What is poetry for? Is its purpose to describe reality or to conjure imaginary worlds? To define standards or to subvert them? To reveal to us how we should live or to demonstrate to us how we should not?  

And what of the poet, ‘of imagination … compact’ with the lunatic and the lover, in Shakespeare’s unforgettable phrase? Is the poet’s role to instruct us or to entertain us? To perform for us or to confess to us? To show us himself/herself or to show us ourselves?

These and similar unanswerable questions have been competing for attention in the present reviewer’s mind ever since completing the reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) of William Radice’s Green, Red, Gold: A Novel in 101 Sonnets, published by Flambard Press.

 Composed though its title sounds – and carefully constructed though sequence of Shakespearian sonnets undoubtedly is – William Radice’s new publication is a deeply disturbing work. The ‘novel’ of the subtitle tells the autobiographical story of the poet’s love affair with a neighbour during a period of spiritual estrangement from his wife. It recounts the agonising eternal triangle of French 19^th century literature, but with telling differences. In the first place, it is a man rather than a woman who is forced to choose between fidelity to a spouse and adultery with a new acquaintance. Secondly, that much-premeditated act of adultery is not fully consummated. And thirdly, nobody dies. A ‘no sex, we’re British’ version of the eternal triangle, then, cooled by the author’s mature artistic reflections and tempered by the chill winds of the Northumberland which is the setting for most of the book’s action?

Not quite. The work sometimes makes shocking reading:

In a country that now has twenty-seven dedicated pornography channels, a little poetry-writing of an evening may seem an innocent pastime. But writing about a lover in the presence of your wife, and writing about the fact that you are writing it, and then publishing the completed work, which runs not just to the fourteen lines of a sonnet but to the one thousand four hundred and fourteen lines of a 101-sonnet sequence, and still remaining on speaking terms with your wife (and your daughters) – now, that is shocking.

 ‘These are scandalous poems,’ reflects William Radice himself: ‘I may never live them down,’ – moving on to muse: ‘It’s not just that they stem from infidelity … It’s more the way they strip bare / The divine body of the world.’ And that body is, as the poet concludes a few lines later, a ‘mess.’

A bemusing sea-change. A loving husband and father is caught up in the flush of an illicit relationship that threatens to destroy his marriage, family and home. As though observing his own actions from a great height, he reflects not only on the nature and implications of his dangerous amorous/poetic enterprise (‘ … the only treasure / I have that would break me to pieces to lose are my wife / And my daughters’) but, through the prism of that new experience, on a world which is perceived as flawed but described nonetheless as divine. Here, it seems to me, we have some of the essence of William Radice the poet, translator and scholar of Bengali. For if life is a river, then for William Radice it’s the Ganges, full of indescribable beauty and filth, domestic and mythical, enticing and revolting at one and the same time.

William Radice’s deep relationship with the Indian subcontinent scarcely figures in these pages, however. Instead the references are to a carefully selected number of polarities (sea/land, betrayal/trust, Ariel/Cordelia, Prospero/Lear) and the landscape distinctly Britannic, ranging from the domestic garden from which the author rips a spray of red/green fuchsia as a spontaneous love-token to the holy isle of Lindisfarne which his 'friend' and he see from afar, their thoughts full of the possibility of consummating their passion in this remote and rocky place.

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, as Voltaire said. Without presuming to understand everything in the poet’s heart as revealed through Green, Red, Gold – and still less everything in the hearts of his wife and lover – I think it is, however, possible to get beyond the initial reaction of shock at the content of this work and see it as, precisely, a work of art – finely crafted, delicately nuanced, allusive, varied, surprising on every page. In a sense, William Radice takes it upon himself to be Everyman for us. We witness him by turns yearning, elated, confused, regretful and downright frightened as he attempts to resolve the ‘Green’ of the spirit with the ‘Red’ of the world in order to achieve a balance between the two (‘Gold’). ‘Am I doomed, after all, to be good?’ If he comes across as naïve in the endeavour, then he reminds us of how naïve we ourselves have been in affairs of the heart; if he comes across as exploitative, then ditto. ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet …’

 Nabokov famously remarked that the most important question to ask about a work of art is out of how deep a life it is sprung – a position which might be claimed with equal justification by both aesthetes and moralists. Green, Red, Gold is indeed a shocking work, and one which perhaps many of its readers would not have wished to have written themselves; but it offers a deep aesthetic and moral experience. Indeed it goes further, examining the aesthetics of morality and the morality of aesthetics in haunting new lights.

Sonnet 72 of the sequence, addressed to the poet’s wife, balances gently on this tension:

It is good to see William Radice’s work appearing once more between the covers of a mainstream English publisher. And it is lovely (if perhaps aesthetically and morally perplexing) to read in this complex and difficult book – which is so erudite, so self-referential and so allusive – a declaration of love that comes as fresh off the page as the scent of a freshly baked loaf of bread, prosaic but pure poetry withal: ‘If you changed sex, I would still love you.’ I think poetry probably exists to enable us to say things like that. 

© Jonathan Steffen 2005. This review first appeared in the October 2005 edition of the literary website www.falconeditions.com. Reprinted by permission.