A MAP FOR TOUGH TIMES: On Iain Maloney’s ‘Mountain Retreats’

From the Glasgow Review of Books, 21 July 2024

By T.Y. Garner

Read the original here.

The appeal of a retreat as a place to recuperate, slow down and perhaps even be creative is obvious in our stressed-out age of constant connectivity. But where and how to find it? The title of Iain Maloney’s third poetry collection – Mountain Retreats – offers the mountains of Japan as a possible locus.

The collection is split into two poetic cycles, following a tradition established by other ‘climbing poets’ Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder. The first cycle, entitled ‘Where the Sky Begins’, opens with a narrator dealing with an unnamed sickness:

new year
a hospital waiting room
holding hands

the news filters
through me.

The narrator’s reaction to this unspecified news is immediate:

I run for the treeline
run for cover
run for health.

Maloney is known as a novelist, and this deft creation of a narrative arc rich in jeopardy is a novelistic strength he brings to his poetry. Without any great fanfare, we understand that these are high stakes poems about illness – whether physical or mental we don’t know – and the search for a cure.

But is this impulsive dash for high altitude – and, by implication, away from people – a wise response? Will the mountain cure work? This is the narrative tension that impels a rapid first reading of these short poems, knowing they can be savoured again after.

The answer, initially, seems uncertain. The very sparseness of words on the page in an abundance of white space seems to be a visual metaphor for an identity overwhelmed.
Gradually, poem by poem, an ‘I’ comes (back) into being, with the link between going to the mountains and the act of writing poetry established early on:

hike
haiku
home

healing

With these stark, one-word lines, Maloney conveys the idea of starting out from scratch, of trying to go back to the simple things to refind yourself. With equal economy, he draws attention to the fragility of this stage of recuperation: ‘the air is brittle’ is a repeated refrain.

A narrative poem, like a novel, depends on shifts of key. The first one here is the appearance of an old friend offering companionship and a shared history, transforming the mountain landscape into something at once softer and less reliable:

a Ghibli forest
our reference for nature
fantasy

Maloney’s narrator seems aware that easy companionship might come at the cost of clear-eyed, Zen-like insight. But there’s an understanding that the fuzzier force of human connection, as much as the mountain itself, may be the source of recovery.

Any reader who is familiar with Maloney’s open-hearted, frequently humorous non-fiction about his life in Japan will start to recognise the voice here. It’s one that combines a wise scepticism with a knowing range of reference from his home and adopted cultures:

the only Zen you find
at the top of a mountain
is the Zen you brought with you

Pirsig waiting on every summit.

The reference is to Robert Pirsig, American author of the 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Maloney suggests we can’t avoid seeing with the filters of culture and upbringing: pure Zen, for most of us at least, might be an illusion. 

As the poems move seamlessly into a more colloquial register (‘I’m fair peching’), there’s a sense of a narrator growing at ease with himself and (re)turning his eye outwards. Maloney’s non-fiction prose is brilliant at capturing brief encounters, and here he shows he can do it in poetry with an effortless economy of phrase and delightful rhythm:

you’re half my age she says
spry, springing down the rocks
in well-worn boots

Subtly, Maloney then reminds us that these are poems of exile, of living, and growing old in a very different country and culture. Having settled in a rural part of Japan (as documented in The Only Gaijin in the Village), Maloney knows the frustrations of being an outsider. When the narrator meets the same old woman in a bothy she asks him where he’s been, but all he can recall is:

Shin-something-san-thing
then Nishi-whatsit-ho-thingmi

I smiled reading this, recognising the exact way my own brain clutches at multisyllabic Japanese words. But it doesn’t have to be Japanese: anyone who has struggled with getting by in a foreign language will relate.

Now the poems start to loop back on themselves, recasting earlier refrains and anxieties so that, like the narrator, we see them in the light of a hard-earned wisdom with compassion at its heart:

try being seventy-eight
living on a state pension

the air is brittle

we’re all sick

somehow

Yet knowing that ageing and sickness are universal doesn’t make them any easier, and the poems take on a tinge of melancholy, an awareness that life is passing. The double meaning of ‘it’s all downhill / from here’ is all too apparent.

The eight poems in ‘All this has happened before’, the shorter second cycle of the collection, take this as their starting point. What unites them is Maloney’s use of geological forces working on stone as a vehicle to contemplate inevitable mortality.

‘An Old Salt’ stands out, combining striking use of anaphora, geological language and imagery with a trademark self-deprecating humorous twist. My favourite of them all is ‘Heat Death’, where Maloney personifies the cooling and heating rock as variable human nature:

fatigued introvert
alone beneath the stars
slowly coming apart

thermal extrovert
shocked to breaking
cracked at the seams

The common ground here is stress or trauma, and in dramatising a journey of recuperation, Mountain Retreats more than fulfils its initial promise of suggesting, if not a cure, at least a map for navigating through the toughest times in our lives.