Opened Ground: Seamus Heaney

Opened Ground:  Poems 1966-1996

Seamus Heaney

Faber and Faber

I love Seamus Heaney's poetry and I have a few scattered collections - Stations, Death of a Naturalist - but I've recently treated myself to this because it covers most of Seamus' collections, from the first in 1966  right up to The Spirit Level in 1996.  This gives a wonderful overview of the development of his work and it also includes his Nobel lecture 'Crediting Poetry'.

Seamus chose the poems to be included himself, weeding out ones he was no longer happy with and some of the poems were re-written, though the alterations are so minor it's difficult to find any differences.

All my favourites are there - The Forge, Digging, The Barn, Churning Day, and his prose poem The Stations of the West, which describes how he was sent to the Gaeltacht to learn Gaelic and hoped, perhaps, to learn something of the Celtic mysteries.  These visions are denied the child, but there are other kinds of revelation. It ends:

'Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days in that upper room when all around me seemed to prophesy.  But still I would recall the stations of the west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Ranna-fast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh;  names portable as altar stones, unleavened elements.'

Other favourites are the poems about his childhood home, Mossbawn, political poems such as The Ministry of Fear, Oysters, The Skunk - his erotic poem to his wife, peeling potatoes with Mary Heaney in 'Clearances', then the beautiful Postscript, and finally Song -

'There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.'

Yes, that's it exactly - that's what the poetry does. Words like 'big, soft buffetings' that come at you sideways 'And catch the heart off guard and blow it open'.

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber

What Light Can Do: Robert Hass

Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World.

I've always loved the poetry of Robert Hass, (I have his Apple Trees at Olema) though I had never read any of his essays.  Now, this is rapidly becoming one of my favourite books - on Kindle - and I'm buying a hard copy to read and re-read and underline and scribble in the margins - it's that kind of book.  What he says, and the way he says it, makes it a must-read.

In a week when Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot prize for poetry I re-read an essay sub-titled 'Poor Monkeys and the White Business in the Trees'.  It's a thoughtful discussion of autobiographical poetry about families.  Hass points out that it was a new subject when Robert Lowell published 'Life Studies' in 1959.  'It is a fact,'  Hass observes, 'that [you] can learn nothing about the aunts or the grandmothers of John Donne, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope... John Keats, Emily Dickinson or Robert Browning' from their poetry.  He also feels that it may be a particularly American phenomenon.  'American poetry is full of aunts and grandmothers, but French poetry isn't, or Serbian poetry or Arabic or Brazilian or for that matter, English poetry'. Robert Hass takes us through some theories of Why this might be, which I found fascinating.

One of the essays is a deliberation on war - particularly the Iraq war.  'How did this happen?' Hass asks.  'And why are ordinary Americans not being driven crazy by it?'  The answer he supplies is 'fear, anger and ignorance'.   How could ordinary people be expected to know that 'bombing Saddam Hussein because of a terrorist act perpetrated by Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Muslim terrorists would seem to the people in the Middle East an act of pure aggression against all Islamic cultures by a power that could not distinguish among them.'  But government and the educated media should have been able to and Hass castigates them for their failure to do so, accusing them of 'morally culpable ignorance'.  He states that  'The moral and intellectual failure of American journalists and of political and policy intellectuals was breathtaking'.

There are several 'major' essays in the book;  one of them on 'Chekhov's Anger', which told me quite a lot I didn't know about the author's life as well as providing an illuminating analysis of the work.  Chekhov apparently began his career writing for comic newspapers and magazines in 19th century Russia - the same kind of 'penny dreadfuls' that Herbert Allingham wrote for in Britain.  Chekhov's grandfather had been a serf who had bought his freedom and become a bailiff - the classic case of poacher turning gamekeeper.  Chekhov's father was a small shop-keeper who went bankrupt when he was only 16 and the family moved to Moscow.  Chekhov began publishing stories, sketches and jokes to pay his way through a medical degree.  Soon he was keeping the whole family.

Robert Hass is very good on these early mass-market stories which were the 'equivalent of newspaper cartoons'.  it taught Chekhov a lot about writing - particularly economy.  This is Chekhov writing to Gorky - 'cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you like.  You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out'.

Hass points out that these early commercial stories have the same structure as the later stories that Chekhov is famous for.  'They depend on a surprise ending, usually, though not always on dramatic reversal, and the surprise in in one way or another wounding . . .  The gasp that the story evokes, the little cry of surprise and discovery, comes out not just because the ending surprises, but because it fits'.  The stories are also witty and it is 'the terrible presence of wit' that takes the stories from pathos into tragedy.  Chekhov knew what he was doing in his fiction and his drama.  'I finish every act as I do my stories;  I keep the action calm and quiet till the end, then I punch the audience in the face.'

Chekhov's anger came from the violent treatment meted out by his father, which he couldn't forgive, as well as the social injustice he witnessed in a Russia building up to civil war.  Anger, Hass observes, can be 'the wellspring of art'.  It reminds me of  Katherine Mansfield, who said that one of the 'kick offs' for her was a 'cry against corruption'.  Anger motivated many of her stories, and Chekhov was one of her big influences.   She too, wrote only short stories, never a novel.

There are other wonderful essays in this book - 'Howl at Fifty' takes another look at Ginsberg 50 years on and compares the style of it to passages from the Waste Land (I'd never made the connection with Eliot before, but it's so obvious I now feel stupid!).  He describes Howl as 'a kind of exploded, hallucinatory autobiography'.  He talks about the genesis of Moloch and observes that 'Moloch has still got hold of a good chunk of the American soul'.

I also loved 'Imagining the Earth' - his essays on eco-poetry and literature, and one on 'Teaching Poetry' which I can't even begin to precis.  It touches on the oral nature of poetry on the page - poetry is 'a kind of speech that's meant to be said by others'.   In other essays he explores the connections between poetry and the natural world. He is pessimistic about our generation's custodianship of the planet. 'What a depleted world our students are inheriting'.  Will they be able to save it? 'The task may be beyond us.'   But  'We have to act as if we can accomplish it, as if we can preserve that richness and diversity.  We have to act as if the soul gets to choose.'

I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves literature - it's a great companion volume to Robert Hass's collected poems too.  Thoughtful, profound, outspoken - the writings of a compassionate individual who is also a great poet.

What Light Can Do:  Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World.
Robert Hass.

The Apple Trees at Olema:  New and Selected Poems
Robert Hass.

Michelle McGrane: A Suitable Girl

A Suitable Girl was published by Pindrop Press in 2010, but I've only just caught up with it.  Now I regret not reading it sooner.  This is a wonderful collection that displays a breadth of technique across a range of very different poems.   There's a sci-fi sequence 'Lunar Postcards', prose poems that can also be poetic flash fiction, a series of moving elegies to the poet's father,  lyrical poems that sing, and muscular poems that celebrate language.  There's a sensuality in all the poems, (I loved 'Thirteen Ways with Figs') and they all tell stories.  The words are rich and powerful, creating strong visual effects. 

This is from the story of an Irish sailor-woman:

'Through flags of smoke, a square-rigged galley, its blackjack flapping as corsairs swarmed aboard. Snugging the stock into my shoulder, I picked out a flinty crag of a man bawling like the divil hisself and assailing my lads with a boarding axe.'

And in 'The Recalcitrant Muse':
'Sunlight blisters through moth-eaten curtains.
In her mildewed apartment high above the city,
the Muse stumbles out of bed, stubs her toe
in the kitchen as she fumbles for a cigarette,
reheats last night's coffee and loneliness....

'Frangipani Night' is one of my favourite poems because it conjures Africa for me - excessive, sensual, cruel.  The boiling of a live lobster, a moth immolating itself in a candle flame, fruit bats and baobab trees, the decomposing blossoms of the frangipani - whose cloying smell always reminds me of death.

'We sit in silence gazing into darkness,
a coconut shell of shredded seafood
and a bottle of cheap Malagasy rum between us.
The frangipani blossoms strewn on the table
have started to wither, brown at the edges,
spotting a trail of milky sap
across our makeshift tablecloth.'

Michelle is particularly good at taking us back in time.  She takes us along the corpse road in Ireland, or out to sea in 'Terra Marique Potens'.  We sit with Mary Shelley watching the gulf of La Spezia for the glimpse of a sail, and with the Tsarina Alexandra at Ipatiev, oblivious of her imminent execution.  We observe Marie Antoinette aged fourteen, stripped for inspection as she becomes the Dauphine of France.  The range of characters includes Bertha Mason, Madame Bovary, an African mother - and not a suitable girl in sight. In fact, the women are all quite feisty!

Half the Secret

you could never have accused me of being pretty.
I was what they called handsome
like a favoured brood mare or wolfhound bitch.

Renowned, I could outrun every girl on the island
and most of the boys.  I could swim like the wild salmon
and shoot a birch knot at thirty paces.

I could clad a byre-house with wattle and daub
and midwife a milch cow.  I could till and tend herb-beds
and haul turf from the hillsides.

Only once did I long for golden hair, when
Cuán Ó Ruadháin danced with Mairéad Ó Riain  
on the eve of the Midsummer Fair.

For me, a good poem is one that doesn't give up everything at first reading, but has more layers to be unpacked at the next visit.  These are good poems.

A Suitable Girl  © Michelle McGrane, Pindrop Press, 2010.

Also check out Michelle's wonderful poetry review site 'Peony Moon'.

Brain Turner: Here Bullet and Phantom Noise

Brian Turner served as a US soldier in the middle east and in the Bosnian war in Yugoslavia.   Everything in these poems he has seen, heard or felt.   Here Bullet comes from his active service, Phantom Noise from the trauma of trying to reintegrate into civilian life afterwards.
 
The poet puts in front of us Wilfred Owen’s ‘pity of war’ as well as Yeats’ ‘terrible beauty’ with the minimum of words and economical imagery.  There is no hyperbole, no gratuitous violence, pathos or horror just for effect.  Brian Turner lets us enter an unimaginable world where human beings are stretched beyond their limits of endurance, where extremes are ‘normal’.   The horror is never condoned. They are trained to kill, but Turner gives a warning in a poem called  Sadiq -

‘It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequence
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists my friend,
it should break your heart to kill’

For me one of the highlights of this collection was the prose poem ‘Last Night’s Dream’ dedicated to Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love and war.  The poem records the catastrophic result of any kind of love or union between two opposed cultures, however much it may be longed for by individuals.  Though it also seems to be saying that it is only through love that true understanding can be achieved.

‘In the dream she kisses Arabic into my skin and I understand every word of it, I transcribe it backwards into cuneiform and stone, I rename the arteries and veins for every river and wadi from Dohuk north to Basra south, I feel for this geography of pleasure, my tongue is a marker that writes even in the rain, even in salt and sweat, and I write with it now, over every curve and turn of her body.

In his dream they fuse together and their explosive love-making destroys everything around them.  ‘As we kiss on, long into the denouement of skin and fire, where medevac helicopters fly in the dark caverns of our lungs in search of the wounded, and we breathe them one to another, a deep rotorwash of pain and bandages.’

There are graphic images from war of slowness, hours and hours of waiting and watching, keyed up for action.  
‘And the hours pass the way helicopters
hover above the palm groves
or the way Fiorillo reads letters from his wife
with a red lens flashlight, down in the troop hold.’

In Night in Blue the soldier is leaving Iraq and finds language inadequate to express what he has experienced.

‘At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights
blacked out under the wings and America waiting,
a year of my life disappears at midnight.......

I have no words to speak of war. ....

I have only the shadows under the leaves
to take with me, the quiet of the desert,
the low fog of Balad, orange groves
with ice forming on the rinds of fruit.
I have a woman crying in my ear
late at night when the stars go dim,
moonlight and sand as a resonance
of the dust of bones, and nothing more.

Turner's poetry stands with the poetry of other middle eastern poets - Iraqi or Palestinian - it goes beyond politics, articulating what war does to people - physically and mentally.  It asks the question why?  Points out the idiocy of it all, the pointless destruction.

There are beautiful, sensual descriptions of the middle eastern landscape:-

‘Cowbirds rest in the groves of date palms,
whole flocks of them, white as flowers
blossoming into wings when the wind rises up.’
[Jameel]

I haven't read war poetry in the English language as powerful as Turner's since I read Wilfred Owen.
As one reviewer put it: the poems ‘leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.’

More importantly for me, all the poems reference arabic poets and the long tradition of poetry in the middle east, with quotations and epigraphs, Brian Turner fitting his own work alongside theirs in a way that makes conflict between the east and west appear obscene.

Phantom Noise allows us to experience what it feels like to come back to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, in a place of relative safety.  The world of shopping malls and relationships, where every nail becomes a pin from a weapon, every car hides a bomb, the street a booby trap.  The woman in bed with you faces away from you to avoid the war video running in your eyes as you look at her.

Returning soldiers who have seen and done the unspeakable, carry the war inside them like an invisible wound.  The film of it plays and replays in their heads.  Post traumatic stress syndrome isn’t an illness, it’s an alteration of the personality, changing the way the world is seen and experienced.  Brian Turner writes from within it, with supreme intelligence.  If the reader was a fibre optic probe inside the soldier’s brain, we couldn’t have a view more graphic than this.

Personally, I think Here Bullet is the better of the two collections, but it was Phantom Noise that was short-listed for the TS Eliot prize.   Both collections are published by Bloodaxe and are also available on E-platforms. 

Robert Bringhurst: The Tree of Meaning

A Story as Sharp as a Knife was the first book of Robert Bringhurst’s that I read and I found it so interesting I began to look around for others.   The Tree of Meaning is a collection of essays, which were given as lectures on the subjects of language, mind and ecology.  Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘it’s one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head - a profound mediation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on the habits of thought and feeling that inform them.’   It’s also about how we use language to make sense of the world, and how we can learn the language of the universe and develop a sustainable relationship with it. 

Robert Bringhurst is known for his work on the mythology and literature of the Haida nation.   When challenged about why he spends so much time learning and researching ‘extinct’ languages, he responds that they are of great practical value to us.  ‘They are the legacy, after all, of peoples who knew how to live in this land for thousands of years without wrecking it.’

Like fossils in rock, these languages tell us a lot about ourselves as well as the people who used them and are a cautionary tale for the present. ‘A language is a life-form, like a species of plant or animal.  Once extinct, it is gone forever.  And as each one dies, the intellectual gene pool of the human species shrinks.’  We lose knowledge that can’t be replaced; we lose diversity and progress further and further towards monoculture.  ‘The structure of meaning,’ Bringhurst asserts, ‘is polyphonic’ - the more voices we lose, the nearer we get to monotony.   A culture is an ecosystem - ‘the community we create for one another’ that enables us to function as a human organism.

He refers to the colonial policies that have led to the mass extinction of languages and cultures.  Bringhurst thinks that the greatest danger to the planet is ‘those who think the world belongs to them’ rather than those who think they belong to the world.  Cultures are still being wiped out and Bringhurst cites the recent Bosnian war ‘where a tradition of oral, epic poetry survived from Homer’s time ....... now, at this moment, the villages in which those poets lived are rubble and mass graves.’

He homes in on our increasing numbers and the flawed logic of consumerism - ‘endlessly increasing material wealth for an endlessly increasing number of humans is a suicidal dream’.  I have to agree with him, particularly when he identifies the moment it all went wrong - the moment when commerce changed from a public service meeting the needs of the community, to a predator, creating needs and strengthening demands ‘turning them into addictions which cause material goods to turn into drugs’.   He doesn’t claim to have answers, but he asks questions and thinks around them in an intelligent way.
 
But he’s best on language and poetry.  All language, he reminds us, is metaphor - standing in for the thing itself.  What makes a poem?  In poetry ‘it is not the text that counts.  However remarkable this text may be, its poetic quality depends on its author having known how to keep alive in it the light of what is beyond language.’  And he’s very good on metaphor.   ‘In every tuneful metaphor, an interval is sounded.  It is heard in the mind’s eye, or the mind’s ear ..... Two disjunct constituents of reality are evoked, on top of one another, like two bells rung at once.  The interval is the simultaneous consonance and difference between them.’

Simone Weil wrote that the purpose of works of art ‘is to testify, after the fashion of blossoming apple trees and stars.’  Poetry, Bringhurst adds, ‘is the thinking of things’.  Though this resonates with me at an emotional level, I’m not entirely sure what he means by it in plain words. It made me think of Rilke’s lines from the Duino Elegies:

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -
possibly: Pillar, Tower?... but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.
               
A tree has its own truth, a plant or a rock, or a star - anything we say about them can only be at second hand - though as a writer I try to get as close as I can to Rilke’s intense ‘saying’.   Stories and poems grow like trees from the roots of our language - as human beings we crave them.  These are what Robert Bringhurst calls the ‘trees of meaning’, trees that embody the whole history of our culture and take their place in the forest of cultures that have grown during the lifetime of human existence on the planet.  Every tree that is cut down impoverishes our literature and our lives.

According to Bringhurst, the original text is the world itself, a text that we, in our urban, consumer-driven citadels, are increasingly unable to interpret, even as our scientific knowledge of it grows.  The general message of the book is that if we don’t see ourselves as part of the ecology - the forest - of the whole planet, if we continue to exterminate other cultures and species instead of cultivating diversity, we won’t survive, and our stories and mythologies will die with us.

It’s absolutely true, but I can’t help believing that somewhere, somehow, a small group of humans will survive the catastrophe and become feral and their language too will escape into the wild, throw down new roots and grow new branches.   I can’t imagine what it will look like, but on one of the twigs there just might be the story of a man and a woman, a utopia, and a fruit that gave forbidden knowledge and brought expulsion, destruction and ruin.

Robert Hass: The Apple Trees at Olema

Robert Hass - New and Selected Poems

The American poet Robert Hass wasn’t someone I’d taken much notice of until a Tuesday Poem friend shared ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’.  It was extraordinary - not just the way the poet used words, but the thread of reasoning that moved through the poem.  This was a poem about love, memory, longing (‘desire is full/of endless distances), and language itself:
                 .......‘the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.’

So I looked for more of Robert Hass’s work. The Apple Trees at Olema runs to 352 pages and contains a selection from five previous volumes and a generous helping of new work, so I thought it would be a good introduction and I was right.   This isn’t a book to skim through.  I’ve taken months and months reading carefully through the different sections, reading and thinking, reading and underlining, going backwards and forwards.  Now that I’ve finished the collection I’m about to start again - this time just dipping in and out to remind myself, to go swimming in poetry that is unique and exceptional. 

He has a gift for choosing images and phrases that lodge in your mind; ‘Quiver dipped the nib of his pen/into the throat of the inkwell.’   ‘The wind-chivvied water,’ ‘The sky is inventing a Web site called newest azure.’  ‘They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.’  ‘Where the fat green figs hung like so many scrotums/among the leaves.’  Poetry - language - is itself a kind of translation.  Robert Hass writes  ‘as if language were a kind of moral cloud chamber/through which the world passed and from which it emerged charged/with desire.’   

Hass translates Czeslaw Milosz, as well as Japanese poetry and each poem has a depth of knowledge behind it of European and eastern traditions, history, psychology and philosophy.   You’re aware of this hinterland as you read, but you don’t need to know any of it to understand the poems.   Louise Gluck described his work as ‘entirely his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to human and non-human nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual’.

Some of the poems are autobiographical - growing up with an alcoholic mother, the break-up of a marriage, death of a brother.   But it’s the way he tells stories that impresses me most.  Some of the longer poems seem to be short fiction (one of them is called Novella), the shorter ones could qualify as flash fiction - and it could be argued that they’re prose poetry - they cross the borderlines of genre.  Because it’s flash fiction day in the UK tomorrow, I thought I’d quote one of the poems from his collection Human Wishes.  'Museum' has a lot of resonance for me because I visited the same museum and looked at the work of Käthe Kollwitz, just at a time when eastern Europe was emerging from behind the Iron Curtain.  Robert Hass manages to get the whole experience into a very small space.

Museum

On the morning of the Käthe Kollwitz exhibit, a young man and woman come into the museum restaurant.  She is carrying a baby; he carries the air-freight edition of the Sunday New York Times.  She sits in a high-backed wicker chair, cradling the infant in her arms.  He fills a tray with fresh fruit, rolls, and coffee in white cups and brings it to the table.  His hair is tousled, her eyes are puffy.  They look like they were thrown down into sleep and then yanked out of it like divers coming up for air.  He holds the baby.  She drinks coffee, scans the front page, butters a roll, and eats it in their little corner in the sun.  After a while, she holds the baby.  He reads the Book Review and eats some fruit. Then he holds the baby while she finds the section of the paper she wants and eats fruit and smokes.  They’ve hardly exchanged a look.  Meanwhile, I have fallen in love with this equitable arrangement, and with the baby who cooperates by sleeping.   All around them are faces Käthe Kollwitz carved in wood of people with no talent or capacity for suffering who are suffering the numbest kinds of pain: hunger, helpless terror.  But this young couple is reading the Sunday paper in the sun, the baby is sleeping, the green has begun to emerge from the rind of the cantaloupe, and everything seems possible. 


Quoted under the Fair Usage Agreement for the purposes of comment and review.

The Apple Trees at Olema is published in UK by Bloodaxe Books (there's a good video clip of Hass reading) and in the USA by Ecco Press (Harper Collins)  

Martin Figura: Whistle

I’ve often been disappointed by poetry cabaret performances at literature festivals - so often over-acted, precious, amateurish, with a lack of balance between poetry and cyber-technology - it’s rare to see something really good. So I approached ‘Whistle’ with a degree of scepticism. And was unprepared to be blown away by it.

It’s very low-tech - a video projector unobtrusively parked, a stage with low lighting, a screen for the black and white images. Martin Figura came on-stage and stood, equally unobtrusively, behind the microphone in the shadows at the side of the screen, dressed in black and white. He began to speak and the images began to flicker across the screen and I was immediately lost in the story.

My mother and I pose in Sunday best
in front of a cottage with roses
around the door. She dreams .....

The performance is a blend of poems, letters read by a female voice (his wife, the poet Helen Ivory), and his own narrative links. There are no pyrotechnics, no special effects, no emotions except those generated by the words themselves and their relationships with the images. I was moved, delighted, saddened, and moved again by the story that unfolded.

When Martin was 9 his father, a polish refugee who came to Britain during the war, murdered Martin’s mother.

‘Through the wall, it causes no more than a ripple
on the surface of milk....’

His father - diagnosed with mental health problems - was placed in Broadmoor, and Martin and his two sisters were consigned to boarding schools and orphanages after an uncle and aunt decided they couldn’t give them a home. Salvation came in the shape of the Piggotts - a large catholic family who had been neighbours and who rescued Martin from school to bring him up as one of their own brood.

‘Taken prisoner by this bashing, clouting clan. Jammed between
Danny and John, the second and third boys with their shock
white hair and flying fists. Dragged through lanes and hedges
into ponds and up trees for birds’ eggs. ......
Flying over fields on the Honda fifty, being chased
by the mad dog. The mad dog burying bones in your bed;
hurling itself downstairs.......
Family parties at the drop of a hat: party cans and egg-
rolls, trifles and crisps, hokey-cokeys and terrible dancing
to Status Quo.....'

The poems try to claim fragments of memory to bring his mother June to life. There are a few black and white photographs of her as a young woman, a young wife, quotes from her letters, a glimpse of her daily life.

Her own face appears in the furniture.
She shines small brass animals back to life.
A tiny kitchen disappears into the mist

of an afternoon. A sponge cake rises
behind the oven door. He watches
the last slow hour on the factory clock.

... we can nurse baby for half an hour and then you must put him to bed. I insist on this as I want him to know his Daddy as much as me. He must grow up to love us equally. We must give him a good life so he will be proud of us.

Poems reconstruct a family history, trace the rehabilitation of Martin’s father, and the awkward attempts at a relationship after his release.

The girl I’m going to marry
sits with a cup of tea on her lap
while Dad fusses over the gravy,
peels the potatoes under the tap.....

It’s a stunning show because it’s so honest and doesn’t try to push any buttons. There are just the words and the images. Martin is also a photographer, so he knows how to use visual imagery.

I bought the collection, published by Arrowhead Press, so that I could read the poems again. And as I read, I can see the images floating through my head. What it would be like to read the poems without those images, I don’t know, but I have a feeling that they still stand up. Poetry as narrative autobiography is rare - and even rarer when it works as this does. Whistle has won awards, notably at the Edinburgh Festival, and it deserves them.

Martin Figura 'Strange Boy' is my Tuesday Poem over at http://www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

Clips from the show   http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/whistle-clips/

Martin’s website   http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/

Buy the book here:   http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/whistle.html   

Stanley Plumly: Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me

Stanley Plumley sounds more like a Yorkshire shop-keeper than an American poet, but names are deceptive. He’s one of their best. Plumley is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and published by CCC - an imprint of HarperCollins publishing. Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me is a collection of new and selected dating from 1970 to 2000. It’s arranged in reverse chronological order because the publishers want you to read from the new poems back to the ones he started out with. I tried to read it like that, but found myself giving up and going to the back of the book, reading through his life from young man to old man (he was born in 1939). My favourite poems are from the early period - his first collection ‘In the Outer Dark’.

Many of the poems are autobiographical - which is probably why it makes more sense to start at the beginning. His relationship with his mother is told in personal, affectionate detail as in ‘My Mother’s Feet’

                 ‘How no shoe fit them,
and how she used to prop them,
having dressed for bed,
letting the fire in the coal stove blue

and blink out, falling asleep in her chair.
How she bathed and dried them, night after night,
and rubbed their soreness like an intimacy.
How she let the fire pull her soft body through them.’


his alcoholic father,

‘I watched you humble a man in a fight once -
he went down like an animal whose spirit
world has suddenly collapsed and all that’s left
in the wounded moment after is not quite
animal nor man. He was big, which made
his humility that much larger, and there
was blood but so little that it seemed less like
a fight than a conversion. You had his right
arm at the wrist in your right hand and simply
turned him down onto the floor, which stank of wear
and sawdust. I’d seen you break the back of wood
like that. The man wept, he was drunk, you were drunk
and at the same time sober. He was my size
now. And in his eyes I could see his children .......’

Many of the poems are personal observations of the relationships around him - trying to make sense of them.

‘People are standing, as if out of the rain,
holding on. For the last two blocks
the woman across the aisle has wept
quietly into her hands, the whole
of her upper body nodding, keeping time.
The bus is slow enough you can hear,
inside your head, the traffic within
traffic, like another talk.’

There are prose poems, and beautiful exercises in observation, such as ‘In Answer to Amy’s Question What’s a Pickerel’

‘Pickerel have infinite, small bones, and skins
of glass and black ground glass, and though small for pike
are no less wall-eyed and their eyes like bone.
Are fierce for their size, and when they flare
at the surface resemble drowning birds, .......

But through all of it, the poet’s voice, with a quiet tone of enquiry and exploration, is steady and consistent and extraordinarily likeable. My favourite poem, even after I’d read the whole collection, remains the title poem ‘Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me’.

We lie in that other darkness, ourselves.
There is less than the width of my left hand
between us. I can barely breathe,
but the light breathes easily,
wind on water across our two still bodies.

I cannot even turn to see him.
I would not touch him. Nor would I lift
my arm into the crescent of a moon.
(There is no star in the sky of this room,
only the light fashioning fish along the walls.
They swim and swallow one another.)

I dream we lie under water,
caught in our own sure drift.
A window, white shadow, trembles over us.
Light breaks into a moving circle.
He would not speak and I would not touch him.

It is an ocean under here.
Whatever two we were, we become
our falling body one breath. Night lies down
at the sleeping center - no fish, no shadow,
no single, turning light. And I would not touch him
who lies deeper in the drifting dark than life.

Now All Roads Lead to France: Matthew Hollis

I'm always happy when I see a biography of a poet written by a poet.   Matthew Hollis is one of the 'poetry whizz-kids' in Britain - someone who has won all the prizes going and has now ventured into biography with this study of Edward Thomas.

It's one of the new breed of biography - that tackles one aspect or one period of a life rather than ploughing through the whole thing.  This one is very cleverly done.  Edward Thomas's whole life is reflected and discussed in consideration of the most important five years of his life - the years just before his death, when he began to write poetry rather than prose.

Central to the story is Thomas's meeting with Robert Frost who had sold up all his possessions and come to England in a gamble to launch his own career as a poet, feeling overlooked in America.  For 5 years the two men talked, corresponded, shared their work and encouraged each other.  There are echoes of their conversations in each other's poetry - compare Thomas's 'The Signpost' with Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'.  The book is very good on their relationship.  But I don't always agree with Matthew Hollis's analysis of the poems.

In the background is the (one can't help but feel) tragic relationship between Edward Thomas and his wife Helen.  The youthful marriage he came to regret so much that he sometimes treated his wife with considerable emotional cruelty, and which seems to have precipitated  long episodes of depression.   Thomas had love affairs with 3 other women (one a very young girl) which may or may not have been platonic, but all deeply troubling to his wife.  One feels pity on both sides.

There is always a narrative hook at the end of a life abruptly terminated.  The question mark -  what would he have written/done/said if he had lived beyond the war?  We can't know.   The question mark hovers in the concluding lines of his own poems and is one reason we are so drawn to them - the other reason is the poignancy of the foreshadowing - the poet's own haunting uncertainty - matched with our own reading of the poems with the knowledge of how the story really ended.

Edward Thomas's poetry is better, much better, than I remembered from reading it years ago.  Let's pass over the much quoted Adlestrop, and his poem 'To Helen' (the meaning of which changes once you know the background).    Thomas's collected poems are available to download in a number of formats, free, at the Gutenburg Project.   Read Bright Clouds, The Long Small Room, Liberty, It Rains, In Memoriam,  Lights Out (written after he went to France, believing he would die), There's Nothing Like the Sun, and the poem that he wrote last to finish the collection 'Words'.  Then read the biography.

Lights Out (excerpt)

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book,
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Under Storm's Wing: Edward Thomas

A Memoir of a life with Edward Thomas
By
Helen and Myfanwy Thomas

I’ve been reading this as an introduction and another perspective to Now All Roads Lead to France - Matthew Hollis’s account of the last 5 years of Edward Thomas’s life, when he began to write poetry seriously and enlisted in the war that was to kill him with such casual cruelty.

Helen Thomas’s memoir is a personal and passionate account of her relationship with the poet - how they met as teenagers, and became lovers in spite of their parents’ disapproval.  Her frank accounts of their youthful, innocent love making in the open air are quite beautiful, marking her out as a writer of talent in her own right.

They married (secretly) while Edward was still at Oxford, because she was pregnant and, although she was happy to live in a free relationship, Edward wanted to protect her reputation.  It was hard for the two young people.  Edward Thomas found it difficult to get enough free-lance writing work as an essayist, reviewer and hack biographer.  He suffered from depression and often had to go away and live by himself, leaving Helen to cope with the children alone.

 He fell in love with other women, or they fell in love with him - Eleanor Farjeon was one - and, although Helen skims over this - it must have been hard for her to cope with.  Behind her careful sentences there lurks the suspicion that there were times when ET wished that he was free and single and not burdened with the task of supporting a wife and three children. But Helen’s account asserts that they loved each other profoundly and this held them together, like trees strongly rooted in the ground, whatever storms were blowing in the branches. 

Helen writes of ET’s friendship with Robert Frost, who encouraged him to write poetry seriously - though it was never commercially published while he was alive.  The good thing about this edition (bought second hand)  is that some of the letters between ET and Robert Frost are included in a separate section.

The poem ‘To Helen’ was, apparently, written for her and given to her the night Edward Thomas left for France.  He died, not in action, but quietly smoking his pipe outside the observation post, when a shell whistled past him so closely, the blast stopped his heart.

Now to read Matthew Hollis’s biography which, I suspect, since both Helen and her children are long dead, may tell a slightly different story.

Mahmoud Darwish: Unfortunately, it was Paradise

It’s been a significant week for political dates. This weekend was the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and the subject of much celebration. But not in the middle east, which was subsequently carved up by the victorious allied forces and land apportioned in ways that have led to most of the conflicts of our recent history - most fundamental of all the partitioning of Palestine without any safeguards for the Palestinian people, twenty per cent of whom are Christian.
May 6th wasn’t just the election, it was the last night of the Palestine Festival of Literature - an amazing event that celebrates the poetry and prose of the middle east, as well as including a number of British and American authors. The line up included Ahdaf Soueif (brilliant short stories as well as the Map of Love), Henning Mankell, Michael Palin, Carmen Callil, Deborah Moggach and Claire Messud.
Palestine has, over the years, produced some brilliant writers and poets including Kalil Gibran. Right at the top would have to be Mahmoud Darwish who died in 2008 and was regarded as the poet laureate and international voice of the Palestinian people - ‘a poet sharing the fate of his people, living in a town under siege, while providing them with a language for their anguish and dreams’. But he always declined to be involved with any form of extremism, deploring the excesses of Hamas. Mahmoud was born in Galilee in either 1941 or 42. Six years later the Israeli army occupied the area, bulldozing over four hundred Palestinian villages with their tanks. Mahmoud’s family were among those who fled over the border into Lebanon to escape the massacres that followed. When they returned, a year later, they discovered that because they had not been there to be ‘counted’ among the survivors, they were illegal immigrants into their own country and became what were described as ‘internal refugees’.
Mahmoud Darwish began writing poetry while still at school, though he was banned from reciting it. Eventually, like so many, he left for a life of permanent exile, stateless and therefore without a passport.
‘All the birds followed
My hand to the barriers of a distant airport.
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white graves
All the borders
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the dark eyes
All the eyes were with me
But they crossed them out of the passport.
Deprived of a name, of an identity,
In a land I tended with both hands?’

But his poetry also celebrates the way that art can transcend oppression - the founding principle of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Mahmoud Darwish is always optimistic, always looking forward.
‘I have witnessed the massacre
I am a victim of a map
I am the son of plain words
I have seen pebbles flying
I have seen dew drops as bombs
When they shut the gates of my heart on me
Built barricades and imposed a curfew
My heart turned into an alley
My ribs into stones
And carnations grew
And carnations grew.

Darwish grew up reading the poetry of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amicai, and there is always an acknowledgement of the shared cultural and historical heritage of the Israeli and the Arab. They all came originally from Mesopotamia, and all acknowledge Abraham as their ancestor. The old testament is an account of shared history. In Darwish’s words:
‘We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets, and are born again in the language of nomads’
And he can ask, in the voice of the murdered Abel (a story which is also told in the Koran), ‘Brother... My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?’

His latest collection is ‘Unfortunately it was Paradise’ published by the University of California Press. It’s a joint translation by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche and I don’t like it as much as the earlier translations by Abdullah al-Udhari. These new translations are less lyrical, less true to the spirit of the arabic originals. There are infelicities, such as ‘This is my language, this sound is the twinge of my blood.’ But the message always comes through.

In his journal of a visit to Ramallah ‘A River Dies of Thirst’ he writes: "Hope is not the opposite of despair, it is a talent." And in this poetry, written after he had experienced the first of the series of heart attacks that would eventually kill him, there is a fervent affirmation of the existence of hope.
‘What does life say to Mahmoud Darwish?
You lived, fell in love, learned, and all those you will finally love are dead?
In this hymn we lay a dream, we raise a victory sign, we hold a key to the last door,
to lock ourselves in a dream. But we will survive because life is life.’

On the PalFest website there are a number of author’s blogs written by the visiting writers. Most were shocked by what they found and the way that they were treated as they tried to get into Palestine under the auspices of the British Council.
Carmen Callil writes:
Everywhere there are checkpoints and Israeli soldiers, many of them young women, young girls really, all of them draped in weapons, smoking in our faces as they grudgingly allow our bus of writers to proceed from A to B. ....Everywhere we see Jewish Settlements crowding out the old Palestinian towns. There are new settlements and the beginnings of hundreds more. Curfews, roads blocked, areas where only Israelis can go. Towns and villages closed off and hacked to pieces by road blocks, checkpoints and walls. Labels, tickets, permissions, queries, intermittent water, constant harassment and constant questioning’.
Follow the link here for more and for a wonderful, moving video of the final event of the festival, where writers gave short readings.

I’m a great fan of a singer called Reem Kelani - British, but the child of Palestinian refugees. She is also a musicologist who has travelled the world collecting the traditional songs of the Palestinian diaspora. She performs often with Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon and his Orient House ensemble and she often sings settings of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish. There is quite a lot of her music on YouTube, but this is just an introduction.

Eavan Boland: Women Writing Outside History

Living and writing in twenty first century Europe, it’s easy to take much for granted where the politics of women and poetry are concerned; to forget that there was a time when the two words existed across a gulf of gender prejudice and cultural assumptions. There are also, in Britain, other problems to be surmounted. As Deryn Rees-Jones writes in ‘Consorting with Angels’, ‘the legacy of British Imperialism, and the divisions and difficulties set up within notions of Britishness in relation to both Black and Asian as well as Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities’ extends far beyond the gender question, and adds another level of complexity.

Reading Eavan Boland’s account of what it was like to become a woman poet in post-war Ireland, confronting all these issues, is fascinating. She clearly felt a lack of permission to write, as a woman, about ‘the feminine’, her body, her experience, her politics. ‘I know now that I began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. I became used to the flawed space between them. In a certain sense, I found my poetic voice by shouting across that distance.’ She reminds us that there was a time when female experience was considered either an unsuitable subject for a poem, or one of only minor significance - male experience was ‘universal’; female experience ‘domestic’. Boland’s volume of autobiographical essays, ‘Object Lessons’ records her struggle to make her life and her womanhood the central subject-matter of the poem. ‘I wanted there to be no contradiction between the way I made an assonance to fit a line and the way I lifted up a child at night.’

I find a lot of resonances in Eavan Boland’s poetry. I am third generation Irish - part of the Irish diaspora in England, brought up in a welter of story-telling and music, still influenced by it, still aware of the traditions, but with a strong sense of displacement. So, I find her elegiac poems of people and places fill me with a kind of cultural longing, for a history of belonging, that I can never have.

I found the first collection in a second-hand shop - The Journey, published in 1987 - containing titles such as ‘The Oral Tradition’, ‘The Emigrant Irish’, ‘The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon’. It didn’t disappoint. ‘Oral Tradition’, with its account of two women overheard telling the story of a woman who gave birth in the fields, reminded me of my childhood and the whispered conversations of adults, telling the stories of ancestors who had done forbidden things, passing the stories on like heirlooms, forming an unbroken memory line that went back two hundred years.

‘The oral song
avid as superstition,
layered like an amber in
the wreck of language
and the remnants of a nation.

... singing innuendoes, hints,
outlines underneath
the surface, a sense
suddenly of truth,
its resonance.’

I went on to buy ‘Outside History’, published by Carcanet in 1990. It contains the long poem-sequence ‘Object Lessons’, from which her prose volume borrows the title. In it she writes about writing, in ‘The Rooms of Other Women Poets’.

I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions
of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,

make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think
I see that gesture in the way you use language.

And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers
dried and fired on the ironstone rim of

the saucer underneath your cup, are a sign of
a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.’

I was fascinated by the story of ‘The Shadow Doll’, which was created by dressmakers to show a bride what her wedding dress would look like, and was kept under a dome of glass.

‘Now, in summary and neatly sewn -
a porcelain bride in an airless glamour -
the shadow doll survives its occasion.

Under glass, under wraps, it stays
even now, after all, discreet about
visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts ...’

Other poems, such as ‘The Latin Lesson’ are directly autobiographical. Forced to learn Latin for university entrance, Boland hated it. From her tutor’s room, struggling with the complexities of the ablative absolute, ‘I could watch friends walking to and from class, carrying tennis rackets and hockey sticks, laughing and talking, free of the burdens and worries of a dead grammar. I envied them.’ But then one day, she suddenly began to understand ‘how the systems of a language which could make such constructs ... Stood against the disorders of love and history..... the precision and force of these constructs began to seem both moving and healing.’ She had realised the power of grammar to reveal minute shades of meaning or organise complex arguments - ‘I had never known words as power.’
Another sequence gives the collection its title, ‘Outside History’, and these poems are about female experience - particularly Irish female experience - unrecorded by history. The images sometimes seem a little cliched but the poet’s personal connection with the subject matter lifts them out of it - the elderly Achill Woman struggling up the hill with buckets of water for a young girl on holiday in the Gael-tacht, a woman sewing by candlelight with a child beside her, the white, unlucky wash of hawthorn in the hedgerows, frosty stars ‘these iron inklings of an Irish January’ that symbolise history’s own distancing from the suffering they witness.

But my favourite Boland poem comes from her 1994 collection ‘In a Time of Violence’, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize . I like it because it describes perfectly that brief pause that seems to come at dusk, when you stand in the half-dark, hearing children calling, the first bats beginning to flit across the sky and all time seems to be suspended and the ordinary seems invested with significance.

A neighbourhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.

Apples sweeten in the dark.

In her prose essays, Boland describes what was for her an epiphanic moment. It’s a summer evening in a Dublin suburb. ‘I am talking to a woman in the last light. I have just finished cutting the grass at the front, and we are outside, between her house and mine .... She lives across the road from me. Her children are teenagers. Mine are still infants, asleep behind the drawn curtains in the rooms upstairs. As we talk, I feel the shadow of some other meaning across our conversation, which is otherwise entirely about surface things. That it is high summer in my life, not in hers. That hers is the life mine will become, while mine is the life she has lost. And then the conversation ends. I turn to go in.’
But once inside, sitting at her table in the upstairs room, she finds herself unable to write about her experience. ‘It is in the foreground of the poem that the difficulties exist. That the poem falters. Where the women stand and talk - deep within that image is, I know, another image. The deeper image is that shadow, the aging woman, the argument that the body of one woman is a prophecy of the body of the other. Here, at the very point where I am looking for what Calvino calls "that natural rhythm, as of the sea, of the wind, that festive light impulse," the exact opposite happens. I cannot make her real. I cannot make myself real.’ The book, Object Lessons, is really Boland’s attempt to answer the question ‘why’ as well as her search for a solution and an account of the distance she has travelled between that moment and the present time.
Though declaring herself neither a ‘separatist nor a post-feminist’, she ends the book by stating that ‘the personal witness of a woman poet is still a necessary part of the evolving criteria by which women and their poetry must be evaluated. Nor do I wish to imply that I solved my dilemma. The dilemma persists; the crosscurrents continue.’
I find this very sad, and wonder how true it is that women’s poetry is still undervalued and marginalised because its subject matter is seen as ‘minor’ rather than universal. I have spent half my life chronicling the struggles of woman writers to be published and recognised, from the 17th century Duchess of Newcastle (A Glorious Fame), through Dorothy Wordworth and Sara Coleridge (A Passionate Sisterhood), to Christina Rossetti (Learning not to be First) and Catherine Cookson. Are women writers still unequal? Am I misguided to think that is all in the past? In 2010 I’m not aware of any glass ceilings as a writer. But perhaps I owe that sense of freedom to women like Eavan Boland and my other literary ancestors.

Eavan Boland, ‘Object Lessons: the life of the woman and the poet in our time’, Carcanet, 2006

New and Collected Poems, Carcanet, 2006
The Journey, Carcanet, 1987
Outside History, Carcanet, 1990
In a Time of Violence, Carcanet, 1994
Deryn Rees-Jones, ‘Consorting with Angels’ (essays on Modern Women Poets) Bloodaxe, 2005.

The Poetry of George Szirtes: Pt 2

The Burning of the Books and other poems

Bloodaxe, Sept. 2009

One of the sequences in this collection is called The Penig Film. Penig was a concentration camp in Hungary during World War II and George Szirtes’ mother was imprisoned there as a very young woman. On his blog, George has a photograph of her standing with one of the soldiers who liberated the camp. Although she married someone else, she named her son after this man. A fragment of film from the Penig Camp was discovered recently.

In the poem, George describes watching the film, ‘a small thing, wound down to a few/inches, running across your life on the screen’. He wonders if any of the faces on the celluloid belong to his mother.

‘And so in Penig, in the unexpected sighting
of a moment that she, who is at the centre
of this poem yet not there, lost in its low lighting,’

The poem is a dialogue with Clio, muse of history, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Goddess of Memory) here portrayed as something of a cool media babe.
..................................You are not her lover
after all, merely a figure she meets while staging
one of her periodic out-takes in an ordinary place
on cheap location.’
Like a hardened journalist, Clio ‘does not/believe in getting involved.’ The poet, the protagonist, is left to write his own script.

‘Go on working in the dark, in the long night
of the empty cinema, I’ll leave you to it now.
I must catch my beauty sleep. I have an early flight.’

The poem reminds us that History can so easily become

‘that which propriety requires, the tidy sum
of tidy greynesses in an official film, shot
by army officers on an afternoon, glum

as the century’s mood, emerging from your cot
of earth, mud, lime and bone, to rise, or be carried
to a hospital from the place Clio forgot......'

The most powerful section of the poem is the last section ‘Excuse’ where Clio considers how history can be edited like a movie to fit any particular point of view. ‘Everything’s allowed.’
.........................................We can
say what we like about the past. We can raid

its archives, find films and texts, select a span
of it, cut and re-cut, splice, add soundtrack;
we can resurrect the voice of woman and man,

slur it, dub it, subtitle, caption it, run it back
so it sounds like prophesy, use it as prologue
or epilogue, render its subtle grey as black
or white,’

The past is always ‘delayed present’. ‘The past is no excuse’.

Part of the power of the poem is in its tightly controlled structure. Like a number of the poems in this collection, it’s written in terza rima. George Szirtes - ‘Poetry without shape is not poetry’ - is a master technician, choosing to write in some of the more challenging forms, finding a framework for chaos. Meaning and structure represent ‘the triumph of civilized values over barbarity. I think here of the barbarity that overtook my parents’ generation, that is never as far from us as we believe or hope.’ Language can be used ‘to exercise a degree of control over our otherwise inexpressible, inarticulate, inchoate lives.’

‘Writing, at best,’ George writes on his blog, ‘is a wrought set of dimensions within which it is possible to live. The young poet moves from self to language, makes a self inside language. That language provides its dimensions, the dimensions within which a written self can live. And through those dimensions it begins to explore the world, which is out there and not the self alone, but the wind and the cold and the cry of animals and the whistling of the planets and the voices of others.’

The Poetry of George Szirtes: No. 1

The Burning of the Books and other poems
Bloodaxe Books 2009

I’ve been a follower of George Szirtes’ blog for quite a while. I like his politics, his sense of humour, his take on history, but most of all his poetry, which has affinities with the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose collection, ‘A Part of Speech’, I’ve been re-reading alongside George Szirtes new collection ‘The Burning of the Books and other poems’.
These poems satisfy a thirst, not just for images or words that fit exactly in the mouth or in the mind, but for ideas - flexing the muscles of the intellect. This is poetry that is ‘more than autobiography’ or observation; poetry as dialogue, part of an ongoing debate between the writer and himself, the reader and the cosmos.

Beginning to read a book is rather like embarking on a voyage - with all the anticipation and anxiety of travel, and the expectation of an altered perspective when you arrive at your destination. In a poem called ‘Seeking North’ [from a sequence called ‘Northern Air - a Hungarian Nova Zembla’] the first stanza records the excitement of setting out on such a journey.
‘To set out with no compass but your nose
for the land of certainty and cool judgement
past moral latitudes, on the back of the wind,
with a plentiful supply of warm clothes
and every spiritual accoutrement
is the dream of the voyager whose mind

seeks resolutions.’

There are few resolutions in George Szirtes’ poetry, but many questions, and many journeys of exploration. Even the validity of language as a medium of communication is challenged in a number of poems. The narrator of ‘The Translators’ makes this observation:

‘Look hard into the eyes
of language and you see nothing. Only rhyme

and punctuation.’

George Szirtes is himself a translator of both prose and poetry from Hungarian to English. He knows the treacheries of language well. Part 2 of the title sequence ‘The Burning of the Books’, a poem called ‘In tall angular letters’, begins:

‘Where books are gathered there gathers also the dust
That sieves through the pores of the skin and the head,
The absolute dust of the language that falls apart
In your hands, that settles in your palm
Like a promise. Ideas are dust. Words dust.’

At first glance it seems a bleak viewpoint for a poet, but George explains more fully in an article in ‘Poetry' magazine entitled ‘Formal Wear’. ‘I cannot help feeling that the gap between signifier and signified is potentially enormous, and that the whole structure of grammar and syntax is a kind of illusion that hides this unpleasant fact from us.’

‘.....................Meaning vanishes
into night, into the vacant parishes
of the imagination, into a non-presence
that is positively terrifying.’
[The Translators]

That is the challenge that every writer has to face - wrestling with the inadequacies of language to express what we mean. As George said in his 2005 T.S. Eliot lecture,‘We realise the terrible truth about words: their arbitrariness, their hopelessness, their hollowness and lack of substance. Language, it seems, is no more than a thin layer of convention stretched over dark inchoate matter of which we know nothing except fear and desire’. But George regards poetry as ‘a healing act’ that can ‘bridge the gap between language and what happens.’

For me, as a reader, the poetry is in that space between signifier and signifed. The darkness where the magic and the mystery lie, where memory and imagination are called into play - not just the poet’s, but the reader’s own. The ‘reading’ of the poem is in that space - beyond language.

George Szirtes attributes his own preoccupation with this linguistic chasm to the way that he was abruptly ‘transplanted’ as a child. He was born in Hungary at a particularly troubled point in its history. The Hungarian uprising - a move for independence from Soviet control - was brutally suppressed by the Russians in 1956. George’s parents were among those who chose to leave before the Russian army arrived - abandoning all their possessions and walking across the border to Austria with their young children and two suitcases. They had originally intended to go to Australia, but got as far as England, where they settled. Once in England, George’s parents decided that only English should be spoken at home in order to ensure their complete assimilation.

What this meant, George touches on in his T.S. Eliot lecture. He learned the English words for ‘tea’ and ‘bread’, but they were not the same tea and bread that he had previously known. The lesson for the child was that the meaning of the word ‘bread’, is different in every culture, and it is ‘not just that you will get different kinds of bread in Germany and France but that these breads come with a complex baggage of history, culture and association’. From then on, Hungarian was a lost language, only re-discovered as an adult, along with the cultural identity it represented. Since then, George admits in an interview with a Romanian journalist, he ‘cannot write the songs of the tribe. I feel excluded from it.’ If he has a cultural identity it is wider than any single nationality. ‘I am, I think, above all, a European.’

George went to art college in Leeds and trained as a painter - a discipline that has influenced not only his approach to structure in poetry (more of this in the next post) but the way in which he observes and communicates the visual world. In a poem called ‘Lead White’, he inhabits the voice of Van Gogh:

‘Once I loved the poetry of words
but now it is the poetry of the intractable
that moves me: the hovering of birds
above a field, the windmill’s terrible
sails droning in the gale, the taste of white lead,
the narrowness of a room with its single bed,
the quarrel with a close friend,
the fury of the provincial alley
late at night, the mind’s dead end.’

But in those narrow, closed spaces, there is an epiphany where language blazes ‘with the fury of the sun’ towards the miraculous revelation - what Seamus Heaney called "that moment when the bird sings very close/To the music of what happens".

‘........................Mind grows chambers like
the heart and, all clumsiness
forgotten, learns to lilt, dance and strike
light into the world, to bless
the places where god sits: the emptiness.’

[to be continued]
Prose quotations from ‘Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern’, George Szirtes,
From ‘Poetry’ magazine, Volume 187, Number 5, February 2006
Copyright © The Poetry Foundation
And George Szirtes' TS Eliot Lecture 2005, courtesty of the Poetry Library

Book cover by Clarissa Upchurch

Author photograph - Caroline Forbes

The Poetry Challenge: Owen Sheers, Skirrid Hill

When I committed myself to reading one collection of poetry a month, I promised to read some new poets and not just old favourites. Owen Sheers was born in 1974 in Fiji, but brought up in Wales at Abergavenny where his family have roots.

The cover of his collection Skirrid Hill promises 'one of the most exciting new talents around' - a quote from Carol Ann Duffy and 'A gorgeously elegiac volume' - The Guardian - as well as other examples of suspicious hyperbole. Are any other readers put off by 'over-quoting' on the cover?

Owen Sheers, like the Cumbrian poet Jacob Polley, is writing out of a particular cultural identity, rooted in a particular landscape. This seems more and more common these days - once to be a 'regional writer' was a term of abuse and poets and authors were encouraged to be 'universal'. But now, as the world of writing gets more crowded we seem to be trying harder to seek ways of making ourselves different - separating ourselves - from all the others. I suppose a strong cultural identity is one way of marking us out. For a Welsh poet, this must be fraught with pitfalls. Just as Jacob Polley has to write in the shadow of William Wordsworth, Owen Sheers has to write looking over his shoulder at the two big T's - Dylan Thomas and RS Thomas.

Both Owen and Jacob were involved in the recent series of programmes on poetry made by the BBC (and well worth watching). Jacob's poem 'Honey' was used as a trailer and Owen was the presenter of the Poets and Landscape programmes. I liked his approach enough to want to read his work.

Both Owen and Jacob have published novels recently and I wonder if there's a feeling that you can't be a real writer unless you've had a work of fiction in print? Is it not enough to be a poet? (Very tempting to put a 'just' in there, so I suppose that's the answer.) I read Jacob Polley's Talk of the Town (see earlier review), but I haven't yet read Owen Sheers' novel Resistance - just watched the interview on YouTube.

Skirrid Hill, published by Seren Books, has been around since 2005 when it won the Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Award. It is now on the schools' poetry syllabus, quite a coup for such a young poet. The poems express Owen's sense of place - in a poem Inheritance (after R.S. Thomas) he acknowledges not only his poetic ancestors but his genetic legacy:

From my father a stammer
like a stick in the spokes of my speech.
A tired blink,

.....From my mother
a sensitivity to the pain in the pleasure.
The eye's blue ore,

I'm always intrigued by the criteria poets use to put together a collection - is it a snapshot of what they're writing at the time? Or is it thematic? Some of Owen Sheers poems have no obvious linkages. There are war poems, perhaps sparked off by research for his novel, - mentions of Robert Capa, Manetz Ridge - that sit alongside memories of blackberrying on the way home from school, an account of his mother's death, an Indian marriage, the breakup of a relationship.

There are poems that remember childhood - a gentle rural childhood, on the bare bones of the Welsh hillside, where he helped his grandfather with the sheep, detailing the things we do to animals to turn them into a food crop without sentimentality or accusation. It brought back memories for me of helping my own father with the sheep.

It made me feel like a man
when I helped my grandfather
castrate the early lambs -

picking the hard orange O-rings
from the plastic bag
and stretching them across the made-to-purpose tool,

This is the landscape that RS Thomas portrayed with such exactness and no compromise. Owen Sheers inclines more towards the romantic. He uses images brilliantly - an obsolete steelworks lies 'A deserted mothership/becalmed on the valley's floor.' A flooding river is 'bleeding through the camp like ink from a broken cartridge', Swans on a winter lake float like 'icebergs of white feather'.

But there are also surprising poems, including a sensitive account of breast cancer.

She hears the words he uses
and is quietly surprised by how language can do this:

how a certain order can carry so much chaos,
and how that word, with its hard C of cruelty

and soft c of uncertainty,
seems so fitted to the task.


I understood the references in the cover quotes to elegy - things past and passing haunt the poems. Two lovers look back at the ground under the trees where they have lain and see:

a double shadow of green pressed grass, weight imprinted.
A sarcophagus, shallow among the long stems
and complete without them.

Through all the poems the image of Skirrid Hill recurs, a feature in the physical landscape of Owen Sheers' home country, which also refers back to a tiny quote on the title page. 'Skirrid: from the Welsh Ysgyrid, a derivation of Ysgariad meaning divorce or separation.' - So, now I know the theme that links them all.

It's very strange reading such euro-centred poetry in an environment so un-european it can scarcely be imagined. Context really does alter our readings of things. If I was homesick, (and I'm not yet) then this book would be a solace, talking to me about the hills and green places I count as home. The elegiac mood also resonates here in Asia where you do get a sense of things lost and terrible events just beginning to heal over. But the Asian setting - which is so extreme - also made the poetry seem just a little insipid.