Christopher Middleton: Poems 2006-2009, Shearsman £12:95; Ida Vitale: Garden of Silica, Salt £10:99; Robert Saxton; Hesiod's Calendar, Oxford Poets (Carcanet) £9:95; Eleanor Cooke: The Return, Salt £9:99; Anna Woodford: Birdhouse, Salt £9:99; Eleanor Rees: Eliza and the Bear, Salt £12:99; Tim Dooley: Imagined Rooms £9:99; Stephen Derwent Partington: How to Euthanise a Cactus, Cinnamon Press £7:99
Reviewed by James Sutherland-Smith
'That is
no country for old men,' wrote Yeats on the verge of old age. To judge by the
proportion of incentives and awards on offer to young poets, British poetry is
just such a place. Fortunately we have Christopher Middleton, primus inter
pares among the sages, to give the lie to the efforts of the media. Middleton
has reached a level of attention to language and its interaction with the world
which is unwavering, Mozartian in its inventive musicality, and Matisse-like in
its shapely configurations. The work in Poems
2006-2009 is radiant in its expression of the various forms of desire,
rarefied into apprehensions of the ghostly breath of those with spiritual
aspirations, or reified into a more direct address to the natural world,
history and, of course, sex.
Poems 2006-2009 is
actually three collections in one bumper book, 'The Enjoyment of Shouting,'
'Slight Poems', and 'For Want of an Axiom.' Many of the poems take other works
of art as their points of departure although they are never knowing in that British-insider
academic manner where a poet is content to scribble marginalia across the
achievements of greater artists. The physical setting of the poems is often the
Eastern Mediterranean, although there are excursions into North America,
Central Asia and even London. There are a number of poems on small animals,
particularly birds. Middleton's work has reached such a pitch of grace that,
whether a poem is tightly focused or peripatetic, there is a consistent
elegance of style. 'The Strategy of Apamea', based on a possible satire by the
philosopher Posidonius, is a well-wrought 'parable', to use Middleton's word,
in the manner of Cavafy, himself recalled in the poem 'Alexandria 1908.' This
is followed by 'A Longer Wind', with the opening four lines almost a manifesto
against the use of poems for moralizing: Don't
I know well enough how the world turns,/ Yet a May morning, this one, prompts
me / Less to question the weight of certain sympathies/ Than to memorialize a
sprinkle of events.
The
impulse lasts only for a poem. Almost immediately afterwards in 'Calligraphy'
the line the constructors of emporia and
office blocks refers polemically to those who re-bury the carvings of the
masons of antiquity, and yet there is a characteristic swerve in perception in
the direction of the weapons given to resistance fighters in the Second World
War as though they were valuable ancient artifacts: Plain or grainy, the wooden rifle butt, / Polish it up until it glows
// Fitting snug into your skinny shoulder - / An age before you knew what
calligraphy was.
Middleton
has established an individual oeuvre in writing about nature. 'Mole-Catching',
'Goldfinches', 'A Spider's Web Caught in Amber,' and 'The Saint Preaches to the
Birds' are significant additions to the canon. 'Mole-Catching' moves from the recollection of a
youthful episode trapping moles to an identification with moles in old age: I seem to have joined the party / of moles.
He imagines himself as a mole of language with the intensity of a W.S. Graham
poem: The small black beast scratching a
tunnel out, who surfaces by the end of the poem, Line by line I arrive / In air for the amiable who live to let live.
There
are some wonderful poems where art by others is the point of departure. 'Samuel
Palmer's Ghost Goes Scavenging' encounters Blake: Of Strand brats hopping / Before his window I heard the old man
volunteer: / Heaven designs their voices. 'Variation on Orhan Veli Kamik's
Poem about Listening to Istanbul' veers between despondency - But then what was it / But a twitter, but a
pang / At the time lost, the time wasted - and the arrival of the muse: She walks in with her smile and the teapot.
One or
two poems are harder to unravel, but repay close attention. 'The View Back from
the Whirling Weathervanes' conjures a world coming into being: But no, the pulse of fishes darting
everywhere / Travels into your wrist then leaves us with mystery: People appear, boats but stealthily / Even
memories of noise have not arrived here yet. 'The Murmur of Erasmus' with
its careful syntax is more fearful: Zealots
/ Now calculate only to destroy; stunted bullies, / Where great questioners
could not, will not mend the world.
Poems 2006-2009 is the
work of an undisputed old master.
Ida
Vitale is better described as the great lady of Latin- American poetry. She was
born in Uruguay in 1923 and went into exile in 1974 after the military coup,
returning in 1985 following the junta's collapse. However, like many exiles and
expatriates, the habit of living elsewhere had become ingrained, and she
departed from Uruguay once more in 1989, and now lives in Austin, Texas.
Garden of Silica is one
of two selections available in English of Vitale's work, and spans her whole
poetic output. Vitale is a major poet whose procedures and strategies are
allied to modernism - and post-modernism. Her style was formed in the 1940s
under the influence of the arbitrary collocations of the Surrealists and the
spare imagery and diction of Antonio Machado. The economics of poetry and its
relatively small readership means that it takes time for a poet to receive
exposure in a second language. Vitale's work is not a modernist curiosity from
the twentieth century, but a shock to the system. The poems should be read
independently of the introductory essay, which separates Vitale's work from
expectations of a nationalist rhetoric or South American women's writing: 'because
she is a woman who, …. doesn't write like a woman ought to.' However, the
essay's assertion that the mission of Vitale's generation is 'the construction
of a participative intellectual subject' is not very enlightening, and it tells
us nothing about the style or processes at work in her poetry.
Finding
the way into Vitale's poetry is not so difficult once a reader sets aside the
preconceptions of English realism. She works through associations of imagery
and perception, but not in ways characteristic of the British mainstream. Her poems possess a rhetorical
structure - as in 'Perspective', which at one level is about what happens when
we look at a picture, but in which Vitale uses the device of the painting as a
central metaphor for the illusory pursuit of truth: to discover and bring nearer / what is hidden, / what must be
sustaining the miracle. / And only finds / the limit once again / and the
inquiry.
'Psalm'
reinforces Vitale's scepticism with regard to the possibilities of thought and
imagination yielding any more than their own processes. It is particularly
harsh in its degree of abstraction with only one word having a physical
referent: You will fall / transmutable
seed / when beauty and hope / in reverie / pass on. 'Confirmation of
Shadow', by contrast, is almost horrific in its physicality: Lizards … / they pile up, one body over
another, / scales of a sinuous, / long / different reptile. It provides a
more conventional figuration for Taciturn
thoughts, / no less incapable / of lighting their own fire, indicating that
for Vitale even thought can barely confirm shadow. 'Houses' is even more direct: Living rooms in shadow, blind, lone
houses, but by the end of the poem we encounter Vitale's device of dissolving
sense data: Later, / a connect-the-dots /
the absent balcony hangs / and visions appear but they no longer watch us.
'The
Glory of Philitis' demonstrates how the sensibility of Cavafy has a world-wide
resonance. It is the nearest Vitale comes to political statement in its
celebration of an Egyptian shepherd,
plowed nothing whose name locals give to the pyramids in order to avoid
honouring the rulers who forced them to build it.
Later
poems seem to be more directly accessible. 'Slow Obstacles' offers a relatively
clear insight into Vitale's aesthetic where tracing out the processes of
imagination rather than signalling social or political messages provides a
poem's dynamic. The poem offers a series of conditional clauses for what a poem
is: mineral, fruit, bird, and if my word kept emerald / today's ferns. In the final verse
the condition of doubt operates, but the romantic negative capability is held
at arm's length. It is without splendor
in the journey / or direction within the poem.
Ida
Vitale's work repays repeated reading. The translations convey something of her
musicality, and are usually as faithful as they can be to her meaning.
Occasionally the poems emerge with difficulty from translationese, with words
such as 'error' and 'quiet' doing duty as verbs instead of nouns. The Spanish
genitive construction would probably sound monotonous in this large selection if
rendered as 'of the', but there does seem to be an overuse of the Anglo-Saxon
genitive. A more tactical employment of this form would have made some of the
less successful translation sound not so congested.
Hesiod's Calendar by
Robert Saxton is a book of eighty sonnets providing versions of Hesiod's Theogony and his Works and Days. The Theogony
has been pruned to fourteen sonnets and an Invocation. In his foreword Saxton
explains that he has tried 'to convert the heart of the Theogony and the whole of Works
and Days.' He confesses to having no Greek, and tells us that he worked
with the aid of Dorothea Wender's Penguin Classics translation into iambic
pentameter and the prose version by Glenn W. Most in the Loeb Classical Library
Series. He also admits to translating only what captured his interest in the Theogony, leaving out a mass of mythical
genealogical material. This has worked to readers' advantage. Saxton has been
able to foreground such recoveries as the fate of the stone that Rhea gave
Cronus to swallow in place of the infant Zeus. The stone is disgorged along
with Zeus's siblings, and Zeus makes it the site of the Delphic oracle.
In his
introduction, Saxton links Works and Days
to the Theogony through the god Zeus,
to whom Works and Days is dedicated,
celebrating the ethical framework Zeus has imposed on mankind of obedience,
propriety and work as an aspect of divine justice. Works and Days is often contrasted with the Iliad and Odyssey as the
origin of civic verse, being didactic in pitch and set in the everyday,
practical world of an ancient Greek farm, with its personnel, livestock and
relationships with one's neighbours. There is some discussion about the
suitability of the sonnet form, and the presence or absence of the volta in the
Hesiod sequence. Saxton claims that there is 'some kind of decisive pause,
shift or contrast after the octave in over half of the sonnets in the two
sequences.'
Saxton's
Hesiod is an entertaining and skilful recovery of the first poetry of
dailiness. It is neither epic nor lyrical nor excessively matter-of-fact. Its
close connection with what we must do to live, and the social ramifications of
work, law and religion, require a plain diction yet a wide vocabulary. Saxton
evidently relishes placing his contemporary sensibility alongside that of the
agricultural poet of three millennia ago. The Invocation opens with down to
earth language: Let's start with
creation. Show me. What came first? The complex creation myths, which are
often thought to be accounts of the displacement of one culture's deities by
another's, move from the earthy to the erotic in the sonnet of the birth of
Aphrodite: VIII The massive organs,
landing with a splash, / rolled in the waves like a wounded whale finishing
with flowers sprang up from her footsteps
as she moved /up the beach. Doves cooed round her lovely head.
Works and Days is even
more successful. The complex of reasons why mankind is condemned to a life of
toil is neatly unravelled. There is punishment as a consequence of trying to
cheat on the divine portion: IV Zeus was
the one who filled our lives with toil, / as punishment. We'd tried to fool him
when / an ox was apportioned
between gods and men, / and Zeus was offered only bones to boil, and
the mischief wrought by the automaton, Pandora, fashioned by Hephæstos who
opened the jar containing grief, disease
or painful toil. Perses, Hesiod's rascally brother, who has cheated Hesiod
of his fair share of his inheritance, is introduced, and his position in the
text at this point puts him alongside Prometheus's theft of fire and Pandora's
insouciant release of mankind's ills. A third moralizing element is added with
the myth of the different races of mankind; gold, silver, bronze, demi-gods and
the present race of iron, which is destined for an era when elementary human
values will decay: XII Men will loathe
parents who grow old too soon / and cruelly evict them from the family home.
From XXI
onwards Saxton gets down to Hesiod's practical matters of virtue, husbandry and
common sense. Hesiod's feel for the weather is rendered in XXXVI - If in the spring the cuckoo calls from the
oak, / he gives us rain for three whole days, which soak / into the ground and
fill up to the level // of an ox's hoof print, a despairing eye for the
human condition in XXXVII - rubbing with
scrawny hands your swollen feet - / a sure sign of malnutrition - and a
ruthless pragmatism in an autumn described in XLIV: Turn out your
hired man, and instead install / a loyal serving girl who'll cater for all /
your needs in the home. Religious observance is never far away, even in the
most involuntary human activity: (LVI) On
the subject of wine and dawn, there's an abuse / I should warn you against:
don't face the sun / when you urinate. The warning that the gods do not 'wish to see you with your tackle out'
indicates how instinctive is the desire for privacy - The god-fearing man slinks to a private place.
The
choice of form and Saxton's consistent diction together with his judicious
editing and additions has resulted in two sequences that are difficult to stop
reading. Despite two anachronisms, one of which he admits to in XII - Athens will sink with the rise of Rome -
and the other in XXXVII - the clock's
ticking - Saxton has done a masterly job of recovery.
In The Return Eleanor Cooke encounters myth,
although not of the classical kind. She has a scrupulous regard for the line as
the fundamental element in a poem. There is hardly an opening line in the fifty
or so free-verse poems in this collection that is not a clause or phrase whose
meaning cannot be construed from the line itself. Cooke thus establishes a
ground bass on which her poems are built, with the consequence that they become
more than the sum of their occasions and sensuous details. Like Saxton, Cooke
writes in a plain style, one which is deceptively so. In the second poem, 'In
Answer to your Question' she writes, I
burnt the poems, so what it was I fell for / I don't know. I'm old now. The
internal half-rhymes 'know' and 'now' deftly signal that age does not
necessarily bring knowledge and, by inference, wisdom, and the art remains
obdurately mysterious. In the very next poem, 'Cuply', there is a little more
grandstanding of her verbal skill in the last line, how cuply is this cup, how lovely love. Yet generally Cooke
conceals her devices. In a poem called 'The Message' the notion of absence is a
kind of ghostly presence, and there is a delicate balance of the seen and
unseen either vanishing or coming into being - the leaf blown in through the open window / believing itself to be.
The Return is divided into six
sections, with a skeletal chronology which runs from the myths of Genesis in
the first section, 'Lileth', to the last section, a longer poem set five hundred
years hence in a post-diluvian London. In 'Lileth' short lyrics combine a love
affair in a rural setting with religious, Christian and pagan, apprehensions,
and the sense of a world that is no more. This does not make for nostalgia, but
poetry where historical forces make their presence felt. This is powerfully
realised in 'Lifting the Lid' where regret - who'll hold our shadows on the drift-house wall - transforms into a
sense of unfinished business: We heard
and turned away, but somewhere, someone / is listening in the dark, lifting the
lid.
Ghosts
linger on in the second section, 'Help', which contains a number of beautiful
love poems. In 'A Small Explosive Surprise' Cooke demonstrates a gift for
closing out a poem: At the window, my
corner of sky bows in, / with a small explosive surprise. She also has the
ability to turn, almost nonchalantly, the simple if slightly grisly action of
mopping up blood into an image of metaphysical power: I'm doing a figure of eight with the mop / practising trans-substantiation
- // blood into water, water to air: / changing this stranger into you.
The past
is relinquished in the third section, 'The House of the Inventor'. The poem 'Fever
Sheet' recalls a bout of scarlet fever in childhood and presages hallucinatory
poems of the present and past where a horrific history and future are contained
within Cooke's shapely forms. 'The Girl Next Door' employs interior monologue
to achieve a marvellous sense of loss as the speaker distractedly recalls a
miscarriage as her young neighbour nears her time: Every night I hear her calling - / the girl next door - for the
midwife, God; / for me. I put my hand on the cold spot.
The
sequence entitled 'Mr. Blake and the Bag Lady' seemns less successful. The
latter character is too coherent and sensible and the former another ghost,
this time unconvincing. The fifth section, 'Bag', has poems ranging from a
delightful one about a Saint Godric brought forward in time, but remaining
unable to adapt to contemporary world, to a poem whose occasion is the
aftermath of a mass murder. Cooke manages to contain a great range of subject
matter, including some excursions into what is almost science fiction, within
short lyrical forms. Some of her effects can't be bettered.
Anna
Woodford's first collection, Birdhouse,
is bedecked with notices of praise and prizes. A reader who is suborned by all
this might be encouraged by the book's title poem: You fiddle with the catch / between my legs until my mouth / springs
open, where the combination of wit and extended metaphor recalls the best
of the Liverpool poets. Like theirs, Woodford's work has recourse to
reminiscences of childhood and adolescence in a free verse which depends on
judicious phrasing, the oddball situation, and occasional unusual items of vocabulary.
Her recognizable style is dependent on avoiding blank verse rhythms with their
ghostly echo of the pentameter. This tends to make much of her work prosy, as
in 'Twitching with Isaac' in which
A pair / hover on the platform
raised / by the Wild Life Trust, although less often there are successes
with rhythm as in 'The Tree': When I
raise my foot / off the ground, in
line / with all the other women / and the couple of men. The breaks at the
end of the first and second lines seem to enact the movements of a yoga
workshop.
Of more
concern is Woodford's apparent lack of awareness of the effects that different
registers of vocabulary might have on the reader. A number of poems are based
on the lives of her parents and grandparents, but the employment of the
intimate 'Gran', 'Dad' and 'Mum' without exploiting the register for precise
emotional effect tries to wheedle a sympathetic response from a reader through
establishing a vague sense that these are nice people. The effect on this
reader is rather like having a coffee with somebody one hardly knows who,
unbidden, tells you all sorts of things about their family. Woodford might get
away with this, but she's hardly consistent in the collection. 'Lot 927' uses
'Mum' and 'Staying the Night' refers to 'My mother'. I can detect no difference
in emotional sympathy between the two poems. The most affecting poem about her
family, 'Grandfather Once Removed', is a powerful study of the destructive
effects of bereavement, and all the more poignant as the grandfather in this
poem appears to be a second husband. Woodford's terms of endearment are a long
way from the intensity of the second-person address of 'Daddy' used so
mercilessly by Sylvia Plath.
Towards
the end of the collection there are poems on Woodford's experience of pregnancy
and child-rearing, a not entirely original rite of passage for a young female
poet. Elsewhere there are word choices which seem arbitrary rather than all of
a piece with a poem. For example, 'lei' in the last line of 'Suttee Song' mixes
a Hawaian garland and an historical Hindu funeral rite in a poem which, despite
the title, has little to do with either. Finally, the collection is not without
its grammatical solecisms. The third line in 'Summer Cold', I am noticing your face, should be I notice your face and in 'Singing in
the Bath' A flash / of coarse hair is fitting / between my thighs should be fits / between my thighs - unless this
is supposed to be a surreal image of detachable pubic hair with a mind of its
own.
Eliza and the Bear by
Eleanor Rees is publication that takes us back to the days of the slim hardback
volume with a dust cover. Of the fourteen poems in the contents list, 'A Flower
Dipped in Ink' and the title poem are substantial sequences. Many of the poems
are written in unrhymed couplets, which is a simple way to create vivid
impressions, and if employed with discrimination can communicate a sensuous
physicality. However, Rees is preoccupied with a romantic subject-matter, and
she plays fast and loose with language and imagery. There is an element of
synthetic mythology that recalls the excesses of Ted Hughes in Gaudete and Moortown. A merman, a changeling, a probable witch's coven, the
ghost of a child, a bear spirit and other things that flop and flap about in
the night inhabit the book. This kind of petit
guignol might be excusable if a convincing imaginative world were called
forth. Rees strives after her her effects by using verbs of violent action, of
which 'explode' seems to be the most popular, rather than the interaction of
word choice with line and syntax. In 'Changeling' she gives us Let them go. / Fall to animal. // A bended
paw, / a furred back. // Colours cede to grey. // A rupture in the belly. /
Birth through skin not uterus. What
does 'Fall to animal' mean?" The whole paratactic strategy, far from creating
an atmosphere of violent demonic presence, is seems like an over-ambitious
effort to be different; 'Colours cede to grey', for example, looks likes an
attempt to avoid the cliché 'colours fade' or the internal rhyme 'give way to
grey.' 'Cede' might be an unusual word to pair with 'colours', but it leaves us
with a noisy sibilance and the homophone 'seed' at the back of readers' minds.
This is just bad craft.
The
title poem is in eight parts and was written for public performance accompanied
by specially composed harp music. Poetic texts with music, and especially if
they are to be sung are often thinner in verbal texture. This might be one way
of defending 'Eliza and the Bear', but not when imagery and content are
childish and silly. The first line might be arresting: I did not know my lover was a bear. But it's followed by I've seen
him bare, and one can almost hear the ghosts of the Carry On cast tittering in the background. In section 2 the
protagonist claims I give birth to cubs
every month. At high tide I hatch my eggs / and spawn bear cubs in the bath, /
in thick gluey eggs. There seems to be some confusion between bears and
turtles here. By section 6 the poem has withered into a simple chanted syntax
with intentions of wringing pathos out of a fanciful situation over which
nobody in their right mind is going to suspend disbelief. Rees is capable of
writing well. In 'On an August Midnight' the
garden of the churchyard // mumbles in its sleep / turns over in a blink,
and in 'Material' He is striding through
their sentences /syntax, cerebral cortex / as the sun ticks over a whole day's
work displays a fine unity of image and sound. In future, Rees ought to be
more disciplined and less indulgent to fanciful impulses.
Tim
Dooley's Imagined Rooms is for the
most part a collection of poems from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.
Thirty-five of the fifty-five poems are in Dooley's first collection, The Interrupted Dream. If this is put
together with Dooley's critically successful collection of 2008, Keeping Time, the greater part of
Dooley's published work is now available from Salt. Twelve of the poems in Imagined Rooms are in a form peculiar to
Dooley, which consists of three eight-line stanzas where the lines vary in
length, and achieve a shapely configuration to match the twists and turns of
Dooley's perception. They shift rapidly between personal, historical and
political concerns. Dooley's poems written in the Thatcher era seem exemplary
of the defeated liberal consciousness that lived through that time and which
was briefly revived at the end of the millennium, only to be defeated again. A
poem emblematic of the resulting dilemma is 'Cousins.' Pindaric in
argumentation, the first three lines indicate a collapse of communal feeling: It is too much for him, suddenly too much. /
Adding it up is too much; trying to make / ends meet in other people's lives is
too much. This contrasts with the committed individual of the second
stanza: The one you wouldn't mistake him
for wakes / hungover and it's the crisis of capitalism. The final three
lines are as forthright as possible about the bad faith of the intelligentsia
during this era: Each is the other's
problem. / I see them in a street of tall houses. / They will not admit they
are relations.
Dooley
is at his best in his eight-line stanza form. He has a finely judged sense of
things not coming together or slipping out of one's grasp, as in 'Impossible
Object': Before it is time for words we
lose their touch. We live in their aftertaste, nervously. There is a
consciousness of evasion of the consequences of knowledge: We hide from our knowledge like the yellow press / plumping the stair
carpet in 'Eden is Burning'. The Britain of this era trembles on the brink
of a descent into dystopia, We've heard
the shuddering playback of ourselves, / the uncommitted crimes, the promises
and planned / betrayals, - 'The Hypnopompic State'.
Dooley
finds respite from this in personal relationships and the art of others as in 'His best piece of poetrie"': And think about / Ben Jonson's words, his
child who dies at seven. Some of the poems in this collection could have
been written by the first persona in 'Cousins', consoled by art and private
concerns. This is a well-ploughed furrow in contemporary British poetry,
modest-toned celebration or reticent elegy. This is not to deny that Dooley is
capable of moving a reader as in 'Tidying Up': This morning, / feeling how much less of loss I know than you. But
elsewhere perceptions are dependent on assumptions of a shared high culture. We
need to know in a poem why Dooley is reminded of an Edward Hopper painting and
why something is like a painting by Mondrian. The donnish 'Alfoxden 1798' comes
as an unsurprising disappointment, a footnote to Wordsworth rather than a poem
standing on its own two feet. Even this is to be preferred to 'The Apiarists'
with its dreadful puns: 'stinging comment',
'the buzz of debate', 'the lecture drones on.'
The last
poem of Imagined Rooms, 'Nightfall',
with its intricate form (rhyme royale in the last two lines) and imagery from
the suburbs blended with contemporary physics, restores the complexity of
consciousness present in the best of Dooley's work: Is this how dark it gets?/ The question Lucille / asked could
penetrate the crystalline array / of solid surfaces, enter a space / an
angstrom wide, or reach to distant space. It will be interesting, in view
of the strength of his work in the 1980s, to see if Dooley responds to the
second bout of conservative political engineering and its inevitable griefs and
disruptions at the beginning of the second decade of this millennium.
Stephen
Derwent Partington is an educator in Kenya although he hails from Great Britain
- as the poems "The Troubles", "Etchings" and "Where Was I Happiest?" indicate
- although it's difficult to pin down Partington's precise origins from these
poems. Northern Ireland? Cambridgeshire? The very first poem of How to Euthanise a Cactus uses the word 'thrutching,' which,
is said to be an East Lancashire dialect word which means to throttle. Most of
the occasions for his poems are set in Kenya, although there are references to
the Gaza Strip and Sarajevo, and a moving poem called 'Shopping in Zimbabwe,'
where they have their stomachs full of
loss / and, of necessity, priorities: // a nod to her with half a tin of maize
/ but then a shaken head to her with only leaves.
Despite
the collection's predominantly polemical drive, it opens with a poem called
'Nightmares' which relates the writing of poetry to deeper personal levels than
political events and situations, and to the limits of what can be written
about: There is an old, unspoken contract
/ that obliges us to leave such dreams / unspoken. We compact them like a
grave. However, he is most successful when he writes about his immediate
experience in Kenya. There are poems where the Troubles in Northern Ireland and
the Civil Wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina are related to Kenyan events,
sometimes to great effect as in 'Post 1960's Britain; or Pamphlets in the Rift',
which is unafraid of flirting with bathos; People's
lives, like any bus stop / can be vandalized. Partington has written a
wonderful poem celebrating personal restraint in times of political violence: We laud the man who, though he snatched to
scrutinize / the passenger's I.D., / saw not the name - instead, the face - /
and slid it back / as any friend might slide his hand to shake a friend's.
At the
other end of the spectrum, he is capable of the precise aesthetic frisson - as
in "Romantic": And then it snowed. / It
fell like desiccated coconut on palm trees, / shook its salt across the
shambas, / iced the cattle in their bomas, even at the risk of sounding
like 'Hiawatha' in the last two lines. There is a short sequence, 'Kamau's
Occurrences', where the protagonist emerges as a deracinated Everyman: And now Kamau / his uncombed hair a
moonscape / and his every pore hungover, a victim of poverty and political
corruption reduced to 'some momentary
pleasure.'
Some of
the poems make for harrowing reading, as in 'Customary' where the goat
slaughtered and eaten at a wedding feast is inextricably connected to the
bride: From ear to ear they carve a
lipstick mouth, a cut / that severs everything: the jugular, the windpipe,
bone, / and youth from married life. Others are less figurative and are
almost verse reportage, as in 'Soda', a Kenyan slang term for corruption: it shuts a mouth, it opens doors / it buys a
merc, it pays for whores.
Towards
the end of the collection Partington's poems celebrate personal events. The
birth of a child is commemorated wittily in 'Present at the Keelhauling': the doctor pulls you sternly round your
mother's keel, / and here you come full-bloodied, / slick as kelp. There is
more pleasing wit in '6 a.m.': Horses in
the morning mist / their dunking heads the pistons on / some slowing
locomotive. 'Shutting Down' describes the terror of senile dementia whose
insidious effects are enacted with a skill equal to Larkin's: It's the ones you love who notice it. / For
you, the change is subtle, like / the shift between the thousand thousand /
thousand shades of green within a spectrum. / Nothing's altered. All is well.
The
poems in How to Euthanise a Cactus
range seamlessly between the political and the personal. Not only are the poems
alert and intelligent, they are written in rhythms which resonate in a reader's
psyche, even if occasionally they have an old-fashioned rhetorical shape, and
move with an imagery that is original unique to the poet. One hopes for more of
the same from Partington in future collections.
*
ON THE RACK
Angela Topping, Catching On;
Róisín Tierney, Dream Endings; Christopher
Reid, Airs and Ditties of No Man's Land;
Nicholas Murray, Get Real!; all
published by Rack Press, £4.00
Pamphlets reviewed by Peter Daniels
Angela Topping's Catching On is 'an elegiac sequence' in
memory of the Liverpudlian poet Matt Simpson (1936-2009). Simpson himself, in
'Talking with a Dead Man' (from In Deep),
once said: 'Talking with the
dead's a glib pretence/ that we can put things right in some way' - but poetry,
like life, is full of 'glib pretence', the mechanisms that make things work.
The opening poem, 'Catching On', is an unembarrassed presentation of personal
frustration with times 'when I feel slighted, snubbed':
He'll
sting with bitter words a poem
not
too cack-handed except he makes it so.
Other poems show more
negotiation of 'the grammar of friendship' between them. The poems have
understated rhythms, and very occasional rhyme or near-rhyme. This kind of
flatness can be expressive, but it often leaves the subject with the job of to
energising the poem. The reader's taste will decide how much it works:
It's
Monika and I know. Matt died.
Her
voice is disbelief. She's all cried out.
Such plain texture depends on
getting the words exactly right, and perhaps Angela Topping could have given
the poems longer to settle. Nevertheless, the rawness is part of them:
I
will never let you leave me,
carry
you inside my head.
Your
voice still buzzes in my ears.
Róisín Tierney's Dream Endings is 'her first solo appearance between book covers' despite well over a decade of writing. In these poems reality is never quite how it was advertised:
It
was as if all our elements had got mixed up.
Flowing
Concentration had become Compassion Cloud,
who
had become Questioning Mountain
Death is prominent, and the
ending of dreams in asylums. In 'Diogenes Syndrome', an old man, not even aware
that he is in a dead-end of filth, faces 'that thing, that whatever-it-is, that blocks your light'. In 'Dream
Endings' a mad, glass-carriage funeral happens in simple demonstrative
sentences and apparently random apostrophising:
Rain
fills the puddles that edge your grave.
O
Tinkerbell! Lao Tzu! Narnia!
'Cathy' is only her golden hair
and pink cheeks - her soul seems to depart through 'flapping plastic curtains /
round the bed'. The back cover tells us that this is the poet's dying sister,
which the poem itself does not. 'The Suicides' exist only in medical records.
The steady rhythm carries their gentleness and weightlessness:
Softly
they settle round me now,
gentle
birds come home to roost,
dropping
and shuffling one by one
Tierney's work has a rewarding
subtlety that keeps the poems working on further readings.
Christopher Reid's pamphlet is the libretto for music by Colin Matthews. Captain Gifford and Sergeant Slack are 'two skeletons / hanging on wire in no man's land': avatars of Vladimir and Estragon, a double act keeping themselves and each other entertained in the face of despair.
SGT: Crucified!
CAPT: That's blasphemy,
sergeant.
SGT: With respect, sir, there
was two thieves
hanging
by our saviour's side.
The symmetry of futility also
applies across the line, with 'my friend Fritz',
when
I've killed him
and
he's killed me,
we'll
be quits.
None of this needs to be highly
original: it is high quality, entertaining and making its point, as part of the
tradition of soldier-ditties (Kipling, Brecht, Hamish Henderson), Oh What a Lovely War and the War Poets
themselves. 'I know a village some way away…' deserves to become a classic,
about the occasional trip to the whorehouse before returning
SGT:
where you spend all day and night in a trench -
CAPT:
thinking of women -
SGT: and
practising your French.
BOTH:
Thinking of women and practising your French.
Reid's words can survive well
however the musical setting turns out; they not only aspire to the condition of
music, but are about as musical in rhythm and texture as they can be.
Murray's indignation is fairly
direct -
They
have the gall, these men in suits,
whose
family cash is stowed in Coutts
to lecture
interspersed with ironic
personas -
promise
of dividend and copious fees
for us,
which
'trickles down' - don't they know this?
We
are the true philanthropists
- though occasionally the point
of view shifts disconcertingly. The hard-headed realist voice of the final
section utters the most convincing conclusion:
There
is no option but to grin and bear it
and
what makes every politician dare it?
Give
Brits a hair-shirt, they'll always wear it.
To infinity!
*
Poetry Round Up
There are so many ways of writing a poem, so many distinctive manners of address. The American poet John Ashbery, who has been publishing collections of poetry for more than half a century, and whose first installment of a two-volume collected poems (Carcanet Press, 1042pp., £19.95) is already gargantuan in size by any poet's standard, delights, teases and bemuses us in just about equal measure. Ashbery carries us along on a tidal wave of teeming words. We never know quite where we will land or what landfall will look like when we get there. The poems, which often present themselves as quasi-philosophical musings upon the perplexities of negotiating one's way through an ever-shifting world, possess a kind of extravagant, free-wheeling gaiety, shifting from the casual to the elevated within the space of a single line.
How different they feel temperamentally from the great sequence of Canti (or Songs) written by the soul-stricken, bodily disabled 19th-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, which have just been newly translated into English by Jonathan Galassi (Penguin Classics, 498pp., £14.95). Although Ashbery's manner of address often seems intimately confiding, his poems also feel rather impersonal. Leopardi, in every one of this great sequence of poems, fully impregnates each word that he writes with a kind of exquisite, honed anguish. Seldom has a poet written so beautifully, so eloquently and so pessimistically about the predicament of the loveless, estranged writer in a hopelessly withered and ever withering world.
Has the world then changed for the worse? Not at all, is the message we receive from what must certainly be the finest of poetry anthologies of the year, Patrick Crotty's Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (Penguin Classics, 1042pp., £40). Never before has there been an anthology of Irish poetry with such a mighty historical sweep. The book surveys the 1500-year history of Irish poetry. Predictably enough, much of it is given over to translations, often newly made, by the likes of Seamus Heaney, Maurice Riordan, Michael Longley and Patrick Crotty himself. The book is not to be valued for its poetry alone. The introduction is the best and fullest account I have ever read of the complicated history of poetry in Ireland, of its languages, the battle between Gaelic and English, the flight of the Bards - all this is summarized masterfully and engrossingly in a tremendously informative introduction that runs to ninety pages. But, finally it is poems for which we value an anthology of this kind, and almost every page contains its moments of sheer delight. And, most of all, we recognise that the ferocious, contrary, wilful nature of the human beast has changed little throughout that millenia and a half. Yes, the world has not changed for the worse. It has never been less than pretty bad.
The season's most companionable new collection is written by an undertaker from Michigan who has not only felt and negotiated his way through many heart-aching situations throughout his professional career, but also lives to write about them tenderly, soulfully, and with a deft humour. Thomas Lynch's Walking Papers (Cape, 62pp., £10) feel as if it is written at walking pace, in step with everything that is heartbreakingly human - the loss of loved ones, mortality, the sputtering candle flame of religious faith. These are poems that delightfully memorialize what it is to be the undependable, Janus-faced creatures that we are.