Necessary, David Harrison Horton
Downingfield Press, 2025
Necessary, David Harrison Horton’s most recent publication, is strikingly paradoxical. The style is minimalist: seventy-four nine-line sections, variously arranged, yet whittled down to a bare and elliptical form. On the other hand, the poem’s geographical and cultural breadth of reference is dizzyingly maximalist. In terms of space, we move from Oakland through Utah, Montana, Michigan (the Clinton river, Houston-Whittier St.), Georgia (Oglethorpe) to the Golan Heights (Shouting Hill), before being flung eastwards to Beijing (Bashan). Alongside the persona of Mr. Lusk, a motley cast of historical-mythical figures appear in supporting roles: Virgil, Boethius, Tiama (Babylonian sea-deity), Diderot, Marco Polo, Lot, Lei Feng, Agobard (Carolingian archbishop of Lyon), Ariadne and Andre (Bernie Sanders?), Edison, Christ, Lincoln, Shelley. Tennyson and Keats, at least, are alluded to. Such references range so widely, wildly, and elliptically to be comprehended easily upon the first few readings.
However, in terms of style, the title Necessary becomes increasingly puzzling the deeper we read. The word ‘necessary’ appears once in the poem, in the first line of the first section. Yet ‘contingent’, its antonym, appears twice (48-49). Whilst some of the substance of Horton’s sequence subtly tends towards the fatalistic, the style veers wholly towards the contingent and even aleatory. Most notable in this regard is the syntax: the poems are, by-and-large, structured not as a succession of sentences but a collage of clauses:
…slippers and sandals
hammer-toed children
one pair of pants between
unlike a reservoir
unlike the Christ… (22)
If we expect Necessary to suggest the ‘tapestry of a story’ (61) then it is a tapestry with threads left loose, a frayed fabric in which ‘what comes between’ (42), the lacunae of loose ends, permits us as readers to weave our own meaning. (The poem can be read across facing pages for interesting results. Try, for example, 4 and 5.) Open-text poetics is well-established: an Ikeaesque assemble-it-yourself imperative. But in certain stretches of Necessary, the instructions appear unclear and essential parts seem to be missing. The poetry remains too much at the level of the fragmentary, the threads too frayed to form a sufficiently cohesive texture of meaning:
To claim
to vent
Ariadne’s loss
theodicy
mongoose and weasel
fall of an empire
ships returning to port
to cut one’s hair
to change one’s wardrobe (58)
Cue T. S. Eliot’s familiar statement that modern poetry ‘must be difficult’ because of modernity’s accelerating complexity. However, in that same essay, Eliot opposes ‘the ordinary man’s experience [which] is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’ with the ‘poet’s mind… [which] is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.’ Indeed, in many other passages of Necessary, an amalgamating energy offers us a sufficient sense of place and experience where pathos can appear:
Table scraps
the linens
the women who take care of such fare
the banter between
how she sings when she is not happy
boredom’s barometer
how she smiles
fall and fallow
simultaneously (7)
The figure of Mr. Lusk is intermittent; somewhat too intermittent to cast the shadow of a narrative. The sections where Mr. Lusk as a persona is absent, and an anonymous speaker present, are more compelling as personal lyric:
Companionless and weary
anthologized
the heart a weak remembrance
the way the clay sticks to the shoe
impeded reading
the way the scent becries a scenery
tossed in among
scuttled
evening greys on blacks (5)
As can be seen from the quoted sections so far, one of Horton’s prime organisational principles is anaphora and one of the most remarkable aspects of this book is his highly unconventional use of this technique in terms of tense and mood. In Necessary, the most common use of anaphora is in the infinitive:
To account for
to share a burden
to revise a statement (17).
Also notable is the anaphoristic use of ‘how’:
how the wind changes line…
how it all racks up…
how children talk between destinations (45).
The effect of this is difficult to define. Personal pronouns are largely elided, the poem takes on a detached tone, ungrounds itself from the relation of concrete singular events and, via these tos and hows, drifts towards an impersonal contemplation of events unfolding in and of themselves:
No man invisible
no man forgotten in himself
no transparent shadow
to walk a room
plié
to walk
to decide
grocery cart
to have made a decision (35)
Another striking move in Necessary’s repertoire is a truncated repetition, reminiscent of Beckett’s later prose and resonant with the overall minimalist bent of the book: ‘less / the need for less’ (4). Paradoxically, this reductive tactic is significantly productive, unlocking the multiplicitous resonance of worn-out words: ‘to be in a state too long / to be in a state’ (26); ‘to have waited out a hope / to have waited’ (30); ‘To reach a point / to reach’ (32). Such lines hint at an ambivalent condition of activity and paralysis, desire and despair, which sound out more and more strongly as the book is read and re-read
Horton’s prosody is seasoned: the tone even and detached, the rhythms never clunky or congested. There are frequent instances of beautiful assonance and imagery: ‘tacked to the heart’ (2); ‘beatified hands’ (30); ‘the way the clay sticks to the shoe’ (5); ‘scarlet beetle on a bamboo stalk’ (10); ‘flag stuck on a heap of bones’ (56); (45); ‘the two waves that fucked’ (63). And Horton’s lexicon often ranges to unexpected extremes in ‘scrimshawed’ (11), ‘pharosial’ (49) and ‘valescence’ (74). The latter pair appear to be neologisms: ‘pharosial’ chiming with ‘ambrosial’ and ‘Pharos’, conjuring a sense of divine light. ‘Valescence’ appears to be an act of etymological excavation which unearths an antonym for ‘senescence’. ‘Lusk’ itself, an Americanism unfamiliar to the average British reader, is also fertile; sprouting as it does towards lush, lust, luck, busk. As we range through Necessary, we get the sense of a distinctive style long-formulated and mastered.
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James Bradley is a poet from the west of Scotland. His work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Gutter Magazine and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2024 UK National Poetry Prize and is currently shortlisted for the 2025 Wigtown International Poetry Prize. He lives and works in Beijing, China.
