial reaction to The Anti-Basilisk was a sort of disbelief, turning into gratitude. Middleton was born in 1926, and his first books, Poems and Nocturne In Eden, appeared from the Fortune Press in 1944 and 45, respectively. To put it in context: these are the same years when Eliot's Four Quartets were coming out as a whole. There are two amazing things. First, that if you're lucky enough to have a legal deposit library nearby there really are some good poems in the wartime teenager's books. Second, that The Anti-Basilisk contains 150 pages embodying a vast energy, invention, intelligence, talent and curiosity. It collects five years' work, and is the sort of book that feels like it could carry on surprising people, as slow reading matter, for at least that duration.
Okay: but which people? There are reasons for suspecting that this book will not be a Christmas bestseller, and one of them has to do with the ways we think about poetry in relation to knowledge, intellectualism, academia. It's impossible not to notice that Middleton is a poet with an endless patience for erudition, for allusions, a sort of playfully austere or austerely playful appropriation of 'academic' matter. In this mode - to pick almost at random - we have a poem on 'An Enigma Commonly Passed Over', which considers the evidence surrounding 'the graphic details / In Cavafy's poem about the Cappadocian king / Orophernes...' These words come from the first three lines, and, as a mise en scene, you can understand why it might stop some people from carrying on. I think the poem is pretty good, but I admit it only really comes to life if you know or go and look up the Cavafy poem (which, it turns out, is also really good - p.43 in the Chatto paperback of the Keeley/Sherrard translations). Is this the way we want to read - endlessly having to go read something else?
In the old Eliotic/Hillean/David Jonesy style The Anti-Basilisk gives us 'Notes', telling us too little of some things and too much of others at the same time. For example, this gem:
'...resting on a negative': cf. Hegel, Phenomenology cap. 1 and commentary by Giorgio Agamben, in Le langage et la mort (1982, French translation, 1991).
The way readers take this no doubt crystallises a pretty fundamental reaction to Middleton's poetry. Personally I love this kind of thing; the attraction is the same as in reading a novelist like James Buchan - those hints at a vast body of clinching and detailed information just waiting for you to uncover it, with a generous pointer from the author. But then, as a comfortably-imbursed PhD student I must be in a fairly small demographic of people who could plausibly be bothered to chase the implications of a four-word phrase in a poem through two books of rather hard-to-read continental philosophy (other people, I imagine, must have lives to be getting on with). And if I'm honest, I won't actually ever do it myself; but it's a pleasure to me to be offered the chance by Middleton. And I'm amused by what must be the donnish joke of citing the French translation of Il linguaggio e la morte rather than the English one, as if making a generous concession to our slowness, but still refusing to make things too easy.
The argument I want to make, however, is that readers who don't like this sort of thing would be wrong to assume that The Anti-Basilisk is not worth reading, or able to be read. The poems are often very funny, fun and self-aware. One section is called 'Apropos Saul Pinkard', and features poems in which the eponymous Saul negotiates the intersections of some of these forms of knowledge with the business of 'real' or actual life, in ways that sometimes seem to overlap with the author's experience, as in 'Pinkard Brings Hoelderlin to the Awareness of Americans' (Middleton worked for many years as a Professor of Modern Languages in Texas and, along with Michael Hamburger, is one of the great translators of German poetry).
The Pinkard-persona is a tool for examining the sorts of interest the book has, as in 'Pinkard Bookish', where we find him,
Prone on a couch, with pillowed head,
Holding with both hands a book,
Pinkard conjectures: Devil take it,
There must be more to life than this...
By the end of the poem, after encountering a 'big bird-spider' (which is another pleasure of the book - when there are animals, they seem like brilliant cartoonish allegorical presences; this must be what it's like, living in Texas), and wondering 'Where was the world not full of people?', Pinkard tries to come round to a realisation of Keats's 'negative capability':
Pinkard recalls the words of Keats,
How he could slip inside a sparrow.
Now unheroic Pinkard squats
And 'picks,' with Keats, 'about the gravel'.
It is a winning moment of 'bookish' burlesque in a splendidly clever poem, and it's of a piece with some of the other places where the poems delight in mischievous or telling silliness which sometimes approaches what Yeats called the 'tragic joy' of aged poets, as when a mocking-bird becomes a compound figure of political violence, 'Saddamosamahitlerchingiskahn', or when the poems seem to go a bit ruefully insane:
As if all that aches had oaken
As if all that peaks had poken
As if all that creeps had cropped
As if all that peeps had popped
Along with this, there are poems such as the opening 'Tableaux 1-20' where the author's rather massive and tough intelligence is brought to bear on scenes and questions which are evidently 'about' life, even if their syntax and arguments can seem hard to parse:
Hairclip a semicircle of imitation tortoiseshell
To aureole her really uninteresting hair,
She gazed through schoolmarm glasses at a script
And laughed to see the way her father wrote it.
Thus a girl in a restaurant. It's a thumbnail sketch done with a miniaturist's precision, even at the expense of seeming a bit mean or finicky (that 'really uninteresting' hair). The point is that the precision, the playfulness, the entertainment are underwritten by the same intelligence that gives the rigour of the learning, if we want to see them in opposition; and they underwrite it in return, making the experience of The Anti-Basilisk, for this reader and perhaps for others, unusually rich and rewarding.
The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.
The original article can be found here.




Book Information
ISBN 9781857547894
Author Christopher Middleton
Format Paperback
Page Count 164
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 9mm