Book reviews: Thomas Wyatt | Matisse

By MICHAEL KERRIGAN
Published on 06/10/2012 18:20

MICHAEL Kerrigan reviews the rest of this week’s literary releases

Thomas Wyatt

by Susan Brigden

(Faber, £30)

Star rating: * * * *

There have been greater poets, perhaps, yet none whose most famous works have proven quite so haunting. Apparently plainspoken but at the same time profoundly (not to say ostentatiously) enigmatic, they make a play of confiding even as they hint at so much more withheld. A leading nobleman and a diplomat, Wyatt was one of the stars and survivors (just about) of Henry VIII’s intrigue-filled court. In part, presumably, his guardedness stemmed from an instinct for self-preservation. But he also found resonance in reticence. His poem “Whoso list to hunt …” is if anything more captivating because we’re not sure if its subject is Anne Boleyn, or if they ever actually were lovers. In any case, no mistress could be more mercurial than the man himself, pulled this way and that by his own emotions and ambitions and by the stresses of life on “the slipper top of courtes estates”. We can at least catch glimpses of him in his poetry, Susan Brigden finds. His was a life measured out in love lyrics, stoic sententiae, satires, verse epistles: one of the incidental joys of her book is the introduction it provides to less familiar writing. Its most important achievement, though, is to offer a clearer portrait of the poet than we’ve had before. It’s too much to expect that she would “nail” her subject – but if he were finally fathomable, he wouldn’t be Wyatt.

Matisse

edited by Dorthe Aagesen and Rebecca Rabinow

(Yale, £35)

Star rating: * * * *

The conclusion of a picture is another picture,” said Henri Matisse, and this fascinating study finds just how true that was. From the start, Matisse – who burst on to the scene in 1905 with a tidal wave of colour and unbridled energy – repeated the same scenes, with subtle changes, producing pairs, trios and longer series of related canvases. Worrying away at the same challenges, but bringing new techniques to bear – different effects of light, line, colour, texture, perspective – he hoped, he said, to “push further and deeper into true painting”.