Night of the Ragman Totts

The Ragman Totts, Ian Caws, 1990

Am struggling with Caws. This is unemphatic poetry and its surface is inconspicuous. But it gets more fascinating as you read more poems. It has not attacked the conventions of the 1950s and so can look like something conservative and unoriginal. But it doesn’t have a 50s aesthetic, and anyway the 1950s already had poetry, it’s not all in the innovations.
The Ragman Totts were a smuggling gang of the 1780s, in Sussex, where Caws is based. It is a sort of joke name, the kind of elusive titling a gang might choose. The Internet tells me “The gang's unusual name originates from their practice of wrapping cloth rags around their cartwheels to muffle the sound of squeaky wheels on their midnight smuggling runs.” The poem about them starts
Rain falls into my sleep,
Around my shoes as I walk the shoreline.
Images jolt me out of shape
And the sound is the tide again,
Hissing at the walls of this attic room.

The poems seem at first all to have a maritime theme, on a quiet coast. That is not quite right but they are very consistent and concentrated. That is the striking thing – everything sticks to the same psychological set-up and they build up in density. That is why he doesn’t feature much in anthologies- I don’t have a note of any that he is in. The forty or so poems of ‘Ragman’ feel like parts of one pattern. This stability shows great formal concentration and also gives the feeling of life being led, of the weight of a life. His gaze is steady and intent.
It is valid to say that he is expressing how time feels as it is passing and how a landscape feels around human presence. That is generic, but perhaps it is the valid description of what Caws is doing. It doesn’t matter that other people do it badly. In “Houseboat” he sees a coupe making love, on the boat, with the curtains undrawn. The speaker passes them and says [I] “Cover up my face with wind, host/ Always to doubt and loath/ To share”. Then

No formula
They seem to say, no equals sign
Exists any more: to define
Is to negate. I lay
The image aside once again[.]

This is not “pastoral”, as one quote alleges, and the poems often show doubt, often record drownings. William Oxley said “What I mean is that his poems are subtle and blended like the finest malt whiskies.” This has no descriptive force.
A poem from a 2020 volume runs in part

I watch moonlight decorate the river
And think of other days. It is the owls
Who have made the difference and perhaps
They will return. It is the owls crying
Across the land, their notes that would hover
Above the dark town like cathedral bells.
It is the owls and the silence that keeps
Them in our memory now, renewing
Something [.]
(from “When the Owls Left the Hangar”)

G.B.H. Wightman, best known as an enemy of modernity in the 1970s struggle at the Poetry Society, writes 'The world he inhabits is that of Blake, Traherne and Vaughan. It is a world where the substantial turns insubstantial and the present is enveloped in time. Caws enlarges our consciousness by writing of what is beyond our sight.' This isn’t inaccurate, but it projects Caws back into poetry as it was 200 or 300 years ago. Again, this lacks descriptive force. Caws is not a religious poet, and he is a man of his time. It does record the enthusiasm which readers of Caws often feel. As I read the poems I think also of RF Langley, Peter Bennet, and Harry Guest.
Brian Fewster said "I state the content tentatively, since a poem by Caws is like a late Turner, so full of movement and shimmering light that it isn't always easy to see what's going on.” And “While recognising a strong talent at work, I sometimes found this style too much like hard work. Amid the indirection, ambiguity and fractured narrative, I yearned for something that was hard-edged and sharply focused.” and:
“The qualification in the first line is typical. Many of the poems have a family resemblance. A scene is sketched in. A question is posed. Before it is answered a different question follows, and the scene often unravels into a general bewilderment. Some of them seem to be about the difficulty of knowing what question to pose in the first place. They have the ambiguity of conversations overheard out of context, the intensity of urgent half-remembered dreams.”
I think Brian wanted to feel confused. He resisted composing facts into an intelligent whole, as part of a protest. I think he understood the (modern) poems very well, but regarded being inexplicit as cheating. Caws' work is sharply focused - forceful and intent. Caws is not a fan of perfect metrical regularity or of unambiguous relations between facts. Bewilderment is not in the poems, not in the ones I read. Although – the title about leaving the hangar clashes with the references in the poem to hanger, a hanging wood. The wood is the hangar in which the owls, as flying vehicles, rest – so maybe there is a hanger/ hangar pun.

The website (the poet’s page at poetrypf.co.uk) records his birth in 1945 and collections starting in 1975 and going up to 2020. Most of these are not on the second-hand market (abebooks) and the others are expensive. I am buying lots of books just now and I cannot immediately pursue the Caws question. I concede that I should have got into this decades ago so as not to embarrass myself now. I notice that he did two collections with Salzburg university Press – their choices are very eccentric but this is probably a laudable achievement for them.