The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems 1964-1988

by Kenneth White

Hard to Find book

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He spent his formative years in Fairlie in Ayrshire.

White obtained a double first in French and German from the University of Glasgow. From 1959 until 1963, he studied at the University of Paris, where he obtained a state doctorate. He purchased Gourgounel, an old farm in the Ardèche region of France, where he could spend the summers and autumns studying and working on what would become Letters from Gourgounel.

In 1963, White returned to the University of Glasgow, where he lectured in French literature until 1967. Then, disillusioned by the contemporary British literary and poetry scene, he resigned from the University and moved to the city of Pau, near the Pyrenees, in south-west France, where he lectured in English at the University of Bordeaux. He was expelled from the University after his involvement in the student protests of May 1968. After leaving the University of Bordeaux, White remained at Pau and lectured at the University of Paris VII from 1969 until 1983, when he left the Pyrenees for the north coast of Brittany, and a new position as the chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne.

In 1989, White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to further promote research into the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade.

White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. He was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and a visiting professor at Scotland's UHI Millennium Institute.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my personal pantheon of favourite writers, there is a cluster that is rather dear to me. These authors speak directly to the heart and yet, while reading, I find myself often on my guard "Am I being taken for a ride? Isn’t he overplaying his hand here? Isn’t this too windy, too self-conscious, too corny, too adolescent?" But then the next moment I allow myself to be swept up by their wrongheadedness, daring, fragility, cleverness, and generosity.

Nietzsche is in that league, and with Baricco the chatter is even louder. And I am thinking of adding Kenneth White to this bunch too. White is a monomaniac, an inveterate traveler with a life-long obsession for the furthest horizon, for the point of no return, where the ego dissolves into nothingness. His habitat of predilection is the north, the Atlantic coastal regions beyond the 60th parallel. There he seeks solitude, silence, beauty and abstraction, a key to the gate of ‘the real world’. Because inland the earth disappears and the mind only rots. Walking the beach, tracing the bird-path is, for White, a gamble with existential import.

But when I walk alone
the rocks or the machair
the silence itself is illuminate
and I do not think of culture
or even subsistence
the question in my mind
is of going outward
always farther outward
to the farthest line of light

There is a constant struggle to reduce things to their very essence. Elementary sensory data - a gull’s cry, the wheeling of a gannet’s wing - become cyphers that point to the Real. The poet's task is to be receptive to these signs, hoard them, densify, polish and articulate them.

for the question is always
how
out of all the chances and changes
to select
the features of real significance
so as to make
of the welter
a world that will last
and how to order
the signs and the symbols
so that they will continue
to form new patterns
developing into
new harmonic wholes
so to keep life alive
in complexity
and complicity
with all of being —
there is only poetry

In this hard-edged quest for enlightenment there is an occasional bit of sermonising, a flash of juvenile petulance and a lapse into self-pity or self-aggrandisement.

Is there
anywhere on the dwindling earth
a man like me
walking at the edge of the sea
and

White feels alone, a poet destined to keep alive the embers of a scattered, obscure culture, “full of hard beauty that had never run to waste, firmly grounded and yet winged.” He doesn’t hesitate to invoke Nietzsche, Rilke, Hölderlin as fellow travelers. Or itinerant medieval monks, shamans and seafarers who ventured out to the farthest reaches of the mind and the whitest stretches of the map.

having lived in Glasgow
lodged in a large dark room
with three shelves of books
a table a chair a bed
on the floor a rough carpet
(Connemara red)
in one corner a rug
(a goatskin from Tibet)
on the first wall was pinned
a print of Hokusai
on the second was
an X-ray photo of my ribs
on the third was
a long quotation from Nietzsche
on the fourth was
nothing at all
that’s the wall I went through
before I arrived here

But why not? I sense in White’s poetry also and foremost also a lot of truth. There’s a level of energy that continues to bowl over.

All poetry comes
from facing a loveliness
all love comes
from living in nakedness
all naked life
comes from the nothingness

The images are bold, the colours fierce and unadulterated.

for
like Kandinsky
returning to his studio at twilight
and seeing a canvas
‘of indescribable
and incandescent beauty’
it happens
that the ‘known’ materials of my life
sunk almost into oblivion
by familiarity
suddenly blaze out
materia poetica
of new realities
each time more complex
and I advance

Somewhere above the Tyrrhenian (2014)

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is might fine stuff.

White’s concerns are nature and spiritual understanding, in particular a Buddhist approach to life. He was raised on the Scottish coast by a railroad worker father who kept Marx on the shelf, and was a brilliant student at the University of Glasgow. Leaving Britain when his publisher said he was too intellectual for the audience, he settled in France and eventually held the chair in 20th Century Poetics at the Sorbonne. He founded the International Institute of Geopoetics. Its website says:

The world is in a wretched state. Whole areas and elements of the physical environment are disappearing before our eyes. Rather than settle into comfortable despair or mindless inanity, our desire is to open up a world with some depth of life. This means a rediscovery of the Earth, which includes ecology, but goes further, into questions of existence and culture.

For there to be anything like real culture, humanity needs, beyond its historically dictated differences, a common basis.

All that and more is implied in geopoetics, a theory-practise invented and developed by Kenneth White, conceptualised in his essays, illustrated in his nomadic waybooks, expressed in his outward-moving poetry.

This possibly makes him sound like a flaky, totally abstract, difficult-to-read poet. Not at all. It is a captivating communication about experiencing nature and reaching for the fundamentals of life. He is a poet of solitude and observation, as far from civilization as he can get. Weaving through so many poems are birds and the color white, and in particular gulls and crows.

About 2/5 of the way in he really finds his way, and the last poems are stunning. I only add two or three books a year to my favorites shelf; this made the cut. His form varies to suit the poetic impulse of each work, and is masterful. I can’t verbalize why it’s so great tonight, but I’ll give a couple of excerpts, although the impact really depends on having absorbed the entire body of his work; they may not convey enough cut out of context.

On the hawthorn path
that went down to the bay
(a layrinth
of flimmer and shade)
he liked to feel
the clarity
gradually unveil--
till it came at him suddenly
with the beat of the wind

and, from a poem about the “Isles of America"

2. Salines, in the silence
“A grove of curved palms

light wind
swaying the fronds

time here is before
ideas were found

and space wants no sharp lines

[Philip Dodd · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cold Wind of Dawn, the title of a poetry book I got out of my local library when I was a teenager in the late 1960's, has stayed with me, though I could not remember its author or if it was enjoyable to read. I liked the simplicity and haunting sound of the title, which is why I decided to barrow the book from the library. Thanks to the Internet, I found out recently that The Cold Wind of Dawn was written by a Scottish poet called Kenneth White and was published by Jonathan Cape in 1966. Some of the poems from it were included in a collection called The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems by Kenneth White, published by Penguin in 1990, so I ordered a paperback copy of the book from Amazon and I am very glad that I did. It is one of the most stimulating, refreshing and inspiring books of poems I have ever read. I enjoyed the journey the poems of Kenneth White took me on through the book, from Scotland to parts of Europe, America and the East. On the bird path through the air, it is a spiritual journey, one that is always interesting, well worth taking. Eastern and western poets and philosophers are mentioned often by Kenneth White in his poems, but they do not hinder the swift flow of his lines. I particularly liked his descriptions of sea birds, impressed by his attempts to record their cries in words on the page. A poet who is spiritually alive, like Kenneth White, can bring to life what he can feel, hear and see, which is what he does in his verses. Anyone who loves fine poetry would enjoy reading this book.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fell in love with this collection as my holiday read one summer on the Isle of Arran. The poetry beautifully captures the essence of Scotland in miniature.

[Black Glove · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this over and over for many years. Still have my old Penguin paperback. Insightful, lucid, wayward, spiritual, thorny, naturalistic, spartan poems formed from extravagant patterns. Less is more, more or less. Behold the mad pine, stark on the sky-line.