Reviews of 'Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty'

Living the Canon

 by John Armstron

Does the Western canon still matter? The answer depends on what we do with it. If we treat it with detached scholarly rectitude it is mummified: a reminder only of past dignities, a record of what was once alive. To live now, it has to be used intimately in the depth and complexity of real experience. In this unusual, and unusually charming, book Paul Monk puts the great tradition to work in charting the rise and fall of a passionate love affair of his own. In writing of his love for - and loss of - 'a dark lady' he is reanimating Shakespeare's celebrated Sonnets.

The book includes twelve brief poems; they have something of the density and music of Shakespeare; but competition isn't the point. Conversation is a more relevant notion; Monk's poems are in dialogue with Shakespeare; he's the junior partner - of course - but a good conversation doesn't have to be between equals. Each poem is accompanied by a picture of 'the dark lady' in various poses by the Canberra based artist Jörg Schmeisser. One image (on p.42) is particularly captivating - it manages to convey a sophisticated erotic charm while being elegant and reserved. Passion, after all, can be about hints and hesitation.

The pictures and poems frame a sequence of essays, which constitute the main body of the book. The essays are erudite, touching on mythology and literary history and the ways in which these illuminate personal experience. Their style is simple - the author is frankly passing on and sharing ideas he finds fascinating.

When I was an adolescent, and first getting interested in reading and writing poetry, I shared an aspiration with some of the other intellectual boys at school. We knew would couldn't be poets (how could you earn enough?) and in any case I wanted to be a lawyer or a civil servant. But wouldn't it be nice, we thought, to bring out a book of poems in middle age: to keep the poetic side of life going even while doing other more practical things.

Like so many of my longings, this one goes unsatisfied. Paul Monk seems to have succeeded. He has a career in business and foreign policy; while these themes don't intrude, the ballast of experience and worldly-wisdom is apparent. In keeping with this, the German poet and politician Goethe has a central place in Monk's canon. For most of us, Goethe is merely a tricky-to-pronounce name (it's 'Goo:ti'); but he wrote a wonderful series of love poems called The Roman Elegies and their influence on Monk stands side by side with Shakespeare's – especially in his sonnets ‘Eternal Woman’, ‘European Love Songs’, and ‘A Roman Elegy’. When we love another person, we come into contact not only with the secrets of their heart, but also with their world.

This was what excited Goethe. He spent many months in Rome - the capital city of civilisation - around the age of forty. But for a long time he was merely a good tourist. He saw the sites, read the guide-books; but the place did not speak to him; it kept its secrets. In the Elegies he describes how a love affair with a local Roman woman opened his eyes to the city. He saw the place through her eyes: the Pantheon was local church you might pass on the way to buy some goats cheese. By breaking the barrier of awe he could love the building. Through his delight in her body his attention to classical sculpture was quickened and sharpened. For Goethe, his affair with this woman was a moral and artistic education, not just an erotic adventure.

This is what I sense is happening in Monk's book. The love affair he is talking about opens his eyes and ears to the meaning of much of the literary canon. Through his love for, and loss of, this woman, he can discover the appeal of the poets and thinkers who have lived through something similar.
 The painter Matisse once said he hoped his works would please tired businesspeople. It's a generous, refreshing sympathy; and, perhaps, in short supply today. Art doesn't exist only to shock or disturb; it can also consol, sweeten and enrich. And sometimes, that might be exactly what we need.