Stress Management: Space, Movement, and the Pause

Abstract Ian Davidson is perhaps best known for his critical work on space and mobility in modern literature, but he is also a prolific and respected poet. In the first part of this essay, I discuss his collection By Tiny Twisting Ways, a sequence in which an emphasis on the mobile natural world of sea and sky, of animals and trees, of wind and walkers, is overtaken by an encounter with cancer and the temporalities of disease and treatment. In the second part of the essay, I discuss another collection, The Matter of the Heart. The two sequences of poems in this volume record the events of the months following his emergency admission to an acute hospital ward in Dublin. The first sequence, ‘In Many Hands’, documents the twenty-three days between his admission and ‘the main event’ of his heart-surgery; the second sequence, ‘Stress Management’, offers a poem a week for the six weekly rehabilitation classes he had to attend subsequently. The essay focusses on ‘Stress Management’, in which formal mobility is set against ‘the pause’: the pause of a heart attack, and the resulting always anticipated pause of the moment when the heart stops beating. In these first two sections, both works are considered in relation to the pause of enjambment to show how Davidson’s handling of the line-break creates a hesitation that can be interpreted psychologically or philosophically. In the concluding part of the essay, this close reading of Davidson’s work provides the basis for a more theoretical discussion of enjambment. This discussion is used to extend Agamben’s account of ‘the end of the poem’ from his emphasis on sound in poetry to an attention to the visual dimension of poetry on the page. This section becomes a meditation on the line-break as an intimation of mortality. In this context, Davidson’s pause, his creation of movement backwards and forwards across the line-break, produces the experience of both potentiality and the end of all potentiality, both living in the moment and an awareness of precarity.