When Aidan Andrew Dun's first long poem, Vale Royal, appeared in
1995, also with Goldmark, it became immediately evident that here was
a poet who had been working all his life beyond the assumptions of
creative writing courses and who was magisterially indifferent to
contemorary cliches about what a fit subject or form for poetry is. Here
is a writer at one and the same time profoundly imbued with the British
poetic tradition and yet also able to make a long poem remarkable for
the newness of its imagination and power of its poetic line. Those
readers already familiar with his achievement might be forgiven for
approaching this second long poem with trepidation: a debut like that is
hard to follow.

Universal blows all such fears out of the water: Dun's range of subject
matter and use of language astonish right from the outset. This is a
poem which draws upon a very deep well of personal experience indeed,
but which is as far removed from adventures in the little world of me as
it is possible to imagine. For Dun's trajectory through life, it soon
emerges from the poem, has been to try and discover what it means to
live, through exploring those aspects of life most distant from the
common preoccupations of a modern, white, Western male.

The first Canto, of which there are twelve, presents the philosophical
context for what is a lifelong spiritual quest: the realisation of the
enormity of death, and the necessity of making sense of being. Dun is
no friend to dualistic notions of the universe, and this is bodied forth in
the very structure of the poem: the poetic voice moves, variously, from
protagonist to his teacher, to grandfather, to father, to the landscapes
through which he passes, to the circling planets, to the universe itself,
thereby reinforcing the universal preoccupations indicated by the title.

Straight away we are shot out like birds or warplanes, over the
Himalayas, "stepping barefoot across warm flooded marble / hearing
the tap of drum-shaped India, far from London." The dreadlocked godman,
/ ash-smeared lord of the cosmos living hand to mouth", whom he meets,
invites him into another way of perceiving time, "the round way of time",
utterly opposed to the linear model which so harrows the West.

This in turn provokes the cycle of memory which brings him to his first
childhood encounter with death: his grandfather "gently speaking of the
great separation", but also a distinctly more concrete one, as the five-year-
old on his bicycle careers headlong towards certain annihilation by a
London bus, only to be saved by cannoning into a hearse. The delicate way
Dun brings out the gallows humour in this is not the least of his achievements:
it resurfaces in his accounts of green jellies misbehaving on the Bay of Biscay,
in a baby's characteristic stubbornness trying to drink liquid which is still
revolving, in the saddhu's mischievous mockery of modern technology.

This spiritual teacher may appear familiar from popular images of the 1960s,
but the poem offers us no easy dichotomy of East v. West, god-intoxicated
v. materialistic. This guru (a word Dun carefully eschews) is as much
misunderstood and reviled by his own family as he might be by an alien
tradition; he has himself been the cause of suffering; and, having suffered
much, he knows what longings for the sacred can be belied by the coarsest
of exteriors: "With the hard-drinkers spellbound I've seen you unexpectedly /
move like a thunder-god in the transformed panorama, / hair flying, great face
calm for the drunkard's wonderment, / all waiting for your revelation in the
evergreen cathedral." His pupil questions him insitently about the relationship
between masculine and feminine, and, although at first Ombilas' response
seems trite (and is suspected of being so by the poet), his vision of the
androgynous fusion of the two underlying creation inspires one of the most
visionary sections of the poem in Canto X: "And suddenly / I saw something
like the cosmogenesis of legend. / A woman! Her bare foot over the deck of
creation. / ... / She stamps! The theatre of the universe explodes! / ... / The
drum! The drumming! Great world-cycles driving. / And the androgyne
dancer dancing. Bom! Bom!

India may have the lion's share, but other landscapes, both spiritual and physical,
are no less important. His international background perhaps renders this more
easy (grandson of Marie Rambert, founder of the Ballet Rambert, a father with
Cuban upbringing, himself growing up in Trinidad), but he has added to this rich
inheritance in Morocco, Persia, Istanbul. The listener (for that is what he calls us)
lives the degradation of sex in a palace in Fez, civil war at the edge of Western
Sahara, a dove silhouetted against the dome of Hagia Sophia, a human corpse
abandoned like a dog's in a gutter in the Port of Spain, and much more. But
the charge of being a spiritual tourist could never be laid at Dun's door: each
experience is rendered in language which makes it abundantly clear that they
are all stages in a process of self-discovery, through the exploration of the world
in its extraordinary complexity and diversity: "And only when I saw that blue-gold
guiding-star / from the deck of a tarantula-infested banana-freighter, / ocean
spangled with the terrible perfection of her spaces, / dazzling expanse of freshening
breezes, mobile / wilderness of fishes, endless playground of seabirds, / mystery of
mariners, aqueous symbol of the cosmos, / then and only then was I born into
existence like a man."

The journey, like the poem, is cyclical. Having left his holy man, as he must if he
is to grow, he experiences all the horrors that await a person coming out of a
contemplative retreat into the noise and chaos of the quotidian world. Trying to
find peace in the hilltown of Simla, he comes across a dusty volume on the history
and legends of old London and the Matter of Britain: the relief at finding an objective
correlative worthy of his imagination is palpable: "And three or four weeks by
good chance / I lived in Troynovant, exotic mother of London, / turning the dusty
treasures in the sunlight slowly, / ... It was written! / And it seemed to me you had
given a parting gift." Vale Royal, 22 years later, was the fruit.

Dun's total isolation from conventional literary outlets is his great linguistic strength,
because it has allowed him the freedom to develop his characteristic style without
interference from fashion. In particular, he has evolved a mastery of the long, sinuous
sentence which, so far from buckling under its weight, is frequently sustained over
six or more lines, and which, to be best appreciated, should be heard, not read. This
creates both a build-up of narrative tensionand a deceptively effortless fluidity; it also
permits the elaboration of discursive passages which do not shirk abstraction: indeed,
such sections are interwoven with his shimmering descriptive language in such a way
as to reinforce the all-encompassing nature of his concerns: "Suns of unique mornings
found us one day in transit / hill-walking as it happened in the deep-green pine belt / up
along circular arcadian trackways sunlit, / talking as we circled of the great transpersonal
sadness / beyond the small diameter of any one experience."This poetic voice really is
unique in modern writing in English.

Given the standard of what Dun here achieves, it does seem almost captious to say
that in one short section of Canto IV, where the father recalls a tale of two beautiful
young Cuban girls, one slave-owning, the other slave owned, the internal references
do not seem to me to make clear quite how this story fits into the overall structure of
the poem: perhaps the incident is too removed from the experience of the poet himself.
Nevertheless, even here, the language is full of evocative power: "Black Cinderella,
African princess in bondage, / barefoot beauty in rags with her chastened shoulders /
walks like a swaying sidewinder or a diamondback / up from the house-kitchen climbing
a flight of white stairs."

This poem is noble, both in conception and execution, a dense weave of lived experience,
serious philosophical and theological questioning, humour, knowledge of many different
spiritual and cultural traditions, evocations of spectacular inward and outward journeys,
a celebration of life. And in the concluding sequence, as he clings to the outside of a steam
train on the sizzling plains of India, comes the epiphany he has been searching for:
"And the train rolled faster into the dust-storm coming, / telegraph-poles fighting with
King Cobra, whiplashing / an inch from my spine, whistling in the noon-race... /
... / And then, with death alongside, knowing I was dying, / thundering into the fiery void
without anything, / suddenly I knew I was full and overflowing. / And the tears came to
prove it on both sides of my face."

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