Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
reviews
At the Races by Michael McCarthy (Smith /Doorstop, 2009)
and
The Road to Murreigh by Paul McLoughlin (Shoestring, 2010)
Poetry can arise from a wish to capture the essence of a “somewhere else” which possesses some magical significance for us. Such poetry may be a time-travelogue of a trip back to childhood or a feet-upon-the ground exploration of a place where our DNA may have originated. In his collection At the Races, Michael McCarthy takes us on a journey through both space and time, beginning in County Cork in the 1940s where he escorts us along winding lanes and into the homes, schoolrooms and fields that helped to shape his childhood. In The Road to Murreigh, Paul McLoughlin writes about the trips he made to neighbouring County Kerry as an adult, visiting relatives in the Dingle Peninsula. The poems describe his discovery of both the landscape and his family and explore the half-understood connection he feels with the place his mother came from.
While McCarthy has an insider’s view, McLoughlin – who was born in West London – writes about Ireland as a stranger who needs directions and can be surprised by what he encounters. He wants to find out how far back where you come from goes; but he is well aware that what’s revisited is changed, / even when you weren’t there at the time. It turns out that even landscape can be questionable: on a beach used as a location for the movie Ryan’s Daughter there are jet-black boulders ... some of them fibre-glass added by / the film crew and not retrieved.
Such wry observation is a feature of McLoughlin’s poetry; but it is always delivered with honesty and a genuine affection for a country and a people to whom, it seems, he feels he both does and doesn’t belong. He takes us on leisurely journeys down twisting, poorly-signed roads and into family gatherings where we learn who said what – and why it matters. A particular tour de force is his account of an afternoon in a pub with flamboyant local characters where topics of conversation range from Good Friday to Kurt Vonnegut. The rich comedic vein in this poem is tenderly mixed with awareness of his mother’s Alzheimer’s: it’s unlikely she’ll remember any of this / - it’s why we’re here, her last trip home.
McLoughlin has a sharp ear for the rhythms and phrasing of speech: we hear of the children who haven’t a step in their leg; the uncle who is the most contrary man ever to put shoes on his two feet; and the many people who were looking well and they’re all dead. He cleverly catches the gentle rhetorical force of repetition. Sometimes he uses it to draw us in to a particular moment: Mostly it rains, but now, just now, the Atlantic’s / so calm; and sometimes it conveys well-meaning anxiety at a patient’s bedside: They give him / something for the pain, they think it’s pain, / he’s very agitated. A boarding-house guest approaches his host and wonders does he have an iron. / He does, he says, of course, then wonders / if he does and where the thing might be.
As well as a good ear for dialogue McLoughlin, has a keen eye for landscape. A disused convent is now a page of windows stuck / on a hill, an advent calendar of its own / demise; and on the rocks below Clogher Head breakers crash against volcanic cliff, / like a strop brought down / to teach a boy his manners. But it is not only word pictures we are given: this fine and rewarding book also includes the author’s own illustrations, which use deceptively simple long and jagged but unbroken ink lines to capture the roads, rock, hills and houses of the Dingle peninsula.
At the Races begins in rural Ireland but extends into wider territory. McCarthy’s opening poems recreate his journey to school, telling us what he ate for lunch, what he wore, what he learned and how he went home. We learn about minor misdeeds like smoking (The excitement was / knowing I wouldn’t be found out) and the occasional fight, after which I felt very sorry / for the loser, very glad it wasn’t myself. Childhood innocence is subtly undercut by Ireland’s troubled history, taken almost for granted. Next to his family’s come-lately radio he remembers framed, a list of names: West Cork’s Heroic Dead; and he admits that, in an essay, I reinvented my father ... that he shot forty Black and Tans in one night. ‘Good man yourself’ says the priest, on hearing about it.
McCarthy is himself a priest and he writes about his Yorkshire parish. He is now an observer of children rather than being a child himself – but he clearly sympathises and empathises with the character in the school Nativity play who has left his Myrrh in the car and with the boy on the doorstep who tells him ‘We’re not Catholics.... We used to be but now we’re not. Mum says she’s not in.’ / ‘That’s fine,’ I say. ‘Tell her I’m not here.’
McCarthy’s skill with stories and good punch lines should not cause us to miss his subtler poetic skills. He is a sharp observer: a fountain has water rounded to a perfect globe / of blown glass; a bee wears yellow / striped prison garb. His poems go deeper than anecdotal reminiscence – he offers a vivid paraphrase of the opening to St John’s gospel and a wonderfully ambiguous account of the Transfiguration (all I saw was greenery, a few bushy outcrops, / that could have been mistaken for eyebrows.) In several poems he plays with illusions and reflections, telling us that I read maps backwards and using the curved metal surface of a teapot to inspire a concave variation on Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”. “Arriving Back” is a futuristic speculation (with echoes of a sixties tune called 2525 by Zager & Evans) which precedes a section about chains of memories that begin with small events like a missed turning or the splitting of a shoe.
The final part of the book deals vividly with the dream-like experiences accompanying severe illness (I see myself coming towards me). But McCarthy reassures us that near-death moments may be less distressing than ... say unrequited love / or missing a train. And even in his hospital bed, he remains sensitive to someone else’s unexpected plight – in this case, a prisoner going to the operating theatre handcuffed to a guard. The poems in this warm-hearted collection sometimes may seem deceptively simple (like McLoughlin’s drawings); but they skilfully illuminate small and complex experiences we all recognize but are seldom able to pin down.
Poems of reminiscence about a “special” time or place might, on the face of it, risk being of interest only to the writer. (I have also written poetry about my tenuous but genuine claims to Irishness, and have sometimes wondered what prompts me to share it.) If we write about a fondly-remembered childhood, we might simply be trying to make a private Eden real to ourselves again – perhaps as a way to explain or criticize our later circumstances. Or are we consciously hoping to evoke a thrill of recognition when the scenery, sound and smell of our story briefly merge with a reader’s own recollections? And if we write about our ancestry and background, is it part of an attempt to thank (or blame) them for what they have bequeathed to us? Or might we be seeking to use the, possibly chequered, histories of our forebears in order to make ourselves seem more interesting?
These brief meandering thoughts lead to the not-very-startling conclusion that poetry of recollection needs to be crafted skilfully and sensitively with a purpose in mind. A faithful recall of things which are quite particular to the poet’s own story must be balanced by broader observations likely to be not too far removed from other people’s experience. History has ensured that many English-speaking readers do have at least some slim Irish connection; and the Irish way of tilting the English language is frequently attractive to English ears. McLoughlin and McCarthy, therefore, both have a sizeable potential audience and their inventive and beguiling poetry deserves to be widely read and enjoyed.
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© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
reviews
Work & Food by Peter Daniels (Mulfran Press, 2010)
and
Mr Luczinski Makes a Move by Peter Daniels (Happenstance, 2011)
Peter Daniels’s two most recent pamphlets come close on the heels of some important competition successes – the Arvon prize in 2008 and both the TLS and the Ver Poetry prize in 2010. A full collection surely cannot be far away; but in the meantime these two small books give an excellent selection of this poet’s work.
Work & Food contains only ten poems but also features some delightful illustrations by Moira Coupe. From the very first poem “Endeavours” we can recognize a distinctive voice and a way of seeing things askew: The stripy shirt today. It chooses my mood. I suit it. Daniels is skilful at telling us about our own lives – the routines of getting up and making our way about the world. He causes us to look afresh at things we take for granted; hence the morning train becomes our derailable transport. The next poem “Assessment” is in a similar vein and takes a wry look at the world of work and management-speak. “Annual Leave” also seems at first to be office-related – but then it whisks us away to an unexpected and perplexing place: That lady up at the castle window calming her nerves / with a tossed lettuce – soon she’ll parachute off / with the raggle taggle, for good. Readers may be left wondering where they’ve got to or how they got here when starting from the consideration of an unused holiday allowance! Having unsettled us a little, Daniels then reassures us with “Regulars”, a totally unthreatening evocation of the simple shared pleasure of dining out with a companion; but the respite is temporary and “Downhill” takes us back into a less readily recognized world with a quasi-mediaeval feel, where hostelries have names like The Stalled Ox or The Rapscallion. The pamphlet continues in this way, mixing the almost familiar with the disquietingly strange: what is important, however, is that the poems usually remain pleasing to the eye and ear, even when they perplex the mind.
Mr Luczinski Makes a Move is a more substantial, 28 page chapbook. Its opening poem, “Policeman, Stoke Newington”, shows Daniels at his most quirkily observant. The constable in question is drawing money from a cash machine, to be stowed / in the safest pocket on the street. “The Pump” – one of the author’s prize-winning poems – also starts with perceptive observation of a redundant artefact but moves cleverly into thinking of the kitchen girl who used to crank it / and crank it till the steely water came up at last, and at last / she could find time to become somebody’s grandmother. Daniels knows how to make good use of a repeated phrase: here he employs it to draw us in more closely to a physical experience; elsewhere it is a device with which to raise a smile. In “Windfalls”, Daniels performs a double-shuffle trick that he seems quite fond of: the poem starts with something tangible and quickly slides into the intangible (Past the equinox / the calendar gets thinner) and then shifts a second time into historical romance territory where the serfs are scuttling round the skirts of the castle, / there’s rumbling and smoke. (Is it the same castle that appeared in “Annual leave”?) There seems to be a threatening undertone here that is picked up and reinforced in “At the forest pool” where the pool says This is your last chance. / You don’t remember the other chances. This could be sinister stuff for readers who may be reflecting on past mistakes and future opportunities.
Many of the poems signal to us from just beyond the edges of our understanding – out there / where there is / whatever there is. In some cases an interpretation still eludes me, but it is clear that not all the signals are warnings; for instance, in “Threshold” there is a sense of optimism: What happened was: the first one over the threshold / put the light on, and the world lit up... Fortunately, Daniels is prepared to escort us entertainingly back into everyday life from time to time in order to relieve whatever anxiety he may have generated. It must be said, however, that “everyday life” for him is rather London-flavoured and I wonder whether the observation that the Queen could reach me on the 73 would carry as much pleasing resonance for a Liverpudlian, say, as it does for an Islington resident. And would there be, in Cheltenham, an instant recognition of encounters with the character portrayed in “Stand-up compulsive” – we’re stuck on the bus with him, longing for oblivion? Buses – presumably London ones – even find their way into the closing, rather Zen-like poem “Incarnation”.
A particular pleasure in Mr Luczinski Makes a Move is an affectionate tribute to the late Ted Burford
... my theory is you’ve gone
to Leeds. Fax us your poem from there,
Ted. Or was that it – the supposed
wrong number, ordering chickens
wholesale? ...
In its light-hearted way, this poem illustrates why Daniels’ poetry deserves the rather paradoxical description “accessible but sometimes difficult”. He can look at ordinary matters with an original and inventive eye to make us smile with recognition of something we had almost noticed. Yet his themes often go far beyond the ordinary; and then his measured, distinctive voice and careful attention to syntax always ensure the reader has firm ground to stand on. Even if his subject-matter seems designed to make us puzzled or uneasy, the poetry is so well-crafted that we can still enjoy his rhythms, his skilful word choices, his subversion of cliché and the occasional short sentence he can place as neatly as a well timed pay-off line.
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© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
reviews
Wounded Angels by Murray Bodo (Blissfool Books, 2010)
Things to Say by John Lucas (Five Leaves, 2010)
Whistle by Martin Figura (Arrowhead, 2010)
Murray Bodo is a Franciscan priest and also a professor of English in Cincinnati. His poetry may not have been very well known in the UK before Blissfool Books launched Wounded Angels but in fact he has many publications in the USA including a best-selling book on St Francis. His Christian faith clearly informs his poetry; but it is important to say that the poems do not insist on the reader sharing his faith. He writes with compassion, humour and humanity about everyday life and experience.
The complexity of Bodo’s tender poetry is shown in the first Wounded Angel poem. She is
blindfolded so she can’t see
what happened to her, so we
can’t see her eyes illumine ...
how we’re the very ones who
wounded her...
as we cart her home to show
what someone else did to her.
Hurt and honesty are recurring themes: several poems deal sensitively with a two-edged relationship with guns inherited from his father. In “Gun cleaning” he writes: This beautiful object / unmans me. Once it made me a man,/ you said. “Dad’s rifle” ends with the lines When I was seven you taught me care/ of guns that would take care of me. Bodo does not let a gun take care of him: yet – like many of us – he may be at times uncomfortably aware that his peaceable existence could be said to be secured by weapons in other people’s hands.
Bodo is an accomplished poetic craftsman, using free, unrhymed verse alongside stricter forms such as ghazal or rhymed couplet. He even makes poetry about the mechanics of poem-making – even down to the letters of the alphabet. On the way to his father’s funeral he considers a photo of himself and his parents outside their grey family home
the picture that can
never be anything but three with its
“e’s” like the “e” in “grey” and the “e” in me
turned in upon itself but not whole
like an “o”, say ...
or the moon still tracking me
... behind the train.
In “Words that fly” he begins with a question that R.S. Thomas might have asked: Do words take us further / than we could go without them? That Bodo’s words can and do take us far is demonstrated by the relatively long quotes in this review: his perceptive insights are often sustained over several elegant lines.
One place where the book takes us is inner city Cincinnati. In “Sunday with Julian”, Bodo finds evidence on the streets that (in the words of St Julian of Norwich) we are clothed, wrapped, in the goodness of God. The poem starts in church but then moves outside to mundane encounters: a young couple in a burger joint; two prostitutes who ask him for a light (is there a code here I’m not aware of? he muses); and a teenage wife eating ice cream. In glimpsing good in the undramatic he is not being sentimental. Bodo’s poetry most certainly does not come out of a detached, restricted or idealised world view. He has no illusions about some of his near neighbours (The bathless stench/ you leave on my car seat); and the last section of the book deals with tough political issues – particularly lamenting the human cost of the Iraq war (No one notices their masked/ pain, their wooden pace, since he/ came home, a metal box ...).
No one who heard him read during his visit to London in autumn 2010 would imagine Bodo to be “soft and fluffy”. His steady belief in The Incarnation leads him to follow St Francis and seek both to carry love and to look for love in ordinary life. Even a firmly non-religious reader might wonder whether the poems are brushing against something deep and worthwhile. Or, to be more colloquial, he might borrow the words of one of the prostitutes in “Sunday with Julian” and say Okay, I like/ the jerk anyway.
* * *
It would be wrong to overstate parallels between Lucas and Bodo. But since they are about the same age, it is not surprising that Things to Say, like Wounded Angels, also opens with poems of childhood reminiscence. (The collection is, in fact, published as a companion to Next Year Will Be Better, a prose memoir by John Lucas about England in the 1950s.)
Although Lucas and Bodo share some similar memories, they handle the poetry of recollection in quite different ways. Lucas makes more use of traditional forms and rhyme schemes. He manages to do this in a way that does not feel old-fashioned. Where Bodo’s memories are rural, those of Lucas are largely urban and give a quite broad picture of the England he grew up in, mentioning political, sporting and cultural events. (Indeed I was glad to have Next Year Will Be Better at hand; I might otherwise have been puzzled by some of the literary references which Lucas, as a Professor of English, can readily deploy.)
Lucas devotes the middle section of his book to war poems. In a poem about a solitary woman bereaved by war he cleverly adapts a line from Larkin: If all that survives of us is love/ what will survive of those who lack for it? He also offers an unusual take on The Few:
... after we’ve seen off Hitler,
what’s to become of them, these heirs
to wooded acres? What song
could blend my buffed Black Country
with their expansive drawl ..?
Particularly moving is “June 1942” which tells how the poet’s mother sat at her dressing table to make up her face during an air raid. Of course she doesn’t think that what she’s done // might shield her children... But she is
... making the case
for all who offer nothing against violence/
but instinct of a pure, unsaving grace.
(“Grace” is another word Bodo might have used ...)
The final section of the book includes some rather more knockabout pieces by “Thorn Gruin”, who is an alter ego of Lucas. This is good fun, but lends a slight unevenness to the collection. Even the excellent and mainly serious first and second sections contain a few weaker pieces – birthday greetings for friends and a found poem consisting of the (admittedly eyebrow-raising) names of British residents in war-time Cairo.
Being only a little younger than Bodo and Lucas, I found the 1940s and 50s poems quite accessible. I too encountered schoolmasters like “Cheesy” in the poem “Mission accomplished”; my children’s generation would expect such a teacher to be dismissed and prosecuted! Similarly, today’s football fans would hardly believe that the ball might go
back to the far end, blurry fast,
and yowls tell us what we can’t hope to see
in unlit 40s mist.
I hope however that Things to Say is not overlooked by readers under, say, fifty years old. These fine, well-crafted poems are a pleasure to read. What’s more, they reflect a time when courtesy, honesty and patience seemed more overtly valued than they are now (at least in certain areas – and Thorn Gruin might wish me to mention financial industries at this point).
* * *
Figura is a photographer as well as a poet so it is not surprising that many of the poems resemble snapshots. Events are described rather than analysed: comment is implicit and subtle, resting mainly on careful choice of words to frame and illuminate a moment. Most of the poems are quite short. This seems to increase the impact of the occasional longer ones such as the extracts from his mother’s letters, incidents from a visit to his father’s home in Poland and portraits of his companions in a children’s home.
The early years of childhood are portrayed with affection. In “How to Steal” Figura realises I can be trusted on my own for a few minutes and so he raids the larder to make and gobble a ketchup sandwich before his mother returns. His final word of advice to himself is Don’t blink when she takes her hankie/ and wipes the sauce from the corner of your mouth. His father, building a fireplace, tapped in each careful stone/ to the satisfaction of the spirit level. Before a music lesson, the piano attempted/ to conceal itself/ behind the standard lamp.
Then, after losing a fountain pen, he realises, with terrible but unconscious prophecy
if one or both of your parents
were to die in a terrible accident, then
the small matter of homework would be forgotten.
Finally, when a tragedy does occur,
The whole thing turns upside down
... Cups and saucers
spin away – disappear
into the infinite Artex swirl.
As he is driven away to stay with an aunt and uncle, a boy on a bicycle behind the car pedals like mad to stay with us, but we stretch away,/ leaving him stranded.
The story continues to unfold in episodic fashion. Figura’s discomfort at living with his uncle is captured in the prize-winning poem “Morning Room”: The family sits round the table/ ready for the meal which is me. Later, in “Strange Boy”, we see him through the impersonal but not unkindly eyes of schoolmasters:
We know he steals but are letting it go for now
He pulls a face when he concentrates
The other boys have noticed this
He has invented an elaborate past
Later still, after being briefly reunited with his father, he takes a girl friend round to meet him. After a meal
[Dad] fetches the camera,
from the drawer in the wardrobe,
poses us on the sofa
in case we never come back.
All in all, this is a remarkable book: moving yet very controlled by virtue of its economy of language and its spare, tight verse structures. It is probably a book to read at one sitting, following the pull of the narrative thread. Afterwards there will be episodes that demand to be revisited.
All three books raise the interesting question of how to handle poetry which responds to facts or events unlikely to be known to most readers. As mentioned earlier, Figura presents the key elements of his story on the back cover of the book. He does not, however, give a detailed timeline for his travels and trials; hence there are some poems which introduce people whose place in the story I was not quite clear about. I did not feel this to be much of a shortcoming.
Bodo and Lucas both need to give a context for some of their poems. Bodo prefers to use notes at the back of the book – although I wish these had explained the real-life inspiration (if any) for “Aristotle in Africa”. Lucas likes footnotes at the end of a poem and “The Scents of an Ending” is a good example of the benefit of getting background information after a first reading. Tackling the poem without knowing who the characters are produces a haunting rather desolate effect which remains even when more facts are revealed. Having the characters’ identities and history from the beginning could have been a distraction.
It can be argued that the poems themselves should present their own background and that notes should be limited to things like translation of foreign or technical words. There may sometimes be a case for this: but it also presents a challenge. It is possible to write poetically about reactions to events that may in themselves be quite mundane; but to use part of a poem to narrate the actual events can be an open invitation to be prosey! There are probably no hard-and-fast rules: but the authors of these three strongly recommended books do, on the whole, find appropriate ways of providing the reader with the “inside knowledge” needed to appreciate their excellent poetry.
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© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
reviews
Emergency Verse, ed. Alan Morrison (Caparison, 2011)
In spite of the book’s subtitle, much of it reads more like attack than defence. Some pretty jagged shrapnel is sent flying towards the agenda and the personnel of the current Con-Lib coalition government – particularly its Old Etonian element. A good knockabout example is Alan Dent’s “All You Need is Gove”:
We’ll have a free school, a free school a free school
We’ll have a free school, a free school and keep the riff-raff out
...
We’ll build it in the suburbs, the suburbs, the suburbs
We’ll build it in the suburbs away from all the chavs.
Andy Croft’s “Not So” uses a quieter, more resigned voice to issue its challenge to the not-so-new establishment:
Of course you win. The powerful always do.
You are the offside goal, the final straw.
With a shooting party of 112, the gunfire can sometimes be a little indiscriminate and threats to the welfare state are not the only target. This diversity probably helps to make the book more entertaining: for instance, Michael Rosen considers the lure of market forces and contributes a verse nightmare about an enterprise calling itself Just-So Justice. Faced with a not-guilty plea
Just-so says, ‘Prove it. You’ve got five minutes.’
We guarantee:
No Just-so case lasts more than an hour.
Great justice. Great value.
No harm in all this aggressive stuff, of course, so long as it keeps at least half an eye on truth. In between throwing missiles, however, it is worth pausing to reflect how we got into the state we are in. In spite of the existence of protesting voices like those in these pages, how have we reached a situation where almost all electable politicians collude in a view that a crisis caused largely by the financial industry should be remedied by penalising the public sector and the poor? One suspects that there has been a crucial lack of engagement with issues of (dis)honesty, and (in)justice during – at least – the last decade. I sense in Niall McDevitt’s haunting poem “George Orwell is Following Me” something of this gap between what is talked about and what is actually followed through:
he’s slumped at my table with a bargain bitter
heavily disguised as a member of the underclass.
For me, the most persuasive parts of the book are the poems which display some of the compassion which has always underpinned the welfare state at its best. It is that compassion which the public sector’s dismantlers can easily be accused of lacking and which has to be kept firmly in view. Such poems include Mick Moss’s “Illness You Can’t See”
you cannot see my illness
it is difficult to quantify
measure and assess,
John O’Donoghue’s “London Sundays”
Once you’ve come this far, soup’s
All that’s keeping you from
Freezing off the booze,
N S Thompson’s “Rehabilitation”
Back home, down on their knees, they scrub and scrub ...
But it will never do
and Tamar Yoseloff’s “The New Loss”
... something which occurs
in two dimensions, somewhere distant, to someone else
until it occurs to you.
These poems give an insight into what the abused phrase “all in it together” ought to mean. Hence they are as important and effective as the more scathingly satirical offerings. Indeed they probably count for more than straight invective like Brenda Tichborne’s “A Curse from an Infant to a Politician” (with its unsubtle last line You piece of shit) or Sebastian Barker’s “Dickhead” or Paul Francis’s “Wanker”.
It is the more extreme offerings that make me want to raise the question: who and what is Emergency Verse for? It has been a rewarding venture to be part of; and at the launch in the Poetry Library on January 5th it was clear that the book has been fuelled by much passion and a sense of solidarity. Given an opportunity – thanks to Alan Morrison’s initiative and enterprise – the contributing writers clearly wanted to make sure their beliefs, hopes, frustrations and fears could be heard. The alternative of doing and saying nothing to challenge government plans did not seem acceptable or honourable. And indeed it is a proper response to raise your voice when you perceive injustice and error. Now that Emergency Verse exists (both in hard copy and in an on-line version) it lays down some kind of historical marker that not everybody swallowed the coalition version of events. More importantly, in the present it can be a great source book for the politically active to draw upon; its best pieces will be an encouragement to the troops of the left in difficult times and should provide useful quotes for future articles and speeches. But, of itself, it may not frighten too many horses on the right wing of the cavalry.
The lively launch reading was, predictably, an occasion for preaching to the converted. But one wonders how the book will ever reach the unconverted? Review copies have, of course, gone to all sections of the press and may generate some small reaction and debate; but one can hardly imagine scales falling from the eyes of (say) the Daily Telegraph’s book critic, prompting an impassioned plea for more public spending. The size, weight and scope of Emergency Verse – while both impressive and worthy – must make it intimidating to the uncommitted. If poets are to live up to their cliché status of “unacknowledged legislators” then they may do better to sprinkle their messages widely but not too thick. Let them keep on slipping their rhetoric onto pages and into readings where the uncommitted and already prejudiced may come upon them unawares and hence be vulnerable.
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© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
reviews
The Finders of London by Anna Robinson (Enitharmon, 2010)
and
Still·Life and other poems of art and artifice by Robert Vas Dias (Shearsman, 2010)
Ghosts slip in between the lines of nearly all the poems in Anna Robinson’s new book The Finders of London (Enitharmon, 2010). Some are reluctant to explain themselves; but others tell their stories as they lead us along corridors and alleyways of a forgotten London. The sense that the collection is haunted is reinforced by other small recurrences: the moon makes frequent appearances, as does “my neighbour” and a Department of Health building in Waterloo Road.
Many of the poems give a voice to “a long line of women getting wet on street corners” who have scraped a living – and sometimes met a death – in ways most modern readers will not have heard of and could scarcely imagine. The title sequence is about women who survived by collecting dog dung for the tanning yards and by scavenging in Thames mud or in the sewers underneath the river. The prose poems in “Portraits of Women” sympathetically describe Jack the Ripper’s victims and gently dignify them. (Mary Jane Kelly was “loved by many men and I am telling the truth: really loved. Even by some who paid good money.”)
Anna Robinson does well to catch the rhythms, economies and repetitions of ordinary speech. On occasions she attempts to capture the South London accent on the page, using a symbol ‘|’ to convey the glo|al stop. Although strict transcription of a dialect is a difficult business, relying on subjective judgements (since one person’s ear may be very unlike another’s), the great majority of the poems speak with authentic voices. They do sound like words of real people and yet they manage to convey much more than a real person usually does. (Samuel Beckett was another who knew how to pull off this useful trick.)
This is Anna Robinson’s first full collection (although some of the material has appeared before in a pamphlet and anthologies). It is a genuinely enthralling book, built around intriguing subject matter and clearly based on careful research (about which a few more background notes would perhaps have been helpful). But it must be emphasised that this is poetry and hence it is more than a gathering of lore and legend. The book’s poetic credentials are considerable and the writing is mature and confident. Most of the poems are unrhymed and seem fairly free – the most formal piece being a well-constructed ghazal – but there is usually an underlying structure. Short but regular-length and lightly rhythmic stanzas occur frequently; and the stanza breaks – like pauses for breath – tend to settle and hold the reader into the poem’s natural tempo.
Anna Robinson has particular poetic gifts in choice and placement of words: ear-catching small inversions (“ this being not the end”) ; an extra word slipped in to avoid a cliché (“Chest tears, bones scream Oh and God”). She makes unsettling use of repeated words in “Chimney”:
I am standing in the hall and looking at the pages of a book.
The word I am here for is ‘chimney’ and I see a tall
dark chimney rise before me. It is a house chimney.
It is on a dark town house. The house has railings,
three floors and a basement for servants and servants
come and go and I am not one of them
In her title poem she echoes nursery-rhyme with tiptoeing repetitions like
rope and bone, rope and bone, you’re not
alone you’re not alone
or
Can you do it,
can you bear it, can you bear not to? Can
you do it, can you bear it, can you bear not to?
She also teases us with line breaks which cause meaning to wriggle away from expectation:
The dog just smiles and wags his tail, as if he’s lost
the power of speech, as if he’d never had it at all
The refrain in the final poem “Agnus” offers a tender variation on standard church liturgy “Lamb, who exalts what the world gets wrong ... feel for us”. Anna Robinson goes some way towards being her own answer to this prayer: she both evokes and displays feeling for the overlooked and forgotten people she is helping us to remember.
If Anna Robinson is mostly invisible behind her cast of characters, Robert Vas Dias is – or at least lets himself appear to be – very much present in Still·Life (Shearsman 2010). (The ‘ ·’ symbol is an integral part of the title just as Anna Robinson’s glottal stop sign is an essential part of some of her poems. ) Vas Dias sometimes plays with the illusion that he is writing the poem for us in real time, sharing his own changes of mind – as in “Natura Morte”
The sky, well, not the sky, the wall
then, is golden, the sun, no,
the light, hazing the objects
on the grey ground, well, a table
more like a dusty plain
It must be said that this hesitancy is not at all annoying. Indeed, when a poem is inspired by a piece of visual art (which is often the case in this collection), it is an effective way of reflecting appropriate ambiguities of interpretation. In fact, Robert Vas Dias seems to favour ambiguity – or at least to advocate open-mindedness – whether he is writing about art or not. The refrain “as if we didn’t know”, which occurs throughout “The Lascaux Variations”, illustrates his concern with how things might be (or how we might see them) if we allowed ourselves to relax our certainties. Sometimes he seems reluctant even to give us too firm a starting point for a poem – “Suppose he sees his wife’s head/as an angular oblong”. That single word “Suppose” invites the reader immediately to consider the possibility that the poem might have been different from what it is.
Vas Dias’s poetic subjects vary widely. He offers several meditations on works of art which both illuminate the image in question and also use it as a speculative jumping off point (literally in the case of “The Leap” and “Bird Man”). Most of these ekphrastic poems will appeal to readers who are not art-addicted; but in any case there are many other topics to choose from. The collection includes a poem involving the US general John Fremont and the poisonous and invasive shrub named after him; and another about a visit to the Normandy Beaches which is interwoven with fragments of eye-witness accounts of the D-Day landings. There are meditations on household objects like teapots and pencil sharpeners and descriptions of encounters with Islington’s animal life. There is also dry humour: a prose poem which begins with a deconstruction of the ticket pricing policy of East Midland Trains is a delight, as is “Domestic Ordinary” which makes a charming progress from custard to global warming. Such diverse themes are well supported by extensive notes and a preface.
Across this range of subject and tone, the poetry is well constructed and sure-footed and includes fine examples of prose poems as well as free-verse pieces, some with regular stanzas and some fairly unstructured. But Vas Dias is also interested in the shape of the poem on the page, showing a liking for an echelon layout as in “The Wilds of London”
Running I must
tell you this:
fox on the doormat
outside the front door
large fox big brush
The spacing and layout here suggest a breathlessness which suits the subject matter; but in other places the formatting becomes more unusual (and less explicable (and less easy to reproduce faithfully)). “Come to the Attention” includes the lines:
Accidents can be
denied, will be
addressed with abuse
s a n c t i o n s
dispensation procedures apply to
all activities
can be life-threatening all
must: cooperate!
(Readers who are not keen on this sort of thing will not find there is too much of it.)
In fact, “Come to the Attention” is an example of a “treated text” – a re-arrangement of found material in a USAF guide to substance abuse. A similar technique is also used in “The Taube” and “How to Save Someone Who’s Hanging from a Cliff” where it works very well to produce a worryingly vertiginous effect:
If you are not safe
you may pull him to safety: pull!
Stand on a surface to help you,
solid footing to help you,
hands to clasp, have the victim climb
as if you have solid footing. Tell him to ...
that he needs to hold very still,
that you are sure will,
or a live tree.
Vas Dias can also produce similarly disorienting effects using all his own words, as in the prose-poem “Moving Bodies” which hovers around the (lack of?) meaning behind measurements of distance.
Still·Life is Robert Vas Dias’s ninth collection and it includes new poems alongside some which have been selected from other publications over the last ten years; but the book as a whole fits very well and enjoyably together. Vas Dias clearly settled on his poetic voice some time ago; but it is pleasing to be able to say that he has retained freshness and variety in using it.
To read these two collections one after the other is a rewarding experience. Both are accomplished and accessible but they present an interesting contrast. The Finders of London belongs to a tradition of narrative poetry that seeks to involve the reader in the episodes and experiences it relates; Still·Life has a more contemporary feel and seems to stand back a little from its subject matter. This is not to say that Vas Dias does not feel deeply about (some of) his material; nor is it to imply that Robinson’s work is old-fashioned. Poets may choose to write in either a “guileless” or a “knowing” vein; and we are fortunate that these two London writers have provided fresh and convincing examples of the merits of each approach.
© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs 2010
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MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS
reviews
Second Exile
by Aleš Macháček & Jane Kirwan
(Rockingham, 2010)
Aleš Macháček was born in 1946 and grew up through the post-war years of communism in Czechoslovakia. He gives a cool but chilling account of the complexity and unpredictability of ordinary life in a totalitarian state, telling his story in a way which is convincing, disturbing and occasionally funny. Jane Kirwan’s tight and economical poems beautifully complement the narrative, sometimes amplifying and engaging with it and sometimes standing back to be almost forensically analytical.
Of course, the book does not attempt to give a systematic history. Characters come and go in a slightly puzzling way against a background of events that English readers may not be very familiar with. There are some helpful explanatory notes but the real strength of the book is not in the detail but in the impression it leaves of life under a dysfunctional system. Although Aleš’s first language is not English, he writes in an easy conversational and slightly deadpan style. This tendency towards understatement is most effective as he describes the arbitrary injustices of a system which imprisoned him and then continued to make his life difficult after his release. Most of the explicit anger in the book is to be found in Jane’s poetry (of which more later).
The slippery nature of ‘facts’ in the Soviet era comes across in Aleš’s use of expressions like So I sort of lie and which is sort of true; and also in his matter-of-fact acceptance of the pervasiveness of corruption, including the need to cheat to pass university entrance examinations. The way in which state paranoia can trickle down to everyday life is conveyed by casual mention that people should tell ‘the authorities’ or your caretaker if anyone comes to stay. Then they would lock up people who let someone sleep in their flat... The state prosecutor’s frighteningly surreal logic regards possession of a forbidden book published in 1918 as proof that since 1918 you’ve been conspiring against the State. In spite of this background of insecurity and irrationality Aleš, even as a thirteen-year-old, seems to show an unusual ability to subvert officialdom. On a school hop-picking trip, a prize is offered for the biggest individual harvest; it is only Aleš who realizes that if he and a friend combine their crop they are sure to share the prize.
The story becomes grimmer when Aleš is arrested and imprisoned for three and a half years for distributing Western books. His description of working conditions in the prison factory should make his readers think twice before using the word ‘pressure’ in relation to their own employment. He has twenty seconds to perform the basic repetitive task he is assigned and until the short breaks [every four hours] I don’t have time to lift my arm and pick up my jar of tea. Things do improve however: after six months I manage to get the extra second to take a drink. The resourcefulness of prisoners in making small comforts out of scraps and leftovers is reminiscent of episodes from the Colditz story.
Matters do not greatly improve when Aleš is released. In spite of being a qualified engineer he is now only able to get menial or dangerous jobs. Eventually he makes his way to London and starts work as a builder. One day someone introduces me to her neighbour who needs a gate fixing. The gate continues to be hopeless but for many years the neighbour listens to my stories and steals them for some poems. Thus it is that Jane Kirwan makes her first appearance in the story.
Jane’s poems respond to Aleš’s experiences with an intensity which reflects the fact that she is his partner in life as well as his co-author. She gives a cinematic quality to the early post-war times of intrigue and confusion: sometimes it is film noir
The meeting is at night, the man waits
for her in a doorway in Nádražní,
collar up, hat tipped, names in his purse
gloves hand-stitched
and he thinks he’ll be trusted.
and sometimes it is a failed comedy
Downstairs they’re not rolling in the aisles,
no one laughs as the small man slides
on goose-fat, lands on the squawking pig.
In contrast to Aleš’s edgy and unsettled growing up, Jane admits that she herself had a relatively sheltered childhood and only saw Mr Holmes / in brown overalls; and reflects that knowing what you knew might have speeded up // this slow accumulation / of calm. She imagines being interrogated and praying you will be able to summon up facts rotting on a shelf with a forgotten tin of cat food. She uses images of slow-moving, careful-stepping water birds like flamingos and cranes to convey the need to tread carefully through the most trivial aspects of life under communism – what’s so hard about translating fudge?
At times, the poems stand back as bitter commentary and accusation. She points the finger at The Man With The Rubber Stamps who took uncertainty and made it truth / with the full weight of his shoulders; and she condemns the StB (secret police) because they skinned the frog, pinned it out and then:
left it twitching
made many notes on how it would react
to pain of different kinds.
They didn’t name it that of course.
They called it an investigation.
Only occasionally does Jane seem to imagine herself into the story, as in the tender and beautiful poem Lásko which accompanies the account of Aleš’s release from prison
The moss is growing up to the gate
please call me if you are coming. I will go to the bridge
and meet you
...
but I might miss you.
I could lie in the hammock, try to read
...
or go back to the lake where we first met.
You might not come...
By the end of the book we feel that we have come some way towards knowing Aleš and Jane. Hence we can feel glad that, after turbulent times, they are now able to enjoy relative calm in a life together that is split between England and the Czech Republic. And yet there is a small coda included in the last few pages which should prevent British readers too easily making smug comparisons between the UK and the old eastern bloc countries. In October 2007, Jane and Aleš join an anti-Trident demonstration at Faslane and are both arrested. Jane is briefly in solitary confinement in Greenock while Aleš finds himself in a Clydebank cell with two others for 24 hours. (Of the three he is, presumably, the most seasoned gaol-bird.) Paradoxically, although he admits that on this occasion he actually has broken a law, he feels innocent; yet when he was arrested in Czechoslovakia, he felt guilty even though he had actually done nothing wrong.
Second Exile is a fascinating and compellingly written book; and Rockingham Press is to be congratulated on publishing it.
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© MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS, November 2010
