Songs of Innocence and Experience – Brian Turner’s Here Bullet

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Zubayr, Iraq (Mar. 23, 2002) -- Sgt. Jeff Seab...
Zubayr, Iraq (Mar. 23, 2002) — Sgt. Jeff Seabaugh, a squad leader with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) (15th MEU (SOC)), moves his Marines to their objective during a mission in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Operation Iraqi Freedom is the multi-national coalition effort to liberate the Iraqi people, eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Brian L. Wickliffe. (RELEASED) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was the embedded reporters who grabbed my attention during Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, an insight into equipment shortages and poor leadership at every level was compelling but polemical, with former members of 1st Recon distancing themselves from his presentation of their officers in the DVD extras for HBO’s spinoff series, his angle was questionable. In David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, the US military was presented sympathetically, as it mounted a futile struggle to improve sewerage for the inhabitants of the Baghdad suburb, Rustamiyah. No matter what your view of the conflict and its aftermath was, it became clear that Operation Iraqi Freedom produced superb non-fiction.

As Brian Turner served as a soldier during the conflict, one might think that his collection of poems, Here, Bullet, would be less interested in an agenda and more interested in coming to terms with soldiering itself. At one level this is true: Here, Bullet is a visceral, personal, adrenaline pumped encounter with sand, rockets and blood. However, Turner’s decision to add an epigraph from the Qur’an to each section and to engage with the great works of Mesopotamian culture reminds us of Colonel Tim Collin’s eve-of-battle speech: ‘Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there‘. Turner is well read and can see the repetitions and ironies in events. In Hwy 1, we read that the highway runs ‘Past Marsh Arabs and the Euphrates wheel, / past wild camels and waving children / who marvel at the painted guns, the convoy / pushes on, past the ruins of Babylon and Sumer, / through the land of Gilgamesh where the minarets / sound the muezzin’s prayer, resonant and deep’. It is believed that water wheels were operating on the Euphrates thousands of years before the birth of Christ and, in Haditha today, the hydroelectric dam is the largest generator of electricity in Iraq. Taking a historical view, Turner’s perspective on Iraq celebrates the antiquity and continuity of its culture and technology.

As well as engaging with Mesopotamian literature and history, Turner’s poetry nods to the Western canon. In What Every Soldier Should Know, he demonstrates exquisite control of the couplet, his aphorisms referencing William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’. ‘Small children who will play with you, / old men with their talk, women offer chai – // and any one of them / may dance over your body tomorrow’. Turner’s decision to run this contrasting set of couplets over the stanza break emphasises the contradictory responses that the soldiers faced. His poem treats it with a stoicism and dignity echoed in The Good Soldiers.

At the heart of this collection lie some important, violent poems. As well as having the power to provoke, Turner’s poetics is one of sensation and The Hurt Locker (the title of Kathryn Bigelow’s film was taken from this poem) and Here, Bullet are outstanding examples. Turner does violence to language itself, tearing sentences into shrapnel: ‘Nothing but hurt left here. / Nothing but bullets and pain / and the bled-out slumping / and all the fucks and goddams / and Jesus Christs of the wounded’. Here, Bullet is a travesty of a love poem: ‘If a body is what you want, / then here is bone and gristle and flesh’.

Turner’s feels like an important voice. Much of the recent war poetry available online vents private grief and suffering. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it feels private rather than public. Here, Bullet, on the other hand, is a collection of poems in contact with Western and Eastern culture and history, its synapses twitching with pain, sacrifice and brotherly love.

  • War poetry is central to UK schools’ English poetry teaching, with poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon at the hub.
  • Do you think that war poetry should be taught in schools and, if so, should we still be teaching WW1 poets, or something that speaks of the experiences of the current generation and their families?
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The smell of the underground – Tobias Hill’s Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow

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English: London - The Gherkin & Canary Wharf T...
English: London – The Gherkin & Canary Wharf Taken from Tower 42 (formerly NatWest Tower) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Forget Eliot’s crowd of commuters flowing over London Bridge. Today’s city can provide an intense rush hour experience at any time of day or night and especially in this Olympic summer, when the people on London’s streets and in her tube network will cease to be individuals. Our bodies will flow, like traffic, like water, as their press distributes us through stations and carriages. We will feel one another’s warmth and we will smell perfumes: both sweet and rank.

This is the kind of city that Tobias Hill celebrates in Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow. The collection opens with a verse treatment of the diary of Henry Morgan, arriving in the capital in the summer of 1653 in the company of John Twentyman. Twentyman is characterised as every inch the puritan (and ironically, therefore, the person most likely to fit into an historically staunchly Puritan capital). He is ‘prudish in all he said, remarking / that the country life is much to be preferred, / there being works of God there, and herein / nothing that has not been touched / into its present form by the hands of men’. In contrast, Morgan revels in the delights of the metropolis, where he says his ‘nights have been / as nights spent in the company of lovers’. The city is ravishing and sensuous. No matter what you are looking for, no matter how exotic: the City of London can provide. As the poem concludes, Morgan is furnished with ‘a brace of snaphaunce’ (pistols) and ‘a sword all out of Damascene’. Snaphaunce is a word of Dutch, or Flemish origin and blades traced with Damask patterns were imported from Damascus. So, in Hill’s opening poem, his London is a multi-cultural confluence, where anything can be bought and sold and, given that Henry Morgan became a celebrated pirate (think Morgan’s rum), perhaps Hill is implying that London was the making of him.

Hill takes the sensory overload of this keynote poem, and delivers virtuoso variations on a theme throughout the rest of the collection, arguing that little of London’s character has changed since. In To a Boy on the Underground ‘The laptop cauls your face with light, / unflattering and glutinous. / The iPod plugs your ears with ambient noise. / If only you would disconnect // you’d see the Underground’s dark tract / unearthed’. There’s a lot to love here, as any journey on British public transport reveals faces shackled to the social media, as the real world slips past. The light cast by our new digital friends is an unhealthy one: the social and cultural equivalent of fast food. The first stanza concludes with a brilliant, ironic reversal of E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End: ‘Only connect’.

The tube train uncoils into London’s bright summer light and Hill assaults the senses, as people lean out of windows ‘one dangling a cigarette, / one seeming to be savouring the smells / of pizza ovens, Peking duck and piss, / the air half-edible and wholly foul’ (great pun here too). If you have ever walked through Soho on a summer’s evening, then you know and probably love this overpowering, crazy blend of odours.

Without pause for breath, Hill’s collection then runs into a twenty-first century London diary, a partner piece to Morgan’s. His poems pulse with the sights, smells and sounds of London life. In the likes of Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, Richard Curtis‘s manicured repackaging of our great, patchwork capital city feels more like an export: the cinematic equivalent of a postcard of Wills and Kate. Hill, on the other hand, gives us the living, breathing heart of a magnificent capital. If you haven’t got tickets for the Olympic Games in a few weeks, read Tobias Hill’s Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow: he’ll put you right there.

Alice Oswald’s Memorial

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Southampton Book of Remembrance
Southampton Book of Remembrance (Photo credit: Dr John Bullas)

Names assume epic proportions when listed. The Roman Catholic church’s First Eucharistic Prayer seduces with its exotic incantations, the priest intoning the names of the saints through a haze of incense: Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus. In the opening pages of Memorial, Oswald presents her reader with the names of the warriors Homer records as having fallen on both sides of the Trojan War. These names are as alien as those of the saints: Protesilaus, Echepolus, Elephenor but, in this context, the reader sees the parallel between this list and those homespun names, lovingly immortalised in books of remembrance and on war memorials across the world. Usually, a typeface serves only the demands of legibility but here Oswald’s Roman capitals invite the reader to see stone instead of paper, and marks inscribed with hammer and chisel rather than printed serifs. She transports us not only to antiquity but to the Menin Gate and the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. Oswald’s act of eloquent, austere simplicity distills war, and views it in human terms.

When reading the Iliad, Oswald’s source material for this poem, it is easy to caricature war as something out of Zack Snyder’s 300, as, in the heat of battle, individual heroes rack up an insane amount of kills: it’s more Call of Duty than All Quiet of the Western Front. However, Oswald’s decision to translate the death scene of every soldier negates that gung-ho heroism and creates something fragile and elegiac:

‘SIMOISIUS born on the banks of the Simois / Son of Anthemion his mother a shepherdess / Still following the sheep when she gave birth / A lithe and promising young man unmarried / Was met by Ajax in the ninth year of the war / And died full tilt running onto his spear / The point passed clean through the nipple / And came out through the shoulder blade / He collapsed instantly an unspeakable sorrow to his parents’.

The sheer repetition of these death scenes allows the reader to see and feel the horror of life cut tragically short: mother bereaved and unmarried. In Oswald’s hands, the accumulated weight of these small and insignificant deaths amounts to something significant indeed. The pain of war: both on and off the battlefield, is powerfully evoked in Memorial.

Each of these vignettes is followed by an epic simile, which is repeated twice:

‘Live leaves / Sometimes they light their green flames / And are fed by the earth / And sometimes is snuffs them out’.

Read aloud, Oswald’s restructuring of Homer gives her poem a gentle, elegiac and incantatory quality. This is a hymn to the dead of all wars and feels absolutely timely. In the United Kingdom, our news media has been rhythmically punctuated by images of the repatriation of fallen services personnel, killed on duty in Afghanistan. In Pat Barker’s Regeneration, (the character of) the poet Wilfred Owen says that ‘Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough’s army, than to think they’d been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can’t challenge. It’s like a very deep voice, saying; ‘Run along, little man, be glad you’ve survived’. In Memorial, Alice Oswald takes this idea and nails it.

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Through a glass, darkly – Gail Ashton’s The Other Side of Glass

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Iridium fountain pen nib, macro.
Iridium fountain pen nib, macro. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The heft of the fountain pen really does deliver the tactile pleasures Seamus Heaney refers to in Digging. Idealistically, naïvely, I had presumed that this thing of beauty, coupled with paper and ink worthy of Albus Dumbledore, would coax a few friends out of the twenty-first century and back into a gentler, slower world of letters. But no. The exponential increase in free minutes and the explosion of the social media leaves me feeling less, not more connected.

In Letters from Abroad, Gail Ashton brilliantly envisions the bygone world of letters with a metaphor worthy of Craig Raine, the ‘pen an oar rowing paper, yet to give up its blue-veined crackle, / fire the liquid at its heart’. She endows the act of writing with an Edwardian glamour and loads her pen with passion. The itch that she cannot scratch, the desire to communicate, leads to a hand ‘italic, clear, violet as a chandelier’. If you love fountain pens then you know what she’s talking about. If you don’t, get one. The strong sense of internal rhyme and rhythm here articulate the harmoniousness of the act of writing.

The Other Side of Glass is a beautiful collection of poetry, suffused with the wildness of the British coastal landscape. Ashton’s language is at turns both light and whimsical, and gutturally alliterative in a salty Seafarer kind of way. In her hands, Dunstanburgh Castle Ruins ‘Begins with ice-skald, / scree, scrimp of air’, loaded with strange Scandinavian wildness. Similar language is joyfully employed in Some call us angels and the Carteresque Untitled, Ashton’s unsettling skit on a Scots Metamorphosis. Throughout the collection, Ashton plays with myth to great effect, with a short sequence of poems on the Philomela myth unravelling like a skein on the page. There’s surprising, playful versatility in evidence at every turn.

A notable poem is the implicitly violent First Cut, where ‘he winks at you when their backs are turned’. The terse couplets suggest intimacy, secrets and abuse. It’s sickening stuff. Then the poem hits its stride with extended, smoothly enjambed stanzas. The reader relaxes, as we realise that the ‘keen-edged smile’ of the first line speaks of nothing more sinister than wood-turning. The images of violence are adeptly recycled as ‘quick-shave curls / and sawdust’. ‘Feel it, he says, touch it just there’, and suddenly the reader’s stomach is turned again – the form of the poem as sadistically playful as its male character. Gail Ashton is a poet absolutely in control of her craft and hers is the power to make us laugh or cry.

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A terrible case of the shrinks – AF Harrold’s Logic and the Heart

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English: Chesil Beach (Southern end)
English: Chesil Beach (Southern end) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Being There, the second poem in the collection, is a horrifying remix of The Twits crossed with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The dastardly villains of Roald Dahl‘s revenge fantasy are duped into standing on their heads, where they are glued to the floor. There they remain until catching the shrinks, a disease that causes the head to shrink into the neck, the neck into the body…

As a child, this was a horrific prospect but in describing his father, Harrold pulls Dahl’s grotesque disease out of fiction and into the heart-breakingly domestic. ‘And now he’s becoming smaller and smaller, / as if his clothes manage to remain life-size / while he falls away, deeper into the distance.’ The ironically active verb ‘becoming’ quietly articulates the futile effort involved in wasting away. However, his helpless fall hints that this is just a matter of perspective: the man is still there if you know where to look. He hasn’t really grown smaller. The physical regression is coupled with a mental one, as his father ‘glid[es] back to infancy, the grown man gone’. The caesura helps to create the chasm between present and lost faculties but again Harrold’s treatment of ageing is complex and ambivalent, as gliding is freeing and gentle.

Harrold recalls a childhood memory, ‘a small child photographed in the garden, / dressed in only a t-shirt and his milkman’s hat. / And I am aware of how little separates us, now and then / as he stands quiet in the front room, in just his vest’. There’s a touching intimacy here, and Harrold’s delicate control of the past and present comments upon his relationship with his father: the milkman’s hat a crown passed from father to son. There’s also a chilly awareness of the passing of generations. In theme and technique, Being There reminds me of Hardy‘s The Roman Road, but his informal diction is more like Andrew Motion‘s heart-breaking Passing On.

On Love, however, seems the perfect antidote, opening with a breathless, excited series of statements: ‘It is night now. This is moonlight. That the Evening Star’. The pace of the statements echoes Matthew Arnold‘s Dover Beach, but On Love initially appears to be its polar opposite, as ‘The night is too short for philosophy’. Instead, the heart says that all love ‘can be contained in the keening of a single thin fingertip’. In this final killer line Harrold readmits wordless grief and the biting cold. Suddenly, the oblivion of Arnold’s pebble-tossed beach beckons.

Harrold sticks with the time-tested themes of sex and death. Who could ask for anything more? His voice is warm and it is a pleasure to wander the deep waters and shoals of his mind.

http://www.afharrold.com/wordpress/

The vibrator in the drawer – Leontia Flynn’s Profit and Loss

 

English: G-Spot Vibrator
English: G-Spot Vibrator (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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There is something uncanny about houses. Especially other people’s and especially shared ones. A few years ago I stayed with a friend, the curate in a Roman Catholic parish. The priests were accommodated in a large communal house, and my bedroom adjoined the Parish Priest’s. The first night, I was awoken by a sharp, repeated swish – loud, even through the wall. A smothering dread pressed upon me. What was he doing in there? Would he come in here? The second night was the same and so, over the washing up bowl the next morning, I shared my fear with my friend. He laughed, pointing to the horde of golf trophies in the dining room, and explained that the PP had been honing his swing. This was all very well, but I had never actually seen him swing a golf club. In my nightmare he might as well have been (best) Silas from The Da Vinci Code, or (worst) Maynard the gimp keeper from Pulp Fiction.

In The Vibrator, the disturbing and supernatural is immediately at play, as the outgoing tenant ‘walked / like a mournful ghost through the blank, familiar rooms’. The stanza reaches a delicious, comic climax as the tenant finally wonders ‘where was the vibrator?’ The bathos of the mock-heroic ‘Oh cruel Gods!’ makes this poem light on its feet and there are echoes of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (another storm in a tea-cup). A whole series of lines opens with ‘Oh’ in a glorious suggestion of sexual play. But the poem shifts and darkens again in the final stanza as ‘the vibrator / still beats, in the dark, its battery-powered heart’. Depending on how you look at it, there’s something tragic about this bright bit of plastic, probably useless in a house rented by ‘four Polish men’. However, the dark imagery and the hidden heart remind the reader of Poe’s creepy The Tell-Tale Heart. Okay, the misplaced vibrator is a great laugh, but who is buried under the floorboards?

Flynn has an eye for detail, and can make even the most humble object speak. In The Floppy Disk, this technological flotsam is given a glorious second life as a keeper of arcane secrets and as an exquisite, archaic object. It is ‘A castaway on shingly paper clips’ and ‘The stainless-steel clip shines, the neat black case / still sleek as a woman’s suit or evening purse’. This is beautifully observed writing. Those metal clips always sprang back with a satisfying snap. The carapace of the ‘floppy’ disc was there to protect secrets and so Flynn’s yonic imagery is spot-on and evokes Plath’s A Birthday Present.

These poems are a brilliant, true, understated exploration of modern life with a haunting, playful gothic edge. If you’ve every heard a troubling swish in the night, or discovered the unexpected gifts left by the outgoing tenants, then there is something here for you.

Shifting Sands: Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability

Venice, Italy
Venice, Italy (Photo credit: kh1234567890)

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Even buildings built on the solid rock of the Eternal City sink with time. Hike up the Lateran hill and you’ll pass St Clement’s, where steps sunk into the cobbles deliver you to its door. Below the floor is the original church and, below this, you hit Roman street level during the first century AD, where a temple to the god Mithras still stands in a villa. These streets, like the ones rumbling with car tyres above, are cobbled. Irrigated water neatly runs alongside the pavement: in two thousand years nothing, and everything, has changed.

Jo Shapcott‘s Of Mutability develops some blinding conceits to explore change and death. In La Serenissima, the stage is set in Venice, the watery paradox of a city which, swanlike, appears serene on the surface, belying the underlying brute force required to maintain the status quo. This force is challenged in the poem as ‘the land didn’t belong / to earth any more […] / The pavement rippled under my shoes. / Everything I could see belonged to water: / liquid churches, theatres, monuments, houses’. Shapcott’s metaphor endows mutability with romantic grandeur – ruins in the Romantic sense are more sublime than the pristine edifice.

Yet, despite evoking La Serenissima, there is something disorientating and hallucinogenic here too: pavements should not ripple underfoot. A Roman street may sink in two thousand years but, in Venice, all it takes is aqua alta. The dramatic line break across the stanzas injects a new note, as the reader is pointed ‘towards rainclouds’. The tangents of city and body collide and the poem culminates in a dramatic statement of uncertainty: ‘Slow – slowly moving, I stepped on’ and the body is surrendered to the sea.

In ‘Religion for Boys’, Shapcott transports her reader to the temple of Mithras, subverting our expectations of a mystic cult worthy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, by debunking these notions with colloquial language and everyday scenes. ‘Thursday night in the temple of Mithras / is busy. Deals to do, rituals to keep, / favours to return. But all the lads / take time to nod to the goddess as they go’. It’s hard not to be reminded of Eliot’s The Waste Land here. People have been offering blood sacrifices, and witnessing resurrections since the dawn of time: two thousand years ago, below Via Labicana, or today in St Peter’s Square. We will all die, but things will never change. Whether you see this as comforting, or occasion for a nihilistic scream into the void is up to you.

Wendy Cope – Family Values

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I’ve seen someone recoil from Wendy Cope’s Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis as if it were Harry Potter’s The Monster Book of Monsters. The poem responsible was Tich Miller, a tragic exploration of being picked last for PE and wearing pebble-lensed glasses. Cope has an undeserved reputation as a writer of light verse and her recent collection, Family Values, is a case in point. Mortality’s cold hand haunts this collection and, for my money, Cope has more in common with Philip Larkin than Pam Ayres.

In At Stafford Services, the passing of time is gently signalled in the transition from the red plastic tomatoes that formerly dispensed ketchup to sachets. Even the Wimpy, a place ‘to smoke, / Drink coffee and feel sophisticated. It was all so modern, so American, so young,’ is now a visual shorthand for the decaying, faded high street of the backwater town. Ageing and generational alienation are not presented unsympathetically by Cope, however, as, fifty years later, the darkness outside turns the windows of Stafford Services’s Wimpy ‘into mirrors, / Lending the place an air of glamour. I like it here. / I could be in an Edward Hopper painting.’ Greydown, by contrast, is a bleak treatment of the family crockery: ‘There are three plates left […] / All the rest have disappeared, / Like the people who used them.’ Cope’s humour was always dark but, in this collection, sometimes the mask slips altogether and the stark contrast which results is arresting.

These poems, with their simple domestic images and theme of bereavement remind me of Tony Harrison’s finest sonnets from his From The School of Eloquence cycle. In O Come, All Ye Faithful, Cope uses the contrast between the past and the present to highlight the child’s inability to value the here and now. The irony is that this present can only be valued by an adult when it has become the past. When singing O Come, All Ye Faithful, Cope’s father asserted that, as Heaven was not a city, it should not be ‘Sing all ye citizens / Of Heaven above’, it should be denizens. As a child ‘It wasn’t too embarrassing’ but ‘In recent years / I have paid tribute to his memory / By singing, rather quietly, / ‘Denizens of Heaven above’. Cope’s painful reappraisal of the ridiculous, of memory, of desire, is as funny and accessible as ever. However, much of Family Values has the force of a sledgehammer swung at the stomach.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Faber and Faber – Arden – Touch Press

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I’ve been tidying the bookshelves today, flicking through my collection and finding enclosures that raise a smile and prick the memory. Even something as ephemeral as a receipt can help you to remember who and where you were when you bought a book. Annotations and highlighting are persistent. Okay, they might fade, but they’ll always be there. You can lend books, they feel good in the hand, they have a spiritual quality. eBooks have no place in this world, right?

So, I was ready to dislike Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the app, but this is nothing short of a publishing milestone and represents fantastic value for money. At the heart of the app is a clean, pleasing copy of the sonnets, and A Lover’s Complaint. With the touch of a button, the footnotes to the Arden edition appear in the margin. These are the real deal, making the app useful to any serious reader. However, you can also choose to read the poems with a commentary by Don Paterson instead. This is where the app gains a pulse as, reading Paterson, I’m mentally transported to a cosy pub, where we natter about the Bard over a couple of pints. Take his commentary on Sonnet 20, for example: ”Dude’, as Aerosmith sang with such vacant gusto, ‘looks like a lady’. OK: this is as good a place as any to clear this up. I feel I will scarcely be believed, but this poem has often been cited as evidence of Shakespeare’s non-homoerotic intent. No: really. As levels of denial go, this is right up there with the health-benefits of Marlboros’. I’m often left feeling that poetry has a public image problem, the sort that bit snooty French winemakers on the bum when New World upstarts started hiring polo necked designers and marketers to conquer the world. Reading the sonnets with Paterson is a joy. With a few more commentaries like these, classic poetry could redefine itself and find a new readership to boot.

I’ve not even mentioned the fabulous video performances at the heart of the app yet. Some of these are utterly endearing. Cicely Berry, CBE’s reading of sonnet 129 is measured and weary yet, at the end, she delivers a schoolgirlish look of approval to camera. Ben Crystal’s reading of sonnet 141, delivered in Original Pronunciation, is a salutary reminder of the warmth and unpretentiousness of our national poet. The makers of the app have wisely front loaded it with a gamut of names: Stephen Fry, David Tennant, Kim Cattrall, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, and I hope that this constellation of stars helps the app to fly off the virtual shelves of the App Store.

My only beef with the almost equally great Waste Land app was that there was nowhere for the reader to keep his/her own notes (a major fag, especially if you’re using it to complement your own classroom teaching, as I am). This issue has been resolved here, and the app allows you to add notes, favourites, and share sonnets via email.

eBooks might have added a format to the publishing world, but Touch Press and Faber’s recent apps have added the heart.

LINKS

http://www.bencrystal.com/

http://www.shakespeareontoast.com/

Tom Paulin – Love’s Bonfire

I selected this post to be featured on my blog’s page at Poetry Blogs.

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‘It all depends on your point of view / but from mine – and I know that men / can mistake colours and shades / – from mine the new suspen- / sion bridge at Toome is puce,’ begins Tom Paulin’s wry ‘A Spruce New Colour.’ Both sides of the Irish border, colour indicates religion, politics, tribe, and Paulin’s McCloud-like speculation about whether the new bridge is puce or an effeminate, scented lavender is comically absurd. The West Belfast joke was that other people had to turn on the television to watch the news while they just had to step outside. You could tell where you were by the colour of the kerbstones, and there was no confusing colour in the old Ireland: it was gloss and was applied to concrete straight from the tin.

Paulin presents a North embracing progress and property development: if you build it, they will come. Standing at the counter of a Belfast tourist centre, I asked what is actually in the Titanic Quarter. I mean, the ship’s at the bottom of the Atlantic, right? (Reader, beware towns newly hung, drawn and quartered by the same, sad, off the shelf marketing). The girl’s conflicted eyes bounced around their sockets as she told me, under the gaze of her supervisor, that it was well worth a visit: history and identity are being reinvented north of the border. Paulin’s shiny new puce or lavender bridge ‘brings the new long overdue bypass / across the River Bann / like a curved – curved or semi-circular / Jacob’s Ladder,’ yet he wishes ‘to drive through the village again / and see the old bridge,’ escaping the province’s property developer induced amnesia. The old bridge echoes from my childhood memory in the lyrics of the troublingly jaunty Roddy McCorley, an account of the allegedly Prebyterian rebel’s defiant march to the gallows.

The poem’s whimsical, interior designer’s opening is transformed in a shot into something darker. The gothic presence of the ‘barracks behind high walls’ creates the mise en scène of The Troubles, and hidden under the dark reach of the bastion is ‘the poster of the hunger striker / – young – thin beard – Kevin Lynch – tied high on a lamp post.’ A hunger striker he might have been, but the symbolism is inescapable. A rebel hangs on a bridge where a rebel was hanged in 1800, a bridge that Paulin sometimes feels the wish to see again, a history he feels the need to acknowledge, even in the new Ireland.

Love’s Bonfire is light of touch, delicate and disarming. In the past, I never really felt that I got on with Paulin the poet. It was all a bit too clever, too knowing. However, these poems are real growers and present a recognisable snapshot of the new North.