Anfield – from the away section (Photo credit: Not forgotten)
At midday, those expecting Ian Payne’s Sunday Review show on Radio 5 Live were thrown into David Morley’s The Crowd, Morley’s tribute to the 96 men, women and children killed by the crush at a Liverpool versus Nottingham Forest match in 1989. This sickening tragedy looms large again, as the Hillsborough Independent Panel has now concluded that no fans were responsible for the deaths and that 164 witness statements were amended by the police. The poem was read by the actor Neil Fitzmaurice, himself a Hillsborough survivor, adding even greater resonance to the performance (David has made it available here).
It began, like a Greek epic, in the middle of things, ‘And today, as you walk to the match, I am beside you’. This epic technique lends the restrained vocabulary of the poem dignity and majesty: a fitting tribute to the perseverance of the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who were bereaved on the 15th April, 1989, in their quest for truth and justice. The poem echoes St Patrick’s Breastplate, as well as football chants, suggesting the continued presence of those who died standing shoulder to shoulder with those at the match.
English: Banner 20th anniversary of Hillsborough tragedy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There’s a bite here too, however, as the poem’s ‘you’ might initially be supposed to be the brotherhood of Liverpool fans: it isn’t. The 96 address Manchester United’s fans and say that ‘You will not chant them down again. / You will not chant them down in their sorrows. / You will not chant them back into the earth. / And today, as you walk to the match, they are beside you.’ This brotherhood was in evidence this afternoon as every player wore a 96 on his back. After a summer basking in the Olympic spirit, football’s tabloid dramas seemed sleazier than ever. However, this afternoon, football rose above this.
Francisco Goya – Wonderful Heroism! Against Dead Men! – Disasters of War – Berkeley Art Museum (Photo credit: Marshall Astor)
An officer, fresh from Helmand, played us the mobile phone footage: the excited chatter and the puny rifle cracks were alien to someone steeped in the tidy narratives and the high fidelity sound of the war film. Suddenly, the hillside erupted to a soundtrack of irrepressible obscenity. In Oxfordshire, this unbridled joy was shocking to witness and difficult to understand but there it was: the battlefield laid bare.
Official emblem of Crni Labudovi – Photocredit, Wikipedia
In The Not Dead, Simon Armitage works with interviews from veterans from a number of conflicts. The results are painful, memorable and demand the reader’s respect. In The Black Swans, the narrator plays at soldiering with a clichéd blend of eagerness and boredom. The ‘panel of glass in the back of the wagon’ signals his thwarted desire for combat and the heavily punctuated lists creates a frustrated lack of pace as ‘You clean your weapon, / make camp, drive around, stand guard, stand down’. The repetition of ‘stand’ suggests how one bored action morphs into the next. Just as the glass in the back of the wagon forces the soldiers to view the landscape at one remove, so they are forced to watch the hostilities as ‘Then one day the Black Swans drive by in a van – / a death squad of Bennies in bobble hats, wielding Kalashnikovs, / smirking, running their fingers across their throats’. You need to have suffered the British soap, Crossroads, to appreciate the reference to the feckless Benny‘s bobble hat. Armitage’s juxtaposition of a gauche comic character and genocidal evil is obscene, brilliantly creating the tension between the Black Swans’ humanity and their inhuman behaviour. Crossing the emptiness of the stanza break, the narrator follows in the wake of the Swans, taking a ‘Walk in the shadow of death’, which evokes the one-sided carnage of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. Armitage’s reference telescopes time and conflicts merge into one. ‘This woman won’t talk, standing there open-mouthed, / tied to a tree, sliced from north to south’. At first viewing, Goya’s The Disaster’s of War floored me and I wish that Armitage’s reference here was merely a cultural one, such is the common ground between this atrocity and those Goya observed back in the early 1800s. However, Armitage was working from interviews and tells us in the introduction that Eddie, his subject, ‘describes at one stage, a pregnant woman tied to a tree, cut open, with her dead unborn baby hanging from her womb. There are other things he won’t describe, he says, because they are worse. After returning home, to try and cure his nerves and overcome his paranoid reaction to loud bangs, he took a revolver into the middle of a field and fired several blank rounds against his head. He also tried to hang himself from a tree’. That Goya’s art is still imitating European life beggars belief. ‘In the town square, a million black-eyed bullet-holes stare / and stare’ bearing mute, forensic witness to silent atrocity. Ratko Mladic‘s arrest in Serbia last year shows that pock-marked walls and shallow graves do indeed have eyes and that the impotent horror inflicted on UN observers at the time will see the light of justice.
English: U.K. soldier, Garath Ormerod with the Lynx Joint Helicopter Force team flies into Camp Sa’ad from Camp Basra in Basra, Iraq, on Nov. 21 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
However, like Brian Turner‘s exceptional poetry borne out of the conflict in Iraq, Armitage’s focus is the discharged servicemen, the not dead, and their families. In Remains, the body of an Iraqi shot by a serviceman in Basra leaves a blood-shadow ‘and out on patrol / I walk right over it week after week. Then I’m home on leave. But I blink // and he bursts again through the doors of the bank. / Sleep, and he’s probably armed, possibly not. / Dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds. / And the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out’. Armitage’s language is brilliantly economical, as the ambiguous ‘bursts again’ suggests a dark subtext. The humble squaddie is recast as Lady Macbeth, troubled in her sleep and attempting to wash the blood from her hands with a bout of OCD. The irony’s a bitter one, as nothing could be filthier than the drink and the drugs and still the blood-shadow persists on the streets of England.
English: Sgt. Maj. Brent Jurgersen, also known as the “Rock,” motivates his son, Chase, to get fit for his upcoming enlistment in the army to continue a family tradition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Manhunt offers the reader a blazon, voiced by a serviceman’s partner. Given that the blazon usually presents a man exalting in the beauty of the female form, Armitage invites us to consider the wounded hero as unmanned, as feminized, even. There’s an irony here too, as the blazon celebrates physical perfection and not the woundedness we’re offered. ‘After the first phase, / after passionate nights and intimate days, // only then would he let me trace / the frozen river which ran through his face, // only then would he let me explore / the blown hinge of his lower jaw’. Visually, this poem is broken on the page.
Restrepo (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Films like the brilliant Restrepo and books like David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers show how vital non-fiction forms are at the moment. It seems that poetry responds equally well to this treatment. Elsewhere in this blog I praised Andrew Motion’s hypnotic Coming in to Land, a literary treatment of a young pilot’s diary and Armitage’s distilled interviews retain the best of the soldiers’ testimony whilst lending their voices a power and gravitas which will, I hope, have us memorializing their sacrifices on the battlefield and their quiet, painful unblooming at home.
When I took my wife’s call, I thought she was trapped in the wreckage of a car. Her brain was wired to the pain and nothing was making sense. She was, in fact, on our bedroom floor and, minutes later, we were in A & E where we were told that all was well and went home for paracetamol. Later, she was screaming in the GP’s waiting room. She was too noisy. She was upsetting the patients. She couldn’t stay there and soon she was bucking on a bed and injected with pethidine. It did nothing for the pain, so the GP shrugged (yes, really), told us he could do nothing more and suggested that we go home. My wife lost her temper. In that case he’d have to call an ambulance, he said. (This line delivered like a threat to someone wasting police time). Six hours after she had first presented herself, we were back in A & E, waiting for the scan that would reveal a cyst the size of an orange in pethidine-shrugging torsion. The cyst was a chasm above the shadow of our ten week old daughter and, minutes later, the consultant would be prepping her for emergency surgery.
Hospital (Photo credit: avinashbhat)
Olivia Byard’s Strange Horses is eloquent on the subjects of pain, loss and the institutionalised impotence we experience at the hands of healthcare professionals. At times, her poems are almost unbearably painful to read but put us in touch with moments which we rarely see clearly. In Intensive Care, the first poem in the sequence HEART CHILD, our rituals and customs are exposed, defamiliarized and rendered as strange and arbitrary as those at the court of Versailles: ‘At least / there are manners; their elaborate rules. / So we play, near despair, a game of courtesy, death on the advantage point’. The caesura after ‘manners’ suggests the timing and precision of a courtly dance. Anyone waiting at a bedside for the promised blood test, unsure whether the doctor intended that it should be taken in twenty minutes or twenty hours, knows how this caesura feels. Behind the clinical facade and the mutual smiles sits something darker and primal, as ‘Outbursts only give hostage / to the slavering beast beyond the door’. The hospital threatens us with horror: the benign smiles hide B movie grindhouse splatters.
Faced with facts of mortality, Byard suggests that we retreat into the irrational. In Intensive Care, the family cling to the karmic qualities of extreme courtesy. In The Crimson Scarf, all of our conceits are stripped from us. ‘When I first kissed the puckered skin / that had been breast, it was to make you / better. We always kissed to make it better’. Time telescopes away as the mother’s motherliness is stripped like her breast, as her daughter usurps her place in the world, symbolised by the kiss. In this poem, the stanza breaks open a void of inexorable time – time for rogue cells to divide and divide. ‘For a while you sported a crimson scarf – / a slash of colour defying dark and all its / weighty terrors’. Again, Byard presents our defiance as a game where even the ‘slash of colour’ carries ominous echoes of the scalpel and the ritualised violence of the operating theatre.
Hereford Mappa Mundi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
These poems enjoy a troubled relationship with the collection’s landscape poetry. In FLOOD, ‘Fields lie buried beneath this water, / a shimmering expanse a boat / could pole across avoiding // only bare trees marooned above / the ripples and terns bobbing / like exotic bait to lure the unwary eye’. The universe is upended as we think of fields buried like a dead thing. Careful line breaks leave the ripples and terns bobbing like a pastoral idyll, Byard skilfully concealing the bait that lures our unwary eyes in the proceeding line. We are all like the reader, caught in a helpless journey along the line of life. We will all be ensnared by the hidden traps beneath the gaudy show. In MAPPA MUNDI, Medieval cartography appears as more than a little ridiculous: ‘There are the dog heads, / the sciapods, and those weird souls / with heads down in their chests, / just where they were rumoured to be: / on the edge of the unknown’ but at least their beasts were ‘corralled / behind a stout fence of biblical words’, whereas ours are ‘roaming monsters’. In a post Christian world, Donne’s ‘Death thou shalt die‘ just doesn’t cut it for most people. The corral has been breached and the monsters stalk the Earth. Ironic really, since ours is the supposedly enlightened world.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Landscape with the Fall of Icarus – WGA03321 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a dark, painful collection of poems. However, there is nothing self-indulgent here. Byard muses on the lives of animals (Auden’s torturer’s horse from his Musée des Beaux Arts) and the English landscape, as well as upon our mortality. Strange Horses is a walk through a cutting breeze on a beautiful winter’s day. Your cheeks may smart by the fire afterwards but you’ll be glad that you momentarily stepped into the cold.
Dale Farm Portaits 010 (Photo credit: The Advocacy Project)
Donkeys were still hitched to lamp-posts in County Limerick in the ’80s and our village was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Yet, despite the lashings of craic (in addition to the seven public houses on the High Street, the ironmonger’s was a spit and sawdust boozer after hours), the village’s small town small-mindedness was enough to rub most of the shine from this emerald idyll. Mrs Dwyer would come and cry in the kitchen and, even at the age of seven, I worked out that her caravan, camped at the edge of town, was unwelcome in Stepford, just as her two scruffy sons were unwelcome at school, picked on by students and staff alike. Later, I discovered that things were much the same in Dorset schools, where pejorative terms for ‘gypsy’ ranked as the most punishing forms of verbal abuse.
Dale Farm boy (Photo credit: The Advocacy Project)
It’s inconceivable that documentaries like Firecracker Films‘ My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and Thelma’s Gypsy Girls would have been commissioned about any other ethnic group. Techniques like unnecessary subtitles function as the bars of animal cages, cynically putting as much distance between subject and audience as possible and the second series and spin-offs show that our appetite for this stuff is insatiable: the mentality’s not a million miles away from watching lions eating Christians. Could another social and ethnic group be treated as badly in Britain?
Dale Farm 2 (Photo credit: The Advocacy Project)
In this context, David Morley’s The Invisible Kings is an important collection of poetry. In the standout poem, Kings, the speaker opens by saying: ‘I beg of you believe in the Kings, the blacksmiths’ tribe, the Boorgoodjìdes / made up of the tamar, true twisters of sàstra, sras or srastrakàni // who jam the jagged srast in the jaws, the chamàhoolya, / of their kerpèdy, and ply it, plume it’. On an initial reading, Morley’s request not to rely too heavily on the glossary and to read at a canter seems a tall order but you soon realise that the Romani words he includes are the echoes of his English. It becomes possible to read with the speaker as your guide. Alliteration also serves to link Romani and English, whilst lending the poem the mythic qualities of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Morley’s decision weaves Romani culture deep into the fabric of the English language. Despite its initial strangeness, this is a poetry of unity and not of leering mockery (Morley is part Romani).
Dale Farm boy 2 (Photo credit: The Advocacy Project)
In his translation of verses from the Song of Solomon, Song of Songs, Morley’s alliterative technique evokes his Hebrew source. ‘I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the katòoni of Kedar, as the perdès of Solomon’. For anyone doubting the astonishing richness of Romani culture, history and language, the word perdès (curtain) points to its Hindu origin somewhere around 250 BC (look at the presentation of Purdah, the segregation of women, in Forster’s A Passage to India). There’s a playfulness here too: ‘gypsy’ in English points to the erroneous belief that they came here from Egypt (some gypsies refer to themselves as Pharaoh’s people) and the Song of Solomon dates from the period following the Jews’ bondage in Egypt.
Morley could have focussed exclusively upon the criminally marginalised Romani but, in Ludus Coventriae, his decision to dramatise Coventry’s staging of the Mystery Plays and blitz on the 14th November, 1941, serves to illustrate that, throughout history, the lives of common men amount to very little. Morley, working with the financial records for the plays, adds ordinary life and breath: ‘• Item payd to the Mother of Death / • Item payd ffor a peyre of gloves ffor God / • Payd up also for the gybbyt of Jeiȝe / • Item payd to Mr Fawston for hangyng Judas / • Item paid to Mr Fawston for his Coc-crowyng’. In his biography of London, Peter Ackroyd wonders whether places, roads, streets have a persistent character throughout history and, on the night of the blitz, two invisible radio beams transmitted from mainland Europe formed a cross in the sky above the city. Morley writes that ‘Out of desert, from the hard stone / three air raid wardens run, three kings / late up with pick, spade, lantern, / tracing the star of each explosion and making there’.
I bought The Invisible Kings on its publication in 2007 and, at the time, I was just interested to read a few words of Romani. However, the flavour of the past five years makes this collection feel far more important. At worst, the mess surrounding the Dale Farm eviction characterises gypsies as trouble: a focus for a militant insurgency of professional demonstrators. At best, the Gypsy Wedding phenomenon presents them as women hating, bare-knuckled thugs, redeemed only by the televisual qualities of their kitsch bridal fashions. The Invisible Kings is an essential antidote to television’s cruel parody of a culture with a language older than our own.
English: Contemporary illustration of the Auto da fe held at Valladolid Spain 21st 05, 1559 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The strangest thing I’ve kissed is a section of stomach lining belonging to the Blessed Ralph Sherwin. He’s an old boy of the Venerable English College, Rome, where I spent a misguided few months training to be a priest. Ralph’s grey, desiccated membrane is sandwiched between a couple of sheets of glass and enshrined in Rococo craziness. December 1st, Martyr’s Day, is a serious business for the college and memorializes the 44 students who met grizzly, public deaths in the years following the Reformation; quite a few body parts are lined-up for kissing. Wherever you find the sacred, however, you also find the profane and, in my time at least, hard liquor made an early appearance in the day’s festivities; a squiffy mate managed to topple as the Te Deum was sung before the Martyrs’ Picture. It’s odd, but unplanned profanity seems to exist in some bizarre equation with piety. Take Martyr’s Day, 1997, for example: a couple of students had been busy at the bottom of the main staircase while the college slumbered spelling out IHS+ in votive candles but, from where I was standing when I looked down, all I could see was SHIT.
In Voluntary, Adam Thorpe nails the uneasy mix of the sacred and the profane. In Holbein we’re in one of those ticketed gallery exhibitions, the secular substitute for the divine if ever there was one, where ‘The crowd thickens, stands in rows / three-deep, as if waiting for a train’. The reviews would have us believe that art is a life transforming experience but the satirical bite of ‘waiting for a train’ is more like it. That we visit galleries just to substitute Apple’s bud earphones for those of the gallery’s self-guided tour baffles me. Those of us who eschew these twenty-first century pleasures generally opt for reading the useless information cards instead. Granted, there’s a certain frisson from learning that some poor family’s had to part with granny’s Rossetti because they can’t afford to pay the inheritance tax bill – anything to avoid actually looking at some pictures, I suppose. Thorpe goes to town on the modern gallery experience, ‘great art’s business end’ where even the stanza break is employed to separate us from art like the line drawn before it on the floor, as the painting hangs ‘behind glass like a saint’s relic’. For some readers, this line will evoke the reverential distance between the work and the viewer. However, if you’ve ever venerated a saint with a kiss, it means the opposite and the level of reverence is amplified infinitely. The work becoming a bridge between us and the divine.
Halfway though and Thorpe throws another observation our way: ‘Though there’s something flirtatious / about these slow-moving rooms, hushed // like a church, where certain faces / become almost familiar and unlike the art / will pass out of our lives for good: // that willowy girl with slight vitiligo, / the loud hipster with his lateral thoughts’. Thorpe has it: for most of us, a trip to the gallery is much like a trip to the supermarket, as our orbits intersect with those of fascinating strangers. The tone darkens though, as the gallery’s older visitors have learnt their place in the world and know that, unlike the subjects of a painting like Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the grave will not remember them and so they ‘cast in wonder while there’s time to do so’.
This poem is in dialogue with the opening Impression, where ‘The pawprint, bedded on the Roman tile / our late neighbour bequeathed us, // is deep enough, even on a roof’s pitch, / to pool rain as petals do’. Like the elderly visitors, the late neighbour will not be remembered by posterity: the common noun attributed to her / him tells us this. In this fickle world, there is no telling who, or what, will be remembered and the pawprint is granted the kind of immortality that many would dream of: Holbein’s Ambassadors, or a cheap Roman tile marred by an animal, it’s all the same.
The found object gains poignancy in Clearing Your Study, where we’re reminded that once useful items we’ve discarded in a desk drawer for possible use tomorrow will be viewed as ephemera by successive generations: ‘Private realm of accounts, typed letters; / a book of unused Green Shield stamps‘. Thorpe’s terse single couplet stanzas give the poem a forensic quality, like a landlord’s inventory. As the speaker is introduced, the poem modulates into something guilty, conflicted and wracked by doubt. The poem brilliantly evokes the child now holding power of attorney working ‘(like a thief) I am short of time / I am only doing this at your behest, of course – // the house must be cleared before it’s sold – / but as I keep vigil in the nursing home // I feel I’m untying what keeps you fettered / or dismantling something what has grown too old’.
Thorpe leaves us feeling that, despite our sophisticated consumption of culture, we are a society which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In Extreme Unction, for example, ‘the local vicar bounds in, / tracksuit-togged, no dog collar. // I mumble something about extreme / unction: prayers, oils. ‘That’s not / our thing,’ he chuckles. ‘Now, // what would you like me to do?” Like the navel-gazing gallery-goers, Thorpe suggests that we are a society preoccupied with ourselves. Yet, for every loud, trendy vicar there’s a figure like the speaker’s unconscious Christian father: the sacred and the profane live cheek by jowl. In Voluntary, Adam Thorpe presents his reader with a series of honest, powerful, painful poems. Despite their apparently personal focus, they achieve a searing universality. At an aesthetic level, the collection will also leave you hankering to revisit London’s National Gallery.
Sunday local conker fight (Photo credit: Nikki Pugh)
In the family album there’s a snap of a tiny boy pressing his gift of a Matchbox car into the romper-suited torso of his new baby brother. The picture appears to wear the cool halo of Instagram chic but it doesn’t; it’s just from the 1970s when, believe it or not, all photos had a dodgy palette. I distinctly remember my brother’s arrival from hospital but I have no other memories from the age of two. The gift was not just a Matchbox, it was a Pontiac Firebird, surely proving that this memory was the real thing. However, the car in the pic is easily identifiable as a specific model, making me wonder whether the whole memory was manufactured from it. Philip K Dick was right: androids really do dream of electric sheep. However, we do too. Memory and truth are nowhere near as trustworthy, or as objective as we like to suppose that they are.
In Inventing Truth, Matthew Stewart memorably plunders memory, including those from childhood. The first stanza of Everything Else, the second poem in the collection, creates a sense of calm and connectedness as the boy ‘stills the conker’s sway / young skin against young skin. / A knot’s jammed underneath, / tied and tightened by Dad; / string leads up to his fist’. The understated but dramatic stanza break highlights the contrast between this three-way moment of bonding between conker, boy and father, and the violence of the game, as the other conker, ‘now a pin-point right hook,’ comes smashing down with a ‘sneering laugh’. The final couplet is troublingly suggestive: ‘Although his fist stays clenched, / everything else has changed’. Was dad the corner man, or the opposing combatant?
Many of Stewart’s poems have this pleasurably slippy quality, like the best fresh ingredients dressed in olive oil. In Formica, an economical couple of lines evokes the smell and sound of a kitchen where ‘Mum’s become Gran, / Son now Dad, but a boy still plays / at the same Formica table’. This is really beautiful writing. Again, Stewart gently suggests the passage of time whilst acknowledging the still point at the centre of things. There’s a sense of truth in details like the ‘Formica table’ too: Stewart’s universal truths grow from these like the swelling Bomba paella rice encountered elsewhere in the collection. You need a bit of patience to cook a decent paella but Stewart can do it just as gently in eight lines.
There’s a pleasing observational quality to the poems in the collection. In Milko, we are treated to the sounds of the ’70s and ’80s, specifically through the milk float. ‘Bottles chimed like a clock on the doorstep / […] Your float’s low hum was the routine soundtrack / to Ready break, wonky ties and dull dawns’. Specific nostalgia quickly gives way to more general musing, as the vanished milk float becomes ‘my generation’s pie and mash, / a tale suffered by countless grandchildren / while something else is also dying out / and patiently rehearsing for your role’. I had to run a French oral examination a couple of years ago and I’d been asked to put a personal cassette player and a tape on each desk. The kids were bewildered, as I explained to the class what the strange device was and showed practically every candidate how to insert a cassette. Poetry often treats us to Marvell‘s ‘Wingéd chariot’ and it’s refreshing to meet an implacable force that torments grandchildren and creates nostalgia for a change.
As the collection progresses, the tone darkens somewhat, the reader experiencing time tugging at the émigré’s sense of identity and the lonely rhythms of Saturdy’s night train, echoing with a young man’s botched dance moves, as it slides away from the glamour of the big smoke and back into the suburbs. Death’s presence is finally felt in Family Visit’s empty house. Here, Gothic menace is realised by the memorable: ‘Rosaries / lie coiled on a sunlit table / like dozing, sated rattlesnakes’. Audit completed and ‘I lock up and head home, / humming fiercely to wrestle off / the creeping, ransacking silence’. Matthew Stewart has plenty of range and he can do heavy.
Inventing Truth demonstrates a consistent eye for a memorable mise en scène: the past and the domestic have a satisfying sense of physicality and trustworthiness which are deftly realised by language at work with silent economy. The poems offer refreshing perspectives and, like a good cook, Stewart trusts his ingredients to do the talking, rather than obfuscating matters with flashy style. Time’s the real star here, shifting yet still, leaving doubts and uncertainties in the silent spaces of the page.
A school friend grasped counterpoint intuitively and had a penchant for writing fugues. He wrote many, won a national award and was invited to a London concert hall to perform, whereas I had a rudimentary grasp of harmony and realised that my GCSE composition folder was thin. Over an evening in front of the telly, I coloured in a picture, a ‘graphic score’, and my accompanying notes explained that this related to Kandinsky‘s colour theory: white and bright colours were high notes, dark and dull ones were low. Then I experimented with serialism. My only concern was to make my piano piece look visually impressive, so my spread chords straddled the clefs in anatomically impossible intervals and changes of time signature abounded. I decided that all my work would be entitled Untitled #241, or some such ludicrous number. We later discovered that our composition folders were worth the same high mark. Indeed, mine was worth a letter of commendation from the exam board. A letter of commendation for an A4 page of slack-jawed colouring in front of Terry Wogan‘s BBC One chat show. I felt sick at the injustice of it.
In On Poetry, some will see Glyn Maxwell as poetry’s arch NeoCon, hitting out against an avant-garde which he does not understand like the near riot caused by the premiere of Stravinsky‘s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1922. Others will agree that the worst contemporary poetry amounts to little more than the emperor’s new clothes. A dialogue with tradition is, for Maxwell, the only way forward:
‘If the poet thinks that unmooring from the margin or destabilising the space is a reward of freedom – and not precisely the opposite, a submission to mortality and the perilous closeness of chaos – the poem not only won’t fly, it won’t walk, it won’t breathe. If you ditch the idea of any fixity – to say the least your heart beating or the top of the breath – without anything to show in its place, you have made a sandcastle. It may be flying with twenty still flags of your intellect, but it’s a sandcastle’ (57).
He then goes on to say that:
‘I was judging a huge poetry competition once with thousands of entries, and a friend asked me how I could possibly get through them all. I said it only took me seconds to judge whether a poet was present. The friend was somewhat scandalised at what seemed a dereliction of duty, so I said – actually I didn’t say. I just thought of saying later, in my car – I said he wouldn’t ask that question of a concert violinist. A concert violinist could tell in seconds of a student knew his instrument from his elbow. When I think of the teaching of poetry, I invoke this Inner Violinist. If I were a violin master at some fine arts academy, what would I think of a student who arrived at my class at 21 having decided there is nothing he or she can learn from long ago? No skills to develop. No moves to learn. No marvels to consider. Nothing to still you with its force. Okay let’s hear you play. Or if a ballet dancer thought the same? Or a sculptor? Nothing to learn from work that outran time? Nothing of lasting value can come from one who thinks so. I don’t think anything has, or will’ (59-60).
I’m left thinking that Maxwell’s absolutely right. Looking around a space like Tate Modern, it’s easy to feel when you are in the presence of another human creature when the work moves you in some way. However, there’s a hell of a lot of stuff in a space like that which leaves me cold. The same’s true in the poetry corner of my local branch of Blackwell’s. Book after book is incomprehensible and a book without a memorable line, or even a memorable phrase, hardly needs to be written. In terms of finding readers, poetry’s in enough trouble as it is and, if we’re not careful, inconsequential, pretentious collections of drivel will ensure that society forgets why we ever read it in the first place. We live in a time poor society and the success of the Poetry on the Underground campaign shows that people are happy to read and enjoy the real thing. As Maxwell says:
‘Formlessness says time is broken. Postmodernism thinks it’s come to a stop, and Obscurity can’t even muster the nerve to look it in the eye. Three monkeys. Move on.
[…] To paraphrase what my teacher said when I interviewed him a few years back: if things go on progressing as they are in contemporary American poetry – which is what we were discussing – it will soon have, effectively, no readership at all’ (70-71).
The book also offers insights into Maxwell’s teaching process and Maxwell’s practitioner’s approach is quite unlike the experience delivered in most secondary schools. For my money, I would like to see On Poetry as required reading on every English teacher training course, as we allow students to dissect a corpse on a page instead of having an encounter with a living, breathing human from beyond the grave. Maxwell says, ‘I don’t teach prosody. Iambs, dactyls, spondees, trochees. I was given a famous old course called ‘Prosody’ to teach at a famous old university in New York, but two weeks in I discovered I couldn’t teach it, and four weeks in decided I shouldn’t. So if you come to this book to find out what the funny Greek words mean, here’s an observation and some suggestions.
They’re funny Greek words because they’re Greek words, which ought to tell you that they were devised by people who spoke and wrote in a language other than English.
See if you can guess which one. If you think every syllable in poetry is only stressed or unstressed, you must dwell in some binary realm where it takes 10 to tango, 1110 days hath September, and there must be 110010 ways to leave your lover’ (84).
This is an important book and anyone with an interest in reading, writing or teaching poetry should read it. Maxwell’s conclusions will be unwelcome to some but the worst excesses of charlatanism are unforgivable. Poetry is no different to painting or music: the divine spark must be handed from generation to generation and not abandoned in a gutter as we walk, empty-handed into the future.
Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo at Chillingham Castle (Photo credit: Emily Webber)
When I saw Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999) dwarfed by Trafalgar Square’s scale and chutzpah, it took my breath away. Wallinger’s figure, modelled at life-size, was lost amongst the great and good of the British Empire. Even Jesus Christ, bound, scourged and crowned with thorns, Wallinger seems to say, will be ignored by traffic and tourists. But this was not, I think Wallinger’s point. The vulnerability of that tiny human figure also rendered the square brash and vainglorious at a stroke. Wallinger’s statue demonstrates both the powerlessness and subversiveness of being small.
In The World’s Two Smallest Humans, Julia Copus presents her reader with a collection of poems choked by creepers and poisoned with stale air. She opens with This Is the Poem in which I Have Not Left You, where we read that ‘The doors of the Green Dragon are not bolted / behind our backs’. At the line break there might be some uncertainty about whether the speaker is trying to forget a lock-in or a lock-out but the following ‘behind our backs’ adds a sneaky, calculating quality to the exclusion. There’s also an echo of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise here too. The speaker offers us a series of desperate, pathetic statements that she has not left which add to the prevailing sense of hopelessness and finality. The poem’s unsettling conclusion introduces a bird like Keats’ Nightingale, or Hardy’s Thrush: ‘Then further off, after the rain is done, / the voice of the redstart calling do it, do it!, / calling from the smallest tree in the garden’. Although birds are sometimes symbols of optimism and change, Copus’ phrase ‘the smallest tree in the garden’ again brings Eden to mind and we question the redstart’s call: only one animal speaks from a tree in Eden. Was its advice followed, or ignored? Is the speaker tortured by hindsight?
A couple of pages on and Wardes covers similar territory. The poem appears to describe a house: ‘Three years we lived immured by its faulty electrics’ but we would usually expect to be immured by walls and not electrics. The house becomes threatening, a place where unpredictably violent snakes of cabling lurk beneath the plaster. Nothing is as it seems, as the reader might initially suppose the rats to be a part of the problem when, in fact, the line break trips us up: ‘the draughty rooms that opened from them, the rats / that huddled for warmth in the corner cupboard’. The scene that Copus creates is choked and monstrous like something from The Go-Between, or Sarah Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare. In Copus’ hands, Time is the amber that suspends the insect in the paperweight: ‘It’ll be fine again tomorrow, my sweetheart whispers / into the dark, some fifteen years ago. / It is early autumn and we two are lying / flat on the moon-drenched lawn, our eyes / fixed heavenwards; the slowly crumbling house / although we cannot see it is afloat / somewhere beneath our feet – this woman, / who is me, and her dark-haired boy. / Something about the way the light has fallen / or the way their outstretched hands seem fastened / each to each like two cut-paper dolls / tells me it’s already too late to warn them, / the long day done and even the peacocks silent’.
Nothing is certain in Copus’ meticulous, unsettling work. She resists the easy binary opposition and instead creates the memorably troubling. In Amherst Interior, Copus primes the reader to anticipate the easy contrast between American progress and Dickinson’s straitened life. The word ‘burgeons’ forces this reading: ‘Outside her window, America burgeons – / its ports and cities and highways, / its snaking railroads. Outside, / the purple foothills of Montana // darken with log cabins’. Copus makes us wait across the stanza break for the word ‘darken’ and, in terms of progress, it’s downhill from here. Surprisingly, Copus’ Dickinson is revealed to be at the centre, not the periphery: ‘In a shut room, with no seasons or weather, words / collect on the page like rain from the brimming / sponge of a cloud: blot, dusk, speck, / god, blood … Week after week // volcanoes, earthquakes, bombs / brood at the heart of the poems. The sun slips down / stage left behind the hill’ It is the sun which is slipping stage left and we’re back to Wallinger’s Ecce Homo: in the face of the human, no matter how small, no matter how reclusive, even the burgeoning of The United States looks like cheap theatre.
In Hero, Copus’ fabulous reworking of Hero and Leander, she stretches her caesuras into a void, like the Hellespont, dramatizing an agonising wait for a boy at the bottom of the Aegean: ‘Now time grows long as wool is drawn / through oily fingers into yarn’. At a formal level, the poem offers the reader a series of separations as the storm claims Leander and leaves Hero. Like Tennyson’s Mariana, there’s nothing like an absence to trigger an existential crisis and what Copus presents her reader with over the course of this collection is not break up poetry: it cuts keenly and deeply.
In The World’s Two Smallest Humans, Julia Copus has created a compelling, claustrophobic world which tests and questions the limits of human significance. Copus skilfully evades the easy answer to create a troubling sense of uncertainty. Hero and Leander were just another pair of young lovers, yet the story testifies to the value of human endeavour, which leaves us richer, even in tragedy. Mark Wallinger’s statue is the same; it’s because of our smallness that our endeavours matter so much.
As the car turned off Bachelors Walk and onto O’Connell Street, my brother and I would lurch chimp-like in our seats for a glimpse of the angel with a hole in her tit. She sits at the foot of the O’Connell Monument and was damaged by gunfire in the Easter Rising of 1916. My amusement paled after a trip to Kilmainham Gaol‘s soul destroying cells and yard: the destination for many of the 90 executed following the Rising. What struck me about that tour was the guide’s palpable sense of anger at a historical event. Stephen Dedalus has a point in James Joyce’sUlysses when he says that ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’.
In Major John MacBride’s Early Morning Breakfast, Paul Durcan shows how pernicious the weight of history can be. Durcan’s mother was a niece of MacBride’s, yet the poem’s title confers a rank upon this hero of the Rising: even in an intimate poem he has been snatched from his family and remains a national icon. ‘For Mummy life would never quite be life / And there would never be breakfast in bed’. Durcan’s informal ‘Mummy’ highlights the distance between the Major and Durcan’s own family. We are left with questions: as the poem tells us that MacBride was executed at 3.37 a.m., why would there never be breakfast in bed again? Isn’t breakfast in bed synonymous with a late, relaxed Saturday morning, a meal which would probably be served at least 6 hours after the execution time? Was this rule imposed by Durcan’s mother, or was it imposed upon her?
Many of these poems focus on Durcan’s relationship with his mother. In Treasure Island, Durcan’s third person perspective puts distance between them. ‘On his sixth birthday, October 16th, 1950, / His mother took him to see his first film’. Again, there’s a precision to the way Durcan records the time suggesting that, for him, this date is just as significant as that of MacBride’s execution. Even this memory collides with the national narrative, as the bus they catch is ‘the Number 11 / Into Nelson’s Pillar‘. This second Nelson’s Column, bombed in 1966, was seen by some as a symbol of colonial oppression: even its absence reminds us of its presence like sensation in an amputated limb. Durcan presents Ireland in the 1950s as a nation on the verge of becoming secular, as he allows the Metropole Cinema to colonise the vocabulary of the Roman Catholic Church, the usherette a ‘girl acolyte strapped to her tray’. The cinema itself has ‘The red carpets, the gilded mirrors, / The brass stair-rods, the swing-doors within swing-doors / Like veil upon veil of a temple / Proceeding to an inner sanctum’. Yet, even within this boyhood memory there’s an unresolved darkness as ‘In his cinema seat he became Jim Hawkins / Sitting in secret at the bottom of the barrel, / Overhearing things a boy should never overhear’.
These reflective poems are liberally interspersed with comic asides and vibrant voices. The best way to read them is to check out Durcan performing his own poetry somewhere like The Poetry Trust’s Poetry Channel. On stage he’s like a cross between Dylan Moran and Father Jack and, once you can hear his voice in your head, you’ll spot the crescendo of irritable humour on the page. In On Being Required to Remove My Trouser Belt at Dublin Airport Security we meet Durcan the nightmare passenger, responsible for all of our airport delays. ‘Holding up my trousers with my hands – what / Would Saddam have to say, indignant / In the dock in Baghdad at not having a pen? – although / I feel and look ridiculous and ludicrous, at least / I will pass through the detector without the alarm going off, but – / Bingo!’ In Tesco’s we see a new Ireland in which women are empowered and Roman Catholicism’s grip on marriage has loosened. ‘My husband quit work years ago / Before we split up. / Quite a busy little consultant / He was, quite in demand. / That was one of the reasons / I left him – when he decided to stop working and he / Hung around all day, / Getting on my janglies’. This is classic comedy, the audience wrong-footed in preparation for the punch line. Durcan’s ear for Dublin vernacular is faultless and words like janglies give this monologue an authentic ring. Money speaks in this new Ireland, void of moral values, and the woman shacks up with a new man because he has a 60K Land Rover. He’s an alcoholic but ‘You don’t really mind having an accident, / Because you know it won’t be you / That will be killed or maimed or whatever’.
Over the course of the collection Durcan’s humour darkens. In the opening poem, Mrs Barrington-Stuart’s Version of What Happened, ‘We spread out our Foxford rug at the top of the bank / In the same place we have always spread out our Foxford rug. / There we were sitting erect on our Foxford rug’. The absurd repetition of this detail renders Mr Barrington-Stuart’s death comic yet, in the collection’s final poem, The Deposition, there is nothing funny about ‘the crucifixion of her husband’ and Durcan’s mother wants ‘only to be beside him in the next life / And for the pair of them not be cold, / Maybe under that Foxford rug we bought in 1948’. Durcan’s exquisite handling of this detail across the course of the collection, a perversion of comic timing, gives death the bitterest of stings.
The Laughter of Mothers is a warm, readable, enjoyable collection of poems. Durcan will certainly make you laugh and may even make you cry. His conflation of personal and national history provides a fresh perspective on Ireland then and now.
Hear Paul Durcan read at The Poetry Trust’s Poetry Prom on the 23rd August.
To live on a narrowboat is to live in a world of either slack or taut ropes. In the downpour, as the river’s level spikes, I looked out the window at the mooring ropes straining against the pontoon, wondering when to slacken off, when to let the boat lurch like a dog on a string. No sooner had the river swollen but it shrank again, the boat wafted in the stream on enough rope to hang itself.
In Katy Evans-Bush’s The Raft of the Medusa, houseboats provide the semblance of security. ‘A hundred miles away your boat / still bobbed all night as if you slept, / cradled like the other sleepers / up and down the canal moorings; lapped at bed level, always moving / but always in the same place in the morning’. The ‘you’ is not sleeping there, is not cradled like the other sleepers, the gentle and warm vocabulary perhaps masking the emptiness at the heart of the illusion. The boat is an eloquent metaphor for the poem’s central relationship: ‘The hardest part was not overbalancing. / You were the one who said it: what…? / Across the road the library’s flag / went smack on its pole, then painfully billowed’. Look again at the detail from Géricault‘s painting. Is the central figure being held from the maelstrom, or rolled in?
The poems of Me and the Dead vividly evoke the details of the here and now. In The Bog of Despair, with memorable turn of phrase, Evans-Bush presents two women walking on the heath, ‘up a foresty path, / past a rubber hung like a thief on a tree, / full of swag’. This is audacious, iconoclastic writing, swinging from the sublimity of the Old Masters to the cheeky swag bag. In a poem like East Ten, Evans-Bush also demonstrates an ear for the spoken word, as her slice of Walthamstow street life sparkles with sovereign rings and swear words. The confrontational nature of the speaker is abrasive but, as her boyfriend hits her, the poem turns on her reflex response. ‘No way am I takin’ that crap. / So I slap ‘im back, and I guess me ring / caught his earring’. Some may scorn ladette culture but we should applaud the spunk presented here. Evans-Bush’s nod to Catullus reminds us that things never change and invites us to adopt a broader perspective.
In ‘To My Next Lover’ we are presented with the singleton’s busy, empty life: ‘I cleaned the kitchen, changed my bed, / lay in the bath with a book, eyed up a waiter, / tried new perfume on, I thought about you – ‘. Her control of the line is pitch-perfect and they’re deliciously undermined by comic asides: ‘running my hands over lace, undoing clasps / (but only to put on the old ones and wash the windows)’. Across the collection, Katy Evans-Bush presents women as confident, strong and materialistic. Yet, in The Bog of Despair, ‘the jeweller’s-window view / of London had ceased to be amusing’ and the cold hand of death takes the shine off the shop window. She wears her scholarship lightly, as her title references John Bunyan‘s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which an Everyman figure struggles to overcome his worldliness and to attain a set of higher values. Yet again: people don’t change.
To return to the narrowboat, I never had much luck keeping the river out of mine and books were the main casualties. Binning a warped, wrecked copy of Cakes and Custard, a collection of cautionary rhymes that belonged to my mother, broke my heart. Evans-Bush reminds us in The Only Reader that the book’s spine will crack and its glue will dry, ‘Its leaves falling brown and acidic on someone’s floor, / Lines scattered randomly and perhaps thrown on a fire’. Her tone is lyrical and elegiac. Yet my Thames-doused copy of Plath, buckled and funny smelling, is still readable and to do so is to reanimate it: ‘a lightning bolt like a rag on a kite-tail / So high on the hill that not even time can reach it’.
Me and the Dead, Katy Evans-Bush’s debut collection, is stunning. The rhythms of London beat on the page and she presents the city in all its sublime foolishness.
Poor Rude Lines: poetry reviews & recommendations by John Field 