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Tichborne’s Elegy (1586)

by Chidiock Tichborne (c. 1562-1586)

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

And all my good is but vain hope of gain;

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

My fruit is fall’n, and yet my leaves are green,

My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I was but made;

My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done. 

 

Dr. Johnson famously remarked that if you have been told that you are to die in the morning ‘it concentrates the mind wonderfully’. This seems to have been the case here as this poem’s date of composition has been traditionally ascribed to 19th September, 1586 -the night before its author’s execution. 

The Tichborne family had owned land at Tichborne, near Winchester, since the twelfth century. Chidiock’s father, Peter, who had a history of imprisonment for recusancy, came from a lesser branch and had married in August, 1562, making it likely that Chidiock was in his early twenties at the time of his death. He had been named in honour of his father’s patron, Lord Chidiock Paulet (a distant kinsman).

Often people fail to grasp just how much the reign of ‘Good Queen Bess’ was one riven by religious intolerance -‘liberal’ only in its use of agents provocateurs, fines, imprisonment and torture as a means of dealing with those of ‘popish tendencies’. To be a member of an ardent catholic family -as the Tichbornes undoubtedly were- was to be subjected to many forms of discrimination, harassment and bigotry.

In the June of 1586 the younger Tichborne was inducted into the so-called ‘Babington plot’ (whose aim was to assassinate Elizabeth I and replace her with her catholic cousin, Mary queen of Scots). This attempt at a coup d’etat was foiled by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walshingham, and most of the conspirators fled -though Tichborne, who had somehow injured his leg, was obliged to remain in London, and soon captured.

The elegy was included in a letter to his wife, Agnes, written during his detention in the tower of London. It was first published in Verses of Praise and Joye (1586) by John Wolfe in a volume intended to celebrate the queen’s survival. It is unusual in that it is comprised almost entirely of monosyllabic words. The elegy can be readily understand apart from the antiquated ‘Tares’ (a type of weed).

Tichborne’s fate was to be hanged, drawn and quartered (along with his co-conspirators Anthony Babington, John Ballard and four others) in St. Giles Field. He addressed the crowd prior to this -the customary punishment for Treason- being performed upon him. When told that this grusome spectacle had merely increased sympathy towards the remaining seven plotters held in custody, Elizabeth ‘commuted’ their execution to simple hanging. The Babington plot would lead directly to Mary Queen of Scots’ implication and her own execution (by beheading) some five months later.

FURTHER READING:

McLean, T. (1982) The Recusant Legend: Chidiock Tichborne, History Today, Vol 32, Issue 5;

Nichol, C. (1992) The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, Cape (very good background reading on Elizabethan dissent);

Williams, P. (2004) ‘Babington, Anthony (1561-1586)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.

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The Sunlight on the Garden (1936)

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

The sunlight on the garden

Hardens and grows cold,

We cannot cage the minute

Within its nets of gold,

When all is told

We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances

Advances towards its end;

The earth compels, upon it

Sonnets and birds descend;

And soon, my friend,

We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying

Defying the church bells

And every evil iron

Siren and what it tells:

The earth compels,

We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,

Hardened in heart anew,

But glad to have sat under

Thunder and rain with you,

And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden.

This poem, one of its author’s finest, is notably generous, tender and reconciliatory. It was written, for the poet’s erstwhile wife, in late 1936 -some weeks after their Decree Absolute came through. They’d married, to the consternation of both families, six years earlier. Mary MacNeice (nee Ezra, 1908-1991) was the daughter -from her first marriage- of the formidable and eccentric society hostess Marie Beazley. MacNeice describes Mary (in his posthumously published autobiography The Strings Are False) as being ‘like a little volcano that is never off the boil’. In this same work (in which she is called ‘Mariette’) her conversation is characterized as ‘like a barber’s scissors when he is giving his last touches to the back of your head, clicking away very fast, very deftly, but apparently not making contact’. She had, however, been ‘the best dancer in Oxford’.

Obviously, any marriage is a story with (at least) two narrators. By October 1935 the couple were renting ‘Highfield cottage’, previously a coachman’s quarters, in Selly Park, south Birmingham. MacNeice was working at that time as ‘Assistant Lecturer in Classics’ at the local university. Staying with them was their mutual friend the former American Football star Charles Katzman (‘Tsalic’ in The Strings Are False) who, it was said, looked a bit like Clark Gable. Louis and Katzman (his passenger) were involved in a car accident on the 11th which left the latter unconscious and in hospital. The next month (subsequent to their American friend’s recovery after convalescing at ‘Highfield’) was a shattering one for MacNeice. He was prosecuted for dangerous driving by the police, received a compensation demand from the driver of the vehicle with which he’d collided -and then (on the 18th November) a spark from the sitting room fire set their cottage’s floor alight. The poet borrowed an axe and smashed the cement hearth while his wife threw bucket after bucket of water onto the burning beams below. The following day she left him, their eighteen month old son, Daniel, and their massive borzoi dog, ‘Betsy’, to be with Katzman in London.

‘The Sunlight in the Garden’ was written almost exactly a year after the events described above. By this time MacNeice had re-established himself as a lecturer in Latin at London university’s Bedford college for women and was living in an ‘attractive garden flat’ in Keats Grove, Hampstead (fifty yards from John Keats’ old residence, Wentworth Place), sublet from an old Oxfordian contemporary, the editor and critic Geoffrey Grigson. Whereas ‘Highfield’ cottage had not had its own garden, this flat boasted a lawn with two large sycamores and rose bushes. It may well have reminded its tenant of an earlier, prelapsarian garden -that of his father’s Carrickfergus rectory, which had looked out over Belfast lough.

The poem utilizes an idiosyncratic variant of an envelope rhyme scheme (abcbba) and was originally entitled ‘Song’. Its first appearance was in The Listener (January, 1937) before it was collected in The Earth Compels (1938). ‘We are dying, Egypt, dying’ is a Shakespearean quotation: the mortally wounded Mark Anthony to his lover, Cleopatra. The phrase ‘sonnets and birds descend’ sounds rather Audenesque. Wystan Auden (with whom MacNeice had recently toured Iceland) was at this time gradually replacing Anthony Blunt (1907-1983, aesthete, closet communist and spy/’traitor’ -known to MacNeice since his Marlborough public schooldays) as the poet’s most influential ‘sounding board’.

The immediate aftermath of his marriage breakup was, for MacNeice, a ‘year of intrigue, spiritual squalor and anxiety’. He’d swiftly instituted divorce proceedings and been granted custody of Daniel but found, to his chagrin, that his capricious mother-in-law had hired a private detective to ‘shadow’ him (presumably in the hope of unearthing an ‘indiscretion’). Of these there were to be a number -the next eighteen months seeing the ‘irredeemably heterosexual’ writer (Blunt’s description) embroiled in affaires d’armour with two very different women, Leonora Corbett and Nancy Coldstream. On 30th November, 1936, Mary married Charles Katzman. She’d become pregnant very early in their relationship but had had an abortion -which she would later come to regret. Louis, who’d offered to take her back, wrote congratulating her on the marriage ‘I do with all my heart wish you both everything you want and send you all my love as ever’. She, in turn, wrote  ‘that the only person who has ever shown me what I feel is real love, in an all round sense -i.e. husband, mother, father, everything is YOU’. She’d left him because she felt ‘lonely in her mind’. What Louis’ own father, by now an Anglican bishop, thought about it all has not been fully recorded. MacNeice would later visit the Katzmans in the United Stated but (in 1953) would do everything in his power to prevent Daniel from emigrating in order to be with his natural mother (who’d parted from Katzman three years earlier). The poet would himself later remarry but -prone by now both to a ‘roving eye’ and to alcoholic excess- this, his second marriage, would also fail.

MacNeice would die, aged fifty five, of pneumonia contracted after a day spent recording sound effects in the Settle caves for his B.B.C. employers. He’d been caught by a heavy storm on the Yorkshire moors and had failed to change his heavily-soaked clothing. Anthony Blunt would be publicly unmasked as a soviet spy in 1979. It is an interesting conjecture whether the atheistic, left-leaning poet ever ‘saw through’ his friend’s suave, pro-establishment facade (they’d visited Spain together just before its civil war in March/April. 1936). Then again, this was the nineteen thirties and infidelity -of one kind or another- was somehow always in the air.

FURTHER READING:

Allison, J. (2010) Selected Letters of Louis Macneice, Faber and Faber;

MacNeice, L. (1965) (Ed. Dodds, E.) The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, Faber and Faber;

MacNeice, L. (2007) Collected Poems, Faber and Faber;

Stallworthy, J. (1995) Louis MacNeice, Faber and Faber.

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Under Milk Wood: An Appreciation, Sixty Years On

 

The fourteenth of May, 2013, will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Dylan Thomas ‘Play For Voices’ first public performance -at least in something close to its currently accepted form- in The Poetry Center, New York. Legend has the writer being locked in a room by one of the center’s staff, his sometime lover Liz Reitell, in order to complete the work on time. The final scripts were handed to the performers as they applied their make-up, prior to ‘going on’. Although initially received in silence, this debut performance was eventually honoured by fourteen curtain calls: the audience hadn’t quite grasped, early on, just what they were getting. Thomas, who left the venue alone, would readily agree to the provision of a fully revised script but, of course, he never lived to finalise it -dying of alcoholic overindulgence (and medical incompetence) less than six months later.

 

There is a recording still in existence of this theatrical debut, with Thomas himself taking the part of ‘First Voice’ (or narrator) -a role later made his own by the young Richard Burton, who knew the writer but seems not much to have liked him. The classic (1954) BBC ‘Third Programme’ version is thoroughly improved through this (necessary) substitution. Thomas was always inclined to ‘ham’ things up: he would habitually greet his fellow poet, the ‘Overseas Literary Producer’ (and future cricket broadcaster) John Arlott, by inquiring if he (Arlott) wanted someone to ‘Boom’ for him. Thomas -contrary to myth- affected a somewhat plumy English accent for his radio work. He would call Under Milk Wood ‘prose with blood pressure’.

 

The origins of the play are, similarly, shrouded in Thomasian mythology. Old school friends would later remember him mentioning a similar project way back in the thirties. (One, Daniel Jones, would go on to ‘set’ the songs to music). More persuasively, Thomas recounted having been inspired by the basic idea whilst living in his bungalow, ‘Majoda’, close to the Cardiganshire town of New Quay in 1944. He wrote an account of this in ‘Quite Early One Morning’ (recorded for BBC Wales that December). To start with, he felt that that town should be depicted as ‘mad’.

 

New Quay and Laugharne (pronounced ‘Larn’) vie for their laurels as the prototypes for the small welsh fishing village, Llareggub (‘bugger all’ spelt backwards). One ‘Rosie Probert’ was a previous inhabitant of Laugharne, but ‘Cherry Owen’ was fairly definitively based on the New Quay builder, Dan ‘Cherry’ Jones. Whether the ‘Sailor’s Arms’ was really  ‘Brown’s Hotel’ no one, now, can ever truly know.

 

In early versions of the script, Llareggub was spelt ‘Llaregyb’. Thomas certainly sailed pretty close to the wind in those far-off, prudish fifties. Captain Cat muses to his dead lover, Rosie

 

  The only sea I saw was the see-saw sea, with you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy -let me shipwreck in your thighs.

 

The warring couple, Mr and Mrs Pugh, are two of the great comic creations. She, a 

 

  needling, stalactite hag and bed-nag of a poker-backed, nutcracker wife;

 

he, with his 

 

  nicotine, egg-yellow, weeping walrus victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory of Dr Crippen.

 

And, always, there is the poetry. Whether it is the lush, punning, compound-adjectival ‘impasto’ of the prologue, lisping

 

  down to the slow, black, sloe-black, crow-black fishing boat bobbing sea

 

or the observational incongruence of

 

  The owls are hunting. Look: over Bathesda gravestones one hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by ‘Hannah Rees, beloved Wife’.

 

Just as in The Canterbury Tales, all humanity is here -if you care to listen for it. Under Milk Wood is as fully achieved as anything by Shakespeare: as timeless, as great and much, much funnier. All that prevented Thomas from reaching comparable heights of sustained grandeur was a chronic personal indiscipline. He is known to have lost/misplaced the play’s manuscript on at least three occasions.

 

You don’t need Mrs Dai Bread II’s chrystal ball to project how, if Dylan Thomas had lived, the sixties and seventies would have loved him; how their burgeoning t.v. culture would have have quickly recognised a ‘natural’ performer. And Oh how he would have enjoyed hob-nobbing with ‘The Beatles’ and ‘The Stones’ (and another ‘Dylan’, too) before, most probably, stealing their shirts. Certain aspects of his humour (P.C. Attila Rees peeing into his helmet, for example) prefigure the anti-authoritarian, surrealist comedy of the Monty Python era. Would we have seen more works of similar stature? This appears unlikely: by the end, Thomas had run out of ideas almost as completely as he had run out of time. Under Milk Wood -alongside perhaps a handful of lucid poems- will remain his masterpiece. Both rib-tickling (and sad), sagacious (and sexy), affectionate (and affecting) it will long survive its author. Happy birthday, sweet buggeralL.

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‘Crossing The Bar’
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

(1809-1892)

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving, seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness or farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to meet my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

In the October of 1889 while the eighty year old Tennyson was making his annual migration from Aldworth (the slightly ostentatious country house he’d had specially built in Surrey) to Farringford on the isle of Wight, an idea for a poem came to him. The resultant ‘Crossing the Bar’ was completed (he said) in about twenty minutes of the roughly half-hour passage by ferry between Lymington (Dorset) and Yarmouth, just across the Solent. His personal nurse, a miss Audrey Durham, was accompanying him on the voyage, and it was she to whom the four verses were first shown. Her reaction has not been recorded – though it is known that she was not afraid either to stand up to the old man or ‘jolly him along’. The Poet Laureate could be rather hypochondriac – over the years he’d expressed concerns over his (own) mental health, eyesight, skin, digestion – and had worried that he had inherited a predisposition to epilepsy. He also, at various times, complained of palpitations, hay fever, neuralgia and lumbago. That autumn he had been suffering from what he described as ‘rheumatic gout’ (which, he averred, ‘would have made an end of nine men out of ten’). The second person to see the poem was his surviving son – and amanuensis – the long-suffering Hallam, who would record his own response as being that was it was ‘the crown […of his father’s…] life’s work’. What he’d actually voiced was the slightly more gushing – though still heart-felt- sentiment, ‘That is one of the most beautiful poems ever written’. Tennyson modestly replied ‘it came in a moment’. He also instructed Hallam (with one myopic eye on posterity) that ‘Crossing the Bar’ was to be placed last in all subsequent editions of his work. When his collection Demeter and Other Poems was duly published that December, the poem was accordingly placed last. The Ferry by which the poet was conveyed would have been one of the two paddle-steamers plying this passage at the time: Solent (launched 1863) or Mayflower (1866). Both were owned and operated by the L.S.W.R. (London and South Western Railway company). The accommodation would have been far more rudimentary than that to which more modern passengers are accustomed.

 

By 1889, Tennyson had been Poet Laureate for thirty nine years: the longest tenure of that post on record. He had been married for the same length of time to Emily (nee Sellwood) who increasingly ‘managed’ his life as a sort of unpaid social secretary and factotum. As an extended metaphor, ‘Crossing the Bar’ appears to espouse a straight-forward Christianity more in keeping with his wife’s orthodox piety than with his own earlier flirtations with ‘honest doubt’ – or even with a nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. Certainly, as he grew older ‘death’ figured prominently within his work – though a fascination with morbidity was perhaps always evident from the outset. The poem’s last stanza was to be embroidered (by the ‘workwomen of the North at Keswick’) into a white pall which covered the first baron Tennyson’s coffin, prior to its internment in westminster Abbey, some three years after the verse’s conception.

‘Moaning of the bar’ is said to be a seafaring term denoting the noise that occurs when a vessel approaches a bar (or sandbank) with an insufficient clearance below its hull to be sure of avoiding ‘grounding’. Tennyson would attempt an exegesis of the poem: ‘The Pilot has been on board all the while, but in the dark I have not seen him’ […the ‘Pilot’ is…] ‘that Divine and Unseen Who is always guiding us’. More prosaically, a ‘Pilot’ would usually, in this context, be understood to mean ‘a qualified coastal navigator taken on board at a particular place to steer a ship into or out of port, or through a channel etc’ (O.E.D.). As the paddle steamer’s skipper can be presumed to have had both intimate knowledge of his route and access to a tide table, it has to be doubtful whether Tennyson – not particularly known for his practical nautical knowledge- would have had the occasion meet any such personage at the conclusion of his voyage.

 

FURTHER READING

Batchelor,J. (2012) Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find, Chatto and Windus.

Hill, R. [Ed.] (1971) Tennyson’s Poetry; Authoritative Texts; Juvenilia And Early Responses, Criticism, Norton.

Martin, R. (1980) Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, OUP.

Ricks, C. [Ed.] (2007) Alfred, Lord Tennyson Selected Poems, Penguin.

Thorn, M. (1992) Tennyson, Abacus.

Kevin Saving © 2012

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‘Leisure’
by W.H.Davies 

(1871-1940)

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

 

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

 

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

 

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began?

 

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

 

 

A predilection to stand and stare (probably after a lengthy ‘tramp’ along country roads) lay at W.H. (William) Davies’s very core – and, possibly, within his genes as well. His paternal grandfather (a seafaring man who’d risen to captain his own ship – and who’d played a large part in the future poet’s upbringing) would, in his retirement, gaze at the sea for hours on end: noting changes in the conditions. His grandson shared much of that old sailor’s wanderlust, as well as some of his stoicism.

 

After a slightly delinquent youth spent in his birthplace at Newport, south Wales, Davies found the prospect of ‘settling down’ into a regular pattern of paid employment distinctly unappetising. He’d ‘taken to the road’ following an apprenticeship in picture-framing, and his consequent travels would find him, by turns, begging his way around Britain; herding sheep in freighters across the Atlantic; getting himself intentionally arrested into American jails (one method of sitting-out the inclement winters) and ‘hobo-ing’ his way towards the Klondike gold rush by methodically jumping trains. It was this latter adventure which had cost him his lower right leg in March, 1899, after an ill-timed leap. Thereafter fitted with a series of wooden legs, Davies’s peregrinations had not ceased entirely – merely slowed down a little.

 

A born raconteur, Davies – a diminutive man sporting a distinctive quiff, which people were inclined to mistake for a toupee- wrote his ‘break-through’ Autobiography of a Super-Tramp after encouragement from a new friend, Edward Thomas. The well-known playwright George Bernard Shaw was enlisted to contribute an introduction – he would also suggest a title and recommend the eventual publishing firm. The Autobiography was an instant success, opening a new world for its author. Its royalties enabled Davies to move to 45, London Road, Sevenoaks, Kent – where ‘Leisure’ was most likely written. He was to lodge there for the three years from 1911. A turn of the century building described as ‘handsome’ and sandwiched between two shops, the house was owned by a local businessman, Henry Martin. Davies already knew the area quite well, having previously lived nearby in a cheap two-room farm cottage found (and subsidised) for him by Thomas.

 

!911 saw Davies consolidating his reputation and making further friends among the literati. ‘Leisure’ was to appear in his fifth poetry collection, Songs of Joy and Others, most of which was written that summer –after a month spent ‘tramping’ in May- and prior to that volume’s appearance in November. Its publisher would be A.C. Fifield, who’d also brought out Super-Tramp. None of this book’s reviews would single out ‘Leisure’, however, as being of especial note.

 

Recent attempts by some of Davies’s new-found contacts to prevail upon him to take up a sinecure at the British Museum had been thwarted by their would-be beneficiary’s home-spun philosophy. Largely a-political (but with a certain sympathy for the lot of the common man) he summed-up his reaction thus: “They expected me to work. I have never worked in my life. THAT’S what your friends do for you!”

Always impecunious – his vices seem to have been alcohol and prostitutes – Davies was awarded a grant by the Royal Literary Fund in February, 1911 and a civil-list pension of £50 per annum. Petitioners on his behalf had included Thomas, W.H. Hudson, Edward Garnett and Joseph Conrad. This same year found six of his poems included in the first anthology of Georgian Poetry,edited by another sponsor, Edward Marsh. Davies was concurrently working on his first novel, A Weak Woman – a melodramatic pot-boiler involving murder, prostitution and an improbable death via the agency of a steam roller. Of this production he was later to write that he regarded it ‘as a pest to be exterminated on sight…’. Jocularly, he offered a bounty of tuppence for every copy returned.

 

Davies came to be ambivalent about Sevenoaks (at that time a ‘dormitary town’). Local children would habitually pester him for small change with which to buy sweets – once his generosity to them became widely known. Also, he fell out with his landlady over a penchant he’d acquired for living with the window constantly open. This, it was claimed, had rotted both blinds and window frames. He would eventually decamp to London in 1914 – at that time undoubtedly the literary capital of the world.

 

A curious mixture of diffidence and hauteur, Davies would continue to publish an avalanche of work in various genres (there were to be, in total around seven hundred poems) but his later oeuvre is generally acknowledged to have become increasingly uneven. He is remembered today (if at all) for a few simple lines from a single poem (quoted in a twenty first century CenterParks advert) and for the Autobiography. There would be a touchingly contented marriage in later life to a former ‘lady of the streets’ (a profession towards which he was always sympathetically inclined, though his wife’s previous history would remain a closely guarded secret). There would be an honorary doctorate, courtesy of the university of Wales. Davies seems to have enjoyed his late-found affluence and respectability, ending his days in a pleasant cottage in Nailsworth, Glos., at the ‘posh’ end of town, on a hill-top with a view – and with a few years still left to him in which to appreciate them.

 

FURTHER READING

Davies, W.H. (1943) Collected Poems Of W.H.Davies, Cape.

Hooper, B. (2004) Time To Stand And Stare, Peter Owen.

Hollis, M. (2011) Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years Of Edward Thomas, Faber.

Stonesifer, R. (1963) W.H.Davies, A Critical Biography, Cape.

 

Kevin Saving © 2012

Kevin Saving on Journey of the Magi

by T.S.Eliot (1885-1965)

 

  ‘A cold coming we had of it.

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter’.

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melted snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces.

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

 

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

 

  Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky.

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with wine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

 

  All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensations,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

 

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was forty one years old when he wote ‘Journey of the Magi’ (featured above). His magnum opus, The Waste Land, had been self-published in The Criterion (a literary journal which Eliot had both founded and edited) five years earlier, to great acclaim -and some notoriety.

 

‘The Journey of the Magi’ was commissioned by Eliot’s ‘boss’, Geoffrey Faber and published by his employers, Faber and Gwyyer (later Faber and Faber) in August, 1927, shortly after its composition. Part of the Ariel series (38 illustrated pamphlets by contributors as varied as Thomas Hardy, Henry Newbolt, G.K.Chesterton, Edith Sitwell and D.H.Lawrence) Eliot’s was the nineth off the press and included drawings by E.McKnight Kauffer. Its author was heavily influenced during this period by the writings of the prelate, Lancelot Andrewes (the poem’s first five lines were ‘lifted’ from the latter’s ‘Nativity Sermon’ [1622]). Eliot would contribute to Faber’s For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on style and order of the following year.

 

At the time of ‘The Journey of the Magi’s writing, ‘Tom’ Eliot had been married to Vivien (nee Haigh-Wood) for twelve years. They lived during this period at 57 Chester Terrace, Belgravia. Theirs had been something of a whirlwind courtship, which had brought neither of its principals any lasting happiness. There are hints of dalliances on both sides (homosexual on Tom’s part) and stories of his wearing make-up -rather in contrast to the prim, Three-Piece-Suited public persona Eliot adopted. A former governess, Vivien’s role in the composition of The Waste Land has often been overlooked. She had also contributed (pseudonymously) to The Criterion -whose titled she’d suggested. Though by 1927 the marriage was unravelling, Vivien had never ceased to believe in her husband’s genius. Their problems seem to have been exacerbated by her hormonal imbalance (excessive menstruation) and his probable heterosexual naivety, possible aversion. Neither was their marital misery much alleviated by Vivien’s reputed infidelities with Eliot’s erstwhile friend, the philandering philosopher, Bertrand Russell. A slightly sinister figure, the elderly ex-detective William Janes entered the Eliot’s life around this time. Part Handyman, part servant, Janes would report on Vivien’s behaviour to her husband.

 

Eliot would often visit churches in the early years of his marriage, partially for aesthetic reasons but also, perhaps, in search of spiritual sanctuary. In 1926 he had surprised his in-laws by kneeling in front of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ whilst sight-seeing in Rome. On 29th June, 1927 he was baptised into the Anglican-Catholic church and confirmed the next day: Vivien was known to be unsympathetic to his conversion. In November of the same year he formally took on British citizenship, which would have been facilitated by his marriage to an English National.

 

The Eliots formally separated in February, 1933, though the increasingly unstable Vivien was by no means reconciled to her husband’s rejection of her. She would be committed to an Asylum, Northumberland House’, North London, in 1938 through the offices of her brother, Maurice (though with Eliot’s acquiescence, if not connivance). Tom would never see her again before her death some nine years later, which (it has been speculated) may well have been the result of an overdose.

 

T.S.Eliot would, in time, become a warden of his parish church, ‘St. Stephen’s, Gloucester Road, London. He would go on to win the Nobel prize for literature, the year after Vivien’s death. He would be invested with the Order of Merit and enjoy a happier (second) marriage to Valerie, his secretary at Fabers -and his junior by nearly 38 years.

 

‘The Journey of the Magi’ was to become Valerie’s particular favourite of all his works. She had heard a (John Gielgud) recording of it -long before they were married. When she asked Tom about how it came to be written he replied: ‘I wrote it one sunday after matins. I had been thinking about it in church and when I got home I opened a half-bottle of Booth’s Gin, poured myself a drink, and began to write. By lunchtime, the poem, and the half-bottle of gin, were both finished’.

 

 

Further Reading:

Ackroyd, P. (1984) T.S.Eliot, Penguin.

Gordon, L. (1999) T.S.Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Norton.

Johnson, P. (2010) Brief Lives, Hutchinson.

Seymour-Jones, C. (2001) Painted Shadow, A Life of Vivienne Eliot, Constable And Robinson

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To Lucasta, Going To The Wars

by Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

 

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind

That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

To war and arms I fly.

 

True, a new mistress now I chase,

The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

A sword, a horse, a shield.

 

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more.

 

War, honour and (courtly) love are celebrated in this poem by one of the foremost of the ‘Cavalier Poets’.

 

Lovelace came from a wealthy Kentish family and, after attending Charterhouse school (then situated in London), studied at Gloucester Hall, Oxford -from where he took his M.A. in 1636. A contemporary, Anthony Wood, described him at this time as being ‘the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him then, but especially after, when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex’. This paragon joined the regiment of Lord (later general) Goring in 1639. Something of Goring’s protege, he followed him to the Bishop’s wars -at first as a senior Ensign, before promotion to captain. Returning to Kent in 1640 to a land seething with political and religious discontent, Lovelace was appointed as a Justice of the Peace. The next year he led a body of men to seize and destroy an anti-episcopalian petition comprising around 15,000 signatures. This, and other actions, resulted in his being imprisoned in the Gatehouse at Westminster which meant -though he was soon released on bail- his missing the opening phase of the Civil War.

 

‘To Lucasta’ dates from this period (c.1642) when Lovelace would have been in his early twenties. He is supposed to have been engaged to a girl by the name of Lucy Sacheverell -his ‘pet name’ for her being ‘Lux Casta’ (or chaste light’). Hearing a false rumour of his death (he would be wounded at the siege of Dunkirk, 1646) she promptly married another suitor.

 

Lovelace would be active on behalf of the royalist cause -impoverishing himself in the process. In the September of 1642 he accompanied Goring to Holland and (probably) spent much of the next four years on the continent. Having picked the ‘wrong side’ in the contest between Parliament and King, Lovelace would again see the inside of prison and lose much of his wealth and land. He is known to have written almost 200 other poems (from his time as a student onwards) -though ‘To Lucasta’ and ‘To Althea, from Prison’ (‘Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage’) remain his best known. ‘To Lucasta’ was first published on May 14th, 1649, and a posthumous volume (Lucasta: Posthume Poems) would be brought out by his brother, Dudley, two years after Lovelace died in poverty (‘in a cellar in Longacre’, according to John Aubrey).

 

Further Reading:

Aubrey, J. (1972) Brief Lives, Penguin.

Maclean, H. (Ed.), (1975) Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, Norton.

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‘Ozymandias’
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on those lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
” My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing besides remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

No poet, surely, has ever deprecated the futility of human endeavour, human hubris, as elegantly as Percy Bysshe Shelley does here. The sonnet dates from December, 1817, and was penned in competition with another writer, Horace Smith (1779-1849), a friend and fellow member of the ‘set’ associated with Leigh Hunt (editor of the protesting journal, the Examiner).

Twenty five years of age at the time of the poem’s completion, Shelley was the son of sir Timothy Shelley, M.P. Bart., and heir to the baronetcy. After Eton, he’d ‘gone up’ to University College, Oxford, from where he’d managed to get himself expelled for the co-authorship of a pamphlet on ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. Always the rebel, Shelley had run off with an innkeeper’s daughter, Harriet Westbrook, whom he’d married, with whom he’d fathered two children, and from whom he’d decamped -to take up with another woman, Mary Godwin, (who possessed infinitely more impressive radical lineage). Harriet had drowned herself in the Serpentine the previous year (1816) -which had freed the well-meaning, but impractical, poet to marry again.

‘Ozymandias’ is a reverie upon the hauteur of Rameses II (known as ‘The Great’) who lived between 1304 and 1237 B.C. it is thought to have been inspired by the inscription recorded by Diordorius Sicules in his Library of History (Book 1, Chapter 47). This -inserted on the pedestal of Rameses’ statue- can be translated as:

King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am
and where I lie, let them surpass one of my works.

 

At one time the poem was reputed to have been occasioned by the British Museum’s acquisition of the ‘Younger Memmon’ statue of Rameses II -through the offices of the Italian adventurer, Giovanni Belzoni. Unfortunately for this theory, the statue had yet to arrive in London during the time of the two sonneteer’s competition.

 

‘Qzymandias’ rhyme-scheme fails to conform to a classical format, imaginatively interlocking Octave and Sestet via the gradual infiltration of new end-rhymes (ABABACDCEDEFEF). It was first published in the Examiner‘s January 11th, 1818 edition. Smith’s sonnet, which originally shared the same title, was printed one month later.

 

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the desert knows:

‘I am great OZYMANDIAS’, saith the stone,

‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

The wonders of my hand’. The City’s gone,

Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,

He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess

What wonderful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

 

Smith had made his name in 1812 with Rejected Addresses (a volume of poetic parodies co-written with his brother). A prosperous stockbroker, he would produce a string of historical novels, and help Shelley to get his finances in order. The latter was to say of him ‘Is it not odd that the only truly generous person I ever knew who had enough to be generous with, was a stockbroker? He writes poetry and pastoral dramas and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and is still generous’. Smith, in turn, would fondly remember his friend berating a pack of children (for stoning a squirrel) until they ‘threw down their missiles and slunk away’.

 

Shelley would die, aged 29, when his new, self-commissioned (and ‘unseaworthy’) boat capsized in the Bay of Spezia. It is wholly in character that he had never leant to swim.

 

Further Reading:

Hay, D. (2010) Young Romantics, Bloomsbury.

Quigley, I. (1956) Shelley, Selected Poetry, Penguin.

Rodenbeck, J. (2004) ‘Travellers from an Antique Land: Shelley’s Inspiration for “Ozymandias”, Journal Of Comparative Poetics, 24, Pp121-148.

Tomalin, C. (1992) Shelley and His World, Penguin

Kevin Saving © 2012

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Poems 

Selected by Martin Amis

Faber and Faber (2011)

How many ‘great’ poems does a writer have to write before they become a ‘Great Poet’? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? For me, Gerard Manley Hopkins is a ‘great poet’ not because he wrote ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, ‘Pied Beauty’ or ‘The Windhover’ (though all these, and several more, are fine poems: well-crafted, idiosyncratic, strong in style). For me, Hopkins is a ‘great poet’  because, as a young man, he wrote ‘Heaven-Haven’ -a slight, (eight-line) gem so perfectly executed that it is impossible to imagine any similar thing being done better.

It is hard, today, to envisage anyone writing anything remotely comparable -that is, until someone actually does. When did you last read a poem which made you think ‘Wow!’? Odds are, if you ever have -and it was written by anyone active during (or after) the second half of the twentieth century- it was one written by Philip Larkin.

Larkin was the first poet I ever read who consistently spoke to me in my own language, who brought forth the recognition ‘yes, that’s just the way it is’. That he was (also) a tight-fisted, bigoted, sexist whinger, with crypto-fascist leanings, only became apparent over the course of time -when biographical attention was duly focused upon him. But are any of his (now fairly undeniable) imperfections really detectable in the work? Or is it only now that we know of them that we can fancy we discern them ‘spread[ing] through other lives like a tree’?

The present is, probably, as good a time as any (following both the immediate-posthumous ‘hype’ and the inevitable subsequent demolition) for the process of ‘winnowing’ Larkin’s poetic achievement to begin. Accordingly, Faber and Faber have released their ‘Selected’ -though, interestingly enough, it was the provincial ‘Marvell press’ who gave him his first, big break, a while before the beatification as a ‘Faber-ite son’.

For too long the sole, generally-available route into ‘Larkinland’ has been via The Collected, ‘edited’ (if that’s really the word) by Anthony Thwaite. Also issued by Fabers, this (1988) production features 242 individual poems, many of them juvenilia, a large proportion -frankly- mediocre. Larkin’s ‘muse’ lacked stamina: even the present volume’s poem-count (58) seems, at times, repetitive and ‘dated’. Then there is the selection itself. Martin Amis (son of the poet’s best friend, though he seems not to have personally liked Larkin very much) unaccountably retains insipid examples such as ‘The Card-Players’, ‘Dublinesque’ and ‘Posterity’ whilst jettisoning minor classics like ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, ‘As Bad As A Mile’ and ‘Best Society’. His introduction, though not without ‘colour’, sheds little in the way of unexpected insight, besides the pontification that Larkin is a ‘Novelist’s Poet’ without being a ‘Poet’s Poet’. Even curiouser is Amis’s predilection towards the more erratically-valuable latter work. Looking back, it appears evident that High Windows represented the beginnings of a gradual desiccation of the poet’s creative juices (though this edition boasts a wonderfully lugubrious cover photograph of him from around this same period).

 

And yet. And yet. Larkin at his best (and this volume does contain most of his finest poetry) can make us laugh at ‘Life’s Little Ironies’ in a way which no one else has quite managed -save, perhaps, his own personal talisman, Thomas Hardy. Who else would lead us into the deserted church, up to the ‘holy end’, make us watch as he donates an Irish sixpence and then surprise us (and himself) with a ‘hunger to be more serious’ -if only because ‘so many dead lie around’?

 

Who else really causes us to see (as in a sepia photograph) the ‘long uneven lines’ of prospective cannon-fodder, standing patiently outside (presumably) the First World War Recruitment Office; ‘the differently-dressed servants/ with tiny rooms in huge houses…the thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer’? Often (typically, his phrase) Larkin’s ‘voice falls as they say love should,/ like an enormous yes’. Truly, there never was ‘such innocence,/ never before or since’ (as that evoked in ‘MCMXIV’) and ‘Never such innocence again’.

 

I’d contend that Philip Larkin wrote a dozen-or-so ‘Great’ poems -which is as many as Auden, and more than T.S.Eliot and Dylan Thomas, combined. Whether, or not, this is enough to elevate him into the (always hotly-disputed) ranks of the ‘Great Poets’ is, really, anyone’s guess. For Larkin (and in this he is entirely a ‘modern’) the best that mankind can aspire to is to be (slightly) less deceived. He could sense (way back in 1972) that ‘England’ -like Brooke he seldom speaks of ‘Britain’- was already ‘Going, Going’ and the conclusion he hesitatingly drew (in a late, uncollected poem) was that ‘we should be careful/ of each other, we should be kind/ while there is still time’. If that prescription sounds simplistic nowadays and, well, slightly un-‘Larkinesque’, who since has furnished us with any better a manifesto?

 

Paradoxically, perhaps this uber-cynic’s last, most enduring and greatest gift is his vulnerability -somehow both well-camouflaged and undisguised- which reaches out to us and confides ‘I, too, am afraid of the dark’. And, ultimately, how can we fail to respond to someone who affirms (even though he partially subverts the statement with caveats and, eventually, wanted to retract it altogether) ‘what will survive of us is love’?

Kevin Saving © 2011

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Mike Wilson, Desperanto, Smokestack Books (2009)

Martin Rowson, The Limerickiad -Gilgamesh To Shakespeare, Smokestack Books (2011)

Desperanto could, perhaps, only have been written by a Briton, Left-of-Centre, of a certain age -someone brought up at a time when cynical Capitalism had not yet (quite) become the only show in town.

Mike Wilson’s debut collection is permeated by a wry, almost Larkinesque sensibility (that, paradoxically Right-Wing, poet is name-checked on several occasions) but, advantageously, it tackles the ‘Sainsbury socialism’ that Larkin never lived to see. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown left a whole generation ‘orphaned’ in a way which Thatcher somehow never managed.

We moved on. Years, millennia, trod past.
  The single mums got shacked up once again
  (identical but different dodgy men);
  the bijoux flats got rented out at last;
  the post office got closed… And more newcomers,
  new waves of Slovak wage-slaves, Polish plumbers
  and Chinese cockle-pickers in a fast-
  incoming tide of willing workers, then
  found harbour in our homes… which is when
  the Left began to feel a tad mis-cast,
  sad soldiers marching to last decade’s drummers

  (from ‘Fresh Fields Revisited’)

Wilson depicts a species of ‘Burnt-out Idealism’ very well but is capable of hitting other notes at need. Desperanto’s title-poem (a villanelle) invokes its own

Sad poetry. It’s written everywhere,
  by broken heart’s in search of self-expression:
  the universal language of despair.

He enjoys word-play and parody:

They fuck you up, your girl and boy.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
  They ought to be your pride and joy
  but they will disillusion you.

  For they’ve been disappointed by
  their parents -you- who, they suspect
  are fallible. You can’t deny
  that sense of dread, when you detect

  they see through you. Familiar eyes
  are mirrored there. You wonder whence,
  from whom, they learned that cheap disguise:
  rebellious indifference.

(from ‘This Be Averse’).

Wilson can ‘do’ both ‘Funny’ and ‘Poignant’. He employs a good line in self-deprecation. His best work combines strong observational skills and technical adroitness. He is obviously ‘a man of parts’, having recently toured the U.K. with the Curt Collective (performing live sound-tracks to silent film classics). Previously, he presented a one-man show based on the songs of Jake Thackray. Smokestack Books are to be congratulated upon their acquisition of Mike Wilson’s name among their growing ‘list’ of writers.

Martin Rowson, The Limerickiad -Gilgamesh To Shakespeare, Smokestack Books (2011)

First there was The Iliad. In responce, Alexander Pope was moved to write his Dunciad. Later, the Pole, Stanislaw Lem, wrote his science fictional masterpiece, The Cyberiad (about computers). It seems inevitable therefore that someone would eventually come up with a Limerickiad (as Martin Rowson has done here).

Each week -for the past five years- this award-winning cartoonist has been contributing an example of the five-line verse-form to The Independent on Sunday, taking for his inspiration the entirety of recorded literature. The present publication is merely volume one: You Have Been Warned!

Though Edward Lear is usually ‘credited’ as the father of the limerick, there are examples from the 1820s which pre-date his by some years. The categorisation seems to have arisen by virtue of the repetition of a drunken chorus: ‘will you come up to Limerick?’. Lear’s verses tend to repeat line one as line five -which sounds ‘anti-climactic’ to modern ears. It’s time now for some examples from the book.

There once was a fellow called DANTE
  Who drank too much Asti Spumante
    (Or it may have been Pernod)
    And went to INFERNO
  Though most folk prefer Alicante.

and

THOMAS WYATT wrote sonnets all week
  And gave Anne Boleyn’s bottom a tweak!
    He got sent to The Tower
    And within one brief hour
  They fled him that once did him seek.

and

But ABELARD now! He did blaze a
  Trail that would frankly amaze a
    Chap, though ’tis stated
    Poor Pete got castrated
  Possibly by Occam’s Razor…

Hmmm…

Rowson approaches his self-appointed task with sauciness and gusto. His narrative is surprisingly proportionate -in that greater textual space is devoted to the works of Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare (the latter has each of his plays ‘dissected’, often with cruel accuracy). The author wears his learning unfussily and (as always) the illustrations are a delight. Though I can’t help thinking that 372 limericks is altogether-too-much-of-a-good-thing, after a while their rhythms start to insinuate themselves into your brain -in some cases to unwholesome effect:

The classics seem too recondite?
Then Rowson’s for you: Lit-Hist-lite;
His range is precocious,
The puns are atrocious
But fun -when he gets them just right.
Kevin Saving © 2011

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Harry Ricketts, Strange Meetings -The Poets of the Great War, Chatto and Windus (2010)

In this, our age of bastardized, interventionist, (mostly undeclared) wars, it continues to be the voices of the poets from the so-called ‘Great War’ -World War One – which speak most directly and most trenchantly to us.

Just why this should be so surely prompts enquiry. The generation born in the Eighteen Eighties and Nineties appear to have felt themselves, retrospectively at least, to have been uniquely gifted and inexorably doomed -though the small specimen-sample of three British prime ministers who fought as young men in the trenches (Attlee, Eden and MacMillan) doesn’t really proffer much in the way of exceptional ability. The 1914-18 Western Front experience was played out by unprecedentedly large numbers -and within a closely circumscribed physical locale. Perhaps this may have encouraged its pre-eminent testimonies to have come via the scribbled notes of soldier-poets (most of them junior officers) who, if nothing else, were not constantly obliged to ‘strike tents’ or ‘re-embus’. More probably, the first fully-industrialised global conflict represented something entirely new in its combination of personal alienation, raw horror and appalling, sustained squalor.

Strange Meetings explores and ponders some of the unacknowledged nexuses between those much-anthologised names (Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg et al) in fifteen separate chapters, plus an epilogue. Many of the leading practitioners knew each other well -possibly not quite the contemporary system of mutually back-slapping grooming and networking, but definitely a distinct, slightly-older first cousin to it. The miniature narratives kick-off with a pre-war breakfast tete-a-tete in sir Edward Marsh’s Gray’s Inn Rooms (9th July, 1914) between that relative ingenuSiegfried Sassoon and a slightly younger (but already ‘established’) Rupert Brooke. Over their bacon and Kidneys – served by ‘Eddie’s house-keeper, Mrs Elgy – a tongue-tied, hero-worshipping Siegfried listens-in as Brooke and another guest, W.H.Davies, discuss just which journal editors currently pay the best rates. Suffusing this brief vignette of Marsh’s machiavellian campaign of literary-‘fixing’ is the unspoken homo-eroticism of all the principals -with the exception of the garrulous, one-legged ex-tramp, Davies.

In another chapter, ‘Fighting the Keeper’, Ricketts probes Edward Thomas’s complicated reaction to the first edition of his friend Brooke’s war poetry, evidenced by two concurrent reviews which the former wrote (in June, 1915) following its (posthumous) publication. ‘Gathering Swallows’ has Thomas and Wilfred Owen in -imagined but plausibly visualised- conversation at Hare Hall camp, Romford, where they are both known to have been stationed in February, 1916. ‘Dottyville’ tells the better-documented story of Owen’s and Sassoon’s collaborative friendship at Craiglockart War-Hospital, Summer 1917. It is still, somehow, disconcerting to find Owen (only a year away from his death-in-action, aged 25) making a list of future plans -which quaintly included writing blank-verse plays on ‘old welsh themes’. ‘At Mrs Colefax’s’ presents a new ‘player’, Robert Nichols, giving a poetry reading (in December, 1917) at a society-hostess’s private ‘bash’ (and with T.S.Eliot in a ‘walk-on’ role). It’s seldom remembered now, but of all the war poets it was (the rather ‘striving’) Nichols who – with the probable exception of Brooke – enjoyed the most substantial, immediate post bellum reputation.

The revelations and reverberations continue well into the post-war years with Sassoon and Edmund Blunden furiously annotating their (Review) copies of Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That (in November, 1929). ‘Strange Hells’ (Summer, 1932) sees Helen (Edward Thomas’s widow) visiting Ivor Gurney in ‘Stone House’ asylum, Dartford. By now deeply enmeshed in what seems to have been a form of paranoid psychosis, Gurney -and his visitor- conduct a heart-rending ‘tour’ of Ivor’s old Gloucestershire haunts, using one of Edward’s field maps. Gurney will never physically ‘see’ these places again, dying of pleurisy and T.B. five years later.

 

Finally, ‘Sacred Intimacies’ reconstructs the (only) meeting, in 1964, of the modernist David (‘In Parenthesis’) Jones and the increasingly ‘passed over’ Sassoon. This seems to have been a curiously tragi-comic affair: Sassoon (patrician, wealthy, reduced to mumbles through anxiety over his newly-fitted false teeth); Jones (half-deaf, hypochondriacal, subsisting on a strange cocktail of medicinal drugs and ‘handouts’). The ill-matched pair, each wracked by survivor’s guilt, finding themselves unable to discuss their (shared) Roman Catholicism or poetic vocations, were reduced to old-soldier’s reminiscences from their very defined vantages as ‘Captain’ Sassoon and ‘Private’ Jones. Sassoon, in particular, appears never entirely to have left The Trenches behind him.

 

Strange Meetings has obviously been a labour of love from Ricketts. It painstakingly uncovers long-hidden connections, literary tiffs (and patronages) antipathies, aversions and reconciliations. In its own  -perhaps slightly specialised – sphere, it is consistently well-researched and tenderly insightful. I commend it to anyone with an interest in a period which remains ‘Relevent’ to, yet is increasingly ‘Distant’ from, our own. A time when both the poet-witnesses, and the events they described, seem peculiarly out-of-scale.

Kevin Saving © 2011

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Wendy Cope, Family Values, Faber and Faber (2011).
ISBN: 978-0-571-27421-5

Wendy Cope’s many admirers will welcome this, her latest collection -which takes its title from a piece towards the end of the book, in which ‘…The Archers family values reign./ The straying spouses all come back again.’ Of course, these ‘family values’ are intended ironically, and the author has much she both wishes to disclose (about her childhood), and work-over (previously suppressed filial resentment against her apparently ‘controlling’ mother, now deceased). ‘You’re Not Allowed’ and ‘Your Mother Knows’ are both variants of a French/Malayan form, the ‘pantoum’, (which consists of multiple linear repetitions in a closely prescribed order).

You’re not allowed to wonder if it’s true:
  She loves you very much. She tells you so.
  She is the one who knows what’s best for you.
  She tells you what to do and where to go.

  […]

  You watch her cry. She cries and sulks all day.
  You’d make you mother happy if you could.
  It’s no use saying sorry. You must pay.
  Things will get better if you’re very good.

  You’d make your mother happy if you could.
  She is the one who knows what’s best for you.
  Things will get better if you’re very good.
  You’re not allowed to wonder if it’s true.

Here, I think, the staccato, slightly sinister/obsessive framework suit miss Cope’s purposes very well.

Family Values often echoes to that peculiar strain of self-conscious quasi-‘confessiveness’ not previously noted in this writer. One critic (Robert Nye) has observed that Cope’s most humorous work came out of a time when she was deeply unhappy. Paradoxically, it can now be remarked that as Cope has become more celebrated, become more of a ‘National Treasure’ (possibly even ‘The Thinking Man’s Pam Ayres’), much of her work has not only ‘darkened’ (which is permissible) but become progressively less funny. One free-verse offering, entitled ‘Omo’ is about a school friend’s acquisition of that nickname. ‘Omo’ concludes

I still love Omo.
  These days I use her real name
  But I don’t dare to mention it.
  She hides from the cameras. And now
  I’ve gone and put her in a poem.

Errr…no, Wendy, actually you haven’t.
Much of Cope’s verse libre (approximately one quarter of this book’s content of 56 poems) works somewhat better than the example given here, but -even then- it occasions little more in its reader than a brief, metaphorical, shrug of their shoulders. ‘Boarders’, ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, ‘The Women’s Merchant Navy’, ‘The Africans’ (among others) seem to be little more than ‘Stocking Fillers’ and could all have been omitted with no diminution to the volume’s integrity. Though, elsewhere, this poet’s acclaimed formal ingenuity is still evident, one finds oneself wondering occasionally if the villanelles haven’t grown just a little bit same-y, the triolets just a little more ‘pat’. Is it solely a question of critical desensitisation, or are the postures on display here just a little more predictable, the emotion somehow ‘squashed’ into a slightly glib kind of Patience Strong-hold? ‘Keep Saying This’ (a rather worthy villanelle) enjoins us, though we might be ‘very old’, to remember that -its repeated refrain- ‘The party isn’t over yet’. Firstly, in many cases, growing older is certainly no ‘party’; secondly, am I alone in recalling that Cope is on record as not ‘doing’ parties?

I must exempt ‘Spared’ (which seems to have been inspired by a close(ish) proximity to the ‘9/11’ disaster) from this, reluctant, critique.

It wasn’t you, it wasn’t me,
  Up there, two thousand feet above
  A New York street. We’re safe and free,
  A little while, to live and love,

  Imaging what might have been-
  The phone-call from the blazing tower,
  A last farewell on the machine,
  While someone sleeps another hour…

[…]

  [or, to be forced to] jump together, hand in hand,
  To certain death. Spared all of this
  For now, how well I understand
  That love is all, is all there is.

Two sets of commissioned poems (both ‘formal’, both inhabiting more familiar Cope territory) close this collection. One -written for the Endellion String Quartet- treats of the pleasures and perils of classical music (I particularly enjoyed ‘First Date’, written from both male and female perspectives). The other -for the B.B.C.’s Radio 4- is, predictably enough, about that station’s selection of programmes.

The wider, literary, reaction to this publication will, necessarily, be mixed. Some will doubtless hail a ‘free-ing up’ of Cope’s muse. Others will be intrigued by a new ‘depth’ to her concerns. I have (already) heard Family Values praised as containing many of its author’s finest poems to date. For myself, I’ll own to a slight sense of disappointment. As a former teacher (of fifteen year’s standing) Cope will undoubtedly have come across the tired old formula ‘Good, but not Outstanding’. While some -though not enough- of the poems in Family Values are ‘Excellent’, most squat down primly in that boarder-region, the merely ‘Fair’ -and I’d wager that Cope is more than aware of this, too.

Kevin Saving on

Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns, Virago (2011)
ISBN: 978-181844-084548

This, paperback, edition (the hardback came out last year) concerns itself with -and contributes towards- the ongoing battle for the ‘soul’ of one of America’s most prominent, yet somehow elusive, poets: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson. Most of Lives Like Loaded Guns (an adaptation of one of Emily’s idiosyncratic phrases) details the power struggle over the poet’s literary estate and legacy -after her death in 1886- between Susan Dickinson (Emily’s sister-in-law and confidant) and a remarkable ‘outsider’, Mabel Loomis Todd. This latter femme fatale first entered the family’s lives in 1881 and was soon cavorting adulterously with the poet’s adored and indulged brother, Austin, fairly remarkably in Emily’s own residence, ‘The Homestead’, Amherst -even more remarkably, without ever once meeting her. It would be Mabel Loomis Todd who’d contrive much of the credit for jump-starting Emily Dickinson’s posthumous  poetic beatification, and her own continuing feud with one branch of the Dickinson family dragged on well into the next century via two daughters, her own -and Susan’s (Emily’s niece).

So far, so flimsy. Lyndall Gordon’s book (which doesn’t attempt to be a conventional biography) rather corners itself -partially through its author’s discursive, sometimes ‘purple’ writing-style- into a usually stodgy, occasionally juicy, disquisition upon literary in-fighting. Lives Like Loaded Guns (sub-titled ‘Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds’) does, however, offer one entertaining and controversial conjecture: that the poet herself may have suffered from Epilepsy. In part, this thesis can be substantiated by a selective reading of some of the 1789 poems Dickinson is known to have penned -only ten of which were published in her own lifetime.

I felt a Cleaving in my mind-
  As if my Brain had split-
  I tried to match it -Seam by Seam-
  But could not make them fit-

  The thought behind, I strove to join
  Unto the thought before-
  But sequence ravelled out of sound-
  Like Balls -opon (sic) a floor-

and (again)

There is a Fitting -a Dismay-
  A Fitting -a Despair-
  ‘Tis harder knowing it is Due
  Than knowing it is here.

If we take into account the disapproving attitude of nineteenth century Western society towards epilepsy, it is wholly plausible that the condition could have been responsible for Dickinson’s famous, well-guarded but self-imposed seclusion. Also, as marriage was discouraged for epileptics at that time (some American states actively prohibiting it) it is feasible that the poet -who saw herself as ‘by birth a batchelor’- would have felt herself debarred from matrimony.

Gordon marshals other, non-literary, evidence in support of her postulate: Dickinson was a long-term valetudinarian who was prescribed Glycerine (which was used, inter alia, by contemporaries as an anti-convulsant). She had at least one consultation, in her twenties, with an eminent Bostonian physician, a Dr Jackson, who not only made out the prescription but was notable for his long-term interest in, and sympathy for, epileptics. In her mid-thirties, Dickinson spent ‘the best part of two years’ in Boston seeking treatment for what presents as as a species of ‘photosensitivity’ -then, as now, closely linked with the ‘aura’ preceding seizures. Furthermore, epilepsy often contains a genetic component and the poet’s family tree offers both a (second) cousin, ‘Zebina’, and a nephew, ‘Ned’ who suffered seizures. Quite close to the end of her life, Emily seems to have experienced a ‘black out’ of several hours duration. She was treated with a number of ‘remedies’ which ‘doubled’ as anti-convulsants (and which included both Arsenic and Strychnine). These may well have contributed to her death, aged fifty five -which was certificated under ‘kidney failure’.

Speculation will continue to colour a significant portion of the literary historian’s/biographer’s remit, and this is all very well if not treated too credulously by their readers. A.J.Balfour wrote to the effect that he was generally happy when praised, not too uncomfortable when abused -but always distinctly ‘uneasy’ when being ‘explained’. Very little is likely, now, either to further embellish or tarnish Dickinson’s iconic status (even the revelation that she drowned four ‘superfluous’ kittens in a barrel of pickle brine). Her’s stands as an agreeably ‘feisty’ and ‘idiomatic’ voice at a time when most females were not allowed such appurtenances. The amalgam of socio-economic-medical influences which either ‘formed’ her (or which, possibly, she had to use stratagems to circumvent) are necessarily of less interest than what she had to say -and the enigmatic way (‘telling it slant’) in which she chose to say it.
 

Kevin Saving © 2011Kevin Saving on

Antony Archdeacon, The Big Idea, AuthorHouse (2008)
ISBN: 9781-4343-3868-6

If, as according to Henry Thoreau we do, most of us ‘live lives of quiet desperation’ then this (first) novel by Antony Archdeacon depicts the lives -during the course of one summer- of two people whose ‘desperation’ is certainly of the quiet, understated kind. ‘John Penry-Hudson’ is a 58 year old Q.C., seemingly ‘passed over’ for a seat on The Bench. He inhabits a ‘gloriously comfortable house’ in the stockbroker belt with his slightly younger wife, ‘Phyllis’. Their problem is that their marriage has grown stale. Phyllis spends an increasing amount of time with her mother in Yorkshire, whilst the couple’s two sons have grown up and moved out.

It is against this background that John has his ‘Big Idea’: he will sell up surreptitiously and transfer to a near-Utopian, rather paternalistic country -the slightly unconvincing ‘Grundia’ (fairly obviously located in post-colonial Africa). Here he will find a new life, a superior climate and a differing culture -in which, incidentally, his money will buy a great deal more. Phyllis will be ‘taught a lession’ and left to fend for herself, bereft of many of the previous advantages bestowed upon her by her (cold-fish) husband. It is to Phyllis that the reader’s sympathy more naturally extends -if it extends at all.

Their story, which hovers on the brink of an old-fashioned morality tale, is enlivened by several factors. Firstly, Archdeacon tells his tale in plain, unadorned prose (without too many of the highly figurative riffs which have become almost de rigueur in more fashionable fiction). Secondly, his own career as a lawyer has provided a wealth of telling details on both the arcana of legal practice and the lifestyles of its practitioners. Lastly, and perhaps less consciously, the whole book is suffused by a kind of unrepentant materialism. John laments the fact that he has attained merely the status of a ‘millionaire, but not [that of] a multi-millionaire’. He covets a large library, but it is unclear whether the books are there to read or for show. He has grown estranged from each of his sons, who despite ‘having enjoyed every conceivable advantage through his efforts alone, were much closer to their mother’. Archdeacon equips his protagonist with a whole panoply of paraphernalia but, alas, with little or no heart.

If occasionally guilty of some of the solecisms which a more experienced novelist might avoid (moments when, for example, Penry-Hudson ‘froze with horror’ or, perhaps, when he ‘sat down with a face that resembled a large question mark’), Archdeacon, nonetheless, writes engagingly enough. Without being especially ‘moved’ by either of his two principal charactors, I found myself reading to the end in order to ascertain not-so-much if they found ‘happiness’ (either together or alone) -but, rather, what the preconditions for this ‘happiness’ might possibly be.

Kevin Saving © 2011

Kevin Saving

Three ‘Creative Future’ Chapbooks:

Jan Bradley, The Winding Keys, (ISBN: 978-0-9563307-4-1),
Tom Jayston, Reverie And Rude Awakenings, (ISBN: 978-0-9563307-2-7), and
Mary O’Dwyer, A Coat Of Blanket Dreams, (ISBN: 978-0-9563307-1-0)
(All published by Creative Future, all 2010)

‘Creative Future’ is a registered charity which specialises in bringing the work of artists and writers, whom it describes as ‘marginalised’, to the attention of a wider audience. By ‘marginalised’, CF means ‘those with mental health problems, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, offenders and ex-offenders, homeless people and substance misusers’.

For the critic, CF’s policy poses a series of moral dilemmas: and it is entirely possible that we might not necessarily wish to read a selection of ‘The Twelve Best Poems written by One-Legged, Learning Disabled ex-Burglars’. First up: the work has to stand (or fall) on its own merits. An act of publishing implies engagement with others. While we have no right to burst into a person’s flat, rifle through their drawers, scrutinise their jottings and then publically lambast them for perceived error -that same person publishing a book or placing their pictures in an exhibition signifies the awareness that their work is liable to be judged, perhaps harshly. An experienced novelist/poet/painter will learn (perforce, must learn) to filter through the criticism, taking what is useful, discarding what is not. The process, in itself, constitutes a form of ‘graduation’.

But what are we to do about (say) a suicidally-depressed writer: can harsh criticism catapult them over some personal tipping point? The answer to this question is ‘Yes, it can’ -witness the sad ends of Randall Jarrell and others. Should the critic therefore shrug their shoulders and say (with Wittgenstein) ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, well-knowing that it is that silence which is the responce all serious artists -and, probably, most human-beings- crave least? Or should mentally fragile poets receive only fulsome tributes?

Historically, of course, many artists have elected to be ‘out there’ in the cold, (probably) believing that a-typical experience might be the best provider of unusual insight. (Or ‘Material’). One potential danger in this is that unceasing, tortured self-scrutiny may not necessarily equate to robust achievement -the American, ‘Confessional school’ being an interesting example of what can happen when self-indulgence leads to solipsism. Rembrandt painted his self-portraits solely because he couldn’t afford to pay a sitter: poets, particularly, need to remember that introspection is only useful insofar as it affords insight into the universal, human condition. Individually, we are all weak reeds -to survive, our work needs to engage others.

But then, writers will always write, critics critique -and dogs continue to pee up trees. It’s what they do.

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Jan Bradley’s The Winding Key appears, at least superficially, to have been influenced by the work of Emily Dickenson -except that it includes nine haiku. While the latter have never, quite, appeared to me to work in English, Bradley’s intermittent use of rhyme -or half-rhyme- adds another nuance, as in ‘Tar Haiku’

Rain freckled with stars,
  Shadows tar -white feathered moon
  Vex Venus and Mars.

or ‘Dwindle Haiku’

Leaf blades, vein engraved
  Dwindle in the singing wind
  Dance in wistful veils.

I’m probably not the best person to appraise these, beyond saying -as they do in The States- ‘if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like’ (which is by no means as dismissive as it first sounds). The Winding Key includes one poem to which I keep returning again and again, ‘Venus’s Villanelle’ (which I would like to reproduce here in full):

Mirrored in Venus’s looking-glass
  Hurt chambers of the heart
  Black ice, blind corners and tear gas.

  I scale the crags of a crumbling crevasse
  Burdened by sorrows, grave from the start
  Mirrored in Venus’s looking-glass.

  Treble-headed hound at the gates, to pass
  Veiled in vanishing vapours, I dart
  Black ice, blind corners and tear gas.

  Remorseful, I wearily trespass
  To the dread path of fate, a distance apart
  Mirrored in Venus’s looking-glass.

  Retorting by gathering wounds to amass
  I observe from my blockaded rampart
  Black ice, blind corners and tear gas

  Unwavering -will not let me pass.
  Blood-inked authors raise a lion’s heart
  Yet, mirrored in Venus’s looking-glass:
  Black ice, blind corners and tear gas.

Intriguing. I came away with the feeling that Bradley doesn’t want her verse to be fully comprehensible or to swim perfectly into focus. It is designed to be masticated, certainly; to be capable of yielding strong flavours, but never to be swallowed whole. The rationalist in me is often frustrated by this arrangement (‘why don’t these poems say more what they mean?’) but, occasionally, (as here) I sense -though don’t fully grasp- a further dimension. Intriguing…

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A more colloquial style informs Tom Jayston’s Reverie and Rude Awakening.  This is a man who knows what he wants to say, and is not afraid to be seen setting an agenda. ‘Lepidoptera’ (an original poem) could, quite easily, be a free-verse translation out of Baudelaire. ‘Your Prayer’ flirts with Naturalism as an alternative to Theism. ‘Sparks’ knows that things could be better, but also that they have been infinitesimally worse. ‘The Pavement Apostle’ speaks for the vagrants who ‘reside in the corner of our eyes’. ‘The Gardener’ rejoices at the notion of uncluttered, satisfying, sustaining work. ‘Abacus’ contemplates self-extinction. ‘The First Time’ lays the blame.

If there is despair here, then there is also life-affirmation (sometimes both within the same structure). If there are few ‘Big Lines’ on display, we wind up liking Jayston as someone who is exercised both by transgressiveness, and by the knowledge that this construct lacks coherence in an empirical universe. Like most of us, he longs for absolution; like many of us, he knows it will not come. We can hear him say it best himself (but with undue self-deprecation) in ‘Self-pitying Attempt at Humour No 4382’:

I am not a poet. I am a cloud of fierce
  Emotion that drifts and veers
  Directionless. The page is my birthplace.

  I am not a poet. I pretend to write
  Words of shattering, staggering insight
  And truth. I am my own subject.

  I am not a poet. I have nothing to say
  Concerning anything in the world today
  Or at any time. I am not bothered.
 
  I am not a poet. But thank you for deigning
  To hear my vain attempts at feigning
  Literary aptitude. I feel honoured.

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Mary O’Dwyer was brought up in children’s homes until late adolescence. Perhaps only someone from that background could have written the affecting title-poem to A Coat of Blanket Dreams.

On the sofa you slept under piles of coats,
  somehow, I kept myself afloat
  in my pool of tears, in my sea of fears.
  I’m alone mother, come out from undercover.
  For the rest of my life it seems
  I will live a life of blanket dreams.

O’Dwyer imagines herself into a variety of different objects such as a book, a table, a chair, a hoover and as an (as yet) undeveloped photograph:

Let’s go into the dark room.
  Switch off all the lights.
  Dip me in your solution
  Until I come out right.

(from ‘A Snapshot’).

She can also visualise herself as a (losing) boxer, a rape victim and a cracked vase. It comes as a relief when (in ‘I Told You’) she finally goes on the offensive:

I’m not the kind of girl
  You can write about.
  I could do without
  All that flattery;
  Your words are a curse.
  So don’t put your change
  Into my silk purse.

  I told you
  I’m not a words girl-
  So stop writing.

Mary O’Dwyer tries on many different dream-coats in this debut collection, from the anthropomorphic, through the surrealistic, to the epigrammatic and the darkly Plathian. I particularly enjoyed ‘Knickerbockerglory’ (even though I’m not normally drawn to concrete poetry).

Somewhat in contrast to that of her two CF compeers, I detect an element of self-effacement in O’Dwyer’s work -which might make it difficult for her to form a recognisable ‘style’. This need not necessarily preclude the fermentation of exceptional ‘one-offs’. As a qualified psychiatric nurse, she will be aware that she shares her own diagnosis of ‘bi-polar affective disorder’ with some remarkably creative personalities. Her (unusual) self-effacement -though, probably, a good thing in a nurse- could prove something of a handicap in the ‘Go Get ‘Em’ world of poetry promotion. Somewhere, ‘Famous Seamus’ has made a comment to the effect that most poets only ever find their distinctive ‘voice’ when they hear someone else speaking with it (and this was certainly true for him). If, and when, O’Dwyer finds this voice, it will not be through ‘eavesdropping’ -and I’m confident that it will be a voice with plenty of ‘carry’.

Kevin Saving © 2010

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Peter Street and Kate Houghton, Not Caild Fireweed Fa Nowt,  Shoestring press (2010)
ISBN: 978-1-907356-14-8

Wor Botanica! It’s not quite clear why lowly willowherbs (Epilobium angustifolium) are given their queer northern argot in this phytogenic phantasy by Peter Street.

The premise appears to be that a war council has been convened in the plant world (with mankind as its potential opponent). A dozen varying botanical voices are given their say (including Plantain, Comfrey and Foxglove) and each soliloquy is augmented by a black and white illustration courtesy of the excellent Kate Houghton. All of these graphics are well-observed, some are truly arresting but, unfortunately, their inclusion has upped the production costs for this sixteen-page chapbook, landing it with a daunting £6 price tag. Still, an attractive curio.

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Caroline Carver, Victoria Field, Penelope Shuttle, OCTOBER GUESTS, fal publications (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-9555661-1-0

October Guests represents a collaboration between three, female, Cornish writers who managed to finesse themselves a two-week reading tour/literary junket (partially founded by Arts Council England) around Toronto and New York -and now wish to record their impressions of it in print. This pamphlet, twenty glossy pages of no discernable merit and retailing at £3.50 per copy, is the result. Possibly, the authors envisage another such tour on the proceeds.

£3.50, at the time of writing, will purchase you a greasy McDonald’s breakfast, or alternatively (and much later in the day, obviously) a pint of filthy, lukewarm slop purporting to be beer. Go on: save yourself a world of disappointment and have either one or the other at the three Cornish ladies’ expense!

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Thought I’d better repackage these two curmudgeonly efforts into the one, misanthropic entity.
Sorry, Al, if the latter won’t exactly warm the cockles of your mate, Pete Street’s heart: couldn’t really see how I could say much else to either of these productions: no need to run with either review if, by so doing, you rack up enemies. I know, for instance, that Penny Shuttle’s still quite influential -so I won’t mind if you decide to sit on ’em.
Kevin Saving © 2010

Sam Silva, The Poetry Of Sam Silva, Volume 3 -Selected Chapbooks by Sam Silva 2008-2009 with Cover Art by Rachel Davis (2009)
Submitted to the Recusant for review and available via ‘Amazon’.

Comprising 43 poems from the prolific, North Carolina-based poet, Sam Silva, this collection encompasses work from five previous chapbooks: Along This Indoor Stream, Shoes on Spring Ice, The Woman with the Veil, What the Ego Thinks of Paradise and Word Returning to its Corruption. Silva was a columnist on the Spring Lakes News for a decade, has published well over 350 poems in a variety of journals and ezines (including the Recusant) and has been nominated for the ‘Pushcart Award’ on seven separate occasions.

An intriguing stylist who sometimes seems to hybridize elements of e.e.cummings (without the ‘typos’) and early Eliot, Silva can sing the seasons or, more wistfully, adumbrate the seemingly ineluctable inertia to which modernity appears to be prone:

I, who am a member of the spiritually dead,
  a moral mouse!,
  drowsing breezy from a morning nap,
  listening to computer music.
(from ‘The Wind within a Half-Crushed Straw’).

He is capable of raw physicality:

…pissing a pool
  from the unrepentant urge to leak
  recycled water from the frigidaire
(‘Briefly Curse the Modern World’)

and of crystallizing awkward, elemental truths:

Nature
  is so huge
  and beautiful
  and cruel.
(‘With Virtue’s Sins’).

Sometimes, however, his profuse -even ‘word-salad’- effects can leave the reader floundering in search of a shaping verb to add coherence to the glistening parts (as witnessed by ‘A Not So Different Story’):

Still a chill
  in spring’s ugly menace
  …murder and will
in the raw green shoot
  …or that naked ache
  that lasts beyond winter
  whose old men watch
  the young gods crucified.

  A crazy grace which has lived too long!
  That pocked withered face of the luckiest fool
  to enter this world with a lonely song
  where clowns are cheered in the circus city
  and a wilderness voice gives passion to pity
  headless and grieving with broken soul.
  Oh fathomless word! Oh fire made from coal.

Sometimes (as in ‘The Economy of New York’) he catches it just right:

Spring is half-assed,
  full of remnant frost
  and of Winter’s frozen berries.
  Towards April a sick March creeps.

Eliot’s influence appears advantageously in ‘Ah, Spirit Things’:

  Then towards the sea
  as the vision grays
  on the creaky bend
  of its rotten days

  watches as winter
  presumes to undress
  that shivering form
  which exhales the soul.

Silva frequently -and attractively- employs intermittent rhyme, or idiosyncratic internal-rhyme. He also enjoys eye-catching, oxymoronic titles. He is, in my own view, overly fond of concluding his poems with ellipses (…), which represent the literary equivalent of pop music’s modish ‘fade-outs’ and which represent a retreat from the summation of a fully quenching closure.

Like most writers, Silva is at his best when he has something trenchant to say. Too often, for this reviewer, he resorts to repetitive variations on a theme of navel-gazing. Although he is by-no-means alone in this respect, one can easily come away with the sense of a mind engrossed in picking at the scabs of its own experience:

  […] I read even less these days
  …all of my books have failed me
  …all that I’ve written
  …all that I’ve read.

  […] but every inch of me back in Ithaca
  in the bannered house I never left.
(from ‘The Word Returning to its Corruption’).

The ‘Rachel poems’ (particularly ‘The Light Preceding Autumn’, ‘Rachel Conceives A Painting’, ‘The Art in my Lover’s Eyes’ and ‘Going North this time for Summer’) seem to me to show Silva at his best, directly addressing his lover: entranced but not entrenched, noticing the nuances. And in ‘A Dim Light Needs Forgiveness’ Silva gradually ratchets-up his sense of moral outrage at his country’s (and its Vassal-state’s) foreign policy:

She likes my book
  …this woman with the veil.
  Perhaps our airplanes will enlighten her as well.
  They come to liberate with Jesus and the nail!
  They come to set the world alight
  in fires of liberation burning in the night.
  I sense her dimly like her music
  …this woman whom our prayers
  will send to hell.

The over-riding impression taken from this volume is of a talent overly-comfortable within its own abundance; definitely one which would benefit from the hand of a firm, sympathetic editor. But (as the conclusion of ‘Veterans Day’ demonstrates), at least the talent is there:

  […] sing[ing] its closure
  […]
  full of pesticides
  and fragrance
  till the evening sun goes down…
 I have learned to swim through days like this
  through an ocean of grief that leaves a kiss
  from a sad smile
  underneath a frown.

©

Kevin Saving on

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, Simon & Schuster (2009).
ISBN: 978-1-84737-635-0

‘Paul Chowder’ (the fictitious narrator of Nicholson Baker’s latest, stream-of-consciousness novel) is -we’re asked to believe- a middling, lower-high ranking American poet, once the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a rumoured long-list candidate for the Laureateship -now reduced to compiling an anthology of formal verse, provisionally entitled ‘Only Rhyme’.

‘Chowder’ comes kitted-out with a number of deeply-engrained beliefs/prejudices concerning modern poetry -plus an on-off relationship with a sympathetic-though-estranged girlfriend, ‘Roz’, (which serves as the novel’s ‘back-story’). He writes what he calls ‘Plums’ -trashy vers libre- but disparages the format, considering it ‘prose in slow motion’. His ‘narration’ consists almost entirely of anecdotes, opinions, potted dissertations on the lives and works of favoured writers, and prosodic-metrical assertions (which I won’t reproduce for fear of alienating non-partisan readers). I found it all quite fascinating -but, then, I suppose I would.

Baker, the novelist, is self-evidently a ‘poetry buff’. Whether ‘Paul Chowder’s tendentiously held views reflect his own (or not) is, of course, a matter for speculation. Only once -when ‘Chowder’ ventures that W.H.Auden’s verse displays a marked decline from the time when he, Auden, began experimenting with amphetamines- did I find myself shaking my head in confirmed disagreement.

‘Chowder’/Baker disdains unbridled Mod/post-Modernism, which he blames on the Futurist, proto-fascist Filippo Marinetti. He dislikes long poems. He’s very cynical/undeceived about ‘poetry politics’. He reckons real poetry is still operating, almost subliminally, certainly haphazardly, within pop lyrics and tv sit-coms. He feels that it may still be fostered by nursery rhymes and baby-talk -though it was almost annihilated by Algernon Charles Swinburne who, basically, was too proficient at it. He sees modern poets as competitively climbing a kind of vertiginous ladder-in-the-sky (watched by academic commentators like Helen Vendler who occupy a safe ‘dirigable’ off to one side). And, O yes, ‘Iambic Pentameter’ is a complete misnomer. ‘Chowder’/Baker is both knowledgeable and ‘funny’ (the latter in a sly/sour/flippant way). His dicta have found a way of insinuating themselves semi-eradicably into my consciousness, a little after the manner of a pungent, chip-shop aroma into a shirt’s fabric. I must confess that I’m genuinely grateful to Nicholson Baker for causing me to revisit the work of Sara Teasdale.

Eventually, I found myself asking: can The Anthologist be numbered amongst the ‘Great Novels’? Will it be read in one hundred years time? The answer to both questions (and I suspect Baker might even agree) is a sympathetic, emphatic, ‘No’. Perhaps ‘Chowder’ would have done better to disseminate his anthology (rather than his own, fairly execrable, verse); or Baker could have written the academic study which this book so nearly is -even in the knowledge that his sales would diminish exponentially. Somehow, the ‘Human interest’ factor remains absent (for all of Paul and Roz’s semi-detached chaconne). A curio rather than a ‘classic’, a ‘good read’ rather than a good book, The Anthologist, like its fictive protagonist, remains something of a ‘striver’: a ‘contender’, but of robust, Second Division status.

Kevin Saving © 2010

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Roddy Lumsden (Editor), IDENTITY PARADE -NEW BRITISH AND IRISH POETS, Bloodaxe (2010)
ISBN: 978-1-85224-839-0

Bloodaxe’s latest anthology purports to represent a ‘new generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s’. It further claims to be continuing ‘a tradition…which stretches back decades…’ and which incorporates Al Alvarez’s (1962) The New Poetry, Edward Lucie-Smith’s (1970) British Poetry Since 1945 and The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). It boasts -slightly more persuasively- succession to Bloodaxe’s own, not-very-originally-entitled The New Poetry (of 1993). Its dust-jacket advertises ‘a time of great vibrancy and variety…[coupled with selections from the work of]…85 highly individualised and distinctive talents whose poems display the breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry’. Lumsden enthuses ‘this might well be the generation of poets least driven by movements, fashions, conceptual and stylistic sharing’. Would that it were so.

After resolutely working my way through the 362 word-structures on offer I can only conclude, with disappointment, that either the 85 featured practitioners are not especially ‘distinctive’. ‘individual’ or, indeed, ‘new’ -or that Mr Lumsden has chosen to represent them through poems which fail to reflect the ‘range and vigour’ of each individual’s personal -and idiosyncratic- canon. As Identity Parade‘s editor readily admits, ‘a third’ of the contributors to this ‘generational’ anthology are academics (actually it’s nearly twice that, if one counts ‘facilitators of creative writing workshops’), whilst another third ‘do work that is literature-related’. Though it can be fascinating to examine each writer’s background (via the medium of their appended profile/c.v.), it can also be unsettling to observe how few appear to have had the advantage of a career discipline affording them exposure to a-typical experience, unusual insight or, even, a ‘grounding’ in the assumption of a common and definable, non-pupillary, humanity. It may be overly facile to parrot ‘what do they know of literature who only Literature know?’ but, just presently, it has become insidiously easy for ‘poets’ to propagate personal anecdotage (or, even, confabulation) when, all too demonstrably, they have little else of which to write.

Repeatedly, the reader retreats from Identity Parade wondering (a) what a particular word-structure was trying to achieve and/or (b) why it bothered. Julia Copus offers us one interesting example, ‘Raymond at 60’, a ‘specular poem’ (in which the top half is mirrored by the lower) and here, at least, one can discern evidence of a writerly skill at work -in which the ‘patterning’ of form enhances, or ‘renders memorable’ the poem’s subject-matter/content. Mathew Hollis, in ‘The Diomedes’, manages to say something penetrating (even whilst deploying fashionable vers libre) about the human capacity for gregariousness -and concerning the time-structuring, risk-averse nature of contemporary western society. Such ‘insight’ is inexplicably rare in an anthology which showcases the ‘form’ which was supposed to be ‘liberating’ above all others. Otherwise, though Lumsden might opine that some-poet-or-other is ‘innovative’, ‘lyrical’ or ‘formally adept’, he appears to be unable to provide examples of anything surpassing the flashy display of self-conscious imagery, of brittle look-at-me cleverness or specious, onanistic word-play. This is an identity parade from which the witness would be unable to isolate one from another of the usual, amorphous suspects.

Whereas this reviewer is entirely aware that genuine poetry necessitates rather more than the employment of rhyme, metre or cadence, Mr Lumsden would do well to recognise that it also requires something in excess of their deliberate, wilful exclusion. Furthermore, the ‘particular’ (though of vital importance to the individual concerned) will always be transcended by the ‘universal’ -which is the irreducible responsibility of any ‘art’ that aspires to be at all ‘worthwhile’. Rather like Mr Lumsden’s own work, most of the word-structures in this publication fail to ‘move’, ‘inspire’ or (much) ‘engage’ us because, ultimately, they are neither concerned with us nor are they, in the fullest sense, contactable.

Robert Littell, The Stalin Epigram, Duckworth Overlook (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-7156-3903-0

Having enjoyed several of Robert Littell’s previous fictions, notably the well-plotted and well-researched The Revolutionist (about an early bolshevik) and The Company (set in the formative years of the C.I.A.), I had looked forward to reading his latest, The Stalin Epigram.

Whilst an historical novel concerning itself with the doings of a cadre of Russian poets might seem to be an unlikely frame upon which to fashion ripping yarns, there is definitely an intriguing story to be told about the persecution and mysterious disappearance of Osip Mandelstam during the ‘Red Terror’ of the nineteen thirties. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced that the much-praised Stalin Epigram fully exploits its opportunities.

Historical novels can be a relatively painless way of learning about a particular period. C.S.Forester’s ‘Hornblower’ series and George MacDonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ books -each in their own different ways- represent especially successful depictions of life during the Napoleonic wars, and the victorian era, respectively. However, in the very best historical fiction, the author will make clear just which aspects of their work are historical, and which
imagined. Littell has signally failed to do this here, with no scholarly foot notes nor addenda to guide the reader.

His story is narrated by a succession of charactors, some actual -like Nadezhda Mandelstam (the protagonist’s wife, upon whose memoir Hope against Hope Littell has significantly ‘leant’) and some apparently fictive -like ‘Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova’ (described as ‘a very young and very beautiful actress who is on intimate terms with the Mandelstams’). This can be disorientating, especially when there is, as yet, no standard English language biography of Mandelstam. Both Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova play narrative -and ‘walk-on’- roles, though each fails to convince entirely. Another (probably) fictitious narrator, a circus-strongman ‘Fikrit Shotman’, adopts a faux-naif style which proves tremendously difficult to consistently ‘pull-off’.

Part of the problem with this publication is that the central ‘charactor’, Osip Mandelstam, does not fully engage us. His epigram about the ‘Kremlin mountaineer’ (Stalin) whose ‘fingers are as fat as grubs’ (and for whom ‘every killing is a treat’) was almost foolhardily courageous. Yet the poet later wrote an ‘Ode to Stalin’ which was obsequious in the extreme. Libidinous, hallucinatory, lapsing in and out of plausibility, the Mandelstam presented here is a wonky reed upon which to play a tune. Of the ‘Epigram’ itself, purported here to have been composed during May 1934, there is evidence that it was first ‘birthed’ in November, 1933. Nor does Littell (who, justly, portrays Stalin as a monster) appear to realise that the ‘Man of Steel’ took such a close personal interest in his poets because he had once been a practitioner himself, back in his native Georgia.

Wilfred Owen felt that it fell under a ‘true’ poet’s remit to ‘warn’. This his near-contemporary Osip Mandelstam attempted to do -though he later retracted his admonishment and retreated into nebulousness. (Not that it saved him). Yet another writer from this same, wounded, generation, (the more fortunate) Bertolt Brecht, famously asked the rhetorical question:

  In the dark time
  Will there be singing?
  Yes, there will be singing.
  About the dark times.

Often posing more questions than it is able -satisfactorily- to answer (about poetic integrity versus political pragmatism, about historical provenance) The Stalin Epigram cannot be said to ‘sing’, but it chirrups along entertainingly enough.

Kevin Saving © 2010

Kevin Saving on

David Kessel

O the Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken – Collected Poems 1970-2006

[Selected, edited and introduced by Alan Morrison]

Reprint/2^nd Edition 2010

Londoner, ‘Survivor’ and poet (but not necessarily in that particular order) David Kessel brings what is almost a surfeit of life-experience to his work. His poems are thrown down like slabs of raw meat into an abandoned amphitheatre – though one through which he knows feral beasts will sooner or later prowl again.

While he expresses an admiration for several soldier-poets of the Second World War (notably Keith Douglas and Drummond Allison) it is a writer from the ’14/’18 conflict, Isaac Rosenberg, with whom this critic senses the closer parallels. Both of them East-enders of Jewish ancestry, both utilising imagistic free-verse of startling power – in each can be heard undertones of the starkest disgust. Kessel’s ‘voice’ is, possibly, the more ‘fractured’ of the two: a jagged, kaleidoscopic affair of juxtaposed contrasts, strange narrative twists, and sudden eruptions into lyrical clarity, the more potent for their non-linear arrival.

The word ‘fractured’ is used advisedly for David’s is a long-term experience of ‘schizophrenia’ -a noun derived from the Greek ‘skhizein’ (‘split’) and ‘phren’ (‘mind’). At some point during the early course of his illness -which interrupted a promising medical career- Kessel determined not to be the passive recipient of a seismic psychical event (which in others can have the effect of completely eroding the personality). Rather, as a poet, he elected to do what genuine poets have always done: make use of what he had. His triumphs -and triumphs they are, though he might possibly disagree- have been to circumvent the prescribed parabola of the illness (and, quite possibly, that of some of its treatments); to function as an artist without recourse either to self-pity or to Denial; and to win-through to that species of informed compassion which is, perhaps, only truly vouchsafed to those who have themselves suffered.

If Kessel appears, at times, to espouse a kind of ‘cockney-centric’ manifesto, it is one that is marked by in- rather than ex– -clusivity. His eyes are firmly on the underdog – and this is evidenced by an underlying aphoristic urgency:

Despair in a girl’s heart, where wild
  chrysanthemums should be. (‘Disintegration’)

The rain is falling
  on chipshop and battlefield, and the estuary
  of your pain flows worldly into the gulled ocean (‘For Drummond Allison’)

Today a sweetheart’s sigh is more dangerous
  than massed armies (‘Desperate sex’)

And I’ll follow the night-train to distant starved cities
  to bleed and pain and sing (‘Bus No 253’).

Clearly, ‘The vixen’, ‘For Zoe’ and ‘Hillside, Llangattock’ are authentic, felt poems -tendentious, yes, but better than anything produced by the latter day Heaneyesque/Hughesian orthodoxy; certainly since those two seasoned counterfeiters made their own names via earlier, stauncher work.

No one is going to tell you that Kessel is in any way an easy read. Some years after I first encountered the poetry, I’m still grappling with it, have never yet felt on wholly familiar terms. But then, after summiting on Kessel’s tortured masterpiece, ‘Hungering’, one arrives at his battered credo ‘I have climbed this hill to learn to care’ and feels that the ascent has been worthwhile for the view. Stay with it.

Kevin Saving © 2010

 

Kevin Saving

Dog Otter

 

He senses danger and is gone,

the water bulging in his wake.

You needn’t ever count upon

this sight again, and so should take

the memory and then move on…

 

You’ll never know what rendezvous he’ll break

with liquid arabesques, nor how he’ll trawl

fresh eddys, find new shoals to dredge.

His underwater playgrounds call

within him, like a lover’s pledge.

He’ll wear the river like a shawl

in slicked-back freedom, near the water’s edge.

Kevin Saving © 2006/2007

Kevin Saving is not at all proud of the fact that this poem won third prize in the 2006 National Poetry Competition; nor that it appeared both in Poetry Review and the Independent on Sunday, 

at the time.

Kevin Saving

Ex-Patriot

One keeps in touch now via SkyNews:

it seems we’re still at war.

We both, habitually, peruse

the Sport for England’s score

(although it’s easy, here, to lose

track what these things stand for).

 

One learns of how it all went wrong

in emails from one’s friends.

I still don’t speak the native tongue –

the weather makes amends…

You ask me just where I belong

but that, I think, depends

 

as we harbour in our own style

(and where-ever we might roam)

the wholly obstinate denial

that things change from what we’ve known

– so we feel much more In Exile

when on holiday ‘back Home’.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving

Gordon Brown

(To be sung to the tune of The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’)

 

Gordon Brown eyed-up The Prize,

now he’s found it’s not his size.

Labour’s dead-beats

losing their seats,

giving up ground through Gordon Brown.

 

Gordon Brown taxes the poor

(when they’re down) ten percent more.

Our ancient rights

sold over-night,

he’s gone to town, our Gordon Brown.

 

Gordon Brown, when interviewed,

looks and sounds like he’s chewing food.

Not voted-in.

Nothing but “spin”.

History’s clown – THAT’S Gordon Brown.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving

Death of a Hedgehog

– some minutes after being hit by my car

 

Your small life, so ill-defended,

(in a ball you chose to cower)

was quite innocent. It ended

and you opened, like a flower.

Kevin Saving

Autumnal

 

Autumn is a time for truth,

when we see past seasons clear:

spring’s long-neutered, likewise youth, 

hedges grin a gap-toothed sneer…

Are old walls still weather-proof?

Rummage out your winter gear.

As the glass falls faster, we’re

stalked by something like a wolf –

mangy, but of sharper tooth –

call it ‘cold’ or call it ‘fear’?

Kevin Saving © 2008

The Headland

 

There is a place we seldom go

which (usually) we’re loath to share-

somehow sufficient just to know

that it might still be there.

 

We think it marvellous -though strange-

how each time we return anew

so little ever seems to change

(it’s only us who do)

 

yet with the years we go there less

(how soon those years will hasten past!)

till we can only ever guess

which time will be the last.

Kevin Saving

Directions

 

We’re quite often asked directions

how to get to so-and-so

and we seldom take exception, 

tell the stranger what we know

till they sever the connection,

judge the likelihood, and go.

 

Do they make their assignation

with a loved one? Do we care?

Do they meet assassination

in some ambush halfway there?

If we know the destination

a rough bearing’s all we’ll share.

False Spring

 

Fooled by our thermostat and light

a butterfly lands on the wall

just by our headboard, preens for night

and flaunts its colours, proud yet small.

I watch and want to clutch it tight

but that won’t do at all.

 

We sleep. Next morning snows swirl round

like snipped, white, pestilential string

and I find cold upon the ground

this insubstantial thing

which left its night-time perch and found 

no summer, just false-spring.

Kevin Saving © 2008

No Equinimity

 

The started fox does not contend

the pack -but looks to flee.

I do not think I’ll meet my end

with equinity.

 

Led to the slaughterhouse, an ox

will die without a sound:

I’ll take the same view as that fox

and, when I’m round to ground

 

or held at bay (you may depend)

snarl at my enemy.

I do not think I’ll meet my end

with equinimity.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving

Six Epigrams

Absence

 

Absence can’t make hearts grow fonder-

that’s a poet’s dismal lie.

Love -just like our eyes- can wander,

time won’t serve to measure by.

Life’s a tad too short to squander,

memory so soon runs dry.

 

If, within a world of sorrow,

some affection comes your way,

love today and lapse tomorrow-

we were cast from fickle clay:

everything we have, we borrow;

no one ever came to stay.

Bounce

 

Most human knowledge is pretence,

most ‘Experts’ know Jack Squat-

when we’ve examined evidence

‘Fuck all’ is all we’ve got.

 

God’s comfort crumbs bob in our wake,

this ferry goes short-haul:

if asked what solace  we might take

I’d answer you, ‘Fuck all’.

Shooting Match

 

It’s politicians who make wars

as ways of saving face-

they speak of ‘Honour’ or ‘Just cause’

and (sometimes) of ‘Disgrace’

though prudence, it seems, still ensures

others die in their place.

 

The pomp and majesty of State,

the sum of corporate fears,

a ‘free’-market inviolate,

a rigged assembly’s cheers:

the whole damned shooting-match can’t rate

one orphan’s abject tears. 

Kevin Saving © 2009

Handkerchief

 

A trusty keepsafe to entrap

all that which secret cavities anoint,

illuminated treasure-map

of silver lakes and rugged points-

whole continents emerge, disjoint

to one galvanic thunderclap.

At pinch, a rustic tourniquet

which (knotted) pesters memory,

wipes cum and caramel away:

like life, a spotted tapestry.

We semaphor a quaint goodbye

to those left standing on the quay,

or wipe from optics smaller fry,

or pocket tears inexpertly.

For all we own and are

 

For all we own and are,

days narrow into night.

For all we note, compare

the light and the half-light

we’ll sniff the evening air

and still fall cowed, contrite.

 

For all we love and like,

foul seasons follow fair-

monsoon and earthquake strike

for all we do and dare.

And time ticks up the stair

for all we owe, and are.

Minotaur

 

King Bull, sluggish but proud,

a meadow for his court,

moves through the bovine crowd.

(His reign will prove quite short).

Though flies besiege his face

one consort’s undeterred-

he grapples for his place

to rise above the herd.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Walking in the Pinter Hinterland

(i.m. Harold Pinter, 1930-2008)

 

You gave our times a new expression,

challenged what you KNEW was wrong

and had the courage for compression,

longueurs, swear-words; staged a strong

rear-guard to cancer. Screw concession!

[…Pinter-patent pause…] So long.

This Is Not Depression

No. This is not ‘depression’ -the nightmare
miasma which infects each waking thought
with reparation’s price: the limb we’ve caught
and must gnaw through to free us from the snare.

And THIS is no ‘Depression’. We declare
our markets ‘weak’, watch dividends ‘decay’.
Our grandparents knew ‘Hardship’ in their day:
they would not think their world, and ours, compare.

We’ve fiddled whilst Rome burnt -we didn’t care-
(‘Adversity’s Old Serenade’). Our chins
are double, and they wedge cracked violins.
No: this is not ‘depression’…it’s ‘despair’.

Lonely Guy (The Gorilla)

I saw him, years ago, in London zoo.
He sat forlornly, grizzled by old-age
(most thought him all but ‘senile’ by that stage)
and, for a fleeting moment, just us two-
no crowds nearby. One fractious urchin who
had planned to goad him into primal rage
(yes, me -young then); one silverback; a cage-
with neither party ‘prepped’ for interview.

How many faces had those dark eyes seen
flit passed across that O-so-short divide?
Some six months after this, it would’ve been,
I’d read -in mock-obituaries- that he’d died,
but for those seconds (what can such things mean?)
eyes met in recognition…and he sighed.

©

Kevin Saving

The Christmas Gift

 

Adie was in no hurry. He watched the human shoals swimming outside the window of the cafe. Had he been ‘made’? It scarcely seemed to matter now. He gazed again at the strangers milling around in the London dusk -each with their own interior worlds pulsing away inside the few hundred cubic centimetres of their cranial cavities. Most were shopping, carrying the over-priced yuletide artefacts upon which so much of this society’s estimation of social worth seemed to be based. Would any of these individuals really miss their lives? He preferred not 

to think of that right now.

  A lady, alone, well-groomed and appealingly self-possessed smiled quizzically across at him 

from a chair some feet away. He watched her smile slowly fade like a searchlight from which 

the power source had been disconnected. Once, he might have been interested -played the courtship game of introduction, small-talk and selective disclosure. The lady seemed to be 

about his own age. Once, he might have thought that she was attractive. But it was late now 

for that sort of nonsense. Too late by far.

  Adie wondered idly what had aroused her interest in him. He’d been staring out of the cafe’s windows, searching the faces in the crowd, looking for identifying features which he might have glimpsed earlier in the day: these things were (in the present circumstances) important. Turning to scan the comfortable interior of the expensive, well-situated cafe, he’d made eye-contact with her. Other women had, in the past, told him that he had ‘hypnotic’ eyes; bright, humerous and alive. Adie didn’t think that he was otherwise, or in any other way, especially prepossessing. He slowly picked his nose then quite ostentatiously examined his fingernails before glancing again covertly at the lady. She was already reaching for her gloves against the winter cold and preparing to leave. Adie smiled inwardly. This was his gift to her, an anonymous but pleasing stranger. His last christmas gift.

  A waiter, neatly attired but with a slight squint, asked him if he required anything further. His coffee lay, already cold, on the table in front of him. He shook his head in polite dismissal and watched, half regretfully, as the woman left. She didn’t look again in his direction but walked, gracefully and with a kind of brittle determination, for the door. Adie didn’t rise to assist her. It was two or three minutes from here to the tube. Five more minutes then before completion of this final, self-appointed task.

  Adie felt once more for the large suitcase besides his feet and under the table. It was exactly where he had placed it when he had first sat down. It contained one final, despairing gesture towards the ‘Great Satan’ whose luxurious palace was situated so close to here. Adie would dearly have loved to have penetrated even further into the dragon’s den -but he knew that security factors militated against the extra risk. He could only speculate as to what tracking devices, sniffer dogs, plain-clothed, armed-guards surrounded the Houses of Parliament. This Satan could afford to protect itself.

  Adie was a well-educated man. He was familiar with the arguments of theoreticians such 

as Hobbes and John Milton on the subject of Tyranicide. Ultimately it had been a pragmatic choice, one informed by personal circumstances (a messy divorce and the prospect of inexorable decline into an illness for which the doctors had assigned multi-syllabic terminology, but no cure). Adie knew that he couldn’t ‘front up’ to that, so therefore the only choices left 

to him were choices of (as the Americans might have put it) what ‘exit strategy’ he might select.

  Adie himself had no religion, looked on it all as the purest self-deception -harmless enough 

on a personal level but historically pernicious. One of his oldest friends, known since before university, had had no such scepticism. Revelation of Adie’s dilemma presented him with an obvious resolution: Adie would be ‘The Movement’s means to strike a great ‘Hammer blow’ against the hated oppressors, the squalid lackeys of a cowboy-state which was prosecuting one of the world’s most infamous war-crimes. ‘Let them see,’ Adie’s friend had concluded (with an oratorical flourish) ‘let the crusaders know that they cannot order the deaths of innocent women and children with impunity…let them understand that we can bring an equal horror into their citadels…let them recognise that there can be no hiding place for child-murderers from the just reckoning of one honest man’.

  And so it had come to pass and with near-bewildering celerity. Adie understood all too little of the higher physics of what was inside the suitcase with which he travelled. He knew only what he had been told by the heavily-bearded courier who’d delivered the device to his hotel room this very morning. That the case contained approximately thirty pounds of semtex, with a roughly equal weight of radioactive material culled from the innards of an old hospital x-ray machine. That it was a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ which (if detonated correctly) would irradiate enough of a city to render it uninhabitable for half-a-century.

  Adie had refused quite steadfastly to make any kind of video-taped ‘Martyr’s Farewell’ for propaganda purposes. He had gone on to make it clear that he had nothing but the profoundest reservations both for his friend’s protestations of devoutness and for the dubious motivation behind his friend’s organisation. He was a Briton by birth, imbued with whatever it is that the experience of forty-plus years of slow-drip national degradation leaves you. Inured from the 

self-serving lies of politicians from all shades of the British political spectrum: men with no principles and no honour. He recognised within himself the great desire to ‘make a difference’. He was just sorry for the innocent bystanders of this rather tawdry show of defiance which he was about to make.

  He rose, a little unsteadily, to his feet, paid his bill and -with a gesture which seemed quaint even as he made it- left a sizeable tip. He pulled the suitcase through the door of the cafe, helpfully held open by the squinting waiter. My god, but the suitcase was heavy! His breathing was laboured now with the draining of what little remaining strength his wasting illness had left him. Adie had been told that for the weapon to have maximum effect it had to be activated in 

as open a space as possible, as close as was practicable to the palace of Westminster. He came panting to a stop and lowered his eyes to the watch at his wrist. Three minutes since he left the cafe, seven since the lady’s departure. he hoped she was on the underground, speeding away from here. The devil alone knew how many surveillance cameras were even at this moment recording his every movement. He stood stock still, one eye watering from the chilly breeze. He watched a uniformed policeman ambling along in his direction with all the unhurried, practiced arrogance of that profession. Slowly, and with infinite care, Adie’s hand reached towards the firing mechanism.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving on

Seamus Heaney

District and Circle, Faber and Faber, London, 2006

 

This, Heaney’s twelth collection, was published on the fortieth anniversary of his first, Death of a Naturalist. He has, over that period, become an almost universally celebrated – and I dare say mimicked – literary icon who once memorably wrote (a propos “the troubles”), “whatever you say, say nothing”.

 

For me, this policy seems to have spilled over into District and Circle, 52 poems (if you include three in ‘Found Prose’), many of a pastoral and/or descriptive nature.

 

Regularly hailed as “the greatest Irish poet since Yeats”, one suspects that Heaney buys into that encomium for he displays a number of ‘the master’s’ own faults: a less than

noble self-absorbtion, insularity, and an occasional, almost naive, pretentiousness. These propensities have, of course, long been observable – as in the rather laboured 

correlataion of his wife, Marie, with a skunk in the 1979 love-poem ‘A Skunk’.

 

Great poetry entails a kind of sharing and I’m uncertain how much is being shared these days. Many of the old G.M. Hopkins-esque tricks remain, however. In the present collection’s second poem, a sonnet, the fourteen lines are comprised of 108 words (six of which are hyphenated), at least six sub-clause, and a parting interogative. All this occurs 

in just the one sentence and, though I am aware that Shakespeare and Keats –

infrequently – wrote one-sentence sonnets, isn’t all this mannered ultra-compression somewhat indigestible? And isn’t it possible that in ‘A Shiver’ one of our most vaunted technicians has written both opaquely and self-indulgently?

 

In the title poem, District and Circle, (apparently a route used by the author as a young man), the stampede of imagery and -again- the surfeit of hyphens (‘straggle-ravelled’, 

‘herd-quiet’, ‘roof-wort’) might well be unfathomable to any reader who has never 

actually travelled on the underground -and considered portentious by anyone who has. 

It’s hard not to be put-off by so many self-regarding literary allusions or seemingly arbitrary line-breaks; and, ultimately, not to distrust the confiding tone Heaney often selects as he embarks upon yet another, largely private, reminiscence. Once we realise that to confide is not necessarily to share, it’s difficult to discern what exactly Mr Heaney is offering us here, other than an insight into his prodigeous vocabulary, extensive  acqaintanceship and elaborate erudition.

 

The collection is at its best when at its homeliest. In ‘A Chow’, the great man has been offered something, evidently hot-tasting, called ‘warhorse plug’.  I found myself smiling at the disclosure ‘The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to/ At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick/ Bran from a bucket, grit off a coping-stone’. This appears much more personal and authentic -yet even here Heaney cannot entirely eschew the literary, with the poem  concluding: ‘like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent’. In more ways than I could ever fully explain, I’ll always hope to avoid a fulgent quid-spurt!

 

There are some decent poems presented here (‘The Nod’, ‘Stern’ and ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ come to mind) but, overall,what’s happened with District and Circle is a 

writer replete with hopnours – in my own opinion the most over-rated since Wallace Stevens – thinking that he can get away with anything. Perhaps a bonanza of acclaim can dull the self-critical faculties, as it did with Wordsworth and sometimes (heresy!) with Yeats himself.

 

So next time, Seamus, please: more sharing, less showing-off.

Kevin Saving

Two King Makers

Against Oblivion – Ian Hamilton, Viking, 2002

The Great Modern Poets – Michael Schmidt, 2006

The twentieth century was when our poets came down, somewhat grudgingly, from their plinths on Mount Parnassus. Up till that time it was still possible for a literary giant like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to become vexed by the curious on-lookers who occasionally peered over the wall surrounding his residence in the Isle of Wight. After 1900, well, what was there to see anymore?

Of “The great modern poets” (those who’ve deceased), it is possible to think of perhaps two who lived moderately interesting lives: W.B.Yeats, a senator in the newly-founded Irish Free State and Wilfred Owen, who was by all accounts a valiant – if troubled – soldier in the First World War. Of their compeers -those of whom had any meaningful existence outside “Literature” – Hardy was an architect; T.S.Eliot, a bank clerk and Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive. Still others, particularly the Americans, sought refuge in, and were embraced by, academia. And it shows.

These two contrasting books (superficially so similar) both furnish biographical vignettes -coupled with brief selections from the work- of fifty modern poets whom the authors judge to be of lasting importance. Of the two, Ian Hamilton’s editorial thesis is the more provocative. Historically, he suggests, few will survive oblivion – and seldom those their contemporaries feel to be the most meritorious. From our own times only four (Eliot, Hardy, Auden and Yeats) will, with any certainty, be read by English-speaking people in generations to come. Most of the rest, he implies, will fall by the wayside: some to be periodically revived, others to be consigned to permanent, dusty anonimity.

Hamilton’s volume is by far the slighter of the two and yet one feels that his judgement is the more considered, his opinion the weightier -even when one is in disagreement with him. Both Michael Schmidt and Hamilton (the latter died in 2001) have written extensively on the history of literature and both have published collections of their own poetry. Interestingly, there is a large concordance between the two (though Hamilton excludes living authors) as to who’s to be allowed into the pantheon. Schmidt – with no acknowledgement – includes all of Hamilton’s big four and acquiesces in the admittance of Kipling, Mew, Frost, Jeffers, Millay, two of the three Thomas’s (Edward and Dylan), Stevens, (W.C.) Williams, Lawrence, Pound, MacDiarmid, Moore, Owen, Cummings, Graves, Tate, Betjeman, Bishop, (Robert) Lowell, (Keith) Douglas, Larkin, Ginsberg, Plath and (Ted) Hughes.

Any such anthology must, of necessity, be a very subjective undertaking. Sports fans notoriously enjoy creating their own fantasy “All-time Best Elevens” – and this in a sphere of endeavour where  statistical comparison can provide some guidance. Not so poetry, in which it is impossible to state whether “Sassoon scored more goals than Stevens” or accurately reflect “how much more weight Hardy carries above Heaney”. Nevertheless both authors feel confident enough to ignore such luminaries as John Masefield, W.H.Davies and Vachel Lindsay, to quote just three with work of stature to their names.  For me, Pound, Tate, MacDiarmid and Ginsberg are (already) so much dead wood. Beauty resides in the interpretive, individually colourative valuation of its appraiser, as Schmidt might put -and as Shakespeare (nearly) said.

The biographical sketches in Against Oblivion, though briefer, tend to carry more thrust, whereas there are a number of factual errors in Schmidt’s text (Betjeman’s family, for example, were of Dutch – not German – extraction). Hamilton’s pen-pictures are altogether pithier – as when he maintains that Stevie Smith (who found late fame in the psychodelic sixties) “was always further out than we thought – and not drowning, but waving”. Schmidt, by contrast, has a habit of saying none too much – but at greater length. Furthermore, he appears to be unable to defend some highly excentric selections (James K.Baxter, C.H.Sisson, Laura Riding, among others), either through penetrating analysis or by the presentation of exceptional work. Indeed, his choice of poems -even from major writers- seems often to be haphazard and without any guiding notion of what makes them either “characteristic” or “special”.

In only one way does “The Great modern poets” supercede the earlier volume. The

selection of photographs is of better quality and (at times) more revealing. For some reason a sizeable number of poets appear to wish to be represented sitting smugly in front of well-stacked book-shelves. Exceptions to this rule include T.S.Eliot (trying – vainly, one feels – to make sense of some algebraic formulation which he has just scribbled on a blackboard), Thom Gunn (posing archly and backgrounded by a highrise, San Franciscan skyline) and Seamus Heaney (doing something crouched and furtive-looking against a tree). Of the two books, read the Hamilton – take a glance at the Schmidt.

Kevin Saving © 2008

 

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Stephen Fry: The Ode Less Travelled, Hutchinson, London, 2005

ISBN: 009179661X

 

Despite its truly awful titular pun, The Ode Less Travelled turns out to be a valuable reference book, an accessible self-help guide to the crafting of poetry and a persuasive piece of literary propaganda.

Stephen Fry, well-known as actor, raconteur and ‘television personality’, does a thorough job in explaining the basics of ‘Metre’, ‘Form’, ‘Rhyme’ and ‘Diction’ (each of which has a chapter devoted to it). He also displays some genuine – though whimsical – talent himself, with a series of verses written as exemplars of various poetic forms – most notably his ‘Kitchen Villanelle’.

Fry appears to believe that poetry – like any other art-form- is regulated by a number of defined accordances, parameters, ‘rules’ (if you like). It is first necessary to have a working knowledge of these before one can work outside of them effectively – if one so chooses. Music, for example, is governed by ‘rules’ of intonation, painting by those of perspective. Although not overtly stated, the suspicion remains that this author has little time for Free Verse.

What reaction, if any, these opinions will provoke in the editors of the ‘major’ poetry journals (in terms of circulation, dwarfed – even en masse – by the likes of Golfing Weekly), or on the burgeoning Faculty Boards of degree-level ‘creative writing’ courses, remains to be seen. For this reviewer at least, anything which serves to promote an alternative to the prosey, verbose and anecdotal fare which currently constitutes poetric orthodoxy, is to be applauded.

 

Whilst at £10.99 (for 357 pages) this hardback cannot be called ‘cheap’, Fry has provided a stimulating and informative pocket-sized classic. Although the prose style can grate in its tendency towards a rather self-conscious jokiness, the effect is (usually) to leaven what otherwise might be a dry discourse on technique. I particularly enjoyed the large Glossary at the back of the book, which serves to decode a formidable – and to the lay-person daunting – array of technical jargon/literary cant.

Kevin Saving © 2007

Kevin Saving choosing one of 52 ways of looking at

Ruth Padel’s 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem

Published by Chatto and Windus (2002)

ISBN 0-701-17318-1

 

An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Ruth Padel takes her title from one of his poems which suggests a finite number of ways one might look at a blackbird (13). Of course, though 

there are both more (and less) than 52 ways to look at poetry, there are indisputably 52

weeks in any calendar year, this book being adapted from a year of the author’s well-received weekly column in the Independent on Sunday.

  Padel discusses 52 poems by 52 modern poets, for each of whom she gives brief biographical details. Quite coincidentally, a good percentage of the material under discussion was written by colleagues from The Poetry Society whom, naturally enough, 

she has come to admire after years of association. Michael Longley, Helen Dunmore,

Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Fleur Adcock, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray and Moniza

Alvi (among others) have contributed individual poems. The book itself has been lavishly praised by both Lavinia Greenlaw and Jo Shapcott (current Poetry Society president) the latter of whom writes:

 

      Her introduction will come to be seen as the summary of the age. I haven’t seen 

      any description of where and who we are that’s as clear, balanced and inspiring”.

      Greenlaw and Shapcott each also happen to have a poem amongst the chosen 52.

      But then, as Padel writes in her text, the poetry world is a small one.

  The introduction IS well-written, confident and stimulating. Apparently, we are in the middle of a poetry renaissance. The author notes some of the trends modern British poetry has been influenced by – which include (anti-) Thatcherism, Post-Colonialism, Regionalism

and Feminism. The current preoccupation with Post-Modernism is given an airing, with its hip, ‘filmic’ references and cavalier disdain for both standard English and end-rhyme. She could equally have added that end-rhyme lost its cachet around the same time as the first, modish influx of publications began, translating the dissenting Eastern European poets of 

the Cold War era.

  Quite a number of the selected poems are, indeed, very good – particularly Paterson’s

‘Imperial’, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Prayer’, Simon Armitage’s ‘The Fox’, Michael Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’ and Thom Gunn’s ‘Still life’. Gunn, especially, is a fascinating example of how a poet can 

build up a formidable critical reputation BEFORE writing anything of substance. However, 

the book’s credibility is somewhat marred by some speculative and occasionally fanciful interpretations of rather ordinary work. For instance, Fred D’Aguair’s ‘Mama Dot Warns

Against An Easter Rising’ (which is written in a Carib patois completely devoid of punctuation) is likened to W.B.Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. Fine, except for the fact that Yeats’ brilliant ventriloquise-ing of his acquaintance, Major Robert Gregory’s attitudes and motivation prior to his death-in-action (killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ in Italy in 1918) has little to do with the historical Easter Rising of Dublin in 1916. D’Aguair’s poem is about flying 

a kite. Another example, ‘Giant Puffballs’ by Neil Rollinson, concerns itself with an act of defecation in a wood. Padel purrs over the poet’s ‘physicality’ and opines “Runs of three consonants or vowels are another way in which the poem holds its lines together: F (‘sniffing’, ‘muffled’, ‘offensive’), T (‘shit’, ‘squat’, ‘walnut’), I (‘bright’, ‘rice’, ‘spice’),

short O (‘moss’, ‘dogs’, ‘drops’)”. Yesss…er…thanks for that, Ruth.

  Though clearly of enormous technical awareness herself, Padel is too easily convinced of the artfulness and ‘daring’ of quite arbitrary line-breaks; of the expertise behind such consonant rhymes as ‘tendrils’/’smile’ (which few readers would recognise as rhymes at all) -and by the ingenious structure of poems that are patently structureless. From time to time we’re offered some highly acute readings/observations, but this book’s prevailing tone 

comes close to suggesting that we should count ourselves fortunate indeed to be in possession of so many works of genius, imbued with deep knowledge and meticulous skill, and to be found presented here by Padel (R) and her coterie of literary-insiders.

  One question this author doesn’t seem to ask herself is: “Should poetry NEED to be explained?”

  I have the feeling that if it does, then it’s already failed. To adopt a rather legalistic-sounding formula: no poem has any right to presume more than a ‘reasonable’ amount of intelligence or knowledge on the part of a potential reader, or that these should be deployed beyond a ‘reasonable’ investigatory period. After that, it’s on its own.

  Ruth Padel appears to subscribe, implicitly, to a rather ‘whiggish’ perception of poetry: that it is somehow obeying an inevitable Darwinian law – she numbers Charles Darwin among her ancestors – which insists upon a natural, qualitative progression. Whilst it is deceptively easy to believe that ‘newer’ implies ‘better’, humanity’s far from measured path as often as not places a new artistic Dark Age after a Classical, Golden or Elizabethan one. Put bluntly, Bartok isn’t better than Bach, Jackson Pollock didn’t out-paint Poussin and Jo Shapcott’s certainly no Shakespeare.

  Under the heading “Why has poetry lost its audience?” Padel admits “…most college educated people, and the wider literary community, see poetry today as elitist, irrelevant, obscure”.

  She suggests some plausible reasons for this – a disinterested, possibly jealous media; the time-consuming pressures of industrial society coupled with the allure of other, previously unavailable pastimes. Hmmm, perhaps. But with all due respect to this well-intentioned and thoughtful publication, I wouldn’t be quite so ready to absolve modern poets themselves.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Saving Grace

more critical pearls from Kevin Saving (Honorary Recusant)

Reviews:

Dalgit Nagra (2007) Look We Have Coming To Dover!, Faber and Faber, London

ISBN 978-0-571-23122-5

British Library Board (2003) The Spoken Words (Poets), Audio CD, ISBN: 0-7123-0516-5

Look We Have Coming Out With Faber!

Retailing at a pricey £8.99, Daljit Nagra’s first collection has been both critically praised 

and prize-recommended. It contains 31 poems and a ‘Punjabi to Ungreji guide’ (‘Ungreji’ 

apparently means ‘English’ in Punjabi). The blurb states boldly that it ‘takes in its sights Mathew Arnold’s ‘land of dreams”. We are told that ‘Nagra, whose parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspirations, assimilation, alienation and love…’

  Whilst I have often wanted to take Mathew Arnold in my sights, I find it hard to refrain 

from questioning some aspects of Mr Nagra’s literary treatment of the land of his birth. I quite comprehend how in his poem, ‘Yobbos’, he can feel disenfranchised when 

encountering the unthinking prejudices of his fellow countrymen. And in ‘Sajid Naqui’ I enjoyed his off-centre elegy for a ‘grungy’, irreligious friend whose funeral is hi-jacked by 

a strict Shi-ite family. However, other poems are more problematic. Several (including ‘A prelude to Suka’s Adventures from the Board Room’ and the title poem – a recipient of the Forward Prize) appear to poke fun at some perceived myth of meritocratic advancement in Britain. This myth (more usually entitled ‘The American Dream’) cannot, surely, have been sustained by anyone in Britain – not even the most ill-informed of immigrants – since Dick Whittington’s day.

  I was sorry to find that Nagra’s free-verse often takes on the dense, stream-of-consciousness smattering of pidgin-English (coupled with a mannered dearth of punctuation) which the academies seem, currently, to be so enamoured of. One fairly typical stanza 

(from ‘Bibi & the street car wife’) reads as follows:

  Ever since we loosened our village acres

  for this flighty mix-up country, like moody

  actress she buys herself a Datsun, with legs

  of KFC microphoning her mouth

  (ladies of temple giddily tell me her tale):

  she manicured waves of men, or honking horn

  to unbutton her hair she dirty winking:

  come on friend, I like letting you in!

 

One of the favoured adages of writer’s workshops (or so I’m told) is ‘Show, don’t tell’.

Unfortunately, when a riot of images chases each other across the page what frequently occurs, indigestably, is not so much a ‘showing’ as a ‘showing-off’. Too often, for such a 

slight volume, its readers can end up feeling themselves not only patronised but that 

double-standards are in play. If this reviewer (of white, English ancestry) were to adopt pidgin-English as a literary device he would, doubtless, receive opprobium. So how is it acceptable for Nagra and others to do so? Lest in these politically-so-correct times I stand accused of constructing some small-minded Little-Englander manifesto, let me add that dyslexics, too, have feelings.

  In ‘Booking Khan Singh Kumar’ Nagra startles himself with the insight ‘Should I read for 

you straight or Gunga Din this gig/ Did YOU make me for the gap in this market/ Did I make 

me for the gap in this market’ yet a few pages later in ‘Kabba questions the ontology of representation, the Catch 22 for ‘Black writers” he growls ”Udder’ is all vee are to yoo, to 

dis cuntry…vut free-minding teecher are you to luv ‘our’ poem…’ This feels like a writer 

who wants both to have his chapatti and eat it.

  Whilst I can, and do, sympathise with the plight of an immigrant to Britain, racially abused, economically exploited and ‘misunderstood’, I’m caused to wonder if this publication hasn’t missed a chance to lessen that misunderstanding and, again, for just what stratum of British society it was written.

Best of the Posthumous Poets

When critics speak of a particular poet’s ”voice’ they appear to have in mind some characteristic combination of syntax, form, vocabulary, subject-matter and revealed philosophy – a kind of idiosyncratic literary modus operandi. There is, however, another ‘voice’ which speaks more directly to the ear, which affords some aquaintance with its owner’s physicality, cultural exposure, even psyche.

  This compilation of early recordings by many of the great figures of English literature (all born during the nineteenth century and all reading from their own work) makes available 

to the interested lay-person archival material which might previously have been obscurely inaccessible or entirely unsuspected.

  The collection opens with an 1890 recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson declaiming sonorously (if sometimes unintelligibly due to poor sound quality) his ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, and showing no signs of an allegedly broad Lincolnshire burr. It is perhaps as well that there are few ‘p’s or ‘b’s in the text. One commentator, Montague Eliot, later spoke 

of being put off poetry for life when, as a child and seated in the front row for a Tennysonian recital, he and other children ‘were regaled with a shower of spittle’.

  This is followed by Robert Browning, caught in the year of his death from bronchitis 

(1889), well into his seventies, but sounding remarkably chipper. He seems the more likable, too, for first fluffing his lines and then apologising with ‘I’m sorry but I can’t remember me own verses!’ Sir Henry Newbolt recites ‘Vitai Lampada’ like the archetypal product of a plummy parsonage (which, of course, he was) inciting us to ‘play up, play up and play the gime’. In later life he’d come to dislike this, his best-known poem.

  We can listen to Mr William Butler Yeats discussing and then reading his ‘Lake Isle of Innesfree’, accent not in the least Oirish, which is unsurprizing when we know that 

between the ages of two and sixteen he was brought up largely in Hammersmith. In ‘Tarentella’, his fellow politician/poet, Hilaire Belloc breathlessly mythologises an incident 

(‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda? Do you remember an Inn..?’) which takes on a slightly different aspect with the knowledge that the “Miranda” in question was, in fact, the Duke 

of Miranda (a Spanish diplomat).

  We can eavesdrop upon a strangely anonymous Rudyard Kipling, perhaps in 1921 still 

guiltily grieving his son, John, whom he’d encouraged into enlisting, under-age and fatally, during the First world war. We catch Laurence (‘age shall not weary them nor the years condemn’) Binyon sounding…half-asleep! Eventually, with Walter de la Mare, we hear the 

first fully competent recitation: rich, cultivated voice, well-modulated tones. Much how we feel a poet should sound.

  We hear Robert Frost with miles to go before he sleeps, workman-like and with a pleasant New-England twang; Alfred Noyes, putting his heart into ‘The Highwayman’; John Masefield 

(in 1941), by now every inch the lettered poet laureate, no longer the waif who’d dreamed 

of a maritime career and then had to jump ship (victim of irremedial sea-sickness). One notable absentee is Thomas Hardy: to date, no archive recording of his has ever been unearthed.

  We DO hear Ezra Pound – a quite dotty performance, this, featuring a cod-Scottish 

brogue, booming balderdash and comic self-accompaniment on the timpani. We hear 

Siegfried Sassoon, very much the gentleman-player, at ease with his material if not yet his memories. And we hear the old mandarin himself, Thomas Stearns Eliot, the merest 

inflection of the trans-Atlantic about his delivery – dry, but engagingly disinclined to treat 

‘The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufock’ too portentiously.

  These are some of the highlights on an impressively compiled CD, which can be resourced via your local library. There is a certain magic to be found here, if you’ve a taste for such things, akin to finding a Virtual-Reality Scheherazade in your living room, telling her tales. 

For all that, these are not, for the most part, polished performances – certainly not by 

actors with extensive training in intonation, pitch and the strategic use of pause. What this collection does bring us is the immediacy of some of the world’s greatest writers, speaking some of the world’s greatest lines and using whatever wit and nature lent them. Not necessarily the finest interpretations available but, assuredly, the definitive ones.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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the latest book in Bardic speculation

The Lodger – Shakespeare on Silver Street

By C. Nicholl 

Allen Lane (2007) ISBN 978-0-713-99890-0

 

All’s Well That Reads Well

When we survey the life – and attempt to divine the personality – of William Shakespeare, it is 

a little like staring down into a deep well. At the end of an ever-darkening tunnel looms a face, recognisably human, but possessing features which seem to shift and warp -just too far off to be recognisable. In some ways we feel that we know Geoffrey Chaucer (his predecessor by 

two centuries) better, both as an historical figure and as a man. Like quite a few such shafts, the Shakespearean well has been used as a bit of a dumping place for things which shouldn’t really belong there, a huge freight of cod-scholarship, wishful-thinking, recycled rumour and gossip which, latterly, has reached industrial proportions. Charles Nicholl’s new book does 

not, however, deserve to be consigned together with this unhealthy sump: it represents an authentic attempt at retrieval.

  Nicholl, previously best-known for The Reckoning (1995) (which probes into the rather 

seamy locale of Christopher Marlowe’s last days and observes there an extraordinary cast of dodgy charactors) is an informed and insightful guide into the labyrinthine world of the late Elizabethans/early Jacobeans. He has mastered his primary sources and the focus of his 

current historical detective work is the period of a few years (just after the turn of the seventeenth century) when Shakespeare boarded in the now-defunct Silver Street, London with the French emigres (and fashionable wig-makers), Mr and Mrs Mountjoy. Much of the chronology is necessarily inexact but this is the period, Shakespeare’s early forties, of his 

plays King Lear and Othello. The circumstance which lights up, briefly and intriguingly, 

The Bard’s domestic arrangements, is his being called as witness – some eight years after the event – to attest to his own part in the Handfasting (betrothal, pledgeing) of his landlord’s 

and landlady’s daughter, Marie, to their apprentice Stephen Belott. The Landlord, Christopher Mountjoy, has reneged on his promise of an adequate dowry and -the Elizabethans were highly litigious- been sued.

  Shakespeare makes an oddly inadequate and, one surmises, highly reluctant witness. His attestation, such as it is, will not have helped or pleased either party. Nicholl employs careful textual analysis of both the Shakespearean opus and contemporaneous manuscripts (those of rivals, friends and collaborators) to tease out societal views on topics with such modern resonnances as economic migration, lady’s fashion and the sex-industry. He tentatively, but tantalisingly, speculates on an affaire d’amour between landlady and playright…Mrs Mountjoy -like her daughter, a Marie – may even be ‘The Dark Lady’ of the sonnets.

  Always readable and sometimes fascinating, The Lodger prods a lantern into numerous indistinct corners of the Shakespearean milieu. Yet despite this tour de force of painstaking erudition and elegant conjecture, at the book’s conclusion we do not feel notably more acquainted with the Mountjoy’s eponymous paying-guest. As ever, Shakespeare, The Man, 

lurks just off-stage or enigmatically at its periphery.

  When we return from this particular descent into our murky wishing-well, we’ll remember scraps of sometimes poignant, sometimes racy graffitti scrawled around its walls. Unfortunately, the deeper we investigate, the less real illumination is afforded us, and the substance of our enquiries, like Shakespeare himself, continues to slip between our fingers.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Ian McEwan’s 

On Chesil Beach

McEwan, I. (2007) ON CHESIL BEACH, Vintage, ISBN 978-0-099-51279-0

 

If ‘sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three/ which was rather late for me’ (as Philip Larkin, with great personal disingenuousness, wrote in 1967) then it will arrive far too late, also, for the two, newly-wed protagonists of this Ian McEwan novella, set one year earlier.

Edward and Florence Mayhew, both quietly repressed individuals, spend a disasterous wedding-night at a Dorset hotel and that – so far as the action goes – is that. McEwan sits, god-like, on high, pulling his writerly strings above these two totally fictitious characters and yet somehow manages to hint at emotional truths in a way which poetry used to, but latterly seldom does.

It says a good deal about contemporary culture that we appear to be so fascinated by (and prepared to invest so much time and money upon) the entirely fictive. The role of 

The Story-Teller has a long historical pedigree but can seldom previously have enjoyed the scale of social acceptability, approval, even apotheosis, that it does at present. This may not suit everyone. When McEwan writes (for instance) “Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed” one small part of this reviewer is tempted to shout in reply”. Oh no he didn’t!” And when the Mayhew’s bedroom catastrophe – both “climatic” and fumbling – is evoked with such near-forensic candour, it is difficult to refrain from speculations regarding the provenance and motivation behind disclosures of such apparent authenticity. And yet if modern readership requires an omniscient narrative presence (perhaps now the only example of its kind we can aspire to) then it’s hard to imagine one which disposes of its humanoid materials more judiciously, or records their separate downfalls more elegantly, than McEwan does here. He manages, skillfully, to enlist our sympathies for both Edward and Florence, each of whom falls victim to integral weaknesses – not ‘faults’ exactly – in much the same, inexorable way as the mythic heroes of Greek tragedy used to do.

One method of determining a book’s real merit (and one which I have not seen previously quoted) is by using what I am about to christen ‘The Oxfam Criterion’. This is definable by the length of time it takes, post-publication, for the opus of a best-selling author to be found gracing the shelves of the charity shops -and at a greatly reduced price. The Oxfam Criterion works on the premise that whilst many people might be conned into buying a book by dint of its writer’s literary reputation (or through slick marketing) few will retain for long an inferior volume -especially a paperback- in the knowledge that that are unlikely ever to re-read, or even finish, it. Using this scarsely robust index, On Chesil Beach rates highly. I have been, thus far, unable to locate an edition for sale outside of the portals of 

a reputable booksellers; nor is it reservable for months yet at my local library.

Strangely, perhaps paradoxically, we seem to have arrived at a time when truth and insight are more likely to be found between the covers of a (decent) novella than those of a (probably bogus) poetry collection. Personally, and having now read all three synchronous publications, I’d rather spend time On Chesil Beach than in a Drowned Book or …Coming To Dover! McEwan, whose writing, here, espouses the old-fashioned virtue of economy (and whose method eshews posturing) encourages us to BELIEVE – even in the knowledge of his artful, formulaic deceit.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Gary Beck

Beck, G. (2008) Remembrance and other poems (origamicondom.org)

(submitted to the Recusant for review)

 

It’s In The Doing…

Whilst the French might have invented vers libre, it took the Americans to re-package it as ‘free verse’ and to tool it, with characteristic hoo-ha, into Town. That’s, increasingly, how I’ve come to think of the phenomenon: as an enormously long line – often literally – of mass-produced, easy-to-assemble, chug-along little vehicles rolling off the stocks in any colour you like – as long as it’s grey.

  Gary Beck’s new chapbook (‘cyber-book’?) is by-no-means the worst offender in this

deleterious cavalcade – that, probably, would be W.C. Williams’ apology for stealing plums (which belongs, more properly, pinned to a fridge-door rather than masquerading in published form). In fact, Beck (a New York theatre director who, as his blurb informs us, has also worked as a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver) finds some engaging, humane and perceptive things to say. But do these reflections/observations justify the praise-word poem?       

  ‘Abandoned’ – the chapbook’s first entry and therefore, presumably, its most-pondered – serves as a fairly representation example:

 

  Abandoned in the desert

  I dream rescues,

  while the smiting sand

  strips the shimmering flesh

  from my rejected bones.

  Where is the guide?

  Wagon master of the soul’s journey

  fording rivers,

  repelling ambushes,

  then leaving me behind,

  a companion to the voyage

  who turned the wheel

  harder than anyone,

  but questioned the road.

 

So, to reprise, we’ve got a desert, a wagon-train, a river, an ambush, a voyage and a road, all 

in fourteen lines. And whilst a certain reliance on the adjectival is forgivable in a man who also writes short-stories, what exactly is the descriptive ‘shimmering’, doing loitering in his demonstrably gruesome tableau in which flesh is stripped, bones are rejected and where sand smites? Genuine poetry ought, surely, to involve more than a succession of loosely-connected images careering around a series of irregular line-breaks.

  Beck has written (in his monograph An Assertion of Poetry) that he finds himself “more concerned with the message, rather than the ‘poetic’ quality of poetry”, so he may, possibly, forgive the odd quibble. When, in ‘Betrayers’, he writes of how ‘the men of World War II…came back with grosser appetites…{to become}…the makers of power/ the abusers of tomorrow’ it 

is difficult to fault this as an analysis of post-war American politics. ‘Once in the Bronx’ charts the decline of a neighbourhood in an anecdotal, yet heart-felt threnody:

 

  I think my girlfriend was crushed

  beneath the wreckage of her house of dreams

  …somewhere in the Bronx.

 

And in ‘Brief Moments by the East River’ there’s a snapshot of urban alienation whose arresting poignancy is unmatched elsewhere in the collection’s eighteen pages:

 

A yellow butterfly flutters,

  sucking off undernourished weeds,

  tries to cross the highway,

  doesn’t make it.

  The helicopter spotting traffic

  doesn’t notice.

 

If we discard one contentious abstract noun, poetry, for a moment, I’d reckon that Mr Beck would be a good man to share a bourbon with: his mind is questing and his heart well-sited.

Let’s allow him the last word:

 

“I write what I write because it springs out of my experience in this complicated life. Calculation or gain has never directed what I do. The doing is everything.”

 

Amen to that.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope, Two Cures for Love – Selected Poems 1979-2006, Faber and Faber, 

ISBN: 978-0-571-23739-5

 

The first reaction upon picking up Wendy Cope’s “Selected” is to register just how slim a volume it really is. 96 pages in total (ten of these devoted to notes on the genesis of some of the poems) seems a paltry summation of 27 years of work. But then, miss Cope has never been exactly prolific when compared to other titans of contemporary verse.

  A very likeable voice, Cope’s: warm, ‘witty’, playful (especially in the early years) but capable of expressing tender truths concerning the human condition. She walks the

narrow path dividing ‘light verse’ and ‘serious poetry’ with such assurance as to make us realise that these are not really substantive categorisations after all – merely the dubious nomenclature of those labouring through life without a sense of humour.

  Cope is easily my favourite poet writing ‘in the mainstream’ right now. Sure, she writes 

‘formalist’ verse (with real rhymes in her villanelles, sonnets and triolets) though she will explain, almost apologetically, that she she didn’t, originally, start out writing that way. In her methods, range and formal inventiveness she most resembles the American, Dorothy Parker, though I have never seen the latter cited as ‘an influence’. If, perhaps, she has never excelled her breakthrough first volume, the best-selling Making Cocoa for Kingsley

Amis (1986), two further collections have followed, Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don’t Know (2001), each of which undoubtedly had its moments. She long ago received that formal imprimatur (both official sanction and pathway to financial security), acceptance onto the GCSE course-work syllabus; and maybe it’s that economic viability (together with

a more lately found emotional security) which has removed just a little of the edge from the more recent poems. Also, alas, formal/lyric poets tend to have written most of their best work before the age of forty -though Yeats, Hardy and (possibly) Houseman might be the exceptions proving this rule-of-thumb.

  It’s good to revisit old friends like ‘Bloody Men’, ‘Valentine’ and ‘Loss’ and to be able to acknowledge that, at her best, Cope is, well, rather wonderful. It’s good to re-enter the slightly cheesy world of that portentious poetaster, Jason Strugnell (I’ve always suspected an anagram here, but have never been able to nail it). It’s fun walking with ‘TUMPs (Totally Useless Male Poets)’ and to enjoy once more possibly the best parody ever, ‘A Nursery Rhyme (as it might have been written by William Wordsworth)’ in which the Old Maid of Mount Rydal finally gets his come-uppance. 

  Though there’s little here amongst the new or ‘previously uncollected’ material of comparable stature, Miss Cope entirely deserves the validation of a Selected and I hope that it sells well for her – at least well enough to justify Fabers bringing out a paperback edition. £12.99 for the present hardback is just a little too steep.  

  If I might be allowed to quote a sizeable extract from just one single poem, it would 

have to be ‘Being Boring’ – and for purely personal reasons. Touchingly, Cope used to refrain from performing this piece in school readings for fear that it would “shock” the impressionable students.

 

                    BEING BORING

                     May you live in interesting times (Chinese curse)

 

                    If you ask me “What’s new?”, I have nothing to say

                    Except that the garden is growing.

                    I had a slight cold but it’s better today.

                    I’m content with the way things are going.

                    Yes, he is the same as he usually is,

                    Still eating and sleeping and snoring.

                    I get on with my work. He gets on with his.

                    I know this is all very boring.

 

                    There was drama enough in my turbulent past:

                    Tears and passion -I’ve used up a tankful.

                    No news is good news, and long may it last.

                    If nothing much happens, I’m thankful.

                    A happier cabbage you never did see,

                    My vegetable spirits are soaring.

                    If you’re after excitement, steer well clear of me.

                    I want to go on being boring.

           

                    I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for,

                    If you don’t need to find a new lover?

                    You drink and you listen and drink a bit more

                    And you take all next day to recover.

                    Someone to stay home with was all my desire

                    And, now that I’ve found a safe mooring,

                    I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire

                    To go on and on…

 

…Wendy, as if.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Young Stalin

Montefiore, S. (2007) Young Stalin, Weidenfeld & Nicholson. ISBN: 978-0-297-85068-7

 

If the history of the twentieth century teaches us anything much at all it’s that we should forever beware the thwarted romantic. Adolf Hitler’s painting – to this reviewer’s eyes at least – reveals a greater natural talent than, for instance, Churchill’s over-hyped efforts, and is full of dreamy landscapes. Mao Zedong – an even more egregious slaughterer of his fellow – men – wrote poetry which displays an attractive, homespun imagery. And then there’s Josef Stalin.

  Not the least surprising of this book’s revelations – it serves as a companion piece to the author’s earlier and equally outstanding Stalin – The Court of the Red Tsar (2003) – is that 

‘Stalin’ (Josef Djugashvili, publishing under the pen-name ‘Soselo’) once had a literary-poetic reputation in his native Georgia which preceded and briefly surpassed his political one. Other, previous, biographies – even the mostly-sympathetic Deutscher’s ‘Stalin’ (London, 1966) – have either been unaware of their subject’s poetic propensities, or have failed to attach much significance to them. Yet a love of poetry remained with the dictator right up until his old-age and death. He had memorised the Georgian prince Raphael Eristavi’s nationalistic verses in his youth, and had had five of his own pieces published in the (then) well-known newspaper Iveria (Georgia). Amongst his admirers was Ilya Chavchavadze -acknowledged as Georgia’s finest poet. Stalin’s poem, ‘Morning’ , remained in the anthologies of best Georgian verse (the country, that is, not the English pastoral school[!]), and under the byline ‘Soselo’, long after ‘Stalin’ had been denounced by his successor (and frequent Butt) Khrushchev, for perpetuating a cult of the personality’.

       

                           MORNING

 

                          The rose’s bud had blossomed out

                          Reaching out to touch the violet

                          The lily was waking up

                          And bending its head in the breeze

 

                          High in the clouds the lark

                          Was singing a chirruping hymn

                          While the joyful nightingale

                          With a gentle voice was saying

 

                          “Be full of blossom, Oh lovely land

                          Rejoice Iverian’s country

                          And you Oh Georgia, by studying

                          Bring joy to your motherland.”

 

 

It’s ironic to think of the ‘joy’ to his ‘motherland’ which Soselo would bring via his mass-deportations and large-scale liquidations (he always insisted upon rigorously scanning the proposed execution lists prior to personally sanctioning them). It’s ironic, also, that in his early career other terrorists agreed to work with Josef Djugashvili solely because of the 

“revolutionary character” of his well-metred and carefully rhymed verses.

According to Soselo’s translator, professor Donald Rayfield, “one might even find reasons not purely political for regretting Stalin’s switch from poetry to revolution”. Whilst the imagery can appear derivative, the beauty (apparently) lies in the “sensitive and precocious” fusion of Persian, Byzantine and Georgian influences, coupled with a “delicacy and purity” 

of rhythm and language. Stalin knew his Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation and could recite Walt Whitman (who’s still popular in Russia to this day). In his latter, influential, years he detested modernism, promoted “socialist realism” and involved himself in the affairs of major Russian artists such as Pasternak, Shostakovich and Bulgarkov. In a strange, protective gesture of mixed jealousy and reverence, he wrote a propos the former: “Leave that cloud-dweller in peace!” Osip Mandelstam he considered to be (possibly) “a genius”, but when that poet’s vitriolic lines came to his attention castigating the “Kremlin grag-dweller…[whose]…fat fingers…[were]…greasy as maggots”, Mandelstam had penned his own death-warrant. Even here, there is evidence that Stalin wished merely to “isolate but preserve” possibly the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century. Mandelstam would die in transit to the gulag: he’d been uncannily prescient when writing “In Russia, poetry is really valued. Here, they kill for it”.

An intriguing postscript occurred in 1949 when, for Stalin’s official seventieth birthday, his Politburo acolyte (and fellow Georgian) Beria commissioned a team of translators (which included Pasternak) to produce a Russian edition of the dictator’s Georgian poems. Although the team, quite deliberately, had NOT been told the author’s name, one of them judged the work to be “worthy of the Stalin prize, first rank”. Somehow, Stalin got wind of the project and scotched it. He’d confided to his “godson”, Levan Shaumian, “I lost interest in writing poetry partly because it requires one’s full attention -a hell of a lot of patience”. But then, patience was never a stalinist strongsuit.

  Montefiore’s monumental biography concerns itself with far more than a somewhat abortive literary career. The author is clearly steeped in every aspect of his subject’s obsessive, murderous, yet oddly compelling world. Stalin must be an uncomfortable man to have constantly inside one’s head. Within this arch-cynic, rabidly paranoid fantasist and Machiavellian schemer there had once been an idealistic seminarian capable of writing (in 

‘To the Moon’:)

                           

                      Know for certain that once

                              Struck down to the ground, an opressed man

                              Strives again to reach the pure mountain

                              When exalted by hope.

 

Unfortunately for his contemporaries (once ‘Soselo’ had been crushed and subverted into a far steelier carapace) this same, enigmatic individual could remark that “A single person killed in a traffic accident is a tragedy; one million killed is a statistic”.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Saving Grace

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Ezra Williams

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Losing Henry and other stories by Ezra Williams (Sixties Press, 2007)

ISBN: 978-1-905554-01-0

 

A collection of eight interconnected short stories, Losing Henry signals Ezra William’s full authorial debut -his work has previously featured in Forward Press and Sixties Press anthologies. Each story is a ‘stand-alone’ but several share charactors -in particular the two generations of a moderately-affluent, jewish family, the Albrights.

  Williams adopts a number of different literary styles, and the narratives (mostly in the 

first-person) whip back-and-forth chronologically in a way which lends the book, as a whole, a slightly dizzying, kaleidoscopic quality.

  Taxi Driver maps a day-in-the-life of London Cabbie, puzzle-addict and penitent, Gerry MacMahon – who later turns up in Whitstable Clarion: a surreal amalgam of Salinger, Kerouac, Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock – please remind me never to visit Whitstable. Life Fragments proves the truth of Wordsworth’s contention that ‘the child is father to the man’ and, by way of passing, that the speed of light is not an absolute. Nana Tristana is the slightly more problematic tale of a youth (possibly with ‘Asperger’s syndrome'[?]), wheeler-dealing with his grandmother’s pension money. The final short-story, from which the publication takes its title, is the most sustained -and substantial. Told by two (linked) narrators, it is elegaic, ‘confessive’, profoundly-moving and wholly-believable.

  This collection is shot-through with themes of mental turmoil and long-digested regret. It comes as a surprize to learn that Ezra Williams was still under thirty when it was first published. His choice of imagery is entirely consonant with the subject matter, full of cars ‘spluttering in cardiac failure’, sunlight reacting like a ‘cheap shampoo sludge’ and the ‘exemplary squalor’ of an alcohol-induced migraine. Williams, who also loves a conumdrum, can actually write (unlike some of the part-time celebrity authors with whose pallid 

offerings our bookshops are presently crammed). He is currently working on a novel: I, 

for one, look forward to reading it.

 

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Terry Jones on

Geoffrey Chaucer

Who Murdered Geoffrey Chaucer? by Terry Jones (et al) (Methuen, ISBN: 0-413-75910-5)

 

Inevitably, the first question must be: why would anyone want to do away with Geoffrey Chaucer (1340- c.1400), courtier, man-of-letters and sometime Clerk of the King’s works?

  Well, the poet certainly had enemies. Two, not even given a look-in in this self-styled ‘medieval mystery’, are the anonymous Franciscan friar whom Chaucer seems to have beaten up in Fleet street (and to have been fined two shillings for so doing). The other, unmentioned here – as well as in my childhood history lessons – was one Cecily Chaupaigne, who had, sometime prior to 1380, accused him of Raptus (which in the legalese of the time might mean either ‘rape’ or ‘abduction’). It should in fairness be noted that she later, for reasons unknown, withdrew the charge. Additionally, Chaucer was mugged (three times!) in September 1390 and relieved of some £20 of his own and Richard Plantegenet’s money.

  Geoffrey Chaucer doesn’t appear to have been expecting to die anytime soon when in the December of 1399 he took out a 53 year lease on a house in Westminster. Though already an old man by medieval standards, this seems not to have stopped him making a Channel crossing early in 1400. Yet he must have known by then that the strong tide of court politics had started to turn against him. In February 1399 his brother-in-law, the influential John of Gaunt, had died unexpectedly. Later that same year Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, supplanted Chaucer’s patron, Richard II, before having him murdered in Pontefract castle. Even worse, Thomas, Archbishop Arundel (Bolingbroke’s reactionary eminence grise) was determined to stamp out any stain of Lollardy and Chaucer was tainted on several counts: by personal association; through his known criticism of the mendicant orders and the more worldly clergy; and by dint of his ridiculing the contemporary veneration of religious relics. Lastly, and most damning of all, Chaucer wrote in English, 

not Latin.

  Archbishop Arundel gradually emerges as the prime suspect in this whodunnit and, indeed, would have lacked neither the means, the motivation nor the personal asperity to ‘rub out’ the ‘Father of Eng-lit’. If remembered at all today, it is as draconian censor, fervent pursuer of recusancy and as the man who oversaw the English adoption of the practice of burning heretics at the stake. The new sovereign was no shrinking-violet liberal either. When a Cambridgeman, John Sparrowhawk, was overheard complaining that it hadn’t stopped raining since Bolingbroke ascended the throne, the latter had him hanged, drawn and beheaded: the first documented example of judicial execution by reason of the spoken word.

  Terry Jones – best known as a Python and co-creator of the Monty Python films – and his team of four academic specialists, struggle manfully to convince the reader of their thesis. The book is popularist in style but meticulously marshalls its archival resources. There is ne’ery a head-banging monk nor a dung-festooned peasant to be glimpsed in the text. However, some cards are overplayed: the dearth of original Chaucerian manuscripts is ascribed to a Lancastrian purge but could equally be explained by the injurous passage of time. We have extant, for instance, just the one first edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (in its time more popular than the plays). And this was written close to two hundred years after, say, The Canterbury Tales. Similarly, Chaucer may not have died intestate as the authors suggest – all records of his Will may simply have been lost.

  Geoffrey Chaucer was a notable, long-term affiliate of the House of Lancaster. In February 1396 (three years before he became king Henry IV) Bolingbroke gifted the poet an expensive scarlet robe trimmed with fur – hardly the act of an enemy. Soon after his succession, and in prompt response to The complaint of Chaucer to his purse, the new monarch confirmed his supplicant’s grant from the previous reign – not that Chaucer lived long to enjoy it. After Geoffrey’s – it must be admitted – rather abrupt and mysterious exit from recorded history (his ‘traditional’ date of death, October 25th, 1400, turns out to be a much later accretion) his son, Thomas, continued to enjoy royal favour. Sinecures such as Royal Chief Butler and, interestingly, ex officio Coroner to the city of London were to come his way. Finally, of course, the poet did get to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

  How we moderns do love a consiracy theory. We know that skulduggery is in our nature (we have ample proof of this from our own experiences of office-politics, W.I. A.G.M.s and the like. We hope, usually fruitlessly, to uncover evidence of similar duplicity/venality/

perfidy/general naughtiness in those wielding slightly more serious powers. We’re destined regularly to be disappointed – conceivably because the powers-that-be have grown skilful at covering their own tracks. Sometimes, as here, all the relevant witnesses are long-dead. And occasionally, just occasionally, because the conspiracy which unfolds so plausibly never happened at all. Jones, whose long-standing interest in the period is clear (he published Chaucer’s Knight, which debunked the generally received notions of chivalric gentilesse, as long ago as 1980) makes a well-informed and trenchant advocate. If ultimately he fails to furnish us, the jury, with photographic evidence of Archbishop Arundel holding a smoking gun, he must be left rueing the historical inconvenience which insists that both pistol and Pentax were yet to be invented.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Anon

Forever and Anon – A Treasury of Poetry and Prose from the Pen of Author Unknown 

ed. Gerry Hanson (JRBooks, 2007) ISBN: 971-1-906217-11-2

 

Advantageously for potential reviewers, the multiple authors of this publication are highly unlikely to take collective dudgeon, nor to invoke punitive copyright-protecting measures.

  Gerry Hanson’s brain-child of anthologising anonymous poems, verses, ballads and doggerel 

is an excellent one. ‘Anon’ has been undeniably prolific over the years – 163 examples are reproduced in this volume and, as its editor admits, it could’ve been many more. By turns funny, clever, wise and (occasionally) poignant, ‘Anon’ can be technically dextrous too, as 

‘A Reversible Love Poem’ (whose verses can be read, line by line, either up or down and still make sense) and ‘Susan Simpson’ (written using only words beginning with the letter ‘s’) amply illustrate. It is noticeable also that ‘Anon’ is a great formalist: the vast preponderance of his/her oeuvre – if one discounts translations from the Chinese, Gaelic, Apache and Welsh – 

is composed along formal lines, although (praise be) there is just the one limerick on display. Even leaving aside the insight from modern neurology which indicates that our hunter/gatherer brains are ‘hard-wired’ to recognise patterns above all else, it still appears probable that when ordinary, ‘real’ people pace the Poetry Society, want to be uplifted, consoled or merely diverted, they look to poetry which rhymes and scans.

  Forever and Anon is subdivided into sections which deal with imponderables such as ‘The Human Condition’, ‘Time’, ‘Love and Marriage’, ‘The Monarchy’, ‘Animals’, ‘The Natural World’, ‘London’ and ‘Christmas’. At times one could wish for more editorial guidance. Both ‘Greensleeves’ and that awful dirge best known as ‘The National Anthem’ are included – 

though these have been tentatively ascribed to King Henry VIII and John Bull respectively. 

The haunting ‘Do Not Be Afraid’ – spoken at a thousand funerals – has an interesting back story which bears re-telling. It first came to light in a letter to his parents from British soldier, Steven Cummins, prior to his death on active service in Northern Ireland. Initially presumed 

to have been written by Cummins himself, this seems now not to have been the case. Someone, somewhere is missing out on some serious royalties…

 

     ‘Do Not Be Afraid’

 

        Do not stand at my grave and weep

        I am not there, I do not sleep.

        I am a thousand winds that blow,

        I am the diamond glint on snow.

        I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

        I am the gentle autumn rain.

        When you wake in the morning hush

        I am the swift, uplifting rush

        of quiet birds in circling flight.

        I am the soft starlight at night.

        Do not stand at my grave and weep

        I am not there – I do not sleep.

 

A tad maudlin, yes, but demonstrably it hits its target via a meticulous non-specificity in assertion of an immortality which mourners desperately want to believe in.

  A potential problem with material which has often been passed down orally is that there 

may be a number of alternate versions. One poem/song reproduced here, ‘An A.A. Gunner 

Lay Dying’ (of Second World War vintage) is definitely a corruption of an earlier piece sung 

in their squadron messes by the pilots of the Royal Flying Corps in world war one. 

  With a few notable exceptions, ‘Anon’ tends to write more in the style of Pam Ayres than, say, John Keats. Passages of authentic, strongly sustained emotion are rare. Of wit and worldly wisdom there is an abundance. One little aphorism (from ‘Make the Most of Today’) which I’ll continue to treasure is:

 

       Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift-

        that’s why it is called THE PRESENT. 

 

Inevitably there are omissions. The eternally useful jingle beginning ‘Thirty Days Hath September…’ was penned by ‘Anon’. Personally, I would have found space for some of the marching-songs coined during the Great War by Tommy Atkins: mordant, sometimes grotesque, they warrant the same scrutiny which the more sophisticated outpourings of Owen, Sassoon and Robert Graves routinely get. Theirs is a worm’s-eye, not an Olympian, view. Similarly, but two centuries previously, the observation that

 

      The law doth punish the man or woman

          That steals the goose from off the common

          But lets the greater felon loose

          That steals the common from the goose

 

shows the enclosure movement through a rather different lens than that which it is customarily accorded.

  Finally, and perhaps prudently, the following anonymous insight (from Eugenics Review, 1929) does not make the cut:

 

        See the happy moron,

          he doesn’t give a damn.

          I wish I was a moron.

          My god! perhaps I am!

 

Quite wonderful just how non-PC one can be when one signs oneself ‘Anon’.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Anna Beer’s Milton

Milton – Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot – Anna Beer (Bloomsbury, 2008) 

ISBN: 978-0-7475-8425-4

 

Milton’s life story, told here on the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth is, in outline, 

well-enough known. Spoilt eldest son of wealthy scrivener goes to Cambridge, travels in Italy, works for regicidal government, goes blind, suffers under the Restoration, writes Paradise Lost and dies. As a synopsis, this is reasonably accurate, although -as ever- our satan is definitely in the scrutiny.

  Anna Beer shows us glimpses of a figure, undeniably flawed, but flawed in slightly more human ways. This is a Milton new to me, a young Milton filling-in at the last minute as a kind of Master of Ceremonies at a Cambridge university ‘salting’ (or revels), a Milton who makes rude jokes (in Latin) about farting. New to me also are some of the connotations behind the sexually-charged, multi-lingual correspondence with his childhood friend, Charles Diodoti.

  Like many of his contemporaries, especially those of a seriously theological bent, Milton had some notable hang-ups. He writes a propos man’s seminal fluid (in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) that it was ‘the best substance of his body, and of his soul too as some think’. Heterosexual intercourse (even within marriage) is categorised as ‘the promiscuous draining of carnal rage’ and ‘the quintessence of excrescence’ (which rather makes one feel sorry for the three Mrs Miltons!). Anne Powell (Milton’s first mother-in-law, who had lived in his household) describes him – in a petition over her sequestered estates- as ‘a harsh and choleric man’ whom she cannot press personally as he will victimise her daughter, Mary. Accused in his middle-age (by ‘Salmasius’, a long-term sparring-partner) of financing his earlier Italian travels by acting in the capacity of what, in modern parlance, is known as a ‘rent-boy’, Milton (in 1654) was also being defamed by an erstwhile bishop for having been ‘sent down’ from Cambridge – and he certainly was ‘rusticated’ by the university authorities- for unnatural practices. But then, vituperation was the common coin of these disputatious times.

  Misogynistic (in the spirit of much of his culture), personally vain, snobbish and self-serving, this most difficult of men did go on to create, in his own imaginary ‘satan’, one of literature’s greatest and most unnervingly charismatic charactors. And in his pamphlet Areopagitica, one of the English language’s most eloquent defences of free-speech. Beer does well, in her subtitle for this book, to highlight the extraordinary range of erudition, rhetoric and invective which make John Milton one of the most controversial and effective propagandists ever. Her biography (400 pages of text plus another 50-odd of notes and index) is both proportionate and accessible. Sufficiently scholarly, it sets its polymathic protagonist squarely against the backdrop of his age. At the same time, however, Beer’s prose occasionally takes on some of the aspects of its subject’s own, often tortuous style: immersing oneself in an historical 

milieu can sometimes cause this.

  Milton knew himself to be an important writer and posterity, by and large, has deferred to this self-assessment. Whilst we might sympathise with A.E.Houseman’s comment that ‘malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man’ we, at least, should be grateful that the attempt was made.

Kevin Saving © 2008

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Byron Rogers

The Man Who Went into the West

(Aurum 2006)

 

This is a biography written by an eccentric, about an eccentric – and none the worse for that. Byron Rogers has chosen to commemorate his acquaintance – Ronald Stuart Thomas would seem not to have possessed many ‘friends’ – the poet, priest and Welsh Nationalist, R.S.Thomas. Some years ago this reviewer was comfortably ensconced in the (now defunct) ‘Red Lion’ at Litchborough, when Mr Rogers announced that his next book would treat of all the ways in which the Welsh were superior to the English: he was teased that it would then have to be a very slim volume. Far from being disheartened, the author has elicited here his very own, peculiar insight into the life of an uncharacteristic yet militant Welshman -a ‘pacifist’ who believed that the survival of the Welsh language was worth ‘the death of one Englishman’; a ‘patriot’ unable to write, in Welsh, the poetry which so beset him; and an Anglican minister contemptuous of his own, Welsh, congregations.

  Born in Cardiff in 1913 (as we eventually discover on page 63) R.S.Thomas thus slightly pre-dated his even more notorious Swansea namesake, Dylan. Despite an upbringing in Holyhead and an education at Bangor university, ‘R.S.’ spoke with a ‘posh’, ‘English’ accent. After his priestly apprenticeship at the theological college of st. Michael’s, Llandaff, Thomas descended upon a series of increasingly remote, increasingly Westerly parishes, taking his patient, bemused, artist-wife, Elsi, with him. And that, as they say, is that. There is a wonderful photograph reproduced here, taken of Thomas at Sarn on the Lleyn peninsula, some years after retirement from his last incumbency at Aberdaron: the poet protrudes, waste-upward, from the half-door of his icy, cliff-hewn cottage -wild of hair, forbidding of countenance, his whole appearance more than faintly malevolent.

  A late-developer, Thomas would make his name with the ‘hill-farmer’ poems featuring the quasi-mystical ‘Iago Prytherch’ (‘listen, listen, I am a man like you’). His reputation progressed by a process of accretion from his first collection, The Stones of the Field (1946), through his collection of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (1964) until his late short-listing, four years before his death, for the Nobel prize for literature in 1996, (swagged that year by a Mr Heaney). Opinions differ as to the quality of the man’s achievement: his own (second) wife, Betty, felt that he ‘churned’ poems out (there are over 1,500 of them). His only son, Gwydion, whom he’d sent -in spite of everything – to an English boarding school, feels that his father was an ‘actor’ with just the one note: ‘Me, Me, Me’. Though these caveats should be noted, R.S.Thomas’ best work has a way of insinuating itself into the memory. No one, surely, since Thomas Hardy can have written so poignantly or so lyrically about an ambivalent marriage (ended only by Elsi’s death in 1991):

    ‘We met/ under a shower/ of bird-notes./ Fifty years passed,/ Love’s moment/ […] She was young;/ 

    I kissed with my eyes/ closed and opened/ them on her wrinkles./ ‘Come’ said death […] And she,/

    who in life/ had done everything/ with a bird’s grace,/ opened her bill now/ for the shedding/ of one sigh no/ 

    heavier than a feather.’

 

  Thomas himself left a number of strangely impersonal autobiographies, perhaps the best-known of which is Neb (meaning ‘Nothing’ or ‘No One’) in Welsh (1985). A previous biography, much derided by its subject, (Furious Interiors: Wales, R.S.Thomas and God), appeared in 1996. This present book, which fleshes-out the misanthropic legend, represents something 

of a return-to-form for Rogers, whose previous work, The Last Englishman, (on the novelist J.L.Carr), appeared decidedly under-cooked.

  A two-year delay between publication and review can, in this case, be best explained by the reviewer’s miserly reluctance to fork-out the £16.99 necessary to purchase a diminutive volume of slightly over 300 pages: Thomas might even have approved this parsimony. Anyone interested in the poetry of a complicated clergyman – someone unafraid to conduct a bleak life staring into the abyss – could do far worse than to borrow, as I did, this quirkily perceptive publication from their local library.

 

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving 

The Edge of Love 

(Capitol Films/BBC Films, released 2008)

 

This film centres on an episode towards the end of the second world war when two families, the Thomas’s and the Killicks, were living in close proximity near the Cardiganshire coastal town of New Quay. The ‘Thomas’s’ were, of course, the poet Dylan and his bohemian wife, Caitlin, whilst Mrs Killick was Dylan’s childhood friend, Vera (portrayed here by the seemingly ubiquitous Keira Knightly, kitted- out with a serviceable Welsh accent).

  Predictably (as with anything concerning the Thomas’s) there was always going to be a smidgen of alcoholic excess coupled with a dollop of adultery). What perhaps was less forseeable is the brooding presence of a combat-fatigued commando captain, William Killick (the excellent Cillian Murphy). Writer Sharman MacDonald and director John Maybury keep the story -rather slender in itself- moving along briskly enough, though I suspect that, ultimately, Mathew Rhys’s charismatic Dylan is -for once- done less than historical justice.

  At the heart of The Edge of Love is the relationship between its female leads, and Knightly -though competent enough – finds herself acted off the screen by Sienna miller’s Caitlin: a version rather more svelte than its original! Miller is luminous as Dylan’s spouse, a woman both sinned against and sinning, and manages somehow to convey the enduring love which held the marriage together, despite the wanton and selfish excesses of its two principals.

  For me, this beautifully-shot film is redeemed by its director of photography, Jonathon Freeman’s, polished and atmospheric cinematography -which compensates for some occasionally ‘tricksy’ directorial liberties. I also could not help admiring the solid authenticity of the squalor depicted in Thomas’s ‘Majoda’ bungalow (he once memorably described its walls as ‘bum-paper thin’). Hollywood, to this day, has never quite mastered ‘squalor’ – it takes Brit cinema to do that.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving on

Crawford, R., The Bard. Robert Burns, A Biography, Cape (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-224-07768-2

Poor Scotland! Superb geography; wonderfully hospitable, resilient people -the latter forever vexed by midges, blighted with a lamentable history (both cultural and culinary) and disheartened by an ingrained incapacity for football. Och, and then there’s the poetry!!
This publication, which styles itself ‘the first twenty-first century biography’ of Robert Burns (or ‘Burnes’, his father’s patronymic) coincides with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s birth. It still comes as something of a shock when the author -a noted academic and poet- establishes his subject as a precursor of the ‘Romantic Movement’ though, certainly, both Wordsworth and Keats were admirers.
The Bard is one of those books upon which its reader embarks with a strong sense of expectation and through which they move, with growing dissatisfaction, into a state of bloody-minded irritation. There is, after all, a robust story to be told here of how a man, born into poverty on a lowland farm, effectively forged a mongrelised language -and then passed the act off so well that he became both a ‘National Treasure’ and a cult industry.
But then, the Burnsian brazier (for all its incessant stoking) tends to emit large quantities of smoke. There’s ‘Rabbie the Radical’, for example, whose coded egalitarian sentiments do not seem to have prevented him either from kowtowing towards his aristocratic patrons, or indulging in secretive, masonic rites. Or ‘Rabbie the Romantic’, who’d seldom hesitate before cheating on his long-suffering wife, Jean.
Though Burns presents as an appealingly dissolute character, drinking and womanizing his way to a pitifully early death, aged 37, Mr Crawford somehow succeeds in making the whole story appear rather dreary. His somewhat wordy exposition is often clumsy, whilst the copious footnotes are (in the main) un-illuminating. Nor is the central narrative helped by so many discursive digressions into lack-lustre minutiae.
I suppose that it’s time to declare myself as being not exactly ‘The Bard’s’ greatest fan. A question of individual taste, perhaps, but -for me- Burns’ work seldom rises above the level of slightly self-conscious prattle. ‘For All That’ Scots (all over the world) will continue to enjoy their Burns Night knees-up -and good luck to them. Better, by far, that they should celebrate a man who -for all his faults- was, at bottom, human in his sensibilities -rather than (say) a charlatan such as his nearest rival for the post of ‘National Poet’, Hugh MacDiarmid. Of course, if all else fails, there’s always poor, wee Willie McGonagall…
Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life cut Short, Chatto & Windus (2008)
ISBN: 978-0-701-16988-6

Born in Boston in 1809 to parents who were travelling actors, Edgar Poe was adopted at the age of two (after the death of his mother) by a prosperous but childless couple, John and Frances Allan -hence his middle name. Young ‘Eddy’ spent the five years between 1815 and 1820 with the Allans in England -including schooling in Stoke Newington- before returning with them to the United States. Two less than totally committed sojourns in higher education (at the university of Virginia and at West Point) book-ended a two year spell as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, during which he rose to the impressive rank of Regimental Sergeant-Major. Thereafter an increasing estrangement with his foster-father ran concurrently with a penurious career as poet, sub-editor, reviewer, writer of sensational -in every sense of the word- short-stories, lecturer and general literary hack. Though one of the first American authors to make the attempt to live solely via his pen,it has been estimated that Poe’s total income from his books would not have exceeded $300. This was largely because printers in the New World could, at this time, ‘pirate’ work from the better-known British writers without incurring copyright expenses.
Haughty, a heavy drinker, an inveterate liar, occasional plagiarist and a trenchant supporter of the institution of slavery, Edgar Allan Poe does not come across as a particularly attractive individual. Some of his importunate correspondence (with John Allan and with prospective editors) calls to mind the later effusions of another dissipated, improvident and short-lived poet also prone to reading-tours and short-stories: Dylan Thomas. Other parallels are equally notable -the practised morbidity of the work and the peculiar combination of celebrity without prosperity in the life.
Poe died at the age of forty, but daguerreotypes make him appear older. He wed his fourteen year old cousin, Virginia, in 1836, but there are doubts as to whether the marriage was ever consummated. His wife was to succumb to T.B. in 1847 after a life of illness and poverty. Eddy was known to go off on a ‘spree’ (as he called them) for days at a time and it was after one such episode that he would be discovered, two years after her death, in a tavern dying of unknown causes. Some time previously he had conducted a one-sided controversy against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -at that time perhaps America’s most celebrated poet- accusing the latter (with some justice) of ‘Literary robbery’ from Alfred Tennyson. Throughout these tirades, which were fairly cynically designed to heighten public awareness of E.A.Poe, Longfellow maintained a dignified silence. Privately, however, he remarked that his defamer had most likely been provoked by ‘the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong’. This seems an astute judgement.
Poe’s output is multifarious and uneven. A good case can be made for his work providing the prototypes for at least three genres: an article which has come to be known as ‘The Balloon Hoax’ established a template for Science Fiction and The murders in the Rue Morgue prefigure the ‘Detective’ narratives of Arthur Conan Doyle.  Surmounting these, The Fall of the House of Usher ‘ushered in’ psychological Horror stories and ‘The Raven’ is still, surely, one of the world’s most widely-read poems.
Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Poe forms the latest of his ‘Brief Lives’ series which provide short, introductory biographies for historical figures such as Geoffrey Chaucer, J.M.W. Turner and John Newton. These render a valuable service without necessarily featuring the startling, original research of earlier work (on T.S.Eliot for example) -or without being as spell-binding as his volume on Blake. Poe: A Life cut Short shows some evidence of being hastily written and contains several ‘infernal’ metaphors which, on reflection, might have been better avoided. We learn, for instance, that Poe was ‘bound by ropes of fire to the first experiences of abandonment and of loneliness’. Whilst, later on, ‘Like the salamander he could only live in fire. But the fire was often started by himself’. Once he has calmed down from these incendiary passages Ackroyd returns to his customary lucid style: this Poe is rather better than your average pot-boiler.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving on

Sacred Blue by Mia Hart-Allison 

(Visionary Tongue Press, 2008)

(www.visionarytongue.co.uk) RRP:£2.99

 

Sacred Blue is Mia Hart-Allison’s first collection and comprises fifteen poems together with four short stories. It takes its title from an encounter with a cadaver ‘laid out’ in a mortuary (the ‘Blue’ being both a reference to the cyanosis on the corpse’s lips and a play on the colloquial ‘blues’ of depression). 

  There is some powerful imagery here coupled with strong, emotive language. Hart-Allison’s experiences with bi-polar affective disorder have clearly driven an agenda (as she says) to ‘find beauty in that which would usually be considered ugly or difficult’. An obvious debt to Sylvia Plath is acknowledged, but there are parallels also with the explorative morbidity which occurs in Baudelaire. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have given us much over which to grieve, but it can be salutary – sometimes – to be reminded that there is a peculiar aesthetic associated with the scrap-heap of industrialisation, or the early-onset of lividity in the newly-deceased.

  This collection can be uneven. It’s author appears, occasionally, too eager to seize and shake the reader’s attention. The poem ‘Phantom Limb’, for example, is written in the first-person and catalogues the sensations experienced by a recent amputee (which Hart-Allison, as she admits, is not). Elsewhere (in ‘Marooned’) she utilises the disturbing and (for me) unfortunate simile: ‘I am discarded like a new-born girl/ strangled with her own umbilical cord’.

  At other times the poet is able to enter her chosen subject’s world with much greater authenticity, returning with unexpected insight. ‘Orchid Bliss’ is suffused with a trenchant and insistent, emphatically female, sensuality:

 

Lasciviously the orchids lick the air

their petal tongues’ passion formed,

protruding a rude invitation,

proposing propagation.

 

Nature’s Geisha,

gaudy yet graceful,

perfumed concubines,

floral whores of the sublime.

 

whilst in ‘Ants, Inc.’ she writes beautifully of that insect’s near-preternatural endeavour:

 

Each one is a tiny chitinous* Atlas, hefting similarly impossible burdens

carrying much more than Christ and incapable of sin,

kindred to a precision the very stars envy.

 

(* ‘Chitinous’ is, helpfully, defined in the attendant ‘Notes’ as ‘the main constituent of insect exoskeletons’).

  The short stories are more consistently realised, continuing to evince their author’s fascination with the macabre. Desecration is very well written: both real and surreal at the same time. The Voice of Ignition is about ‘arson’ (though the term remains unused). Plagued features a lady obsessed with cleanliness…and has revenge as a sub-text. Finally, Here Be Monsters tracks the course of a writer’s brief relationship with a femme fatale – but with a twist. An added enhancement to this production’s text is the talented artist Ruby’s original and attractive illustrations (somewhat after the style of Aubrey Beardsley). 

  Mia Hart-Allison will, and should, continue to write with brio. Her work has already appeared in Staple, Black Poppy, Open Wide and the much-lamented, hard-copy edition of Poetry Express. If Sacred Blue now and again sacrifices precision in the pursuit of force, at least its author has things she wants to say and is unafraid of saying them – publically and pungently.

 

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving on

A Victorian Class Conflict? by Dr. John T. Smith (Sussex Academic Press, 2009)

ISBN: 978-1-84519-295-2

sales@gazellebooks.co.uk (RRP: £49.50)

 

One of the ‘attractions’ of reviewing is that, occasionally, you get given books you wouldn’t ordinarily elect to read. Here we have a case in point. The subtitle to Dr John T. Smith’s volume is ‘Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837-1902’, which, it is fair to say, provides a totally accurate summary of its content. This work is scholarly, exceedingly scrupulous and, perhaps, a little worthy – 

its reviewer, none of those things. A formative influence in my life was being ‘schooled’ in English at the hand, quite literally, of the local (Anglican) vicar. Watching him deal with the, admittedly vexatious, distractions of some of my fellow pupils proved an education in itself. Dear Dr Barnes (now long dead), you taught better than you knew.

  It is informative to view these various inter- denominational power – struggles through the smoked-glass of retrospect. Education was – for the Victorians – one of the major battlefields. Nor have we yet (in mostly-secular Britain) resolved the muddle which the Victorians bequeathed us – it is even arguable 

that we have made it worse. ‘Muddle’ lies at the heart of this narrative. Do we lack clarity in our thinking through educational deficits, or is the muddle-headed nature of our teaching system(s) a product of unclear thought? The author, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Hull, even manages to confuse himself with his dense prose-style. Towards the end of chapter four (page 100) we’re granted the following insights:

 

The incumbent’s status in society, as well as his income, had fallen considerably, while those of his teachers were 

  in the ascendant. The experiences of the Roman Catholic Priest and the Wesleyan minister were however very    

  different, as their backgrounds and positions were not those of the Anglican clergyman. Both suffered from poor        

  stipends, which were exceeded by their own teachers’ salaries. Deference however came more naturally to the 

  Priest, by nature of his office and the Eucharistic teachings of his church.

 

Let’s try to recapitulate. Are we to understand that the incumbent’s teachers (those who had taught him[?]) were earning more than him or (more probably) that the salaries of the teachers working under his auspices, exceeded his own? From those of just whom were the priest’s and the Wesleyan minister’s experiences so different? From the incumbent’s or from each other’s. Is the incumbent the same person as the Anglican clergyman? Both suffered from poor stipends, but should we assume that they (the Wesleyan and the Priest[?]) were ‘moon-lighting’ as teachers? And was the Priest more deferential by nature of his office (and the Eucharistic teachings, obviously, of his church)? Or did he expect more deference from his flock? Answers (on a postcard, please) to Dr John T. Smith, care of the university of Hull.

  The pity of it is that a wealth of original, highly specialised, research on the ‘interplay’ between Anglican, Roman Catholic and their dissenting rivals, co-educators and co-religionists, the Wesleyans, should become obfuscated. I’m caused to lament, yet again, the belief seemingly prevalent in academe that the harder a text is to decipher, the more profound its contents are likely to be. More often, it’s just ill-written. 

  To Dr Smith I would like to prescribe a dose of sir Ernest Gower’s The Complete Plain Words, or failing that, a good boxing of his ears from my own nemesis, the Rev Barnes. Clearly (or unclearly) produced for a coterie of like-minded academics this book (176 pages plus 39 of notes) will not find an enthusiastic readership among the laity.

 

Lastly (as my own little footnote) Dr Smith really should be aware that the schools inspector, Matthew Arnold, (though he wrote widely on religious matters) was never a ‘clergyman’ – as he, Dr Smith, wrongly states on page 174.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving

Baby Blues Ballad

(with apologies to Whittier’s ‘The Changeling’)

 

They cited ‘post-natal depression’.

They said that she’d come round in time

but Mother, devoid of expression,

repeated ‘That baby’s not mine!’

 

The Midwife returned in the morning.

The Doctor had promised to phone.

The Husband said ‘I give you warning-

we can’t leave those two on their own’.

 

The infant lay wriggling and squawking

when Grandma hove-in from the south

(for Mother, by now, wasn’t talking).

But Grandma had such a loud mouth-

 

she simpered ‘You ought to be grateful

for life that’s so newly begun’,

poor Mother just grimaced ‘It’s hateful-

that thing lying there’s not my son’.

 

They took her away the next morning

(the neighbours said she looked quite calm).

They took her away without warning,

a cannula stuck in her arm.

 

Well, Father found part-time employment

and Grandma -O she was a brick.

The baby just gurgled enjoyment

(whilst Mummy remained ‘on the sick’).

 

At six-months -just after his cat-nap-

and sworn oaths no bairn ever knew,

Babe flew round the house, out the cat-flap

with ‘Daddy, you bastard, I’m through’.

 

The detail’s a devil, as ever:

don’t clasp one too close to your breast.

Psychiatry isn’t so clever-

it’s clear now that Mother knew best.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of

‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae (1872-1918)

 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place: and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

scarce heard amid the guns below.

 

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

 

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch: be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

 

Whenever something is published (especially something which subsequently acquires a certain fame) it is always entirely legitimate to enquire just how much its author actually knew about their subject. John McCrae (1872-1918) was well-acquainted with modern warfare. The ‘Kaiser’s War’ was actually his second as he’d served, with some distinction and as a junior officer, with the Royal Canadian Artillery in the Boer War. By no means a ‘name’ poet, McCrae wrote poetry for his own pleasure and had met one of his literary heroes, Rudyard Kipling, in South Africa around this time.

  Second son of a second-generation Canadian, John David McCrae (who was destined to reach the high rank, for a ‘colonial’, of Lieutenant General) joined the Cadet Corps at the age of fourteen and, a year later, his father’s regiment as a bugler. Academically gifted, at 16 he was awarded a scholarship to the university of Toronto. After a break in his studies due to recurrent asthma, he qualified as a doctor at 26, subsequently becoming a respected lecturer on bacteriology and pathology.

  Already onboard ship en route to England at the outbreak of world war one, he lost little time in offering his services to the Canadian government either as medical or artillery officer. At first rejected (due to his age) he saw service during the battle of Neuve Chapelle (March 1915) as Brigade Surgeon, although he found himself unable to resist acting in a combatant role, directing gunfire, when the opportunity arose. 

  ‘In Flanders Fields’ was composed under conditions of extreme mental and physical stress. 

In April 1915 McCrae’s unit – First Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery – moved onto the Ypres sector, just in time for the second battle of Ypres in which the Germans debuted their new secret weapon, chlorine gas. Completely unprecedented, defensive measures against this threat were rudimentary at best (soldiers were advised to cover their faces with urine-soaked hankerchiefs) and over 60 per cent of the Canadian troops engaged became casualties. Included among this number was lieutenant Alex Helmer, McCrae’s student and close friend, killed by shell-fire. On the night of 2nd May, in complete darkness and just behind the lines, Helmer’s remains (gathered up into two empty sandbags, their flaps held together with safety-pins) were buried in a makeshift grave -McCrae himself officiating in the absence of a chaplain. The following day and in a brief interlude from ministering to the wounded, McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance just north of Ypres, and wrote his famous poem (at first entitled ‘We Shall Not Sleep’). Around him, between the growing number of wooden crosses, the first wild poppies were coming into flower. The story goes that McCrae discarded the poem only for it to be retrieved by his commanding officer, Edward Morrison, who sent it first, unsuccessfully, to The Spectator before having it accepted by Punch. The latter printed it, anonymously, in December 1915, whereupon it quickly took on the status of a modern classic.

  ‘In Flanders Fields’ is a Rondeau (fifteen lines, two rhymes and a thrice-repeated refrain). This verse-form was originally a French invention, often used for humerous purposes -but it was McCrae’s peculiar inspiration to subvert the genre, to infuse it – quite literally – with a 

grave cadence, distilling both morbid and bucolic imagery to startling effect. Nowadays, the final bellicose stanza is often omitted -yet it is entirely consonant with its author’s outlook in which avocation as healer vies with inclination to perform as man of action.

  Two days prior to the Armistice an American Y.M.C.A. worker, Moine Michael, noticed the verses reprinted in a copy of her Ladies Home Journal. Enthused, she immediately bought 25 poppies and handed them out to colleagues in memory of the fallen. Post war, she campaigned for the poppy to be adopted as a symbol of remembrance. A French woman, Anne Guerrin, had the idea of selling artificial poppies in order, initially, to raise funds to aid children affected by the recent hostillities. In 1921 she visited the recently ennobled Earl Douglas Haig who agreed to use his influence in order to amalgamate a number of veterans’ associations and form the British Legion – who held their first official Poppy Day on November 11th of that year.

  By then, John McCrae was long-dead. He’d been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and become Chief of Medical Services at Number 3 Canadian General Hospital, near Boulogne. The debilitating effect of attending to so many wounded soldiers from the battles 

of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele had eroded his own health and this – coupled with a recurrance of his old enemy, asthma – led to his death, at the age of forty-five, on January 28th 1918 from double pneumonia.

 

Further reading: 

Fry, S. (2005) The Ode Less Travelled, Hutchinson.

Gardner, B. (1964) Up The Line To Death, Methuen.

Giddings, R. (1988) The War Poets, Bloomsbury.

Graves, D. (1997)  A Crown of Life: the World of John McCrae, Spellmount.

Lawrence, W. (2005) Great War Literature Study On War Poets of the First World War, Great War Literature publishing.

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of

Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell by John Milton (1608 – 1674) 

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud

Not only of war, but destractions rude,

Guided by faith and matchless fortitude

To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed,

And on the neck of crowned fortune proud

Has reared God’s trophies and his work persued,

While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued,

And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud,

And Worcester’s laureate wreath; yet much remains

To conquer still; peace hath her victories

No less renowned than war, new foes arise

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains:

Help us to save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

 

We are fortunate enough to be in possession of Milton’s working copy of his earlier poems (know as the ‘Trinity Manuscript’ by virtue of its residence at Trinity college, Cambridge). Via this source we know that the sonnet – the first in a series addressed to various prominent figures of his time – was composed in May 1652, in response to the heated deliberations of a committee for The Propagation of the Gospel. Some on the Committee advocated an established Church with ministers appointed (and paid for) by the state. Others favoured a greater freedom of conscience – and this latter view was shared, at least in the matter of organised worship, by Cromwell and Milton himself.

  Milton at this time was very much a political insider. Forty-three years of age, he had only recently moved into a house in Petty France, Westminster, close to the seat of The Commonwealth’s Government and his job, Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State (an amalgam of senior civil servant, secretary/interpreter and propangandist) which paid him a relatively modest £288 per annum. The Government he worked so assiduously for was a republican one since the execution of the former king, Charles II, in January, 1649 (in favour 

of which Milton had, quite vehemently, written).

  The verse quoted above represents a fairly blatent piece of political opportunism. John Bradshaw, formerly Milton’s lawyer and something of a patron, had stepped down from his position as chair of the Council in November 1651. Everyone by now knew that the real power in the land was wielded by Oliver Cromwell, all-conquering Lord-General and head of an ideologically energised New Model Army. The sonnet, condemning the Presbyterian drive for conformity, has Ciceronian undertones. Whilst bloodthirstily lauding Cromwellian victories (the Durwen was a tributary of the river Ribble, near Preston, where Cromwell decimated the Scots invaders in 1648) Milton presumes to remind Cromwell that there is much still to do. The allusion to a crown might be considered unfortunate! Traditionally, sonnets reach their volte (or turning point) around their eighth line, but here the poet over-runs into the ninth, driven by his need to sweeten the pill of what is about to come. There is little textual evidence here of the familiarity, indeed open admiration, of another sonnet – written only a little over a month after this one – to the Treasurer of the Navy, Henry Vane. Milton and Cromwell, it may be conjectured, were useful to each other, but not friends. Strangely, there is no mention of the poet’s name in any of Cromwell’s correspondence or speeches. Milton later wrote admiringly (in his Second Defence of the English People, 1654) of the Protectorate’s ‘well-regulated liberty’ and, elsewhere, of The Protector’s lack of personal arrogance coupled with ‘a trustful faith in God, and a native vastness of intellect’.

  The later poems in the Trinity Manuscript are written in various, unknown hands. Though demonstrably copied under his close supervision, their author had cause to employ a number of amanuenses. Though this was a fairly common practice of the time, Milton had more need of it than most: at this stage he was almost totally blind. Suffering from what by modern diagnostic criteria was almost certainly glaucoma, he had – at a time when blindness was often, superstitiously, believed to be a sign of God’s displeasure – attempted to disguise the infirmity for a number of years. Personally vain, he believed both that the casual observer was unable to detect him in this deceit, and that he, still, appeared much younger than his age. In a letter to a friend (dated 1654) he chose to categorise the symptoms he’d experienced progressively over the previous ten years. These included a body ‘shaken with flatulence’, awful headaches in which colours ‘proportionately darker would burst forth with violence and a sort of crash from within’; by 1654 everything was ‘pure black, marked as if with extinguished or ashy light’. 

  Milton’s domestic circumstances in the May of 1652 were equally punishing. On the fifth of that month he lost, three days after giving birth to their fourth child, his first wife, Mary, with whom he’d had – we may comfortably surmise – a fraught relationship characterised by a three-year separation and infused by familial and political differences. Just six weeks after his mother, their only son (another John) died at the age of fifteen months, in circumstances which caused Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, to fulminate against ‘the ill usage or bad constitution of an ill-chosen nurse’.

  Milton was to undergo a number of vicissitudes in the remainder of his life before dying quietly in his bed (of gout, in his sixty-sixth year). By then he’d been fortunate enough to survive The Restoration, jail, the Great Plague, the fire of London; to marry twice more, and to produce his long-planned masterpiece, Paradise Lost, in his late fifties. Though his politics have frequently been questioned, his literary survival never, seriously, has. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England and his senior by nine years, would predecease him on September 3rd 1658 – the anniversary of the twin victories at Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651) which the poet had eulogised some six years earlier.

 

Further reading:

Beer, A. (2008) Milton, Bloomsbury.

Danielson, J. (ed) (1999) The Cambridge Companion To Milton, Cambridge university Press.

Fraser, A. (1973) Cromwell: Our Chief Of Men, Methuen.

Hill, C. (1988) Who’s Who in Stuart Britain (1603-1714), Shepheard-Walwyn.

Milton, J. (1997) The Complete Shorter Poems (ed. Carey, J.), Longman

Kevin Saving © 2008

Kevin Saving

Paleoscriptology of

‘The Darkling Thrush’ 

by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Has sought their household fires.

 

The land’s sharp features seemed to be 

The century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

 

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air 

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

 

31st December, 1900

For the Victorians the Twentieth Century only began on the 1st January, 1901 – and thus the end of two eras coincided when the aged Queen died on the 22nd of that month. Thomas Hardy at this time was in his sixty-first year, wealthy, famous but disenchanted by the critical effront taken to his penultimate novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), living in an ugly, self-designed house at Max Gate and embroiled in an increasingly desolate marriage. He’d even had a new, private entrance built so that he could come and go without contacting Emma Hardy in any way.

  Withdrawing from the Novel form, he returned to his first literary love, poetry, and published Wessex Poems in 1898 (his debut collection at the age of fifty-eight). Afforded a respectful but lukewarm reception, this ‘early’ verse took a while to win the critics over. ‘Poetry is not his proper medium…he is not at home, he does not move easily in it’ sniped 

The Spectator in 1902.

  The fictionist in Hardy remained active. Although now always dated 1.1.1900, the poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ originally appeared in The Graphic on December 29th, 1900 under a different title, ‘The Century’s End, 1900’. A deleted ‘1899’ on the author’s manuscript indicates that it may have been written earlier still. Either way, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ appeared in Hardy’s second collection, Poems of the Past and the Present in November, 1901 (alongside such other notable – and historically pertinent – work as ‘Drummer Hodge’). This desire to tinker with his personal and literary history would continue, even posthumously, with the publication (1928 and 1930) of the writer’s two volume Life, ostensibly written by his second wife, Florence, but in fact self-penned.

  A-typical in several respects, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ ends on an up-beat note. Famously pessimistic (a charge the author himself was uncomfortable with) Hardy felt that ‘if a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst’. The rhymes here are – with one exception – precise, even prissily so: this is again uncharacteristic. ‘Inexact rhymes now and then are far more pleasing than correct ones’ was a tenet which the younger Hardy had brought with him from his architectural studies, tending as they did to evoke ‘spontaneity’. Finally, the regular ababcdcd of the four stanzas is very unusual for a poet who prided himself on his ability to conjure up new, but never avant-garde, metrical forms.

  The ‘Darkling’ of the title represents a nod in the direction of John Keats (one of Hardy’s most enduring influences). The word occurs in the similarly avian ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The opening line, ‘I leant upon a coppice gate…’ is very Hardyesque. Of the (almost) one thousand poems of the oeuvre, 152 begin with the pronoun ‘I’.

  Thomas Hardy would go on writing lyrical poetry, very much in his own style, well into his eighties. In this he is probably unique: even Yeats’ muse was silenced (by death) a decade earlier. Hardy’s heart is buried – with his two wives – in Stinsford churchyard, Dorset, and the rest of his remains lie (next to Charles Dickens) in Westminster Abbey. Despite his usual, gloomy forebodings (‘Alas for that volume’ he’d written to his friend, Edmund Gosse) Poems of the Past and the Present was an instant commercial success. The first edition was quickly sold out and a second was being planned just weeks later. Thomas Hardy could still shift copy.

 

 

Further reading:

Gittings, R. (1975) Young Thomas Hardy, Penguin.

Gittings, R. (1978) The Older Hardy, Penguin.

Hardy, T. (1994) The Works of Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth.

Tomalin, C. (2006) Thomas Hardy – The Time-Torn Man, Penguin.

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Palaeoscriptology of 

‘An Irish Airman Forsees His Death’ 

by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

The Irish airman in question, for whom Yeats ventriloquises so brilliantly, was Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only son of the poet’s confidant and patron, Lady Augusta Gregory. As 

in any act of ventriloquism, the words are not necessarily an accurate reflection of their subject’s real feelings. Gregory and Yeats were not especially close: the former could become exasperated by the way ‘Willie’ Yeats used his mother’s house at Coole, near Sligo – drinking only the best wine, sleeping only in the best quarters, cosseted and pampered by all. Yeats in turn felt that the younger man failed to make the most of his talents and would only work if forced to for want of money. Politically, too, there were differences: Gregory was ‘Imperialistic’ – the poet, a self-proclaimed Irish patriot who would later serve as a senator in the newly independent Irish Free State. 

  William Robert Gregory was a substantial personality in his own right. Educated at Harrow, New college, Oxford and the Slade School of Art, he excelled at boxing, horse-riding and cricket. Having collaborated with Yeats in designing the sets of early Abbey Theatre productions, he’d exhibited in Chelsea just prior to the Great War. At the outbreak of hostilities he enlisted in the 4th Connaught Rangers before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, gaining his ‘wings’, being awarded the Military Cross (and Chevalier de Legion d’Honneur) and leading his squadron in France and Italy. On January 23rd, 1918, he was shot down and killed, seemingly by an allied (Italian) pilot.

  In a postscript to a letter dated 2nd February, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats ‘if you feel like 

it some time – write something down that we may keep – you understand him better than many’. Soon after she added an appeal from Robert’s wife, Margaret, with whom Yeats had a sometimes difficult relationship, to the effect that ‘if you could send even a paragraph – just something of what I know you are feeling – to the Observer – or failing that the Nation – she would feel it a comfort’. The Observer duly printed Yeats’s ‘Note of Appreciation’ on 17th February; an encomium for a figure represented as something of a ‘renaissance man’.

  Yeats was to elaborate on this theme in four separate poems in the months to come (‘An 

Irish Airman Forsees His Death’, written that year, was the third of these). Later, in a poem entitled ‘Reprisals’, he would antagonise Augusta by envisaging her son – Yeats was enormously ‘into’ spiritualism – as an avenging ghost returning to Ireland to take issue with the ‘Black and Tans’. The poem was not published until after her death as she found it to be less than ‘sincere’.

  Something of a hybrid ‘Anglo-Irishman’, Yeats wrote just the one war poem, reproduced here. Though he’d witnessed (at a distance) a Zeppelin raid over London in 1915, the Great War left him cold as did its poetry, towards which he felt ‘distaste’. When editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) he deliberately under-represented the war poets as a group, and ignored Wilfred Owen entirely. The ‘Easter Uprising’ of 1916 and his newly wedded wife Georgie’s ‘automatic writing’, were the things that were really exercising him at this time. Nevertheless, his threnody to Robert Gregory is a remarkably crafted and controlled piece of work: the manuscript in Yeats’ own untidy hand reveals just one major revision, ‘angry crowds’ becoming ‘cheering crowds’. The would-be patrician in him could hardly apreciate the difference anyway. ‘Kiltartan’ lies close to the Gregory’s country seat at Coole Park (which was to inspire the title of the collection in which the poem would be published in 1919, The Wild Swans at Coole.

  William Butler Yeats was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, at the receipt of which news he is said to have enquired, ‘How much?’ He died in France in 1939 at the age of 73, eight months before the outbreak of another world war.

 

Further reading:

Coote, S. (1997) W.B. Yeats, A Life, Hodder and Stoughton.

Wade, A. (1954) The Letters of W.B. Yeats, Rupert Hart-Davis.

Yeats, W. (ed) (1936) The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, Clarendon.

Yeats, W. (1994) W.B. Yeats – The Poems (ed. Albright, D.), J.M.Dent.

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‘The Daffs’

Palaeoscriptology of

‘The Daffodils’

by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,

Besides the lake, beneath the trees

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

 

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretch’d in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

 

The waves beside them danced, but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-

A poet could not be but gay

In such a jocund company!

I gazed -and gazed- but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought.

 

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.

One of the most famous of all poetry’s opening lines started life as ‘I wandered like a lonely cloud’. Fortunately, Wordsworth – a notorious tinkerer with his own work – ammended the simile to the form we know today. The more widely recognised (revised 1815) version printed above was the poet’s second manifestation of his floral broodings: a three stanza poem with similar sentiments had been penned in 1804 and published (1807) in Poems in two volumes during the height of the Napoleonic wars.

  An outstanding exemplar of the Wordsworthian credo of ’emotion recollected in tranquility’, ‘The Daffodils’ is thought to have been inspired by a stroll around Lake Ullswater on the 15th April, 1802 (Wordsworth was an enthusiastic walker) – although this would have been by no means the first time he’d have witnessed the locally renowned profusion of daffodils near Gowbarrow. On this occasion he was visiting his friend Charles Luff, a captain 

in the local militia, who was conducting exercises nearby. Providentially for literary historians, he was accompanied by his devoted sister, Dorothy, who recorded in her Grasmere Journal how they had happened upon a ‘long belt’ of the eponymous flowers…’I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones […] Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing’. These uncultivated blooms would have been rather paler, smaller and more delicate than modern variants.

  Wordsworth was 34 when he wrote what is possibly the most famous of his poems. Married less than two years to Mary (nee Hutchinson) he formed the dominant and indulged quarter of a menage a quatre (which also comprised his sister and infant son, John). They inhabited the tiny, un-named cottage overlooking Grasmere lake, which until fairly recently had been an inn, The Dove and Olive Branch. William, typically, took the best room for his study and library – though (according to his self-appointed ‘Boswell’, Thomas de Quincey) he often composed his poetry on the hoof. If his friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was 

becoming occasionally fraught – they had published their collaboration, the ground-breaking Lyrical Ballads some six years earlier – it was still very much alive, but Wordsworth was growing closer to another member of ‘the set’, Robert Southey. A productive time in a number of ways (Mary had become pregnant with the couple’s second child) the Wordsworths had finally been paid the money owed to William’s father by the Lowther family (earls of Lonsdale). Concurrently, he was engaged upon an ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, (his personal favourite) and what was to become ‘The Prelude’.

  ‘The Daffodils’ (also known solely by its first line) is written in iambic tetrametre (te-TUM, 

te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM) and quite deliberately moves away from poeticised diction into the language of ‘the common man’. The lines ‘They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude’ were contributed by Mary Wordsworth (not usually credited with a poetic sensibility). They were, William considered, the finest lines in the poem. It is not even 

certain that daffs were the author’s best-loved flower: he wrote three poems about the 

lowly celandine.

  Wordsworth would go on to become poet laureate in 1843 before dying at the age of 

eighty – staunch conservative where once he’d been convinced radical, pillar of an establishment he’d once affected to despise.

 

Further reading:

Barker, J., Wordsworth, A Life, Viking (2000).

Davies, H., A Walk Around The Lakes, Orion (2000).

Sisman, A., The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, HarperPress (2006).

Wordsworth, W., William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, Penguin (2004).

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Palaeosriptology of

‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’

by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

 

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?

–Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

 

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen was probably experiencing more than his fair share of ‘anxiety clusters’ when 

in the September of 1917 he wrote the poem quoted above (the earliest of his truly mature works). Firstly, as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment he was afforded only the status, in the charming terminology of the time, of a ‘temporary gentleman’ (although his mother, Susan, was very ‘class-conscious’, his family had for some generations been of solid yeoman stock). Secondly, as a repressed-homosexual, he would have been very aware of the societal stigma – not to say legal sanctions – implicit in any overt display of homoerotic affection. Lastly, as a Mental patient in Craiglockhart war hospital – required to wear a blue armband when visiting the nearby city of Edinburgh- he’d have known that a large question -mark was being placed against both his physical courage and his right to lead men.

  24 years of age, with no conventional officer-class background of public school or university to bolster his self-confidence, Owen had already endured the experiences which were to fuel his later poems ‘Exposure’, ‘Futility’ and ‘The sentry’ (in January, around Serre in the valley of the river Ancre) and ‘Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori’ (in a gas attack). Two more recent traumas had caused his referral to Craiglockhart: a mysterious fall into a cellar where he’d lain, possibly for upwards of a day, with concussion -and (a month later) a ‘near-miss’ shell which had blown him into the air and rendered him briefly unconscious. Following this latter incident, Owen seems to have cowered in a cutting for several days, surrounded both by corrugated iron and the newly-disinterred remains of a brother officer.

  After Casualty Clearing Station Owen found himself classified as a ‘neurasthenic’ (suffering from what today might popularly be called ‘shell-shock’ or, clinically, ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’). His army file states that he was ‘observed to be shaky and tremulous, and his conduct and manner were peculiar and his memory was confused’.

  Rather fortunate to be placed in the charge of Dr Arthur Brock (whose humane methods were very much at variance with some of the ‘treatments’ dished-out to the non-commissioned soldiery), Owen was encouraged to immerse himself in amateur dramatics and editorship of the hospital’s magazine, The Hydra. An even more propitious meeting occurred when captain Siegfried Sassoon, M.C., was finessed into Craiglockhart. An upper-class, previously published, well-connected, heroically decorated and handsome figure, Sassoon -who became the acme 

of everything Owen admired – was another ‘closet-gay’, who’d rebelled against the conduct of the war by dropping his Military Cross into the Mersey and writing an anti-war protest letter which was subsequently read out in the House of Commons. ‘Mad Jack’ (as his men named him) Sassoon was to be probably the most important influence of Wilfred Owen’s short life. Some of the amendments to the early draughts of ‘Anthem’ (there were seven in all) are written in his, Sassoon’s, hand -indeed, the word ‘Anthem’ was the latter’s suggestion.

  It is seldom acknowledged just what a hotch-potch of imagery and influences ‘Anthem’ really is. To start with, Owen quarried his own (1916) draught-poem, ‘A New Heaven’. Keats (another enduring ‘hero’ for Owen) had written – in ‘To Autumn’ – the line ‘Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn’. ‘Monstrous’ guns borrows from Beatrix Brice’s once-influential, now forgotten, To the Vanguard (1916) and Ian Hay’s (1915) novel The First Hundred Thousand (about a ‘Kitchener’ battalion earlier in the war) includes the sentence ‘a machine gun begins to patter out a stuttering malediction’. ‘Doomed’ youth was originally ‘Dead’ youth, and the monstrous anger of ‘the’ guns was previously ‘our’ guns (Sassoon urging that the perceived anti-German sentiment needed diluting). Finally, the last line of ‘Anthem’ echos and elaborates Laurence Binyon’s (1914) For the Fallen.

  A variation of the ‘English’ or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet, the poem utilises full end-rhymes instead of the new-fangled ‘para-rhymes’ (his acquaintance, Edmund Blunden’s 1931 coinage) with which he’d been tinkering around this time. His ‘Song of Songs’ – written the previous month – is the first known example of a poem whose rhyme-scheme is worked exclusively around ‘half-rhymes’ (as they’ve come to be known) – although ancient Welsh, and recent French experimental verse, had toyed haphazardly with the idea.

  Wilfred Owen was to return to active service and win his own Military Cross, for gallantry, 

in October, 1918. One month later (and exactly one week before the Armistice) he would be killed, alongside many of his comrades, whilst attempting to cross the (militarily) ‘virtually impossible’ defences of the Oise-Sambre canal. In his own lifetime only five of his verses had been published (two of these in The Hydra). For many years accorded the status of a minor poet, it was only in the 1960s – especially after Benjamin Britten’s use of the poems in his celebrated War Requiem (1962) – that Owen’s work began to receive greater critical attention, and that the writer himself gained, retrospectively, what he’d always most desired: recognition as ‘one of the ones’.

 

Further reading:

Barker, P., The Regenration Trilogy, Penguin (1998) (three novels, but well-researched ones)

Egremont, M., Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, Picador 2005)

Hibberd,D., Wilfred Owen, A New Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicholson (2002)

Stallworthy, J., The Poems of Wilfred Owen, Chatto and Windus (1990)

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the palaeoscriptology of

‘Song’

by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

 

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor Shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dew drops wet

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt forget.

 

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not see the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember

And haply may forget.

 

Christina Rossetti had barely turned eighteen when she wrote ‘Song’ on 12th December,1848. The world outside her comfortable Charlotte Street home in central London was being shaken by rumours of foreign revolution and Chartist demonstrations and, domestically, her life was in some turmoil also. The poem was written as an engagement present for her new fiancee, James Collinson: a painter friend of her brother’s, Dantë Gabriel, and a fellow member of his fledgling Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is doubtful whether she harboured any especially strong feelings for Collinson, and she was to end the engagement after two years when he returned to his previous Roman Catholic persuasion.

  Christina’s high church Anglicanism was to be one of the defining aspects of her life. Her elderly father (Professor, minor poet and Neapolitan political-exile, Gabriele) had suffered a deterioration in both general health and eyesight and she herself appears to have undergone some form of nervous collapse around this time. A doctor, Hare (the family physician), who attended upon her when she was ‘about 16-18…[was reported to have been convinced]…that she was more or less out of her mind (suffering, in fact, from a form of insanity, I believe a kind of religious mania)’. Christina, in stark contrast to the demure paragon of Christian virtue she was to become, seems to have been quite wilful and to have engaged in self-harm as an adolescent (as she reveals in a later letter): ‘On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath’. This type of behaviour has led at least one biographer to speculate about the possibility of an incestuous and/or abusive relationship between Christina and her ‘papa’.

  There seems scant evidence of religiosity in ‘Song’, which may indeed even be read from a humanistic perspective. It does however deal, in a way which was to become typical of the poet, with the classically adolescent subject matter of Death and the possibility of survival of some form of personal identity.

  Though Christina had been writing poetry from a very early age, her work would not reach 

a wider public until the 1862 publication of Goblin Market and other poems (which includes ‘Song’). The Literary Review perhaps best summed up the critical accolades heaped on this volume, when it enthused: ‘Simultaneously with the publication of Mrs Browning’s Last Poems, the legacy of one whose untimely death has robbed us of many a noble thought set to rich music, we receive from a poetess whose name is known to but few, a first work of singular merit’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although Christina never met her, remained a great insiration: she was later tempted to write the older woman’s biography – though Robert Browning effectively scotched the project.

  Christina Rossetti’s later years were to be characterised by a determined self-effacement in the path of life’s vicissitudes. She would work for ten years as a volunteer at the St Mary Magdalene refuge for single mothers and former prostitutes, in Highgate. She would lose her equally celebrated elder brother (for whom she’d once acted as painter’s model) in 1882. Looking after her mother and aunts until late middle-age, she was to be denied a tranquil senescence of her own by the twin afflictions, stoically endured, of Graves’ Disease – a thyroid disorder – and terminal breast cancer. Her literary reputation, which had suffered neglect for many years, underwent a significant re-appraisal in the Nineteen Seventies, with the advent of feminism.

 

Further reading:

Jones, K., Learning Not To Be First, Oxford University Press (1991).

Marsh, J., Christina Rossetti, A Literary Biography, Jonathan Cape (1994).

Rossetti, C., Selected Poems (ed., Roe, D.), Penguin Classics (2008).

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Palaeoscriptology of

‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’

by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

 

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

Often hailed as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States – prior to the concept being formalised in America – Robert Lee Frost espoused a kind of homely self-determinism which chimed perfectly with the perceived spirit of the Founding Fathers and emerging nationhood. Frost was 48 years old when he wrote ‘Stopping by woods…’ in the June of 1922, ensconced in his New England farmhouse, The Stonehouse in South Shaftesbury, Vermont. The Peleg Cole farm was a ninety acre holding with a granite cottage (circa 1779) and an orchard. Living there since November, 1920, he’d previously farmed (poultry) in Derry, Rockingham county (1900-1911) where, together with his wife, Elinor, he’d raised and schooled his five surviving children (they were both qualified teachers). Harvard educated, Frost was by no means an efficient farmer (he liked to sleep in late into the morning) but enjoyed the freedom it afforded him to write. The farm in Vermont represented an attempt to escape from the rigours of academia – he’d just resigned from a lectureship at Amherst college – although he still enjoyed a well-paid but less taxing visiting fellowship at the University of Michigan.

  It had taken a move to England, just prior to the first world war, for Frost to gain an entree into literary society and to forge the beginnings of a reputation. Though he’d had few poems published up to this time, he managed to place his first book A Boy’s Will (1913) within two months of his arrival, and the successful North of Boston came out the next year. His friendship with Ezra Pound, and the Georgians Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie and – particularly – Edward Thomas, dates from this period, prior to his return to The States in 1915.

  ‘Stopping by woods…’ was first published in New Republic and was included in Frost’s fourth publication New Hampshire (1923) which was to win the first of his four Pulitzer prizes. Its author (in old age and about to embark, yet again, on a plane journey) said of it ‘If I’d known […] that when I wrote those few verses they would have led to this amount of travel I wouldn’t have written them’. But then, he’d also called the poem ‘his best bid for remembrance’ and stated that it contained ‘all I ever knew’. It is written (bar the last verse) in the Rubaiyat stanza, created by Edward Fitzgerald (aaba) and carries a rhyme over from one verse to the next (chain rhyme). It has been subjected to many interpretations, though Frost thought of it as a simple piece. If ‘the darkest evening of the year’ means the longest night of the year (21st/22nd December) then the ‘promises to keep’ would, presumably, be Christmas presents.

  ‘Stopping by woods…’ is claimed to have been written ‘in a few minutes without any strain’. According to one account, Frost had been sitting in his chair all night by the kitchen table, crickets calling outside ‘like a metronome’, finishing a poem called ‘New Hampshire’…’I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn’t disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o’clock went back in and wrote the piece about the snowy evening and the little horse as if 

I’d had an hallucination – little hallucination – the one critics write about occasionally. You can’t trust these fellows who write what made a poet write what he wrote. We all of us read our pet theories into a poem’. In another interview Frost admits that the poem DID require fine-tuning: ‘I wrote the third line of the last stanza in such a way as to call for another stanza when I didn’t want another stanza and didn’t have another stanza in me, but with great presence of mind and a sense of what a good boy I was I instantly struck the line out and 

made my exit with a repeat end’. Typically forthright, this is the same, no-nonsense Robert Frost who felt that writing vers libre was akin to ‘playing tennis without a net’. There is, in fact, a rough draft of ‘Stopping by woods…’ which shows that the poet was being less than totally ingenuous: he’d had difficulty with the second stanza, leaving the first line of it incomplete after four attempts and completing the second line after one revision.

  During the years which followed, when his reputation was being consolidated, Frost was to undergo a series of family tragedies. In 1934 his youngest and favourite child, Majorie, would succumb to Puerperal fever and in 1938 Elinor died suddenly of a heart attack. His son, Carol, would commit suicide in 1940, and another daughter, Irma, would go insane (as had his sister, Jeannie). His apotheosis as the homely sage of New England would continue – ‘Stopping by woods…’ would become a kind of key-note and coda to the John F Kennedy presidential election campaign – until the posthumous demolition of his good name by his one-time confidant Lawrence Thompson’s biographical trilogy (completed 1976) which characterises Frost, in great detail, as an egomaniacal, controlling ‘monster’ in his personal relationships. 

Be that as it may (and Thompson would seem to have had his own agenda), Frost’s poetic achievement appears likely to survive any criticisms of him as a human being.

 

Further reading:

Frost, R., Robert Frost: Selected Poems (ed., Hamilton, I.), Penguin (1973).

Lathem, E., Interviews with Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1966).

Parini, J., Robert Frost, A Life, Heinemann (1998).

Thompson, L., Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1966).

Thompson, L., Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1970).

Thompson, L., Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1976).

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Palaeoscriptology of

‘Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art’

by John Keats (1795-1821)

Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art-

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-

No -yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair loves’ ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, Still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

Eldest son of the manager of the stables/Inn, The Swan and Hoop, in Moorgate, Keats went 

on to study at Guy’s Hospital before qualifying as an apothecary in 1816. His interest in writing poetry dates from just two years earlier. After having his work premiered in Leigh Hunt’s radical weekly, The Examiner, he published his first collection, Poems, in 1817, which was followed by Endymion in April of the succeeding year. These were mercilessly ridiculed in Blackwood’s Magazine as ‘drivelling idiocy’ and as products of the vulgar ‘Cockney Rhyming school’: young ‘Johnny Keats’ was advised to return to his pills and plasters!

  There are two versions of this celebrated sonnet, once thought to have been Keats’ last poem, but now placed with some probability in the period between April and October 1819. Some of the imagery resembles that in his sychronous correspondence, and the ‘soft fallen mask/ of snow’ may refer to an unseasonably heavy snowstorm that struck London (Keats was living in Hampstead for much of this time) on the 22nd of October. In this same month – a little before Keats’ 24th birthday – Fanny Brawne, his secret fiancee, had transcribed ‘Bright star’ into her copy of Dante. The original, also copied out by the poet’s friend and fellow writer, Charles Armitage Brown, was first published in The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal on 27th September 1838. In this first draft, whilst both versions retain the same Shakespearean rhyme-scheme, the Octave (first eight lines) reads similarly to the revision reproduced above -though ‘devout’ precedes ‘sleepless Eremite’. The Sestet (concluding six lines) differs considerably after the volta ‘No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable…’

 

Cheek pillow’d on my love’s white ripening breast,

To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell,

Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest,

To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath,

Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.

 

‘Death’ to Keats – a keen student of Shakespeare – would have been punningly suggestive with its Elizabethan connotation of sexual climax. Brown’s MSS is preserved at Harvard University.

  The better-known revision – printed here – was first published in Monckton Milnes’ Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848). It was inscribed into Keats’ volume of Shakespeare’s Poems (in the blank page opposite ‘A Lover’s Complaint’) on the 29th September, 1820. Keats and his companion, the painter Joseph Severn – to whom this volume would later be gifted – were onboard the Maria Crowther en route to Italy, where he was travelling in the faint hope of finding improved health.

  The tuberculosis which was affecting Keats had, in all probability, been contracted from his brother, Tom, whom the poet had nursed, back in late 1818. It seems to have taken hold of him in the autumn of the following year, whilst he’d experienced severe haemorrhaging in the February of 1820. His own medical training (coupled with the fact that his mother – as well as his younger brother – had died of the disease) would have left him in little doubt of its eventual outcome.

  The ‘My fair love’ referred to in the text probably represents Fanny Brawne, whom Keats had met two years previously and to whom he’d become engaged in the October of 1819. Illness, financial problems and the failure of his literary ambitions were to thwart their immediate plans of marriage. Though he was in some doubt as to her constancy, Keats had written to her in regard to his proposed Italian venture ‘It’s certain I shall never recover if I 

am to be so long separate from you’. The ‘Bright Star’ of the poem is, presumably, the North Star, Polaris. Keats may have had in mind the lines from Julius Caesar: ‘But I am constant as the northern star,/ Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality/ There is no fellow in the firmament…’ (III, i, 60-62). An ‘Eremite’ is a hermit.

  During the long, cramped and difficult voyage Keats’ condition was to deteriorate still further. He was to die, aged 25, on the 23rd February 1821 in Rome, and be buried in the Protestant cemetry there. Although Shelly wrote the elergy, Adonais, in his memory upon hearing of his fellow poet’s death, it was not until the Pre-Raphaelites championed his work, over a quarter of a century later, that Keats was to find a popular readership. This late fame might, perhaps, have agreeably surprised the young apothecary with literary pretentions who’d devised his own epitaph: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’.

 

Further reading: 

Garrod, H., Keats, Poetical Works, Oxford University Press (1956).

Keats, J., Letters of John Keats, (ed. Gittings, R.), Oxford (1975).

Motion, A., Keats, Faber (1997).

Roe, N., John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Cambridge (1997).

Ward, A., John Keats, The Making of a Poet, Secker & Warburg (1963).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of

‘The Soldier’

by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

 

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home.

 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

 

Never robust, Rupert Chawner Brooke – though from childhood a keen sportsman, swimmer 

and walker – was frequently laid low by the slightest ailment (perhaps as a result of a defective immune-system). Second son of a Rugby public school housemaster, Brooke, blessed with a classical profile and a striking mane of red/gold hair, was always destined to be the cynosure. His friends and acquaintances read like a Who’s Who of early twentieth century Georgian glitterati: H.G.Wells, E.M.Forster, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Francis Cornford, Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, (the Fabians) Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, John Maynard Keynes, George Mallory (the Everest mountaineer), Hugh Dalton, Winston Churchill, the Asquiths – Brooke knew them all.

  After a prize-littered Rugby schooling (in his father’s house, ‘School Field’), Brooke won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle, Alan, was Dean. He first drew the attention of his soon-to-be patron, the senior civil servant – and literary insider – Sir Edward Marsh, when ‘starring’ in a college play – as a herald with a non-speaking part. In 1910 he took 

a disappointing ‘Second’ in the Classical Tripos, and in the December of the following year privately published his first collection, Poems. He had his ‘digs’ during this period in The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

  Always something of a restless soul, Brooke embarked on a succession of travels after an ill-fated love-affair with a Miss ‘Ka’ Cox. His various peregrinations would embrace France, Germany, the United States, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand and Tahiti (where he is said to have fathered a daughter to a native girl). In 1914 he returned home to an ‘England’ (never ‘Britain’) about to be engulfed in war and, pulling strings, was commissioned as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division (R.N.V.R.). His admirer, W.L.S. Churchill, was First Lord of the Admiralty. Involved in the five day defence of Antwerp (October 1914) as a platoon Commander, Brooke seems not to have seen action, though he would certainly have heard the sound of guns fired in anger: the chateau in which he’d slept the previous night was hit by shellfire and he lost some of his kit and papers. After their ignominious retreat from Belgium, Brooke’s unit returned to Dover, but the well-connected poet was soon to wangle a transfer to ‘Hood’ Battalion (commanded by Bernard Freyburg, Churchill’s ‘salamander’) based at Blandford Camp, Dorset. Here, in primitive conditions exacerbated by noxious fumes from the coke stoves, Brooke wrote most of his sequence of five sonnets, ‘1914’, of which ‘The Soldier’ is the last. On Christmas night, surrounded by the sounds of drunken revelry, he commenced the poem with which he is always most associated, using the working-title of ‘The Recruit’.

  ‘The Soldier’ was completed whilst Brooke was staying in Walmer Castle, Kent, (‘among all those Field Marshalls’) at the behest of Violet Asquith, the Prime Minister’s daughter, in early January 1915. Hilaire Belloc’s narration of a fictional journey across Sussex (The Four Men, which Brooke had read in 1912) was the inspiration behind the sonnet:

 

‘He does not die that can bequeath

Some influence to the land he knows

Or dares, persistent, interwreath

Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;

He does not die, but still remains

Substantiate with his darling plains.’

 

A manuscript of Brooke’s poem still exists written in his neat hand on lined paper headed ‘Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, Blandford, Dorset’. It was not its author’s personal favourite of the sequence: this remained ‘The Dead II’. It utilises an idiosyncratic rhyme-scheme comprised of a Shakepearean Octave (ababcdcd) and a ‘Petrachan’ Sestet (efgefg).

‘1914’ was first published in the month of its completion, January 1915, in New Numbers. On the 4th April, Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s, read ‘The Soldier’ as part of his Easter Sunday sermon: The Times printed it the next day. This same month (April 23rd, ‘St. George’s Day’) Rupert Brooke was to die of septicaemia on board the French hospital ship, Duguay-Trouin. Part of the allied expedition to The Dardinelles, he’d contracted first heat-stroke and then infection from an insect-bite on his lip. Though the sole recipient of the attentions of a team of twelve surgeons, he would breathe his last during the afternoon – two days before the Gallipoli landings – and be interred on the nearby island of Skyros, once the mythical playground of Achilles. His olive-grove burial-site (which is ‘for ever England’) is now neighboured by Greek naval emplacements.    

 

Further reading:

Brooke, R., Poetical Works, Faber (1946).

Holt, T. & Holt, V., Poets of the Great War, Leo Cooper (1999).

Keyes, G., Letters of Rupert Brooke, Faber (1968).

Read, M., Forever England, the Life of Rupert Brooke, Mainstream (1997). 

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of 

‘Tagus, farewell’

by (Sir) Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)

 

Tagus, farewell, that westward with thy streams

Turns up the grains of gold already tried,

With spur and sail for I go to seek the Thames

Gainward the sun that showeth her wealthy pride

And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams

Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side.

My kind, my country, alone for whom I live,

Of mighty love the wings for this me give.

 

Sir Thomas Wyatt was an example of that most endangered of species: courtier to, and confidant of, King Henry VIII. His father, Henry Wyatt, had allied himself with the Lancastrian faction during the Wars of the Roses and been rewarded by his namesake, Henry Tudor, with a knighthood and a place on the Privy Council upon his succession as Henry VII. Thomas was born at Allington castle in Kent and – probably – graduated with an MA from St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1520. He was married around this time to Elizabeth Brooke who was to provide him with two children before their separation, on the grounds of her adultery – which may account for the rueful tone of much of his love poetry. He also, according to legend, enjoyed a dalliance with the future queen, Anne Boleyn, and may even have warned his monarch against her.

  As a young man, Wyatt was involved in diplomatic missions to Paris and to Italy (where he was captured and ransomed by Spanish troops who were occupying Rome). He seems to have escaped, and upon his return to England published a number of his translations from Plutarch in 1528 (the only examples of his work to be printed in his lifetime). After a two year assignment as High Marshal of Calais he was gaoled in the Fleet prison (for killing a member of the London Guard) in 1534 and, again, in the Tower from May, 1536 (for six weeks) most likely in connection with the fall and disgrace of Queen Anne.

  Royal disfavour was brief. Wyatt profited from the confiscation of church lands at the Dissolution and, newly knighted, was sent to be English ambassador to the Spanish court of the Emperor Charles V – who had been antagonised by the English King’s divorce from his aunt, Katherine of Aragon. Sir Thomas’s mission seems to have been accorded a success and in the poem reproduced above we see him, in the June of 1539, allowing himself, perhaps, some wistful ambivalence at the news of his recall to England.

  ‘Tagus, farewell’ (untitled) survives in a leather-bound notebook which Wyatt kept between 1537 and 1542. This contains over a hundred of his poems in various hands (together with a number by the earl of Surrey), plus drafts of letters and mathematical computations. This particular poem was written by Wyatt himself, in a spidery script, and we can see several amendments – for instance the ‘which’ in line 5 and the ‘alone’ of line 7 are corrections (the original was ‘only alone’). The Iberian river Tagus was celebrated for the resemblance of its sandy bed to gold (by, amongst others, Chaucer and John Skelton). The ‘Brutus’ alluded to is not the Roman regicide but rather a Trojan descendent of Aeneas of Troy, who had dreamt that he would establish a kingdom in Albion and was said, by some, to have founded London. ‘Gainward the sun’ refers to the fact that the Thames, unlike the Tagus, flows eastwards. ‘Bended moon’ is a nod towards the crescent-like kink in the Thames.

  The works of Sir Thomas Wyatt were not available to a general English readership until fifteen years after his death, when they appeared in Songs and Sonnettes, ‘written by the ryght honourable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey’, and other, (better known as Tottel’s Miscellany, published in 1557). This work introduced to the Tudors something of the flavour of the Italianate poets, alongside various ‘new’ forms such as the sonnet, the ottava rima, the terza rima and iambic pentameter. It would prove enormously influential to the Elizabethans, in particular writers such as Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Due to an error in their respective chronologies, it was long believed that Wyatt was merely a camp-follower of the earl of Surrey, but in the twentieth century the primacy of Wyatt’s poetic legacy became fully established. Tottel’s Miscellany fails to attribute the verse to its true author and entitles it ‘Of his returne from Spaine’.

  Wyatt may have been wise to view his return with ambivalence. In 1540 the fall of his friend and patron, Thomas Cromwell, signalled a new period of danger, and early 1541 would see him, once more, languishing in the Tower – on trumped-up charges of treason. Again the mercurial king would release him and grant him new and profitable offices. In early October, 1542, an emissary from Charles V arrived at Falmouth and Wyatt was dispatched, post-haste, to meet him. The arduous journey in inclement weather led to the onset of a fever (probably pneumonia) from which the poet was to expire, at Sherbourne, Devon, on the eleventh of that month.

 

Further reading:

Baldi, S., Sir Thomas Wyatt, Longmans (1961)

Scott, H. (ed), Selected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Carcanet (1996)

Thomson, P., Sir Thomas Wyatt and His background, Routledge (1964)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of

‘Gare du Midi’

by WH Auden (1907-1973)

 

A nondescript express in from the south,

Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face

To welcome which the mayor has not contrived

Bugles or braid: something about the mouth 

Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.

Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,

He walks out briskly to infect a city

Whose terrible future may just have arrived.

 

Christened ‘Wystan’ (after a ninth century Saint) by his affectionate, upper-middle-class parents, Auden’s childhood, public-schooling and progression to Christ Church, Oxford were all unexceptional enough. It was during his time at university that he would make the contacts, flaunt the politics, generally strike the pose that would so distinguish him from his contemporaries.

  ‘Coming down’ with a poor, Third Class degree (or, ‘a poet’s Third’), Auden would decamp 

to the louche counter-kultur of Weimar Germany where he could more easily indulge his homosexual inclinations in pick-up bars like ‘The Cosy Corner’ in Berlin.

  Embarking (upon his return for financial reasons) on a less than whole-hearted career in teaching, he managed to attract the attention of TS Eliot at Fabers and placed his first book, Poems, with them in 1930. Thereafter, Auden’s prolific output of poetry, verse-plays (co-authored with his sometime lover, long-term friend, Christopher Isherwood) and travel books would establish him as a leading voice of the Left in Nineteen Thirties Britain – alongside his ‘MacSpauday’ ‘Gang’ of Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. In 1935, a marriage of convenience to Erika Mann (daughter of the novelist, Thomas), which allowed her to sidestep Nazi persecution, was closely followed by employment with the GPO film unit – his most celebrated collaboration, Night Mail, featured a score by another friend, Benjamin Britten.

  Auden’s two, most practical, attempts to advance the cause of anti-fascism appear, on closer examination, to have been shambolic at best. Volunteering his services to the Republicans as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War, the poet – whose vehicle-handling skills are reported to have been atrocious – ended up driving nothing more dangerous than a mule (which promptly kicked him) miles behind the front-line. His second venture, chronicling the Sino-Japanese conflict in company with Isherwood, resulted in the joint-production Journey to a War. Although this time the two writers did manage to briefly inspect the front – such as it was – the most perilous of their pursuits probably involved sampling their hosts’ eccentric cuisine.

  After their homecoming from China in 1938 the two intrepid and indefatigable travellers (with Isherwood’s latest boyfriend in tow) were off to Belgium for the festive season. Here they joined up with Gerald Hamilton (the prototype of ‘Mr Norris’ in Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains) whom both had known in Berlin. During this fortnight in Brussels (December 1938) Auden wrote a stream of about a dozen poems, including the famous ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ and his ‘Gare du Medi’, reproduced above.

  Something of this poem’s sinister tone might be explained by the coincidence that Auden had just finished reading Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock. He was also, of course, much exercised by the prospect of germ warfare and the immanence of a second world war. Auden had, since that July, been experimenting with Benzedrine, an amphetamine (and at that time 

a non-prescription drug) at breakfast, which he counter-acted with Seconal at night. This self-medication would continue until the former drug’s reclassification in the Nineteen Sixties.

  ‘Gare du Midi’ (or ‘South Terminus’) retains a curious relevance and, with the advent of ‘Dirty Bombs’ (nuclear devices small enough to be contained in a suitcase) may even be considered prescient. It was first published in the spring, 1939 edition of New Writing and was included in Auden’s February, 1940 collection Another Time (the first of his books to be debuted in the United States) under the auspices of Random House.

  Together with the two poems mentioned previously, this volume also incorporates other verse written in the late Thirties including ‘Tell me the truth about love’, ‘Stop all the clocks’, ‘Miss Gee’, ‘Lullaby’ (Lay your sleeping head, my love…), ‘Roman Wall Blues’, ‘Law like Love’, ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, ‘The Unknown Citizen’, ‘Spain’, ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’ and ‘September 1, 1939’. The quality of this work makes Another Time easily its author’s best, most sustained collection (though it received, for the most part, a frosty reception in Britain).

  The reasons behind this lack of critical acclaim are not hard to fathom: Auden and Isherwood, turning their backs on their homeland, had taken passage for New York on board the liner, ‘SS Champlain’, which left Southampton on 18th January, 1939. This flight from a country which was soon to declare war upon a totalitarian regime – the likes of which Auden had for so long, and which such eloquence, opposed – was never, quite, forgiven him. Questions were even asked at the time in Parliament.

  WH Auden would find love in America with a much younger Brooklyn Jew, Chester Kallman (to whom Another Time would be dedicated). He would, eventually, apply for American citizenship and return to Germany (after V.E. Day) as an Honorary Major with the US Strategic Bombing Survey. He would die of a heart attack, after one of his poetry readings, alone, in his Viennese hotel room, at the age of sixty six.

 

Further reading:

Auden, W., WH Auden, A Selection by the Author, Penguin (1958)

Bennett, A., Poetry in Motion, BBC (1990)

Davenport-Hines, R., Auden, Heinemann (1996)

Fuller,J., WH Auden: A Commentary, Faber (1998)

Osbourne, C., WH Auden, The Life of a Poet, Michael O’Mara Books (1979) 

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of

‘I Am’

By John Clare (1793-1864)                                                                                                           

 

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I am the self-consumer of my woes,

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;

And yet I am, and live with shadows tost

 

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

And een the dearest -that I loved the best-

Are strange -nay, rather stranger than the rest.

 

I long for scenes where man has never trod;

A place where woman never smiled or wept;

There to abide with my creator, GOD,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;

The grass below -above the vaulted sky.

 

There is no draft manuscript for these verses by the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare. What we do know is that they were written whilst he was in his early fifties and a patient in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Transcribed by the ‘House Steward’, William knight, ‘I Am’ was first published in The Bedford Times on New Year’s day, 1848, after being sent to a mutual friend, the Bedfordshire watchmaker Thomas Inskip (in December 1846). There is some contextual evidence that the lines were penned even earlier in late ’44 or in 1845 – by which time the writer had been residing in Northampton for three years.

  If John Clare was to exhibit symptoms of mental instability it is hardly to be wondered at. Born the son of an impoverished farm labourer in Helpstone, Northamptonshire, he found employment (after a rudimentary local education) as a flail-thresher, horse-boy, plough-boy, under-gardener and lime-kiln worker. Aged eleven, his family’s cottage was divided, by their new landlord, into four tenements – combined with an annual rent increase from two to three pounds! When he was sixteen an Act of Parliament enclosed the common land in Helpstone and – as he later wrote – ‘trampled on the grave/ Of labours rights and left the poor a slave’. His first surviving poem, ‘Helpstone’, is dated that same year (1809). From his early teens Clare had written verses on whatever scraps of paper were to hand: magazines, newspapers, even discarded sugar-bags. He was ‘taken up’ by the London publisher John Taylor (Keats’ publisher, among others) and their first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, came out – to great acclaim – in 1820, the year of his marriage to Patty (nee Turner) with whom he would have eight children. Lionised by literary London society – where he was for a time the latest ‘fad’ – Clare seems to have been ‘marketed’ as much for his curiosity-value as for his poetry. Slowly the critical attention faded, and other productions – though possibly better-written – were commercial failures. This, coupled with a move from Helpstone (to Northborough, four miles away) affected Clare badly. Already victim of mood-swings, he began to have hallucinations and to complain of awful headaches. There are dark insinuations that he could be violent. Eventually, in 1837, when his wife could no longer cope, he was removed to High Beech, Essex, from where he escaped in 1841, walking all the way home to Northamptonshire. Once again certified as insane, he was admitted to Northampton’s New Asylum (opened only three years earlier).

  Clare seems not to have been violent at Northampton. Patients were divided into five classes proportionate to the severity of their symptoms and the degree of care required. The poet was in the ‘fifth class’ of private patients (those who received least supervision and whose payments, accordingly, were remitted at the lowest rate). These payments were received in part from a charitable fund and, in part, from Earl Fitzwilliam, a local aristocrat and long-term benefactor to Clare. Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now ‘St. Andrew’s’) was a state-of-the-art facility with hot water accessible in all parts of the building, galleries, day-rooms furnished to look as ordinary as possible, and a liberal regime under its first superintendents, doctors Prichard and Nesbitt. Clare was allowed to walk unaccompanied into town where he was often to be found sitting in the portico of All Saints church, usually with his notebook in his hand – always with his tobacco pouch. Occasionally, once in 1844 and again in ’46 and ’48, he would be confined to the asylum after over-partaking in the local ales. His services as a purveyor of verse seem to have been sought by the locals (especially around St. Valentine’s day) and paid for with bribes of tobacco.

  Of Clare’s mental state at this time it is impossible to write with any exactitude. Less than two dozen letters survive from the period of his hospitalisation and, although these always show ‘insight’, there is also – as often as not – evidence of delusional ideation. Clare kept up an irregular correspondence with his family but appears never to have been visited by his wife, or to have seen any of his numerous grandchildren. Prolific in his output during the early years of his institutionalisation (Knight collected 800 of these ‘Asylum Poems’, of varying quality, over the five years prior to his own departure), Clare would lose the thread of his compositions if for any reason interrupted. His conversation, likewise, could be uneven. He’d developed a fixation with an old girl friend, Mary Joyce, whom he would describe as his ‘first love and first wife’ – and was unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge her death. Clare also suffered delusions that he was, at various times, (the prize-fighter) Jack Randall, Horatio Nelson, Shakespeare or Lord Byron, and would spend much time revising the latter’s work.

  Modern diagnostic practices shine little light on the poet’s illness, which displays aspects of both schizophrenic, and bi-polar affective, disorders. Its aetiology is likewise confused (there is no evidence of any previous psychoses in his family) by all sorts of theories. Some experts have advocated the possibility of head trauma (Clare once fell from a tree), others advance 

the notion of vitamin-deficiency due to poor diet (he often lived with his family in considerable poverty), whilst others advocate the possibility of alcohol abuse or tertiary syphilis (again, there is some supporting evidence for these theses). 

  Clare’s oeuvre has also been fraught with questions of editorial tinkering. Knight notes at 

the beginning of his collection that the poems were ‘copied from the manuscripts as presented to me by Clare…the whole of them faithfully transcribed to the best of my knowledge from the pencil originals many of which were so obliterated that without referring to the Author I could not decipher’. The poems have never, completely, fallen into desuetude and have been espoused by such dissimilar commentators as Francis Palgrave, Arthur Symonds, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden and Geoffrey Grigson – all of whom sign-posted its virtues. More latterly Clare’s work has become highly fashionable once again, with the likes of John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney thumbing a lift on to his belated bandwagon.

  As the years in Northampton passed Clare’s productivity lessened – although it never ceased entirely. His conversation was apt to become larded with obscenity and he became quite stout, often sitting in a favoured chair with views over the asylum’s well-tended gardens. He seems to have grown more taciturn and, towards the end, suffered from a series of transient ischemic attacks (or ‘mini-strokes’) until his death, at the age of seventy, after well-over 22 years of institutional life. He’d more than once likened his surrounds to ‘the Bastille’. He was 

to be buried in his beloved Helpstone via the good offices of the local church-warden, thereby narrowly avoiding the final indignity of a pauper’s grave.

 

Further reading:

Bate, J., John Clare, A Biography, Picador (2003)

Clare, J. (Ed. Summerfield, G.) John Clare: Selected Poetry, Penguin (1990)

Storey, M. (Ed.) The Letters of John Clare, Oxford University Press (1988)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of

‘The Tyger’

by William Blake (1757-1827)

 

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fires of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

 

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?

 

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

 

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

 

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

Probably written in 1792/93 – at the same time as the full ramifications of the French Revolution were beginning to reveal themselves – ‘The Tyger’ must, surely, be one of the most famous poems ever written. William Blake, son of a hosier and from a dissenting background, would have been in his mid-thirties when he composed it, residing with his wife, Catherine, at number 13, Hercules Buildings in Lambeth (the two of them were known to sunbathe naked in its garden) and practicing his trade as an engraver. He would almost certainly have seen a live tiger as there were two of them on view at the Tower of London and – in an earlier dwelling place at Green street – a tiger had been exhibited in a private menagerie just around the corner in Leicester House. Blake’s accompanying depiction, however, displays little of that beast of prey’s lissom and feral power, possessing as it does more the feline vigour of a rather sad domestic tabby.

  ‘The Tyger’ is one of the ‘Songs of Experience’ upon which Blake was working as a companion piece to his ‘Songs of Innocence’ (some of which appear to have been begun as early as 1784). It is often cited in direct contrast to ‘The Lamb’ of the earlier sequence.

  Blake’s manuscript containing drafts of ‘The Tyger’ has an interesting history. It originally belonged to his much-loved younger brother, Robert, who died from tuberculosis, aged only 19, in 1787. Blake himself had nursed him at the end, and would keep his brother’s notebook with him until the close of his own life – using the spare pages for thoughts, drawings and verses of his own (including many of the workings of ‘Songs of Experience’). Blake felt that he was ‘guided’ by his brother’s spirit for a number of years and, indeed, claimed to have seen Robert’s soul ascend to heaven (through the ceiling). William had already been seeing ‘visions’ since the age of eight, and there can be little doubt that in a later age the artist would, routinely, have been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, ‘sectioned’ under the Mental Health Act and (involuntarily) medicated. As it was he was left free to pursue his own inclinations which were, at this time, highly influenced by Swedenborgian philosophy.

  ‘The Tyger’ is written from a Gnostic perspective: for Blake ‘Jehovah’ meant merely the artificer of an imperfect creation, beyond which lies the ultimate divinity. In Blakean mythology the ‘Tyger’, symbol of wrath, is a product of ‘Urizen’ (a fallen titan driven by materialism and calculating rationality). ‘Los’ – who embodies artistic imagination – is engaged in an historical struggle with ‘Urizen’ and only their ultimate reconciliation can make ‘Jerusalem’ possible. The ‘Lamb’ is equated with Jesus and a gentler spirituality. The ‘forests of the night’ are often held to be the (French) church and state.

  The drafts of this poem show Blake refining and supplementing his own original vision of the first three stanzas (which are only slightly revised). The fourth stanza as projected might have run ‘Could fetch it from the furnace deep./ And in thy horrid ribs dare steep/ In what clay & in what mould/ Were the eyes of fury rolld’. The poet had likely witnessed the Perseid meteor showers of 1783 (which some observers felt resembled a spear being hurled across the heavens). This may be the inspiration behind ‘When the stars threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears’. The poem is probably unique in containing two climatics (the first being the unanswered question ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’, the second being the single word ‘Dare’ of the final line).

  Blake would continue to go his own way. A political – as well as religious – radical, he was fortunate to be acquitted from the twin charges of sedition and assault at a court in Chichester in 1805. After some years of increasing neglect and debility he would die, still singing, a few months short of his seventieth birthday, and be buried (in a common grave) in the Dissenter’s burial ground at Bunhill Fields. Already a forgotten man, his engraved and hand-printed Songs of Innocence and of Experience had sold less than twenty copies in over thirty years.

  In 1847 (twenty years after his death) the foolscap quarto sketchbook of 58 pages – once 

the property of Robert Blake – was bought, for just over ten shillings, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was not until 1863 that Alexander and Anne Gilchrist’s monumental Life would 

begin the process of rehabilitation, rescuing the visionary from literary obscurity.

 

Further reading:

Ackroyd, P., Blake, Sinclair-Stevenson (1995)

Foster Damon, S., A Blake Dictionary, Brown University Press (1988)

Gilchrist, A. (Intro. Holmes, R.), Gilchrist on Blake, Harpur (2005)

Keyes, G. (Ed.) The Complete Writings of William Blake, Oxford (1966)

Keyes, G. (Ed.) The Letters of William Blake, Oxford (1980)

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Palaeoscriptology of

‘Do not go gentle into that good night’

by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should rage and burn at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could shine like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ was written in the spring of 1951 when Thomas was thirty-six. It was composed in a draughty garden shed -a sort of adjunct to the poet’s residence, ‘The Boat House’, both of which still look out over the estuary of the river Taf at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. Thomas, his wife Caitlin, and their three children had been 

living at the six-room, three-storey Boathouse since 1949, courtesy of a benefactress, Margaret Taylor (first wife of the historian and television presenter A.J.P.Taylor). The latter had put up with the Thomases for a long time: they’d lived in 1946 in a summerhouse at the bottom of his Oxford garden and made regular attempts to wheedle money from him. No admirer – unlike his wife – of the poetry, Taylor observed that Thomas would commence his poems using plain language before quite intentionally clouding  them in successive layers of obscurity. Thomas did, indeed, habitually write using legions of worksheets (his shed at Laugharne was usually left littered with their crumpled remnants until he discovered that they could be saleable). Alongside obvious shopping-lists, certain enigmatic numberings in the margins of drafts initially perplexed literary scholars – until it was determined that they related to Roget’s Thesaurus listings.

  By 1951 Thomas had already begun the series of four drink-fuelled American tours which 

so bolstered his legend. The first (from February 1950) established the template for self-indulgent, self-destructive, absent-minded and shirt-stealing boorishness. Though immensely  popular with audiences (and seemingly lucrative) little of the money found its way into the Thomases’ two bank accounts: the final destination of his earnings and royalties has proved elusive for both biographers and the Inland Revenue. Almost half of Dylan’s collected correspondence consists of attempts to borrow money or apologise for not delivering work/ repaying debts.

  A typical day at Laugharne would involve a late lie-in followed by a short stroll along a coast-hugging lane to ‘Brown’s Hotel’ in the village. He would usually drop-in to his parent’s rented house, ‘The Pelican’ in Mainstreet, where he and his father would do The Times crossword together. After lunch he would spend the afternoon trying to write in his little shed, where neither wife nor children were allowed. At seven o’clock sharp (pub opening time) he would retrace his steps back to ‘Brown’s’, accompanied this time by Caitlin. There were frequent, intoxicated bouts of violence between them, often with their mutual infidelities as a subtext.

  Dylan Marlais Thomas had found literary recognition early. His first collection, Eighteen Poems, was published (as a prize-award) in 1934, a little after his twentieth birthday. The influential Edith Sitwell (after some dithering) became the first of a succession of older, female sponsors and patrons when – barely two years later – she praised his work as being ‘on 

a huge scale, both in theme and structurally …nothing short of magnificent’. Thomas’s pouty, cherubic looks, coupled with his artfully-constructed act of slightly bewildered enfant terrible could arouse some women’s protective, maternal feelings. After his apprenticeship 

on a local newspaper, and with the occasional interlude working on film scripts (which were seldom shot) or radio broadcasts (which were sometimes made), he would never really find conventional employment – and would always be short of money.

  ‘Do not go gentle’ is a villanelle (an Italian pastoral form originating in the sixteenth century and first popularised by the French poet, Jean Passerat [1534-1602]). It comprises five tercets followed by a quatrain and may be expressed as follows: A1, b, A2/ a, b, A1/ a, b, A2/ a, b, A1/ a, b, A2/ a, b, A1, A2 (numbered capitals being refrains). The poem is (for Thomas) written in 

a straight-forward style, and has been read at numerous funerals – particularly in the United States. It exhorts Thomas’s father – with whom he had a complicated relationship – to meet 

his end with defiance, not to fade quietly into the dark.

  ‘D.J.’ Thomas was an ex-schoolmaster, aloof, irascible and fastidious. An agnostic and a thwarted poet himself, D.J. had gained a first-class honours degree in English from the university college of Wales at Aberystwyth before descending into a career which he felt was ‘beneath’ him. Thomas senior, for whom Dylan never lost his respect, had inculcated into his son a love of poetry equal to his own. Before Dylan could read, D.J. would recite Shakespeare to him. He was to die, after a prolonged illness and resolutely dry-eyed, on 16th December, 1952, aged 76, from heart-failure. Contrary to Dylan’s repeated assertions, his father’s sight failed only at the very end; his final recorded utterance was ‘It’s come full circle now’. Dylan vomited during the cremation service.

  Thomas sent ‘Do not go gentle’ to Marguerite Caetani (a wealthy American who’d also commissioned Under Milk Wood) for inclusion in her Roman magazine Botteghe Oscure. In a postscript to his covering letter of 28th May, 1951, he wrote ‘the only person I can’t show [the poem] to is, of course, my father who doesn’t know he’s dying’. Of this foreign debut one 

should not infer too much altruism: American publishers paid far more generously than their British counterparts. The villanelle was included (before D.J.’s demise) in Dylan’s Collected Poems, out that November. It is one of only six poems in that volume completed in the period between 1946 and the poet’s own death late in 1953.

  Dylan’s own ‘close of day’ would occur in st. Vincent’s hospital, New York (where he’d 

been taken with suspected alcoholic poisoning). His mother thus lost her husband, her adored, spoilt son and her only other child, Nancy (from cancer) all within a year. There is strong evidence that Dylan’s death was caused by Iatrogenesis (that is, medical incompetence). An American doctor had injected him with half a grain of morphine (three times the recommended dosage) as a sedative and analgesic. This rather unjustifiable intervention would yet further have depressed the poet’s already compromised respiratory system. Always something of a hypochondriac, Thomas had often said that he would never reach the age of forty.

 

Further reading:

Brinnin, M., Dylan Thomas in America, Ace (1957)

Ferris, P. (Ed.), The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, Dent (1985)

Ferris, P., Dylan Thomas, The Biography, Dent (1999)

Jones, D. (Ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Poems, Dent (1971)

Sinclair, A., Dylan The Bard, Constable (1999)

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Paleoscriptology of

This be the verse
by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.

The type-script of this poem makes its first appearance in April, 1971, when Larkin sent it to his long-term girlfriend, the English-Lecturer, Monica Jones. He claimed that he could ‘never remember [his] parents making a single spontaneous gesture of affection towards each other’. The lines are prefaced as ‘A little Easter poem’. The same verses were also sent (on 14th April) to Anthony Thwaite, asking -ironically- if Thwaite’s wife, Ann, (who was editing Allsorts, a children’s annual), might care for them.
‘This be the verse’ is a reference to Robert Louis Stephenson’s Requiem: ‘This be the verse you grave for me:/ Here he lies where he longed to be;/ Home is the hunter, home from the sea/ And the hunter, home from the hill’. The piece was first published in the New Humanist (August ’71) and included in Larkin’s last collection, High Windows (1974).
Philip Larkin would have been 48 when he completed these contentious, though memorable, verses. They’d have found instant recognition and support from miss Jones, one of his two concurrent inamoratas. She, too, would have regarded herself as a holder of ‘Advanced’ views: one of their favourite holiday pastimes was to deface novels adding prurient variations to originally innocuous passages. The poet might also have found sustenance in Book ten of Paradise Lost: Eve’s protestation ‘Childless thou art; Childless remain’. John Milton (though he sired children himself) would certainly have found a kindred spirit in the notoriously misanthropic Larkin.
The parents -who conspired to ‘fuck’ Larkin ‘up’- were, indeed, a disparate couple. Eva (nee Day, 1886-1977) was an ex-teacher, mousy, perpetually ‘boasting and complaining’ -according to her son- in a kind of ‘rambling natter’. In the same (1967) letter to Jones, Larkin confided his belief that ‘people ought to get away from home as chickens get out of eggs, wholly, utterly, immediately, cleanly […] I suppose I shall become free at sixty, three years before cancer starts’. In this last assertion he was almost uncannily prescient. Yet Larkin, despite his whingeing, retained a curious attachment towards his mother. He continued to visit regularly when she was admitted to a nursing home with an Alzheimer’s-type dementia, and some observers have felt that she was, paradoxically, a kind of Muse. He’d dedicated his first collection, The North Ship, to her. Eva had married the seemingly charmless Sydney Larkin (1884-1947) in October, 1911. The latter made his career in what is now called local government, and reached the dizzying heights of Treasurer to Coventry corporation. He has been portrayed as something of a crypto-fascist; Larkin fils styled him ‘the sort of man democracy doesn’t suit’. A frequent pre-war visitor to Nazi Germany, attending several Nuremberg rallies, Sydney kept a figurine of Adolf Hitler on his mantelpiece. Both parents seem to have indulged the young Philip (named after sir Philip Sydney).
Larkin began ‘This be the verse’ on the same mid-June, 1967 evening that he completed ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (‘Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty three’). The two poems share much of the same tone. Their author would not finalise the twelve lines for another four years.
He’d ‘got out’ fairly early himself when, after an Oxford education under the tutelage of luminaries such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and Neville Coghill, he embarked on a career as librarian which culminated in his appointment as overlord of Hull’s ‘Brynmor Jones’ university library in 1955. He’d occupy this post until the end of his life. Literary recognition came that same year with the publication of The Less Deceived. From 1956 to 1974 Larkin lodged, alone, at number 32, Pearson Park -an upper-storey, one-bedroom flat where he could write, be alone, listen to his beloved jazz records and complain about the noise from his neighbours.
Larkin’s last years make for rather a sad catalogue. Artistic inspiration deserted him and his drinking-habit accordingly increased. He wrote to a friend in 1982 that ‘there was rather too much of the four-letter Larkin for [his] liking. “They fuck you up” will clearly be my Lake Isle of Inisfree (sic). I fully expect to hear it recited by a thousand Girl guides before I die’. A life-long agnostic, Larkin’s last words (uttered to a nurse in his private hospital) were ‘I am going to the inevitable’.

Further reading:
Bradford, R., First Boredom, then Fear, Peter Owen (2005)
Larkin, P., Required writing: Miscellaneous pieces, Fabers (1983)
Larkin, P., Collected poems, Fabers and The Marvell Press (1988)
Motion, P., Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Fabers (1993)
Thwaite, A. [Ed.] Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1940-1985), Fabers (1992)

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Kublai Khan
by S.T.Coleridge (1772-1834)

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
[….]
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight would win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

No one can be sure exactly when ‘Kublai khan’ was composed (there is evidence for several contradictory dates). Coleridge referred to it as ‘a vision in a dream’ and as a ‘fragment’. In a note to the printed poem he described how ‘In the summer of the year 1797 the Author, then in ill-health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton’. In another note to the MSS copy Coleridge stated that it had been written ‘a quarter of a mile from Culbourne Church, in the fall of the year 1797’ -though this would still be the geographical region around Exmoor. The author was notoriously vague regarding dates. Evidence from his correspondence seems to indicate early October, when he was away from home trying to complete his tragedy, Osorio. Coleridge later claimed that the poem had its genesis ‘in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of opium taken to check a dysentry’. ‘The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than two to three hundred lines; if that can be called composition in which the images rose up before him […] without any sensation of consciousness of effort’. Upon waking the writer began transcribing his vision before -in one of the most infamous interruptions in literary history- being disturbed by ‘a person on business from Porlock’ who detained him for upwards of an hour. Once rid of this distraction he found to his chagrin that though the ‘vague and dim memory of the general purport’ of the composition remained, coupled with ‘some eight or ten scattered lines or images’, the rest had vanished, leaving him only 54 completed lines and -one may surmise- the resolution never more to purposelessly procrastinate in propinquity to persons from Porlock!
‘Kublai Khan’ was first published in Biographica Literaria in 1817. Coleridge published it (he said) ‘at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity…[Byron]…and as far as the author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic virtue’. The book, printed by Byron’s publisher John Murray, was not well-received. The Edinburgh Review commented ‘Forth steps Mr Coleridge, like a giant refreshed from sleep…[it had been nearly twenty years since he’d aired a collection of his poetry. The giant had produced, however]…one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty’.
Coleridge would have been in his mid-twenties when he wrote ‘Kublai Khan’. The youngest of ten children born to a Devonian vicar and his wife, Samuel attended Jesus College, Cambridge, between 1791 and 1794. There was an intermission in his studies of a few months when, due to a thwarted love affair, he enlisted in the Royal Dragoons: his brothers had to arrange his discharge due to ‘Insanity’. In 1795 he married Sarah Fricker, sister-in-law to his friend, Robert Southey, with whom he’d planned to establish a utopian and egalitarian community in Pennsylvania. The marriage was to prove an unhappy one and ended in divorce. Between 1797/98 he lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset (Wordsworth rented ‘Alfroxton Park’, three miles away). His Laudanum-dependence, which had commenced around a year earlier, can be ascribed, initially, to self-medication for both facial-neuralgia and persistent toothache.
The draft MSS of ‘Kublai Khan’ displays well-configured writing with few deletions. ‘Alph’ is probably named after the river Alpheus (in Western Greece) which flows close to the historic site of Olympia. ‘Rills’ are meandering streams. ‘Mount Abora’ may refer to Asmara in Eritrea. Kublai Khan (1215-1294) of the Yuan Dynasty, was grandson to Genghis Khan and had his summer-palace at Shangdu (otherwise known as Xanadu). Marco Polo had returned to Europe with stories of his extravagance. Only the Emperor (or persons designated by him) had the right to drink milk from the imperial herd of horses -he owned around ten thousand. The concluding line of the poem ‘drunk the milk of Paradise’ is a reference to this. A quotation from the American, William Bartram (1739-1823) has been identified as a possible source for ‘Kublai Khan’: imagery from that author’s Travels (1792) detailing his exploration of the North American continent, appears to present parallels. The words ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace’ occur in Purchas’ Pilgrimage (1613).
The late seventeen nineties were a period in which Coleridge and his gifted, egotistical friend, William Wordsworth, worked in close collaboration. ‘Kublai Khan’ is anomalous both in that it was written without reference to Wordsworth and that it was not selected for their joint-production, Lyrical Ballads of 1798. By the time of the poem’s belated publication, twenty years later, the two had become estranged and Wordsworth was noticeably reticent -in public- about Biographia Literaria as a whole: he had found little to enjoy there. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to die in Highgate aged 61 -probably as a consequence of his addiction- his later life something of an anti-climax after his meteoric youth.

Further reading:
Holmes,R., Coleridge: Early Visions, HarperCollins (1990)
Holmes,R. (Ed.), Selected Poems by Samuel Taylor coleridge, Penguin (1996)
Holmes,R., Coleridge: Darker Reflections, HarperCollins (1997)
Sisman,A. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Friendship, Harper (2006)

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Fare Thee Well
by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Fare thee well! and if for ever,
Still for ever, fare thee well:
Even though unforgiving, never
‘Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.

Would that breast were bared before thee
Where thy head so oft hath lain,
While that placid sleep came o’er thee
Which thou never canst know again:

Would that breast, by thee glanced over,
Every inmost thought could show!
Then thou woulds’t at last discover
‘Twas not well to spurn it so.

Though the world for this commend thee-
Though it smile upon the blow,
Even its praise must offend thee,
Founded on another’s woe:

Though my many faults deface me,
Could no other arm be found,
Than the one which once embraced me,
To inflict a cureless wound?

[….]

All my faults perchance thou knowest,
All my madness none can know;
All my hopes, where’er thou goest,
Whither, yet with thee they go.

Every feeling hath been shaken;
Pride, which not a world could bow,
Bows to thee -by thee forsaken,
Even my soul forsakes me now:

But ’tis done -all words are idle-
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way without the will.

Fare thee well! thus disunited,
Torn from every nearer tie,
Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted,
More than this I scarse can die.

There are, in all, fifteen stanzas of this maudlin and disingenuous claptrap.
Legends of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, club-footed sixth Lord Byron abound. In point of fact, Byron’s disability is more likely to have been due to poliomyelitis (though there has been some scholarly debate as to which leg actually was the game one). Either way, it seems not to have greatly inconvenienced him as he passed muster (whilst at Harrow) as a serviceable cricketer, practiced later as an amateur -in the fashion of the times- pugilist and, famously, swam the Hellespont. His sexual initiation came early, at the age of nine and at the hands of a May Gray, his nurse. Perhaps this experience fostered an abivalence in him, for the poet would take many lovers -of both sexes.
Byron became the equalvalent of a modern-day pop superstar in 1812 when, after the publication of Childe Harold, he (in his own words) ‘awoke one morning and found [him]self famous’. He first met his future wife, Anne Isabella (‘Annabella’ or -his pet-name- ‘Pippin’) Milbanke, in the March of that same year, at a party given by Lady Caroline Lamb. She was the only child of the sixth baronet, Sir Ralph Milbanke. He first proposed marriage, through the offices of his close confidant, Lady Melbourne, in October -but was rebuffed. Their correspondence continued, however, despite Annabella’s comment that she ‘would not enter into a family where there is a strong tendency to insanity’. Byron’s father had been universally known as ‘Mad Jack’. Annabella would not be the first, nor the last, young lady lured into marriage believing that she could ‘reform’ her husband; furthermore the poet was famed for his good looks! Simultaneously with his pursuit of Annabella, Byron was entering into a liason with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. In April 1814 the latter gave birth to a daughter widely believed to be his. To end the rumours circulating about them Augusta urged her lover/half-brother to marry and, in September, he re-proposed to miss Milbanke who, surprizingly, accepted him. Their marriage of just over one year commenced on January 2nd, 1815.
Soon after their honeymoon the young couple were invited to stay with Augusta. According to Annabella’s later account (to Harriet Beecher Stowe) her new husband ‘treated his sister with a liberty which both shocked and surprized her. Seeing her amazement and alarm, he came up to her and said, in a sneering tone, “I suppose you perceive that you are not wanted here. Go to your own room, and leave us alone. We can amuse overselves better without you” ‘. Byron soon confided that he wanted an ‘open’ marriage, with both partners free to take lovers. Additionally, Annabella had to cope with her husband’s heavy drinking and the black moods occasioned by his debts. She clearly thought he was going insane. When she began to wonder aloud about leaving him, Byron’s riposte -again, according to lady Byron- was that ‘The world will believe me, and it will not believe you’. He was conducting an affair at this time with a London chorus girl, Susan Boyce.
The Byrons made their marital home at 13, Piccadilly Terrace, London (where they were periodically visited by Augusta). Annabella gave birth to the couple’s only child, Augusta Ada, on December 10th and -a month later- visited her parents (who had never cared for the marriage) in Leicestershire. On hearing her story they forbade their daughter to see Byron again. Legal action to obtain a separation were initiated. On the 18th March, 1816, Byron composed the verses featured above and mailed them to his estranged wife two days later.
Either as an attempt at reconciliation, or as one of  self-justification, ‘Fare thee well’ was, almost magnificently, ill-judged. Byron had fifty copies printed for private circulation in early April, and one of these -together with a copy of ‘A Sketch’, in which Byron attacks Annabella’s childhood nurse, Mrs Clermont, for allegedly raising her in a cold manner- fell into the hands of the lawyer, Henry Brougham. Although Brougham -who’d previously criticised the peer’s literary style in print- was supposed to be an impartial mediator in the separation, he had the two poems published (together with a devastating personal commentary) in The Champion (April 14th).  The effect of the two poems was to throw public opinion -for the most part- behind Annabella, though ‘Fare thee well’ caused Byron’s royal fan, the princess Caroline, to claim it made her ‘cry like a fool’.
Opprobrium failed to dissuade their originator from reprinting the verses in his Poems later that year. By that time he’d been forced to sign separation papers (on April 21st). The version printed in Poems had some small revisions and is prefaced by a quote from Coleridge’s Christabel.
  A draft manuscript of ‘Fare thee well’ survives, showing numerous crossings-out and ammendments -characteristic of the poet’s usual compositional style. Until fairly recently it was believed that ink blots on the verso were tear stains. Byron also habitually wrote with the aid of a rhyming dictionary.
Perhaps the nearest to an objective view of the marital breakdown -and subsequent scandal- comes from John Hobhouse (a long-term friend of Byron’s whom we might expect to have been biased against Annabella). Hobhouse came to believe that the poet had ‘been guilty of a very great tyranny -menaces- furies- neglect, and even real injuries…in fact turning her out of the house’. To this charge-sheet was added: ‘locking doors, showing pistols, pouring reproaches on her in bed…’ Annabella’s maid, Ann Rood Fletcher, testified to several instances of what appear to have been attempted marrital rape. There are strong grounds to believe that Byron attempted to sodomise his, highly religious, wife.
Post-separation, and in the eight years that remained to him, Byron became extremely embittered towards his erstwhile spouse, describing her as a ‘moral Clytemnestra’. He sailed from England on 25th April for a self-imposed exile (after being ‘dropped’ by much of fashionable society). The occasion was commemorated by a scurrilous George Cruikshank caricature. After various wanderings around Europe the poet embraced the cause of Greek independence and would die in that country of a fever, his sufferings exacerbated by the over-enthusiastic application of ‘bleedings’ from his physicians. He was destined never to see his country, his sister, his daughter or Annabella again.
Annabella would survive until the age of 67, devoting herself to philanthropic causes but plagued by ill-health. She’d clung to the illusion that Byron would return to her, imploring forgiveness. She even penned a retort to ‘Fare thee well’, ‘By thee forsaken’:
But it must come -thine hour of tears,/ When self-adoring pride shall bow-/ And thou shalt own my ‘blighted years’,/ The fate that thou inflictest –Thou!/ Thy virtue- but from ruin still/ Shall rise a wan and drooping peace,/ With pardon for unmeasured ill,/ And Pity’s tears -if love must cease!

Further reading:
Eisler, B., Byron, Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Hamish Hamilton (1999)
MacCarthy, F., Byron, Life and Legend, John Murray (2002) 
McGann, J. [Ed.], Byron: The complete poetical works, Clarendon (1993)
Nicholson,A., The Manuscripts of the younger Romantics, vol. 12, Garland (1998)
Stowe, H., Lady Byron Vindicated, Fields Osgood (1870)

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Sonnet XLIII from ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s Faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Something of a spoilt prodigy, Elizabeth Barrett could, apparently, read Homer in the original, aged eight. When she was only 14 her wealthy father published her work The Battle of Marathon (of which she would speak disparagingly in later life). At 15, however, an incident occurred in which, saddling her pony, she fell and sustained injuries which may -at least in part- have been psychosomatic. Thereafter she assumed more and more the role of invalid and seldom left her room, tended by her numerous close family, notably her stern, controlling father, Moulton Barrett, whose inherited fortune was based originally upon ownership of Jamaican sugar plantations -and slaves. Elizabeth continued to take a lively interest in literary matters from her sick-room (next door to Moulton’s room, joined by an interconnecting door) whilst her contributions to the Athenaeum and other periodicals, coupled with further publications (such as the two-volume Poems in 1844) cemented a growing reputation.
Her relationship with Robert Browning, six years her junior, the recipient of her later love poetry, began on the 10th January, 1845, with the arrival of his first, admiring letter. Abandoning Victorian notions of propriety he expressed himself as follows -and to a total stranger- ‘I do, as I say, love these [her] verses with all my heart -and I love you too’. Thus began a correspondence which would last twenty months, span 574 letters and culminate in a secret engagement and marriage, their elopement together to Italy and Elizabeth’s estrangement/disinheritance from her father whom she would never see again.
The sonnet reproduced above (the penultimate of a forty four sonnet sequence) observes a classically Petrachan octave. The end-word of line ten, ‘Faith’ seems to stand alone -highlighting the noun- although it is flagged by half-rhymes which both precede it (lines 1,4,5 & 8) and trail after it (‘breath’ and ‘death’). A MSS of the poem (in the possession of the British Library Board) written in the poet’s shaky hand, appears at times to be almost illegible, though it can be seen that the word ‘childhood’s’ (preceding ‘Faith’) is a correction. The ‘my lost saints’ of line twelve does not allude to a wavering piety -Elizabeth was a life-long Anglican- but rather to her mother, Mary, (deceased 1828) and her much-loved eldest brother, Edward (‘Bro’) who’d drowned whilst sailing with friends in Tor Bay in 1840.
The sequence of sonnets was begun in August, 1845, and completed two days before the Brownings’ marriage of 19th September the following year. Much of their non-literary courtship occurred whilst Moulton was away on business, and in the Barrett’s spacious London home, number 50 Wimpole street, where Elizabeth lived with her remaining siblings, her adored spaniel, ‘Flush’ and their attendant domestic retinue. Despite Robert’s concern, Elizabeth was a confirmed and long-standing Morphine user -she, and her doctors, felt it helped calm her nerves. In the fortnight before the secret wedding, Flush was kidnapped by a notorious gang who seem to have made their living at this profession (it was Flush’s third such adventure). He was eventually ransomed for six guineas -though Browning was of no assistance in the matter, claiming one of his notorious ‘headaches’ (fortunately, Elizabeth was independently wealthy through an earlier inheritance). The dog had bitten her suitor on their first acquaintance and had thereafter to be bribed by biscuits.
‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ is a play on words. Though there seems to have been some semi-serious pretence that the poems were translations, ‘The Portuguese’ was Browning’s pet-name for Elizabeth (or ‘Ba’ as she was known to the rest of her family). The nickname was occasioned by her dark complexion -though she may have felt some ambivalence about it, believing as she did that there was African blood in her family via a paternal ancestor’s liaison with a slave-girl. The forty-year-old bride took some time to show her sonnets to her new husband, finally placing them in his pocket for him to find. As Browning later wrote (to Leigh Hunt) ‘I never suspected [their existence] till three years after they were written. They were shown to me in consequence of some word of mine, just as they had been suppressed through some mistaken word; I could not bear that sacrifice and thought of the subterfuge of a name’. The sequence was first published in the final portion of the Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1850. Browning himself thought them the finest examples of their form since Shakespeare.
The Brownings were to enjoy fifteen years of happy marriage and the birth, after a series of miscarriages, of their son, ‘Pen’. Elizabeth was to die of congestion of the lungs (and in Robert’s arms) in Florence in 1861, at which time her literary reputation was considerably greater than her husband’s -though this ascendency has subsequently been reversed. A successful stage play by Rudolph Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole street was premiered in 1930 and later made into a film, telling the story of the two writer’s early romance.

Further reading:
Forster, M., Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Chatto & Windus (1988)
Hicks, M., [ed.] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected poems, Carcanet (1988)
Kintner, E., [ed.] The letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846, Harvard University Press (1969)
Markus, J., Dared and done: the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, Bloomsbury (1995).

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Invictus
by W.E.Henley (1849-1903)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

When this great booming Broadside of a poem was written (during the early part of 1875) its author, William Ernest Henley, was twenty five years of age and languishing in a small ward of the old Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh.
The eldest son of an unsuccessful Gloucester bookseller, Henley was never to experience good health after the age of twelve, when he developed tuberculosis of the bone (which required the amputation of his left leg, below the knee, four years later). Thereafter, he was to walk using crutches and with the aid of a ‘wooden leg’. His right ankle was also affected and required support bandages. A resilient character, the young Henley determined upon a literary career and had just begun to submit work to Cornhill magazine when he was admitted first to Margate Infirmary (where doctors wanted to remove his other leg) and then -after he’d discharged himself- to the teaching hospital in Edinburgh.
The twenty months or so which he spent there under the auspices of the eminent, pioneering surgeon, Professor Joseph Lister, were to be the defining period of his life. Lister -to whom he would profess an abiding gratitude- performed a succession of painful operations on the affected limb, utilising  his own (currently radical)  antiseptic practices, and recommending a succession of splints. Though not entirely cured, Henley kept his foot. Whilst ‘laid up’ he taught himself French and Italian and wrote the majority of his ‘In Hospital’ verse-sequence. This, consisting in the main of un-rhymed sketches of hospital life, was to be published thirteen years later in the poet’s A Book of Verse (1888) which was something of a literary sensation -reviewed in around forty publications by (amongst others) the likes of Oscar Wilde, G.B.Shaw and J.M.Barrie.
Burley and rumbustious, Henley left a strong impression on many of his acquaintances during his hospitalisation. One, Leslie Stephen (editor of Cornhill, and in Edinburgh on a lecture tour) visited his erstwhile correspondent in January, 1875, bringing along another young writer who was based in the city and had submitted work to the magazine. This was the beginning of an important friendship for both Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson: they would co-author several plays (Deacon Brodie being, perhaps, the most successful). Henley, who throughout his adult life affected a thick, piratical beard, became the prototype for Treasure Island’s ‘Long John Silver’. Another new acquaintance, Anna Boyle, who was visiting her brother in the infirmary, was to begin a relationship with the irascible but kindly writer culminating in their 1878 marriage (which endured until Henley’s death).
No saint, Henley -a devotee of self-reliance and affirming high-Tory, imperialistic principles- was a determinedly disputatious individual who quarrelled frequently, even with his friends. He would become estranged from Stevenson in 1888 to their deep, mutual loss.
After leaving Edinburgh’s infirmary Henley would take on a peripatetic and often impecunious career as a freelance, initially working on the research staff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and continuing his association with Cornhill under Stephen. Later, as editor of journals such as the Magazine of Art, the New Review and, particularly, the Scots (later the National) Observer, he would publish some of the early work of the -at the time uncelebrated- writers, Joseph Conrad, W.B.Yeats and Rudyard Kipling. In 1894 the loss of his only child, Margaret, to cerebral meningitis (aged five), would finally knock much of the spirit out of him and he would die, soon after his and Anna’s silver wedding anniversary, less than ten years later.
Sometimes also known as ‘Out of the night’, Henley’s best-known poem was much-anthologised even in his lifetime -though he, and it, have since fallen rather out-of-fashion. His own preferred title was the unrevealing ‘i.m. R.T.Hamilton Bruce (1846-1899)’. The latter was a wealthy financial-backer of the Scots Observer and a steadfast friend, known to Henley (who bestowed nick-names on just about everybody) as ‘The Infallible’. The most common title for the verses, ‘Invictus’, is latin for ‘unconquered’.

Further reading:
Atkinson,D. [Ed], The Selected Letters of W.E.Henley, Ashgate (2000)
Connell,J., W.E.Henley, Constable (1949)
Harman, C., Robert Louis Stevenson, Harper Collins (2004)

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John Masefield

‘Cargoes’

Quinquireme of Nineveh from sunny Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Batting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays.

The year 1902 (in which above poem was composed) represented something of a turning-point for John Masefield: it was the same year that his first book, Salt-Water Ballads –which would make his name- was published.
Born in Ledbury, the second son of a Hertfordshire solicitor, Masefield was orphaned in 1891 and sent (at the age of thirteen) to join H.M.S.Conway, a training-ship moored on the Mersey, as a sea-cadet. Here he was to serve his maritime-apprenticeship for a career in the Merchant navy, an idea which had come originally from his new guardian, his aunt Kate. Unfortunately, as he discovered after embarkation on the four-masted barque Gilcruix for the ‘Nitrate-run’ into Chile, he was to prove an irremediable victim to violent sea-sickness, a condition exacerbated by a four-week passage around the notorious Cape Horn. Under pressure from his aunt, Masefield signed-up for a second voyage, this time for the Far East, but after crossing the Atlantic to New York he abandoned the venture altogether and found work first in a bar and then in a carpet factory. These early experiences were to instil within him a fellow-feeling for the underdog. It is, perhaps, surprizing that a writer who so loved the sea  -and has come to be so closely associated with it- should have spent so little time upon it as an active sailor.
Passing to years 1898 to 1901 (after his return to England) in the employ of the ‘Capital and Counties Bank’, as a clerk in the Kings street, Covent Garden branch, ‘Jack’ Masefield would get his ‘lucky break’ through being invited to an evening meal at W.B.Yeats’ Bloomsbury rooms in the November of 1900. A great admirer of the Irishman’s work, the younger man was adopted into ‘The Master’s’ circle, making useful literary contact with the likes of lady Augusta Gregory and the scholar-poet of the British Museum, Laurence Binyon. It was the latter who ‘pulled strings’ to find Masefield more congenial work, firstly in helping to prepare the footnotes to a new edition of John Keats’ works and secondly as ‘Exhibition Secretary’ (throughout 1902) to Wolverhampton’s new Art Gallery. It was also at one of Binyon’s dinner parties that he would meet his future wife (of 57 years) Constance Crommelin, one of the dedicatees of Salt-Water Ballads. During this same period Masefield continued to rent lodgings at number 15, Coram street (an easy walk from Yeats’ house). His poetry had begun to appear in publications such as The Outlook, the Tatler and the Speaker (which also printed two of his book reviews and a series of semi-autobiographical articles, ‘A Measure of Shifting Sand’).
‘Cargoes’ was not included in Salt-Water Ballads -a title suggested by Kipling’s (1892) Barrack Room Ballads– which brought its author a measure of financial security, selling-out its first edition of 500 within six months. The verses would wait eight years before their inclusion in Masefield’s third book of poetry, Ballads and Poems (1910). The poet’s grasp of geography has been questioned many times: Nineveh (the ancient capital of Assyria on the east bank of the Tigris) was situated 200 miles inland. To an enquirer, a Mr Fawkes, the writer suggested (in 1930) that ‘It has often puzzled myself that a quinquireme owned in Nineveh should be rowing to Palestine, but perhaps before the Flood fully subsided such things were possible’. A ‘Quinquireme’ was a large galley dating from around the fourth century B.C. ‘Ophir’ was a mythical land of gold referred to in the book of Genesis and that of Kings. ‘Moidores’ were Portuguese golden coins dating from the mid-seventeenth century.
In 1911 Masefield’s long, narrative poem The Everlasting Mercy (about the religious conversion of a blaspheming poacher) secured him a wider reputation which, together with his war-work during the first world war, culminated in his recommendation for the post of poet laureate in April, 1930. Boars Hill (near Oxford), where the Masefields had been living since 1919, thus rather monopolised the laureateship -as the previous incumbent, Robert Bridges, had also made his home there. When he heard of the news, the Cambridge poet, scholar -and another potential candidate- A.E.Houseman wrote, good-humouredly, to Masefield ‘In sporting circles here they are asking the question: if Boars Hill get it three times, do they keep it?’
The new laureate would continue to publish prolifically (if unevenly) into his eighties. He would die, full of honours, in his ninetieth year -the second-longest serving laureate (after Tennyson).

Further reading:
Errington, P. [Ed.], Sea-Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield, Carcanet (2005)
Russel, N., Poets by Appointment: Britain’s Laureates, Blandford Press (1981)
Babington Smith, C., John Masefield, A life, Hamish Hamilton (1978)

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If
by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

If you can keep your head while all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -and not make thought your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
And walk with kings -nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty second’s worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And -which is more- you’ll be a Man, my son!

Joseph Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ must be one of the most famous -and certainly one of the longest- sentences ever written (with eighteen main sub-clauses). All things to all men, the poem has been cherished by an assortment of diverse personalities. The Kaiser kept a copy of it on his desk during the First World War, whilst his opposite number, president Woodrow Wilson ‘derived constant inspiration…and often tried to live up to its standards’. The Spanish fascist Primo de Rivera hung it on a wall in his office; Antonio Gramsci (leader of the Italian communist party) rendered it into his native tongue and even the King of Siam  attempted to translate it into Thai.
Born in Bombay (Mumbai) but schooled in Devon, Kipling’s literary career was well-established by the early part of the twentieth century, with classics such as Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Barrack Room Ballads (1892), The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902) already to his name. ‘If’ was first published in the ‘Brother Square Toes’ chapter of Rewards and Fairies (1910) -which itself had been recently serialised in the magazine The Delineator (July of that year). Rewards and Fairies was the sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and consists of interlinked short stories and poems themed around the imaginary exploits of two, time-travelling children.
‘If’ soon took on a life outside of its immediate context and was rapidly ‘pirated’ in numerous, unauthorised editions. Kipling’s (U.S.) publishers, ‘Doubleday’, were highly exercised by the fact that Americans, in particular, seemed to believe that (a) the poem was in the public domain and (b) written about George Washington. This latter misapprehension is understandable as ‘Brother Square Toes’ does mention Washington’s statesmanlike qualities en passant. In 1920 Kipling won a court case against ‘Genatosan’ Ltd. (manufacturers of ‘Sanatogen’) for their illegal use of some of its lines. No feminist, he would refuse Marie Stopes, the controversial pioneer of ‘Family Planning’, permission to alter the text. It seems she’d suggested that if only men could keep their heads and ‘fill the unforgiving minute with sixty second’s worth of due distance run’, they’d be more entitled to be called men (‘my son’).
The author wrote (in his autobiography Something of Myself [1937]) that ‘If’ had been ‘anthologised to weariness’ and ‘contained counsels of perfection most easy to give’. He felt that it was disliked by many younger people (who had been compelled to copy it out). He also mentions -in the same book- that the poem was ‘drawn from’ the character of his Scottish friend, Dr Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917). This gentleman, whilst an administrator in the British South Africa company, had led a force of 470 mounted men in a raid that has come to be indelibly linked with his name. Their intention -backed by Cecil Rhodes and, almost certainly, the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain- was to advance the 180 miles from Bechuanaland into Johannesburg, Transvaal, and unite with ‘Uitlanders’ (non-Boer European workers) to topple the government of Paul Kruger. The ‘Jameson Raid’ ended ignominiously on 2nd January, 1896, four days after the would-be insurgents crossed the border into Transvaal. The Uitlanders did not revolt, the rebel force was captured and Dr Jameson was led, in tears, into captivity. Kipling’s was not the only poem written in praise of the ill-fated and ill-thought-out expedition. Alfred Austin, the poet laureate, also contributed some verses, which -although embarrassing to his Conservative backers- were of lesser quality and more readily forgotten.
‘If’ seems to have been composed in 1909 (two years after Kipling had become the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature). It was probably written at ‘Batemans’ in Burwash (his family’s Sussex home since 1902) and soon after a visit from Jameson -the sort of ‘strong man’/desperado who so appealed to to the diminutive writer. By now in his mid-forties, Kipling cohabited with his older, American wife, the protective and possessive ‘Carrie’ -and their daughter, Elsie- in their own comfortable Jacobean Manor house, furnished with oak beams and large fireplaces. The ill-fated John (short-sighted like his father) had been packed-off to ‘st. Aubyn’s’ boarding school two years previously. With his own, almost boy-ish enthusiasm for new technology, ‘Rud’ had prevailed upon an eminent Civil Engineer of his acquaintance to install an electrical generator, powered by the river at the bottom of their garden. Another enthusiasm of these years was centred on the various prototypes of the automobile. Though he never drove himself, the author soon acquired an early edition Rolls-Royce with its attendant chauffeur.
This same year (1909) Batemans was visited by George Clemenceau -until very recently the French prime minister (as he would be again during the coming war). Kipling established friendly relations with many contemporary, imperialistically-minded politicians (including Rhodes, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Bonar law and Lord Beaverbrook). His own cousin, appropriately enough, was Stanley Baldwin -whom he felt to be ‘nearly a socialist’. The writer’s conversation, always inclined to be ‘salty’, cannot have been improved by his recent abstinence, on doctor’s orders, from smoking. Always something of an insomniac (who felt that he worked best just before dawn) Kipling was ambivalent about his own verse, feeling that it lacked real poetry. According to one of his friends, he felt that it was ‘a useful means of expressing ideas where they could not be expressed in prose’. His method was almost invariably to get a tune into his head -and then fit words to it.
After serving his fairly nominal 15 month’s imprisonment (somewhat oddly, in Britain) L.S.Jameson had been paroled -doubtless through his influential friends’ backing- and had served as premier of Cape Colony immediately after the Boer war. He would be granted a Baronetcy in 1911. Kipling was never the same man after the 1915 death-in-action of his only son, the myopic John (for whom he’d ‘pulled strings’ to obtain a commission in the Irish Guards). He would decline the offer of a knighthood on several occasions, as he’d declined the Order of Merit (twice) and -reputedly- the post of poet laureate. He would die, aged seventy, of complications arising from a perforated duodenum, and on his forty-fourth wedding anniversary. In 1996 ‘If’ was voted the ‘Nation’s Favourite Poem’, according to a B.B.C. poll (with twice as many votes as the runner-up). Unfailingly ‘dug out’ for sporting occasions, its injunction on the correct approach towards those ‘two imposters’ still greets tennis stars about to enter Wimbledon’s ‘Centre Court’.

Further reading:
Adams, J., Kipling, Haus Books (2005)
Kipling, R., Rudyard Kipling, the complete verse, Kyle Cathie (2002)
Kipling, R., Something of Myself, An Autobiography, Hesperous (2007)
Establishing a substantive provenance for this poem has proved a tortuous business. Two possible avenues for research, which might have been expected to provide assistance, were singularly uncommunicative. The curatorship at ‘Batemans’ and the staff of the ‘Kipling Archive’, university of Sussex, both failed to reply to correspondence (with return-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes provided). These joint failures of scholarship and of courtesy reflect poorly on the institutions concerned.

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Adlestrop
by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Yes. I remember  Adlestrop-
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -only the name

And willows, willow-herbs, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that moment a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Confusion exists over exactly which train Edward and Helen Thomas took on that Midsummer Day (24th June, 1914). If the poem is to be taken literally, there was only one express on the Paddington/Worcester line that day, which may have stopped ‘unwontedly’ at Adlestrop (in the heart of the Cotswolds) –perhaps due to snapped signal wires- circa 3.18 p.m. Another possibility exists- namely that a stopping train (scheduled to arrive earlier at Adlestrop at 12.46p.m.) may have carried the poet. This version is given credence by Thomas’s own ‘Field Note Book’ which records: ‘Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam’. Either way, the Thomases were en route to stay for a few days with Robert Frost at Leadington, after going to the ballet in London. The day, emphatically was hot: the local stationmaster’s records list it as 80 degrees Fahrenheit -this, last, pre-war summer was long and dry.
Edward Thomas was catapulted into poetry late in his thirties. Although he’d had the benefit of an Oxford university education, his time-consuming work -as a free-lance reviewer and travel-writer- was often insufficient to provide adequately for his wife and their three children. Thomas was drawn to poetry, respected for his reviews on the subject and acquainted with many of ‘The Georgians’, but he himself  felt that he lacked the affinity for that medium. It was largely through the influence of his new friend Robert Frost (whose own work he’d helped to introduce to a wider readership) that he began to find his own poetic ‘voice’: this, and the fact that as a serving soldier he could at last find the time and financial security to write verse. His whole poetic oeuvre of 144 poems dates from the last two years of his life.
Fairly typically, Thomas went through agonies of indecision before enlisting in the ‘Artist’s Rifles’ in July, 1915. His duties (as a corporal) were initially as a map-reading instructor in Essex and it is probable that, due to his age, he could have remained in this non-combatant role. However, he would (in November, 1916) finally be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the ‘Royal Garrison Artillery’. Frost later admitted that his own, much-anthologised poem, ‘The Road not Taken’, was ‘a mild satire on the chronic vacillating habits of Edward Thomas’.
‘Adlestrop’ was composed on 8th January, 1915, when the writer was ‘laid up quite immovable’ with an ankle badly sprained from a trip on New Year’s Day. He was living at this time at Steep in Hampshire. The first stanza went through four versions in two MSS drafts, but otherwise the poem was little altered. ‘Express-train’ was originally ‘steam train’, ‘unwontedly’ was previously ‘unexpectedly’ and ‘cloudlets’ were ‘cloud tiers’. The poet equivocated with a comma before settling on a full-stop after the first word, ‘Yes’. Sadly, Thomas never saw the proofs for the volume in which ‘Adlestrop’ was to be published. Poems came out under the sobriquet ‘Edward Eastaway’ and six months posthumously.
On the 30th January, 1917, Thomas sailed for France, serving with number 244 Siege battery. He died ten weeks later (at the age of 39) when, on the first day of the battle of Arras (April 9th), a German shell exploded close by. His body was unmarked, but the shockwave from the blast stopped his heart and he would have been killed instantly.
Adlestrop station no longer exists. Though the line -part of the old ‘Great Western Railway’ system- still runs through this same (Gloucestershire) area, the station itself was closed to passengers, in accordance with the ‘Beeching cuts’, on 3rd January, 1966.

Further reading:
Cooke, W., Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography, Fabers (1970)
Farjeon, E., Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, Sutton (1997)
Harvey, A., Adlestrop Revisited, Sutton (1999)
Thomas, E., Collected Poems, Fabers (1979)

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Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Commencing in Hull, Florence Margaret Smith’s -the ‘Stevie’ came later- is not a life in which much seems to have happened. She moved to number 1, Avondale Road, Palmers Green, North London, at the age of three and was to reside there for the rest of her life -supported and ‘managed’ by the formidable Madge Spear (her ‘Lion Aunt’) in a relationship which some have felt almost resembled a kind of marriage.
After completing her education at the North London Collegiate School (for girls) ‘Stevie’ -now nick-named after Steve Donaghue, a well-known jockey of the twenties- became secretary/PA to Sir Neville Pearson, a director of the magazine publishing firm ‘George Newnes Ltd.’. ‘Frozen out’ in an office power-struggle, Sir Neville’s responsibilities were less than onerous (in consequence, neither were Stevie’s). This could make her feel disengaged, but afforded her plenty of time for her writing. She would remain with this employer for upwards of thirty years (her employment records have subsequently gone missing).
‘Not Waving but Drowning’ was first published in a collection bearing the same title (Andre Deutch, 1957). Its author claimed that the original idea came from a newspaper story -though a similar (fortunately non-lethal) experience had occurred to her Newnes Ltd acquaintance, the Times journalist George Buchanan (1904-1989). The anecdote is recounted in his (1959) autobiography, Green Sea Coast.
Smith wrote in April, 1953, to her friend, the editor Kay Dick: ‘I felt too low for words (eh??) last weekend but worked it all off for all that in a poem…called ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. Her optimistic forecast proved inaccurate. Increasingly isolative, by turns apathetic and tetchy, Stevie slashed one of her wrists with a pair of office scissors after a trivial argument with her boss (July 1st). After a period of three weeks spent almost entirely in bed, she confided to Dick ‘I am a nervous wreck, it appears also anaemic’. A short holiday in Haversfordwest was followed by a communication from Newnes Ltd to the effect that as from December she was ‘retired’ from the company. It all appears to have been settled quite amicably and she soon found work as a reviewer. Her natural tendency towards depression may have been exacerbated by her steady failure to place her poetry in anything other than Punch. Although by this time she’d had four collections  (and three novels) published, new rejection-slips from the T.L.S., New Statesman, Spectator and the Listener may have made her feel that her writing career was ‘flat-lining’.
In point of fact, the last ten years of Stevie’s life were, in critical terms, her most successful -the ‘Beat’ generation lending a belated, sympathetic ear to her ‘off-beat’ voice. She would survive her 96 year old aunt by only three years, dying of a brain tumour, the complications from which -most cruelly for her- caused progressive aphasia (complete linguistic ‘melt-down’).

Further reading:
Barbera, J. & McBrien, W. [Eds.], Me Again: Uncollected writing of Stevie Smith, Virago (1981)
Smith, S., The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, Allen Lane (1975)
Spalding, F., Stevie Smith, A Critical Biography, Fabers (1988)

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Epitaph On a Hare
by William Cowper (1731-1800)

Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue,
Nor swifter greyhound follow,
Whose footprints ne’er tainted morning dew,
Nor ear heard huntsman’s ‘Hallo,’

Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nurs’d with tender care,
And to domestic bounds confin’d
Was still a wild jack-hare.

Though duly from my hand he took
His pittance ev’ry night,
He did it with a jealous look,
And, when he could, would bite.

His diet was of wheaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regal’d,
On pippins’ russet peel;
And, when his juicy salads fail’d,
Slic’d carrot pleas’d him well.

A Turkey carpet was his lawn,
Whereon he lov’d to bound,
To skip and gambol like a fawn,
And swing his rump around.

His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching showers    
Or when a storm drew near.

Eight years and five round-rolling moons
He thus saw steal away,
Dozing out his idle noons,
And every night at play.

I kept him for his humor’s sake
For he would oft beguile
My heart of thoughts that made it ache,  
And force me to a smile.

But now, beneath his walnut-shade
He finds his long, last home,
And waits in snug concealment laid,
Till gentler Puss shall come.

He, still more aged, feels the shocks 
From which no care can save,
And, partner once of Tiney’s box,
Must soon partake his grave.

William Cowper (he choose to pronounce his name ‘Cooper’) was born with many advantages but also with a constitution disposed towards depression -possibly an inheritance from his father, John, chaplain to George II. His mother (nee Donne) was a descendent of the poet and divine, John Donne, and her death -when William was six- was a shattering experience for him. Bullying at school, and a rather fraught relationship with his cousin and sweetheart, Theadora, afflicted an abnormally sensitive nature which was ill-suited to the legal career for which he’d seemed predestined (there were previous Lord Chancellors from both sides of his family), After studying at the Middle Temple and being called to the bar (1754) he lost -in quick succession- his father, his best friend sir William Russell (in a swimming accident on the Thames) and concluded his courtship of Theadora (‘Delia’) -though they would both remain unmarried and devoted to each other. In 1763, through family influence, he was offered a choice of three near-sinecures in the offices of the House of Lords but, under the stress of a forthcoming public examination, made several attempts at suicide (involving self-poisoning, stabbing and hanging) and was admitted to Dr Cotton’s Collegium Insanoram, st. Albans. During the mid-sixties Cowper’s recovery was aided by two new friends of great importance in his later life. The first, Mary Unwin, became -after her husband’s death- his house-keeper and a kind of surrogate mother. The second, Rev. John (‘Amazing Grace’) Newton, vicar at Olney (Bucks), and the reformed ex-captain of a slave-ship, chimed perfectly with Cowper’s already well-formed sense of religious zeal. The two would publish their joint-work Olney Hymns in 1779. It was in order to be closer to Newton that Cowper moved to Olney (with the remainder of Mrs Unwin’s family in tow), eventually settling at ‘Orchard side’ where he would live between February, 1768 and November, 1786.
Situated close to the town’s market place, ‘Orchard side’ consisted of two semi-detached houses dating from around 1700. Surrounded by Public Houses and labourer’s cottages, the residence could become enveloped by mist off the nearby river Ouse. The quarter’s occupied by Cowper’s long-serving manservant, Sam Roberts, were damp and rat-infested; however, the dwellings came with a large-ish garden and a summer-house (where the poet could sit, entertain friends or write). Cowper enjoyed assisting his new friend, Newton, with his parochial duties but local gossip, revolving around his -almost certainly platonic- relationship with Mrs Unwin, seems to have precipitated another period of nervous and spiritual crisis during which he experienced delusions both that God was abandoning him and that he was being poisoned.
‘Epitaph on a Hare’ dates from circa 1782. The poet, who’d always loved animals, was recuperating from this second breakdown when he was offered (in the spring of 1774) the gift of a leveret by some local children, who had been unsure how to look after it. Word soon spread of his affinity with wild animals and he was soon inundated with enough young hares (as he later wrote) ‘to stock a paddock’. Three hares became particular favourites, ‘Puss’, ‘Tiney’ and ‘Bess’ (all male despite their names). They had their hutches in orchard side’s hall and a small doorway was made in the wall, allowing them access to his parlour of an evening. Cowper described the arrangements he’d made for his new pets in a letter: ‘Immediately commencing carpentry, I built them houses to sleep in; each had a separate apartment so contrived that their ordure would pass through the bottom of it; an earthenware pan placed under each received whatsoever fell, which duly emptied and washed, thus kept sweet and clean. In the daytime they had the range of the hall, and at night retired into his own bed, never intruding into that of another’. There was to be a great commotion in August 1780 when Puss escaped by gnawing through ‘the springs of a lattice work’. The hare almost drowned but was rescued by a workman lifting him by his ears and returning him, with only minor injuries, for a reward of four shillings.
The tamest hare, Bess, died after only a year but the other two lived on. Tiney, the wildest, died at the age of eight and was buried under a walnut tree -with a carrot for company. Puss, despite the writer’s gloomy prognostications, died (aged almost twelve) four years after Tiney, on March 9th, 1786, ‘between twelve and one, at noon, of old age, and apparently without pain’. The latter had been Cowper’s special favourite.
An early opponent of fox-hunting and other blood-sports, Cowper kept at various times -and additionally to his hares- an assorted menagerie of rabbits, guinea pigs, two dogs, a squirrel, a number of cats, pigeons, a jay, two goldfinches, two canaries, a starling, several robins, several linnets and a magpie plus -more conventionally- hens, geese and ducks. He established a reputation for being so adept with hares that The Gentleman’s Magazine published an essay by him on their upkeep. The diet he describes in the poem would have been very sustaining. Cowper’s diligent animal husbandry undoubtedly had a therapeutic effect -helping, perhaps, to counterbalance his continuing habit of laudanum misuse.
This same year, 1782, Cowper published his debut collection of verse, Poems, and wrote what was to become one of his best-known narratives, The Diverting History of John Gilpin. He would go on to translate Homer and to receive a royal pension of £300, a tribute to his status as probably the best-known English poet of the late Eighteenth century. He would change houses several more times before settling, finally, in East Dereham, Norfolk, where he expired (according to his doctor) of a ‘worn-out constitution’.

Further reading:
Cooper, W., William Cowper: Selected poems, Routledge (2003)
Ella, G., William Cowper -Poet of Paradise, Evangelical press (1993)
Mason, J. & Mason, D., The Hare, Merlin Unwin (2005) (about the animal, rather than the poem).

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Virago Anthologies

Hart, J., Words That Burn (Virago, 2008) 

ISBN: 978-1-84408-554-8

(the ‘follow up’ to)

Hart, J., Catching Life by the Throat (Virago, 2006) 

ISBN: 978-1-84408-392-3

 

Virago Viagra

Anthologies are, perhaps, one major way in which poetry publishing is still commercially viable. The word itself comes from the Greek anthologia which means, literally, ‘a collection of flowers’. In these two volumes, Josephine Hart (aka Lady Saatchi), novelist, theatre-producer and a kind of ‘poetry impressario’, has – simultaneously – gathered colourful garlands and placed her (I’m sure quite dainty) feet firmly upon the bandwagon. 

  Both books adhere to roughly the same format. Eight different poets are afforded their own chapter in which eight or so examples of their work are selected – prefaced by a (brief) biographical note and a kind of ‘introduction’ to the selections themselves. The ‘featured artists’ in the first volume – its title inspired by Robert Frost’s declaration that poetry is ‘a way of taking life by the throat’ – are Auden, Dickenson, Eliot, Kipling, Larkin, Marianne Moore, Plath and Yeats. Words That Burn (a ‘lift’ from Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’) shines its light on Bishop, Browning, Byron, Frost, Lowell, Milton, Christina Rossetti and Shelley. Each book is supplemented by a CD in which ‘name’ actors declaim a smaller set of samples from the texts. 

  Hart’s enthusiasm appears genuine. She also has the contacts in the theatrical world to lend weight to this venture: Harold Pinter, Bob Geldof, Jeremy Irons, Juliet Stevenson, Roger Moore, Ralph Fiennes, Charles Dance Edward Fox and a host of other ‘luvvies’ are enlisted as ‘voice props’. Each agreed to work for free (such is the power of ‘The Hart Foundation’ – once ‘Gallery Poets’ but now ‘The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour’). This organisation sent free copies of Catching Life by the Throat. to every secondary school in Britain and plans to do the same with Words That Burn. Any, residual, profits go to the ‘King George V Fund for Actors and Actresses’. Hart has clearly ‘gen-ed up’ on the poets themselves, and the thoughts of critical luminaries such as Harold Bloom and John Bayley crop up at regular intervals in her text. Unfortunately, she has a way of insinuating herself into the picture, not always happily (although she does have one, interesting, personal story to tell regarding Philip Larkin). She can often appear slightly ‘gushing’, although some of her biographical notes -and, indeed, her selections – can be appealingly ‘left-field’ (especially so in the latter anthology). We learn, for instance, that Elizabeth Bishop was reading Milton’s ‘Optiks’ when she wrote ‘Love Lies Sleeping’. She very nearly ‘gets’ Bishop – but, then, did anyone ever, wholly, ‘get’ Elizabeth Bishop? She does a fair job both ‘digging’ the poetry of and ‘digging the dirt’ on Robert Lowell (who’d, himself, ‘dig the dirt’ on just about anyone – including ‘Cal’ Lowell). No stranger to hyperbole, she claims Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ to be ‘the most savagely witty poem in this or any language’ (crikey, this lady is well-read!) whilst a distracting note of sententiousness is occasionally evident (as when she concludes after quoting the final lines of Paradise Lost, ‘The End. And the beginning’). However – and rather in contradiction of my previous somewhat carping criticisms – Hart can sometimes extract little-known poems from writers one thought one knew well: Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ was quite new to this reviewer, for instance.

  The question of ‘pitch’ is always important and, probably, these books might find their natural ‘Target Readership’ amongst GCSE (or late-secondary level) pupils, or – possibly – as an introductory ‘primer’ for adults wishing to find a helpful guide to deliver them into the arcane world of ‘serious’ poetry. As such, these two Virago productions succeed very well.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving

Public Safety Announcement

Shouting can damage your throat.

Marches, one ought to beware:

placards could take optics out.

Sometimes, it’s risky to stare-

people have died from surprise.

Talking on phones might be bad.

Reading’s a risk to the eyes.

Thinking may drive people mad.

Commemorating the murder of the young Iranian democratic protestor known as Neda

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Stepping Stones, Interviews with Seamus Heaney

O’Driscoll, B., (Faber and Faber, 2008)

ISBN: 978-0-571-24252-8

 

The ‘Heaney Phenomenom’ can exert a peculiar fascination, even to the detached observer. At a time when poetry is in the doldrums  (in terms of sales, exposure and influence) one exponent – an Irishman and an academic, at that – is feted, honoured and held up as a exemplar. Can it be just a reviewer’s cynicism, or are the two phenomena (triumphant Ulsterman/ moribund, politically-manacled art-form) somehow interlinked? Could it, truly, be a case of Heaney Astray?

  Seamus Justin Heaney – not his real name, but more of that later – brings much to his position as poetry’s elder-statesman: ‘gravitas’ (his word), intelligence, articulacy (strangely, not always evident in poets) and formidable net-working skills. Finally – a habit possibly acquired through rubbing shoulders with so many politicians- he’s even becoming media-savvy. This book, possibly modelled on an earlier series of interviews with Czeslaw Milosz, represents an effective way of getting his side of the Story across, whilst maintaining some semblance of objectivity. Thomas Hardy, remember, was reduced to the pretence of writing his own biography and then trying to pass it off as the work of his wife. For these purposes, Mr O’Driscoll makes for an admirable ‘stalking horse’. His (their?) title is taken from Heaney’s Nobel acceptance speech (1995) in which the laureate spoke of ‘a journey into the wilderness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or in one’s life- turns out to have been a stepping stone rather than a destination’.

  This ‘series of interviews’ seems to have been ‘conducted principally in writing and by post’ – at Heaney’s request. (The poet, it is revealed, eschews emails – a discipline Ruth Padel probably wishes she, too, had adopted). Two chapters were the result of a face-to-face exchange – or what is normally thought of in the context of the word ‘interview’. One was recorded privately and one – publically – in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in April 2006. Not being present at the latter, I imagine O’Driscoll’s ‘interrogations’ conducted in hushed, awed tones – hesitant, lest The Oracle be put off its stroke.

  If O’Driscoll comes across as an admiring votary, the major surprise (at least early on) is that Heaney appears so relaxed, modest and sane. In his memories of his farm-boy upbringing (the first and easily best section of this publication) he speaks unassumingly about the local currier-service in poteen, about a series of his father’s farm horses – and about the screams emanating from the local slaughterhouse, situated a bare half mile from home. Sometimes he even forgets to be ‘Literary’ (with a capital ‘L’).

  Now and again we’re offered a few choice scraps (from our position under The Master’s table). We learn, for instance, that Heaney’s first publication was in a journal called Irish Digest – its contention: that ‘Jive’ should be allowed into the canon of Irish Dance! We learn, also, that his first name is really ‘Shamus’ (a – possibly deliberate – misspelling on the Birth Certification obscuring ‘the Irishness’ of his parent’s chosen appellation). After these early revelations Stepping Stones tends to degenerate into a kind of travelogue around ‘The Poems’ and a Debretts-style catalogue of MY POETIC MATES. The Titan is certainly goaded with some fairly asinine questions. In responce to one: ‘Were you the kind of pupil whose essays were held up by the teacher as a shining example to the rest of the class?’, Heaney admits that, at school, he had ‘no particular gift for writing what were called “compositions” and no particular enjoyment of it’. We discover that the ‘Grandfather’ in ‘Digging’ was really great-uncle ‘Hughie’ – but this is hardly the most blatent fraud perpetuated in that particular leitmotif. Whenever I happen across 

 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

 

  I’m invariably assailed by the image of a grown man attacking his allotment with a biro. Another -unintentionally – hilarious moment occurs when The Great Man discloses (a propos his attendance at the influential Belfast coterie, ‘The Group’) ‘I don’t think I considered myself “in competition” with anybody. Admittedly I may have been the cause of it in others, which only means, come to think of it, I was raising the standard without even trying’. To which the only, authentic rejoinder is ‘Bejassus!’

  There is a sense (self-promoted, certainly) of Heaney as a specimen of ‘living history’. Lowell, Brodsky, Bishop, Larkin, Hughes, Milosz, Kavanagh: he knew them all and has the (occasionally) entertaining anecdotes to go with it. He, Heaney, made his way into the world (in 1939) just as the man with whom he is perpetually – and, frankly, seldom to his advantage – compared, left it. W.B.Yeats remains a kind of ‘poetic lodestone’ – as does G.M. Hopkins (towards whom he admits himself – with rare self-knowledge – 

‘a slave’).

  For all his showy erudition Heaney, the man, only really appears likeable on the (increasingly infrequent)  occasions where the farm-boy ‘kicks-in’. For all the sonorous weight of the much-honoured ‘smiling public man’, the ‘cloth ear’ that Philip Larkin was first to detect -in relation to the ‘musicality’ of language – lurks, disablingly in the background. His poetry (praised almost from the first) was always at its best when it actually had something to say, and – in its own way – this book follows the same downward trajectory. The weight of expectation – and the need to forge a living- must sometimes have been immense. If, deeper into the story, we’re treated to too much literary gabble and too many ‘insights’ into the arcade-sideshow of sectarian, academic and ‘poetry’ politics -the real pity of it is that in all probability it’s not completely the man’s own fault. It’s ours, too.

 

 

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving

Rejection Villanelle

We read your work with interest.

Although it’s not-quite-‘Right’ for us

we wish you all the very best.

 

As all our rivals would attest,

a much more ‘trendy’ style’s ‘A Must’.

We’d show your work more interest

 

but ‘Marketing’s none-too-impressed

-they’ve got the next five years ‘sussed’.

They wish you all the very best.

 

Frankly, our editor’s confessed

that (for ‘unknowns’) he ‘can’t be fussed’

to scan their work ‘with interest’.

 

Our shareholders will not invest

‘significant sums’ ‘out of Trust’

(yet) wish you all the very best.

 

For ‘Stellar Talents’ we’ve expressed

far greater urgency than just

‘we read your work with interest…’

 

Subscribe Now! (Read the very best).

 

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving

Pro Patria

 

So many things you’ve done are wrong

and you’ve been doing them too long:

you rob the weak, reward the strong,

my country.

 

The British ‘Bobby’ – there he’ll stand

so brave (his riot shield in hand).

He ‘executes’ a Dick’s* command

‘for Country’.

 

I knew we’d ‘sold-out’ to the yanks

but now what’s left’s gone to the banks-

just don’t count on my vote of thanks,

‘my’ country.

 

The British population’s jeers

fall on the unrepenting ears

of con-men, ‘spivs’ and profiteers.

This country’s.

 

The H.M.G.’s ‘convenience’

is lordly life (at our expense)

– all we take in returns ‘Offence’.

Our Country!

 

And don’t think once we’re rid of Brown

his rotten house will tumble down

O look! – up pops another clown

for country.

 

It spies upon our every move,

it trades in ‘spin’ (and not in truth)

-these days, only a fool would love

their country.

* A reference to the (then) commander Cressida Dick -the ‘brains’ behind the botched July 2005 anti-terrorist operation that led to

the killing of the innocent un-armed Brazillian electrician, J.C. de Menezes, in Stockwell tube station. Dick was promoted after the incident. 

Kevin Saving © 2009

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Andrew Motion

The Cinder Path (Faber, 2009)

58pp, RRP: £12.99,

ISBN: 978-0-571-24492-8

 

No, not the Catherine Cookson ‘Weepathon’ – rather, the first post-laureate effusion of Mr Motion.

   The writer, it had been ‘leaked’ from On High, was experiencing ‘Block’ towards the end of his office – had felt imprisoned in the role, with its more-or-less-unspoken requirements to perform, poodle-like, before royalty. Certainly, the embarrassing ‘rap’ – which he’d felt impelled to write for the two princes – evidenced some deeply-internalised discomfort in an appointment which, after all, no one forced him to take up. So now we’re offered 39 new poems from Fabers to betoken that this creative constipation is a thing of the past.

   Alas, not so. Motion is, and always has been, a fluent writer of prose. His two biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats were both well-researched and a pleasure to read. But (ever!) to call him a ‘poet’ was over-stretching any recognised use of the term and this last collection is unlikely to enhance his reputation. The first poem, ‘On the Balcony’, starts promisingly:

 

  The other, smaller, islands we can see

  by turning sideways on our balcony –

  

  the bubble-pods and cones, the flecks of green,

  the basalt-prongs, the moles, the lumpy chains –

  

  were all volcanoes once, though none so tall

  and full of rage for life as ours, which still

 

  displays its flag of supple, wind-stirred smoke

  as proof that one day soon it will awake…

 

and remains at least competent to the end

 

                                            …a fire that we

  suppose means nothing to us here, but have to see.

 

This is as good as things are ever allowed to get.

   The second, an unrhymed five sonnet-sequence on the life of Harry Patch (a centurion, Cornishman and the last survivor from ‘The Trenches’) again commences well, but rapidly degenerates into a kind of regurgitation from that remarkable man’s memoirs, The Last Fighting Tommy (Bloomsbury, 2008). Several of the later poems, ‘My Masterpiece’, ‘A Dutch Interior’, ‘The English Line’ appear designed to show-off their originator’s ‘painterly’ eye: again, alas, they fail. Quite regularly, all one comes away with is an impression of public self-preening or, indeed, ‘motioning’. The author would do well to heed his own advice (from ‘The Benefit of the Doubt’):

 

  …remember the stranger a thing is

  the less need to say as much.

  

Several of the better poems appear to be written, as they say, ‘from life’ – fashioned in particular from the writer’s own relationship with his father (a D-Day veteran). ‘The Stone’ and ‘A Goodnight kiss’ – both ‘about’ his children – and, especially, ‘The Veteran’ evince real, authentic feelings. At other times – as in ‘Passing On’ (on Motion senior’s death) or in ‘The Mower’, the effects appear more forced and ‘writerly’: therefore, unfortunately, contrived.

   Much of the remaining work (notably ‘The Feather Pole’, ‘A Garden in Japan’ and ‘The view from Here’) seems occasioned only by the desire to be seen publishing a poem.

   Located near the centre of this collection, the title-poem illustrates – and is illustrated by, the book’s front cover (an oil, ‘The Cinder Path’ by S.F.Gore [1878-1914]). Again, the somewhat self-aggrandising tone does not work to the benefit of its author.

  

  I know what it means

  to choose the cinder path.

 

  You might say death

  but I prefer taking

 

  pains with the world.

  The signpost ahead

 

  which bears no inscription.

  The elm tree withstanding

 

  the terrible heat

  of its oily green flame.

 

Andrew, you’re an academic, not Spartacus.

   In closing this publication, Fabers have chosen (for some reason best known to themselves) to bind seven blank leaves together at the end of their book. This seems, somehow, an appropriate summation. Glossy but vapid – and the reader left asking ‘Why?’

 

  

 

Kevin Saving © 2009

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Rose Kelleher, Bundle O’ Tinder, Waywiser press (2008)

ISBN: 978-1-904130-33-0; 88pp; RRP: £7.99

(obtainable via www.waywiser-press.com).

 

At long last! A recent poetry publication which this reviewer can celebrate in these pages without equivocation, qualification or, indeed, inebriation. And from an American too, by thunder.

  Bundle O’ Tinder is Rose Kelleher’s first collection, published last November as part of the ‘Anthony Hecht’ award. It is arranged in sections under five thematic headings: ‘God’, ‘Science’, ‘People’, ‘Love’ and -somewhat perversely, the longest- ‘Perversity’.

  I like the fact that Mrs Kelleher is unafraid to speak her mind intelligibly and intelligently on matters which are of importance to her. I like the fact that she is unafraid to use an array of formal devices and, likewise, unafraid to utilise free-er forms when it suits her purposes. I like the fact that, whilst never prurient, she is -or at least appears to be- unafraid.

  Her (Shakespearean) sonnet ‘Mortimer’ -about a ventriloquist’s doll- contains writing of the highest quality. It commences

 

  The dummy never sleeps. His body lies

  inside a suitcase that his master locks

  and all night long he stares through lidless eyes.

 

The sestet lives up to this overture in bravura style

 

  Behind the boyish frame, a veteran voice

  co-opts him as a witness on the stand

  who’s made to cover up -he has no choice-

  the thrusting’s of an uninvited hand.

  And yet, alone, he thinks with longing of

  those furtive fingers, all he knows of love.

 

Kelleher’s compatriot, Emily Dickinson, claimed to know when she’d been in the presence of ‘Poetry’ by virtue of a sensation likened to the top of her head coming off (though I’ve since been advised that ‘P.M.T.’ can create similar effects). In sharp contrast to the preponderance of contemporary verse -which, granted, can bestow a headache- if ‘Mortimer’ isn’t ‘The Real Deal’ then someone had best trepan this (self-appointed) critic, and quickly.

  Kelleher’s stance is sceptical and, occasionally, playful: surely the correct writerly approach to the modern world (in that full-on ‘Disgust’ just won’t shift many books). Her imagery is unusually precise and applied aptly, sparingly, with the intention of enhancing the subject-matter rather than flashily displaying its own virtuosity. She may -already- be the finest American sonneteer since Edna st Vincent Millay. Her (Petrachan) octave from ‘Rays at Cape Hatteras’ 

almost begs the use of the appropriate ‘shades’.

 

  The cownose rays are showing off today.

  They flip themselves like flapjacks over pans

  of California surf, and when one lands,

  the splat reverberates a mile away.

  sometimes you see the backs of their whale-gray

  pectoral fins, outstretched like flipper-hands;

  or else they show their bellies as they dance,

  white slabs with grins carved out, as if from clay.

 

No, I  don’t know what a ‘cownose ray’ really looks like, either -but if I was on the committee of the Cape Hatteras Tourist Board, I’d sign Kelleher up immediately. 

  ‘Random Sestet’ is, in fact, a rhyming sestina (minus its ‘envoi’) -and you won’t see many of those on the high street. Invented by the twelfth-century troubadour (and mathematician) Arnaud Daniel, their formulaic, rotational patterns -each stanza must place its end-word in a particular sequence- are notoriously difficult to ‘carry off’ and (I had previously thought) display a tendency towards the nugatory. On this occasion, however, the poet contrives to stage-manage her egress from the still-spirralling helicopter with aplomb.

  Though the quality of the 46 poems on display does vary -it could hardly be otherwise- there is not one which does not appear purposive (though I do not fully understand the intentions behind ‘Love Sonnet’). ‘Impulse’ is a very fine poem marred slightly through the want of a more resonant ending. ‘The First Uprising’ works hard, but successfully, to square the circle linking ‘Creationalism’ and Darwinian theory.

 

  The blackest plums are closest to the sun.

  Eve, with a yen for something sweeter, stands

  unsteadily, and with her furry hands

  reaches up and plucks the ripest one.

  Her brothers watch with envy till they learn

  her trick of rearing up; […]

 

  With height, enlightenment. Now they can see

  above the brush, across the burning plains:

  a herd, a stream, a wolf that might attack.

  But God knows what their legacy will be:

  the shifting pelvic bones, the labor pains,

  the feeling that they’ve strayed and can’t get back.

 

Another sonnet, ‘Neanderthal Bone Flute’ would survive just as happily filed under ‘Love’ as under ‘Science’ (where it currently resides). And with equal poignance and truthfulness. This same observation applies to ‘Lovesick’, which seems to posit some kind of pathogen behind sexual attraction, and which is given an added plangency by the subtextual spectre of A.I.D.S.

  If there are no egregious ‘flops’ to be found here, the scale of achievement within Bundle O’ Tinder’s ‘top-quarter’ is formidable. Rose Kelleher was born (as she tells us!) in 1964 -which would make her 44 at the time of debut. I hope that she won’t keep us waiting until 2052 for Bundle O’ Tinder’s successor.

Kevin Saving © 2009

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Hunter Davies, A Walk Around The Lakes, Frances Lincoln (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-7112-30361-1, pp 339, RRP: £9.99

Some might consider Hunter Davies’ decision to authorise another edition of this classic guide to the history, topography and prominent personalities of the Lake District (originally published thirty years ago and re-issued here with a new introduction) to be merely ‘rapacious’. For myself, I hope only that his work will now find a new generation of appreciative readers. Davies, a long-term Cumbrian, spent a whole year touring this ruggedly beautiful locality (back in 1978) walking its heights, ‘checking out’ its ‘tourist attractions’, meeting some of its celebrated -and some of its not-quite-so-celebrated- denizens. The resultant book furnishes a snapshot of provincial, Lakeland life in the late seventies, replete with well-researched, and unfailingly entertaining, diversions into the less-recent past. If, at times, one might wish for some evidence of an ‘update’ (2009 no longer finds Donald Campbell’s remains languishing amid the wreckage of his ‘Bluebird’ at the bottom of Coniston, for example) at other points it is pleasing to find reminiscences of, say, Alfred Wainwright (he of ‘Wainwright’s walks’). This Johnsonian character, now deceased, was -for all his pre-eminence in his field- very much a determinedly private individual.
A Walk Around the Lakes is the slightly-younger sister to Davies’ equally erudite and informative A Walk along the Wall (‘about’ Hadrian’s wall and of which, incidentally, Alfred Wainwright was a fan). The two writers seem to have co-incided, also, on the most important recipe for successful fell-walking: comfort. Nowadays you can see so  many folk kitted-out with the very latest in hi-tec walking boots, hi-visibility anoraks and sat-navs, and  -often- they appear to be indulging more in some strange combination of fashion-parade and ‘mission-statement’ than in preparation for an enjoyable out-door pastime.
Davies is the most companionable of companions. He ‘fills in’ our knowledge of Beatrix Potter, for instance, by ‘interviewing’ -well, really just chatting to- one of her old shepherds. Potter (or ‘Mrs Heelis’, the proprietor of ‘Hill Top Farm’, near Sawty) had ‘abit of a thing’ about Herdwick sheep, which -it is thought- are descended from Spanish beasts shipwrecked at the time of the Armada. For technical reasons these weren’t really ‘viable’ on ‘Hill Tops’ lush, lowland pastures and the locals would tell her this (stories of her ‘expertise’ as a farmer are rather exaggerated). Nonetheless, Potter would resist the entreaties of her workers, to the effect that she was ruining herself financially, with the (kindly) admonition ‘Don’t you worry…it’s only a hobby’.
Over-arching the rest of this publication is the story of William Wordsworth -possibly the region’s most-famous son and, probably, the one who did -and still does- the most to popularise it. Anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with this poet’s opinions and personality might be well-advised to start here. Eschewing the means of a conventional biography, Davies ‘opens the lid’ on this self-confident, self-centred and (ultimately) self-satisfied man. It is fascinating to hear of Wordsworth fulminating, in later life, in opposition to the Kendal and Windermere railway which, he feared, might bring the lower classes to his beloved home-patch; or, ranting against the same white-washed cottages that we now deem so ‘picturesque’ -yet to him represented the equivalent of a ‘blot on the landscape’. The hypocrisy (acknowledged even in his own lifetime) of a man who’d started his political life as a radical but ended it arguing that the poor would be unable to benefit ‘mentally and morally’ from The Lakes -and could only ruin them for the educated classes- is staggering. Especially as his own Guide to the Lakes (1822, and one of the earliest) had been a ‘best-seller’ and accrued more money for him than his poetry. The rest of the Wordsworthian ‘set’ (Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Dorothy and Mary) are accorded their due -and it is particularly pleasing to read Davies expatiating upon the Cartoon-Hero qualities of S.T.Coleridge as a fell walker (his was the first-recorded ascent of Scafell Pike). Evidently he was the best walker and climber of all the Lake Poets (though all were enthusiasts) as well as very likely to have been the ‘nicest’ of them, too.
An engaging, opinionated, ‘rambling’ -in the best sense- model of its kind (as likely to treat of Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestling as the Windscale Nuclear reactor) this paperback is the ideal holiday read to take to the Lakes -for ‘tourists’ an ‘purists’ alike.

Kevin Saving © 2009

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Tim Armstrong, Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems, Pearson (2009)
ISBN: 978-1-4082-0430-6

This annotated selection from Hardy’s poetry (183 of his gnarled lyrics, out of a possible near-thousand) represents a compelling feat of scholarship from its editor- a professor of ‘Modern English and American Literature’ at the university of London. Whereas there have been a host of previous editions and ‘selections’ (the 1994 Works published by ‘Wordsworth’ still the most comprehensive and accessible for my money), prof. Armstrong’s affords the closest, most intimate scrutiny yet into each separate poem. Accompanying the text -reproduced in full- a series of notes takes us through its publishing history, allusions, Manuscript amendments, variants, rhyme-scheme and possible source(s) of ‘inspiration’. If all of this sounds like a tortuous form of academic ‘over-kill’, my own view would be that we have now, probably, reached a stage with Hardy where so much of his oeuvre has been anthologised -entered a kind of collective, Literary-consciousness- that any gentle enquiry into its ‘Provenance’ is entirely to be welcomed.
If we examine one celebrated example, ‘Drummer Hodge’ (1899), many people might already be aware that the poem was occasioned by the Boer war. Few, however, would recognise that ‘Hodge’ (the word doesn’t occur in Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang) was a nick-name for an agricultural worker -a detail of which Hardy would undoubtedly have known, as he had previously attacked the use of such disparaging terms in an (1883) essay, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’. Others might be startled by the knowledge that the poet had likely been ‘stimulated’ by an earlier verse published in the ‘Daily Chronicle’ (by one Herbert Cadett). Hardy had preserved a cutting of Cadett’s opus in which a ‘private Smith of the Royals’ is left to die of a ‘Mauser bullet’ in the lung, and with ‘a prayer- half-curse […] pink froth and a half-choked cry’.
Another well-known (though ‘lesser’) Hardy poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ was written, we learn, nine days after the ‘Titanic’s encounter with an iceberg. Many of its readers might previously have been able to adduce an ‘approximate’ date to it (mid-April, 1912). But is it ‘of interest’ to discover that the poem’s first public outing was one month later: printed in the souvenir programme of the ‘Dramatic and Operatic Matinee’ (held at Covent Garden in aid of the ‘Titanic Disaster Fund’)?  Or to be informed that Hardy had personally known a number of the casualties from the ship’s passenger-list? I believe it is.
Armstrong’s selections are reproduced here in the chronological order of their publication -not necessarily that of composition. There is an introduction to each of Hardy’s eight main collections, commencing with Wessex Poems and other verses (1898, when the author was 58), through to his last, posthumous outing, Winter Words in various moods and metres (1928). Included also are (brief) selections from Hardy’s two ‘disguised’ autobiographies (which can now be quite difficult for the general reader to obtain).
Prof. Armstrong’s Introduction to his annotated Hardy draws on his own wide reading in order to discuss matters such as his subject’s attitudes towards ‘Art’, religion, ‘Free Will’, posterity and ‘Prosody’ (although whenever an academic holds forth upon the latter I have, invariably, to suppress a shudder). If Armstrong’s prose-style is guilty, on occasion, of ‘clunkiness’, well -so was Hardy’s. This is a ‘learned’ book (in the truest and best sense of the word). It unfailingly enhances our understanding of a major poet, probably the last English writer of whom the adjective ‘Great’ can be used without embarrassment.

NOTES TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF ‘POETRY’
(A belated, discursive and presumptuous response to The Poetry Society’s definition of a poem as: ‘whatever a writer wished to style a poem’).

Wilfred Owen, caught up in a cataclysmic war, felt that it was a poet’s duty ‘to warn’. Philip Larkin, leading a rather less precarious existence as a librarian, described his desire ‘to preserve’. For me, interested both in history and in context, it is somehow sufficient to preserve some of the warnings.
Poetry, just like any other pastime, is best viewed as a by-product of the wider society which it reflects and is, in turn, subsumed by. In this respect, our shallow, anecdotal, ‘not what but who‘ culture is well-served by the ‘Literature’ it continues to generate. On the rubble-ed site of an art-form once capable of sustaining the efficient presentation of memorable ideas, a succession of culprits have fly-tipped their ‘jottings’. I allow myself to hope that, in time, the appellation ‘Free Verse’ will come to be understood primarily in the context of ‘verse for which no payment is required’. (Alongside more-or-less everything else) we ‘moderns’ have devalued poetry. Every time -if J.M.Barrie’s ghost will pardon the liberty- some crass editor publishes an under-cooked, artless, self-admiring, null travesty-of-a-poem, somewhere a fairy (or at the very least a brain cell) dies. By that token, I’ve probably polished-off a few myself.

Is poetry, somehow -I wonder- a ‘seventh sense’? Are there, as a corollary, people ‘out there’ who wander through life not realising that they experience this particular sensory-deficiency? And, if so: why do so many of them elect to work in publishing? Poetry should (in this performance-ridden, time-obsessed age) be flourishing. And yet, by contrast, we continue to read -or televisually view- the doings of non-existent persons in utterly fictitious circumstances. What could we be thinking of!?
Personally, I’m loath to disparage the current, influential crop of ‘post-modern’ practitioners. Quite the reverse. From their Olympian heights in academe they appear to have set themselves the ultimate literary challenge: to write using only flat, prosaic cadences; with rarefied, unrealistic imagery and about sweet Fanny Adams. Via the use of shrewd psychology (‘Hey, don’t be a fuddy-duddy!’) they have carried-off the huge confidence trick of making most of us believe that their way is the only way of ‘creative writing’. Balderdash! It is a merely-fashionable outlet for mediocrity, kitted-out to preen upon a cat-walk. If it persists, it is solely through the reluctance or inability of the current ‘in-crowd’ to distinguish the (rare) diamonds from the (all-too-frequent) dirty diapers rotating stolidly in the slap-happy, shop-soiled launderette that is our contemporary poetry scene.

Dear old Shelley got it badly wrong: poets aren’t the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Nothing so grand. At present, they more closely resemble its Electric Toothbrushes -something many feel, vaguely, that they ought to possess but which they are, nevertheless, entirely unable to utilise properly.  Perhaps the-makers-of-poems have one more, final role to perform. In a society which appears completely in thrall to ‘celebrity’ -one in which footballers or even chefs (for goodness sake!) are the new gods- more poets both could, and should, publish anonymously. This might help to return the spotlight onto the ‘work’ rather than on ‘the personality’. Even that daddy of modernism, T.S.Eliot, was moved to declare (in a rare moment of clear-headedness) that, whilst he could understand people wishing to write ‘poems’, he could never fathom the motivation behind them wanting to become ‘poets’.

None of these musings, however, has brought us any closer to an acceptable definition as to what constitutes poetry. I would contend that most ‘real’ poetry is ‘about’ (or, at least, displays a tendency to be about) the great existential themes: the quest for Meaning, the search for love, the overture to -and the act of- dying. Put simply, the big themes deserve to be addressed. I also believe that the five, wriggling digits on the slippery hand of poetry are:

1. ORIGINALITY        (sounding ‘like one’s self’).
2. ECONOMY            (saying the most, in the least).
3. ACCESSIBILITY     (being perfectly comprehensible to persons who use the same
language, who possess ‘reasonable’ levels of intelligence
and who are paying ‘reasonable’ attention).
4. UNIVERSALITY      (enabling complete strangers to share a perception or experience).
5. MEMORABILITY     (resonating on the tongue and in the mind).

I further believe that a poem is, essentially, a device through which one human being (henceforward called ‘the writer’) makes an attempt to enter the head of another (henceforward to be known as ‘the reader’). This device can, perforce, only act in the one, single direction -thus rendering it liable to charges of selfishness, clumsiness etc. To obviate these charges it is necessary to observe a strict etiquette:

‘When making the attempt to enter the ‘reader’s head, the ‘writer’ should always
   knock first, paying particular attention to their footwear. Entrance is by invitation
   only and -should the ‘writer’ wish to stay- it is important to display good manners 
   at all times. While it is permissible to sign the visitor’s book or leave one’s card, 
   a considerate ‘writer’ will never fiddle with their attire, scuff the furniture or
   break wind’.

  In order to facilitate more ‘reader-friendly’ poems I append the following:

A CHECKLIST FOR USE WHEN WRITING POETRY

1.  Never presume personalised or specialist knowledge.
2.  Use only words which can be found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
3.  Be colloquial, not stilted.
4.  Never affect ‘style’ for its own sake. ‘Style’ is like a kind of latex mask
which some writers feel it is necessary to don prior to making a
statement. If and when it becomes so rigid as to preclude a certain type of
truthful articulation, it must be considered a Parkinsonian disability.
5.  Distrust the adjective.
6.  Disregard ‘mad’ Ezra. You won’t, often, ‘make it new’ but you should at least try to
make it different.
7.  ‘Form’ is just the peg we hang our coat on. It’s the coat itself which people remember.
8.  Always ensure that you’re actually saying something- not simply trading in ‘poetic’
effects.
9.  Authenticity. If you write of an experience, it is important that you actually lived it
and wish to share it as a genuine act of communication.
10. Be leery of similes: nothing is really like anything else.
11. Resemble the boxer: unless you figure on landing a series of ‘hammer blows’, go in
quickly -punch- get out.
12. Again, like the boxer: be prepared to take a few ‘hits’ on your way.
13. Strong beginning, resonant ending.
14  Be concise, even terse. Never ramble nor commit tautology. DON’T USE TOO MANY
WORDS.

In conclusion, it might be possible to postulate some kind of ‘negative’ definition: ‘Poetry’ is that which is left over from a piece of writing once we’ve removed the lazy, the stilted, the verbose, the hackneyed, the self-serving, the ill-conceived and the mis-informed.
Kevin Saving © 2009

‘Trustworthy’ was NOT your strong suit:
Oily grins more your forte.
Nose pressed to the yankee jackboot,
You were not the dog to stray.

Bush-whacking the hands which fed you,
Licking blood-stains from your paws,
Arse-sniffing the rich -in-bred you
Issue-out your poodle roars,
Ripped-up Charters in your jaws. –

© –

 

Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze, Jonathan Cape (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-224-08746-9;  RRP: £12.99

Damned silly title. Quite whatever constitutes the ‘maze’ in question, or how precisely this entity can ‘quicken’, are never satisfactorily explained. The author -whose previous work includes the much-lauded, but for me virtually unreadable, The Broken Word- conjures a series of tableaux based around the historical convergence of three fascinating figures within an Epping Forest Asylum in the early 1840s. The first, Dr Mathew Allen, is the proprietor/Superintendant of ‘High Beech’: a man of strong convictions, humane tendencies and remarkable (though not always sure-footed) ingenuity. The second, an inmate, is the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare. The final member of this unlikely trio is the (at that time virtually unknown) future laureate and Baron, Alfred Tennyson -himself cursed with a rather morbid disposition, ‘staying over’ on an extended visit arranged -at least ostensibly- to allow him to spend time with his even more melancholic younger brother, Septimus. Though there is no documented proof that the two famous poets ever met -and nor, indeed, does Foulds envisage them doing so- the compulsion to have had them interact must have been both strong and (in the context of an historical novel) justifiable. If we are to be asked to work our way through impressionistic tableaux then why not add one more, enticing, extra one? The two mad-house prophets might converse: Clare, short-ish, plump, well-passed his worldly meridian; Tennyson, taller, slimmer, ‘posh-er’, sixteen years younger, and yet to reach his; both writers immersed in noxious tobacco fumes of their own making; Clare swearing coarsely, haranguing his interlocutor as to the iniquities of Literary London.
There are a number of pleasant surprises and imagined treats to be found in this slim volume -though also a few too many of the languorous descriptions which seem, presently, to be espoused as  ‘poetic’ or ‘evocative’. There are some good passages on Romany lore (and language). There is a (well-realised) account of an involuntary, manually-assisted rectal evacuation -in the days before suppositories. There is some non-consensual sex. The Quickening Maze can be darkly comic. Foulds occasionally displays an oddly prurient whimsy: his Clare is caused to speculate about how Dr Allen’s daughter, Hannah, might taste ‘in the nest between her legs’, and the novelist pontificates unnecessarily upon the state of Allen’s sixteen year old son’s bed sheets. One particular defamation has been foisted upon ‘High Beech’ -an institution which the available evidence indicates was beneficent for its time.
Foulds’ grammar is occasionally careless. Page 155 of this edition includes a paragraph which commences: ‘Stockdale looked down at the addled peasant who attempted to fix him with his pale eyes. He explained who he was -Shakespeare- and that he spoke seven languages’. Yet it is John Clare (aka ‘the addled peasant’) who believes himself to be Shakespeare and multi-lingual -not Stockdale, a (rather naughty) attendant. Such clumsiness ought not, surely, to be expected from a Master of Arts in ‘creative writing’, courtesy of the university of East Anglia.
John Clare is depicted here as part ‘private Svejk’, part enfant terrible. Foulds has obviously consulted the relevant literature and it is difficult not to have some sympathy for his modern, ‘enlightened’, portrayal. There are, however, independent, dark intimations that Clare could be violent with his wife, Patty. Allen’s own notes state that the poet arrived at High Beech ‘exceeding miserable, every instant bemoaning his poverty…his mind did not appear so much lost and deranged as suspended in its movements…[and in a]…permanent state of anxiety or fear, and vexation, produced by the excitement of excessive flattery at one time, and neglect of another’. This, plausible, interpretation is not really examined in the novella, in which the action is intentionally concertinaed. The man who wrote Clare’s poems was, demonstrably, ‘insightful’, had contact with ‘reality’ and was able to ‘reason’ from cause to effect. Whether it is the action of a sane man to write poetry is, of course, another question. One example taken from this period of incarceration in Allen’s establishment (which Clare, it is true, described as ‘a slave ship from Africa’) follows:

Poets are born -and so are whores- the trade is
  Grown universal- in these canting days
  Women of fashion must, of course, be ladies,
  And whoreing is the business that still pays.

Dr Allen -who would, undoubtedly, have found these lines exasperating- observed of his patient: ‘It is most singular that ever since he came, and even now at almost all times, the moment he gets pen or pencil in hand he begins to write the most beautiful poetic effusions. Yet he has never been able to maintain in conversation, not even in writing prose, the appearance of sanity for two minutes or two lines together’. All of this leads into the vexed, and vexing, question of reliable versus unreliable narratives: splendid grist for the fashionable ‘creative writer’s mill. Still, Foulds’ ‘take’ is, at least, a tenable one.
Another ‘sub-plot’ (and one which can be more fully validated) is the financial entrapment of the Tennysons in Allen’s scheme for a kind of patent wood-press. In 1843 Allen was declared bankrupt. Tennyson lost most of his family’s inheritance and found his engagement to Emily Sellwood, the future lady Tennyson -who doesn’t figure here- temporarily suspended. His degree of privation was, it should be noted, an entirely relative one, soon ended by the acquisition of a 1845 Civil-list pension and the (1850) publication of Queen Victoria’s beloved In Memoriam. It is a strange omission that the potentially fertile soil of Tennyson’s own (chronic) hypochondria, and copious consumption of alcohol, does not warrant a single prod from Foulds’ writerly digit. Tennyson is known to have taken a more than passing interest in mental aberration, probably due to a belief in his own inheritance of ‘black blood’. He found those of Allen’s patients whom he met (probably a carefully selected quorum) to be ‘the most agreeable and most reasonable persons’. This Tennysonian generosity of spirit did not extend indefinitely to Dr Allen himself. Alfred was to versify, somewhat bathetically, of his erstwhile friend (and financial nemesis):

He is fled -I wish him dead-
  He that wrought my ruin-
  O the flattery and the craft
  Which were my undoing.

  Foulds husbands the bulk of his material well enough. We eventually encounter John Taylor -publisher of John Keats, John Clare and, incidentally, Mathew Allen. Some of the phrasing is well-turned, some refreshingly tart. I ended-up liking The Quickening Maze more, if I’m completely honest, than I’d expected to. For all its missed opportunities, it is a perfectly-acceptable ‘B-Plus’ of a novella: certainly adequate enough  to grace the Honours Board of the ‘Man Booker’ (for which it was nominated). Not that this constitutes any ringing endorsement. Damned silly title, though.
©

Kevin Saving

Sonnet For Lost Innocence

There are some things we felt you ought to know…
The old guy dressed in red -him with the hood-
we knew he wasn’t up to any good:
‘Unlawful Entry’ (as our cameras show).
That fairy with a thing for children’s teeth
(or so he says) -we’ve taken D.N.A.:
it’s our belief he’ll soon be put away
(some alibis just beggar all belief!)
You see old hook-nose, giving us the eye?
An A.B.H., two ASBOs and a Tag
(‘Domestic Violence’) -but that old slag,
his ‘partner’, Judy, just won’t testify.

The State must claim us all sooner or later
where ‘innocence’ means ‘lack of current data’.

Kevin Saving on

Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser, Writing Poetry -creative and critical approaches, Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-00812-0

Writing Poetry has to be one of the most pointless, pretentious, canting productions which it has been my misfortune to happen upon. Compiled -‘written’ would be a misnomer- by two American academics (both ‘Associate Professors of Literature and Creative Writing’ at the university of West Georgia), this volume is subdivided under various headings such as ‘The aleatory voice’, ‘voice as palimpsest’, ‘The infantilized voice’, ‘The Semiotic Simian’ and ‘Reursivity redux’. The authors name-drop a series of ‘trendy’ theories (‘Defamiliarization’, ‘Flow theory’, ‘Autotelics’ etc) for no discernable reason other than to show how ‘Right-on’ they both are. A repeated exercise is to introduce work (frequently by their favoured students, sometimes from more-established writers -‘practicing poet’ is their stock-phrase) before adding a paragraph or three of elliptical, attempted exegesis. If we leave their students out of the equation for compassionate reasons -and they surely have my sympathy for a start- let’s trundle out the two professorial poseurs on Gertrude Stein…

…whose poetic noise seems to have ‘substance’ and ‘weight’ all of its own. Listen, for example, to the opening lines of ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait Of Picasso’:

  If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
  Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would
     would he like it.
  If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would
     he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he
     like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I
     told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him.
     If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
  Now.
  Not now.
  And now.
  Now.

  A gifted prose writer as well as poet, Stein starts by casting clamorous poetic repetitions in what appear to be prose form. The almost block-paragraph style of the initial lines grates harshly against the clipped, one- and two-word lines that follow. All the while, Stein creates a kind of sound-machine, a veritable calliope of words.
  On many levels […] ‘If I Told Him’ reinforces the physicality of the text, the sense that poetry remains the hyper-material [author’s italics] literary genre.

  By way of explanation, a ‘Calliope’ is an American term for a steam-organ (also ‘doubling’ as the Greek muse of Epic poetry). Very clever. Also, very dumb. Miss Stein is quite self-evidently having a laugh at our expense here. She would clearly have loved the thought of her lines being treated in so determinedly serious a fashion by this pair of posturing poetry-pseuds. As she might well also have written: ‘A pose is a pose is a pose’.
No mere flash-in-the-pan, Davidson and Fraser can maintain their asininity-levels for as-long-as-it-takes. Next, they sink their collegial teeth into something a bit more meaty: Philip Larkin’s quietly-terrifying ‘Aubade’ (arguably the one substantive poem reproduced in their text -though they also anatomise Craig Raine’s over-hyped ‘Martian’ postcard, plus Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and Dickinson’s ‘Because I could not stop for Death’).

We have explained five (but in no way all) of the potential meanings embedded in Larkin’s formal repetition of ‘no’ in order to make a few important points about semiotics and poetic practice. First, poets learn to trust form and structure not just as architecture on which to hang their ideas. Rather, these features become significant contributors to the complex act of meaning-making in which any successful poem engages. Larkin’s structural repetitions, then, are not merely ornamental exuberance devoid of significance but remain intricately connected to the poem’s nexus of arguable meanings.
  We have also engaged in some literary criticism -unpacking several significances inscribed in Larkin’s repetitive ‘no’s- to help foster a kind of ‘X-ray vision’ for the ways in which forms and structures function as carriers of meaning. What’s more, we have illustrated that a dynamic, dialogical readership half-creates meaning in tandem with the text at hand. As readers of poetry, we do not passively receive the meanings of Larkin’s ‘no’s. Instead, we actively engage the sign, wrestle with its multifaceted contours with respect to culture and manufacture multiple meanings with the poem. To look at poems in this charged, semiotically informed way provides endless material for analysis whilst also respecting the formal complexities of any artistic production.

  Blah, blah, blah. I have underlined the one sub-clause which I could (a) understand (b) agree with and (c) feel is worth saying. Our two word-struck commentators cannot seem to get over the (indisputable) fact that Larkin used the word ‘no’ nine times in a fifty-line poem. They attribute a ‘Sisyphean Complex’, cite Albert Camus (without acknowledging that the latter saw Sisyphus as a ‘happy’ figure) and maintain that the poet’s ‘obsessive repetitions of the word ‘no’ also capture the state of mind that typically characterizes postmodern existance’. Ludicrously, they argue that ‘the poem’s repetitive negations simultaneously begin to sound like an exaggerated, over-emotional plea for clemency. The speaker pleads, ‘no, no, no’, in what amounts to gothic melodrama’.
Hrrumpff!! I shall go on believing that Larkin wrote ‘Aubade’ to communicate (or ‘share’) his personal feelings of revulsion, horror and fear, engendered by his own impending mortality. And that, paradoxically, it was rather brave of him to do so -particularly when his words can be the victims of this type of over-analytical, academic guff. Larkin’s ‘no’s? My arse!
Occasionally, a ‘How To’ book of this nature can provide a useful stimulant (merely by diametrically opposing each of its counterfeit contentions). Unfortunately, with Writing Poetry, the density of the prose -and the thought- obviates even this, happy, possibility. If comfort is to be had, it lies in the discovery that there is still, apparently, a market for books which purport to study prosody and/or the mechanics of composition -though Palgrave Macmillan are highly culpable in feeding this ‘market’ the egregious twaddle they have here.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving on

Can Gerry Robinson Fix Dementia Care Homes?
(Part 1, B.B.C.2, 9 p.m., 8.12.2009)

No, he can’t.

The B.B.C. has, in its wisdom, made a two-part series in which a businessman, (sir) Gerry Robinson, has been ‘parachuted in’ to ‘fix’ dementia Care Homes. The corporation presumably felt that they would be commissioning some ‘compelling tv’ (after the formula of the well-known chef and restaurateur who ‘fixes’ down-at-heel Eateries).

It is certainly arguable that we -the great British public- ought to be grateful to be in receipt of any programme which is neither stale American ‘soap’, ‘Reality Television’, Games show or, indeed, culinary opera. It seems typical, however, that the only solution which can be envisaged is a ‘business solution’.

Part of the problem in the care sector is that it is top-heavy with ‘consultants’ (‘drafted in’ from industry) who are only able to visualise in terms of ‘profit and loss’. These apparatchiks appear to have ‘target-fixation’ and to struggle with the delusion that everything can be resolved via the deployment of an appropriate graph. The trend reached its apotheosis in the early years of the present century when (for the first time ever) the N.H.S. employed more administrators than trained nurses.

Let’s get a few more statistics (each cited in ‘The Gerry Robinson Show’) out of the way. Currently, over a quarter of a million Britons reside in care Homes -a figure which is expected to quadruple within twenty year’s time. The average cost of keeping one person in such a Home is £39K per annum -the vast majority of which is ‘subsidised’ out of the public purse. The gross turn-over (‘gross’ in both senses) is £6.5 billion -for an industry in which the ‘profit margin’ is usually calculated at 30% p.a. Care-workers see very little of this cash bonanza: the typical employee is either an older woman or a migrant worker, subsisting on pay which barely exceeds the national minimum. Unsurprisingly, the staff turn-over is horrendous. This is a situation which has been stimulated -‘encouraged’ is not too strong a word- by the policies of successive ‘New Labour’ governments intent upon closing Local Authority Homes, and promoting immigration in order to artificially ‘deflate’ wages.
Fix this, Gerry Robinson.

Our, quite personable, entrepreneurial guru affects not to see any problem in businessmen making money out of their charges. Actually, I do. The N.H.S. (the world’s largest market -or ‘cash cow’- for the multi-national pharmaceutical  companies) is widely-acknowledged to be in the process of being bankrupted by their ever-more egregious demands. G.P.s and hospital consultants are regularly being ‘incentivised’ to prescribe medications of dubious efficacy. Quite obviously, the only possible solution to the outrages being perpetrated by ‘Big Pharma’ and private medicine is the immediate, compulsory nationalisation of the pharmaceutical industry in Britain. Just don’t bet on it happening anytime soon…
Fix this, Gerry Robinson.

Sir Gerry -technical retinue in an unseen retinue- wanders benevolently around several Homes, chatting amicably to residents, care-staff, managers and owners. Sometimes, the accompanying sound-track becomes a little more ‘up-beat’ when he encounters situations of which he can be more approving (like ‘Miravale’, one of the ten percent of establishments rated as ‘Excellent’ by an independent audit). Elsewhere, he sees elderly people marginalised in their own lives, and care-staff frustrated by their work-load, working conditions and the increasing bureaucratisation of their profession. At one point he remarks: ‘you’re actually quite angry about this’. Amazing!

Western industrialised civilisation has reached a curious juncture in which it is medically capable of prolonging a citizen’s life beyond the limit of their continued, economic, ‘usefulness’. It has, thus far, completely failed to find a role for the ‘valued elder’ comparable to those found in supposedly more ‘primitive’ societies -where a grandparent, or great-grandparent, can ‘help out’ with child-care (or simply dispense the knowledge accrued over the passage of eighty-plus years). In our strange times, we seem to be quite prepared for both parents to work long hours, assigning the care of their children to complete strangers and consigning their own  parents/grandparents into institutions which are demonstrably unfit for purpose. Look around you. Once again, we’re building the kind of huge, multi-bedded behemoths which -it was once supposed- had ‘gone out’ with The Workhouse.
Fix this, Gerry Robinson.

It’s all-well-and-good for a multi-millionaire to spend a few days seeing ‘how the other half live’. If sir Gerry was really so passionate about care-provision in this country (and, yes, we’re been told that he ‘lost’ his father to dementia) he would have elected to make his career within it. Instead, he chose to immerse himself in the world of corporate finance. Consequently, he can never know how it really feels to have a genuine vocation gradually eroded by the realisation that you (and the ‘service users’ you look after) are just small cogs in some entrepreneur’s scheme to enhance his own property-portfolio. He can never experience the desolation of tending mute, late-stage A.T.D. (Alzheimer’s Type Dementia) patients curled-up in foetal balls. He cannot begin to empathise with the equal-victims of dementia care: the shadowy, exploited figures (far below the media’s fickle attention-span) who are spat at -or scratched with faeces-covered finger nails- and for no greater crime than having the requirement to change a confused, elderly person’s soiled garments. All this within an environment in which any expression of displeasure (even to the extent of registering ‘distaste’ facially) is not an option; an environment upon which numerous ‘Do-Gooders’ feel free to pontificate -but within which they are never, ever, obliged to roll up their own, immaculate, sleeves.

Robinson does have the grace to admit that ‘this is all new territory for me’, before adding ‘we’re in the Dark Age of dementia care’.
Well, Gerry, you got that one right.

*                              *                              *                              *

Kevin Saving was involved in what is now known as the ‘care industry’ for upwards of a quarter-of-a-century. He has been employed in the N.H.S. and in Local Authority (social services) care Homes and Day Centres. He has worked in private nursing Homes (both as care assistant and registered nurse) and has managed a unit for persons diagnosed with ‘Asperger’s syndrome’.

Kevin Saving on

Can Gerry Robinson fix Dementia Homes?
(Part Two, the inglorious sequel)
(B.B.C. 2, 9 p.m., 15.12.2009 -part 2 [of two])

Well, no (surprise, surprise) he didn’t.

Poor, poor Robinson…just when he thought things were about to turn around…when his ‘show-cased’ Home had improved its rating from ‘Poor’ to ‘Adequate’…when even the soundtrack was growing jauntier…then, suddenly, (unspecified) allegations are levelled at ‘Summervale’ and it was summarily closed down.

Still, at least we have now been afforded an exceptional opportunity to watch ‘The Robinson Way’ (or should that be ‘Gerry-building’?) in action. Its modus operandi appears entirely to consist of: (1) ‘grilling’ the ineffectual, obviously dis-spirited manager; (2) conducting an ‘Unannounced’ (3 a.m.) inspection; and (3) arranging a staff-meeting in which care-staff were censured for placing call-bells out of reach, and restricting the access of ‘residents’ to the outside world. (By-the-way, the officially-sanctioned form of address is now ‘service-user’). So there we have it: it was all the staff’s fault after all.

Robinson’s ‘staff solutions’ (if I have not misunderstood them) seem to be for the staff to spend more time ‘one-on-one’ (fair enough), for them to wear ‘civvies’ whilst eating alongside the service-users and (bizarrely) for the older, confused females to be given plastic babies.

‘Summervale’ appeared to operate on a system of two care-staff to twenty two service-users (in my experience, a fairly representative ratio which can often rise to 1:15). The ‘Recommended ratio’ is, we are told, one-to-four (which, outside of  the well-funded ‘Learning Disability’ sector, I’ve never yet encountered). So: if we’ve got one staff-member to (say) a dozen confused, elderly people, that’s not -even with the best will in the world- going to translate into much ‘personal time’ left-over, once we’ve finished the ‘meds round’ and completed the washing/changing/feeding/toileting slog. One answer might be ‘more staff’ -but, hey, aren’t we supposed to be a profit-making enterprise today? Eating with the service-users whom we’re simultaneously feeding (and whilst wearing one’s own clothes) -is a policy strictly enforced in some establishments- though not to everybody’s taste, nor especially hygienic, either. Sir Gerry, I notice, did not elect to take up this option. ‘Plastic babies’ I’m not even going to dignify by discussing: just imagine how you’d feel visiting your mother/grandmother whilst she’s sat in her chair, ‘nursing’ one of those things.

Still, at least the soundtrack got jauntier…

Poor, poor Robinson…He clearly found the management of ‘Summervale’ to be inadequate (which, in truth, it probably was). But then: I’d be inclined to wonder what effect having tv cameramen and sound-technicians blundering around invading my service-user’s privacy, would have in respect to the creation of a warm, safe and homely unit.

Just for sir Gerry, I’m about to disclose two appalling secrets about residential care: in many Homes it is made intentionally difficult for service-users to get outside. This is, generally, because confused elderly people have been known to wander off on to busy roads. And the great British public would be sure to have a view about that. Call-bells should, quite categorically, never, ever be placed out-of-reach. Unfortunately, some service-users will activate them (as it is their inalienable right to do) constantly and at all hours of the day and night. So. yes, the odd call-bell will, occasionally, get ‘hidden’ (a practice which I’m not condoning, simply trying to place in context).

Sir Gerry does seems to have what we call ‘the touch’. He sits sympathetically, stroking a service-user’s (anyone fed-up with the nomenclature, yet?) hand -and for at least as long as the cameras are on him. An obvious solution begins to form in my befuddled mind: sir Gerry must manage his own care-home -certainly after a couple of week’s instruction via the wonderful National Vocational Qualification (N.V.Q.2). I calculate his, Gerry’s’ age at 61 -and our marvellous government is busily arranging for everyone’s state-pension to be paid at an age far in excess of that. Yes, sir Gerry, let’s visit your home after you’ve had six months in charge.

That, I’m afraid, isn’t going to happen. At the end of the programme our ‘fixer’ gets into his taxi and is driven off, away from the condemned ‘Summervale’ and its betrayed, newly-evicted residents. He promises to see everyone again.  Earlier in the ‘show’ (because that’s what it is) one of the more combatant elderly ladies told him to ‘fuck off’ (and I thought she was supposed to be suffering from dementia!). Well, Gerry certainly fixed it for her.

Allegations can be extraordinarily corrosive. The present author was once given a ‘verbal warning’ (recorded on his supervision notes) for ‘manually handling’ -aka ‘catching’- a falling resident (in those days we had ‘residents’).  Care-workers are currently supposed to allow them to sort-of cascade down a braced leg onto to floor (yes, really!) It’s kafka-esque.

‘Summervale’ appeared to be no better, no worse than the vast majority of care-Homes of my experience. I truly believe that most allegations of ‘abuse’ are inflated out of all proportion by people who have no idea of the realities of residential, or nursing, care. The whole gamut of ‘Neglect’ versus ‘Abuse’ is, for instance, a far greyer continuum that many realise. They don’t understand this, because they don’t, really, what to think about it. It is, probably, too facile to categorise a whole system of care-provision as ‘abusive’ -but if we continue to place people in ‘paranoid’ environments, if we continue to bureaucratise their practice and we continue to pay them -quite literally- ‘bottom dollar’, then we will continue to manufacture our own, new, wholly-pc, Bedlams.

I once (long ago in another life) used to try to explain how the word ‘care’ has both ‘custodial’ and ‘affective’ aspects: we have both to care ‘for’ people and care ‘about’ them. But then, talk, as they say, is cheap (unless you’re a managerial-consultant).

Poor, poor, Robinson.
Poor, poor, us.

Kevin Saving © 2009

Kevin Saving on

Andy Croft, Sticky, Flambard Press (2009)
ISBN: 978-1-906601-05-8, pp 111, RRP: £8

As it proudly proclaims in its blurb, this collection takes its name from the Russian, ‘Stikhi’, which translates as either ‘verses’ or ‘poems’. Sticky’s opening (and titular) poem is prefaced by a quotation from a George W. Bush speech: ‘By our efforts we have lit a fire…in the minds of men’. A gathering (or ‘knot’?) of humanoid sticks (‘Pessimistick’, ‘Simplistick’, ‘Bombastick’ et al) are being lined-up for the bonfire, each recording their reaction in their own individualistick (sorry!) way.

Just then the wind began to blow,
  The matches flickered in the breeze,
  Said Nationalistick with a snort,
  ‘Those matches aren’t from British trees’.

  […]

  Then Communistick raised his voice
  ‘We can’t just branch out on our own,
  We must resist -all sticks unite,
  Together stronger than alone!’

Croft’s

…moral of this sticky story
  Of sticks who were too proud to bend,
  Is we must learn to stick together
  Or else we’ll meet a sticky end.

A funny -and fiery- parable for our times and like all the best satire, humour with an edge. It seems almost churlish to respond to this committed and collectivist poet with examples culled from the Warsaw ghetto -or from more recent bouts of ‘ethnic clensing’- which appear to indicate that unified tinder is not-so-much ‘stronger’ as more readily furnace-combustible.
Andy Croft’s heart is firmly-planted on the Left. In addition to his seven previous books of poetry, he contributes a regular column to the ‘Morning Star’. Sticky represents a tendentious brand of poetry informed by life -emphatically not precious morsels floated down from some ivory tower. If seldom pretty on the eye, it is gritty, ‘ballsy’ emerging gradually from deep (as befits the effusions of a seasoned Middlesbrough football supporter). Like ‘The Boro’, it often makes its point. Crucially, it is undeceived by the callous mis-adventure capitalism of Cruel Britannia. One section pays homage to Bertolt Brecht -but ends up by admitting that his is an extinct lineage. Another evokes what have clearly been extensive travels in the former Eastern-bloc. ‘A Russian Diary’ (in ‘Pushkin sonnets’) adequately fulfils its job-description, whilst ‘Idiot Snow’ is genuinely witty:

The sound of snowflakes walking
  Through Kemerovo at night
  Would silence anyone who doubts
  That happiness writes white,
  The colour of the senses
  At ten degrees below,
  Where no matter what the question is,
  The answer’s always snow.

This book’s central section (for me, its best) was inspired by its author having done time as writer-in-residence in Her Majesty’s Prison, ‘Holme House’, Stockton-on-Tees. Croft can ‘talk-the-talk’ convincingly but knows

Between Dear John and child support,
  Ex-girlfriends and ex-wives,
  Between bang-up and breakfast-time,
  In dreams of other lives,
  Each man soon learns that even here
  The need for love survives.

‘The Ballad of Writing Gaol’ -accompanied by a Wildean excerpt- may well have started life as a kind of parody, but ultimately bears comparison with its original. In Croft’s (Shakespearean) sonnet ‘How Do You Spell Heroin’, the octave takes a cold, clear look at a phenomenon endemic in modern penal institutions.

Call me unreconstructed if you like,
  But if you really want to fry your brains,
  If you like riding backwards on your bike
  And pumping brown and brick-dust in your veins,
  If you intend to do another cluck
Until your rattling bones begin to melt,
  If you’re prepared to ache and feel like fuck-
  At least you should know how the stuff is spelled.

Prison-Brecht, maybe -or even (in its rhythms and didacticism) a kind of ruddy ‘ard Kipling. ‘Team Strip’, ‘Zoology’ and ‘Black and Blue’ (the latter about a convict with a penchant for tattoos) are all authentic and tenable examples of a recent sub-genre which might be classified as ‘poetry from The Slammer’. Each examines its subject forensically -though never dispassionately.
Sticky’s final section, ‘Letter to Randall Swingler Part III’, reads like a tour d’horizon of contemporary British complaisance and cupidity. (Randall Swingler was a minor, English, left-leaning writer, now deceased).

Because those flabby liberties of ours
  Were out of shape, they’ve lately been massaged.
  Since the assault on those Manhattan towers
  The secret state’s considerably enlarged;
  No doubt the state will find that those new powers
  (Six weeks’ detention without being charged)
  Will come in handy fighting girls in burkas
  Or striking low-paid public-sector workers.

and

These days it seems our government’s at war
  With those whose cause it used to once profess,
  Re-branded as the undeserving poor,
  A drain upon the hard-pressed NHS;
  The rich can’t help themselves for wanting more,
  While those who cannot help themselves get less.
  In Britain if you can’t afford a peerage
  Then you must travel all your life in steerage.

Both strength and weakness, this writer’s insistent topicality means some aspects of his work may date rapidly -that is, if it is not all, one day, governmentally censored. Strongly rooted in the here-and-now, a fair proportion of his interests (the British North/South divide, soccer, the erosion of civil liberty) aren’t necessarily the stuff of a traditional lyrical-aesthetic. If his undoubted gifts (wit, sincerity, great formal ingenuity and a flair for strong -if selective- historical analysis) lend themselves more readily towards the polemic than (say) the elegiac, then a number of his cautions are both timely and timeless. Piquant, rubescent in hue, a true original, this is vintage Croft.

©

Kevin Saving on

Bright Star (PG)
(Pathe, 2009)

Girl meets boy…boy dies.

It’s fairly probable that most of the sixty-or-so audience who clambered with me into the (adapted) lecture hall for this film-revival would have been familiar with its basic ‘plot’. I write ‘revival’ because Bright Star seems, unsurprisingly, to have been a commercial flop. It certainly ‘bombed out’ of my local multi-plex after just two days -and before I’d had the opportunity to view it.

Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, concerns itself with the courtship (‘affaire’ would be far too steamy a word) between the poet, John Keats, and the Hampstead seamstress, Frances (‘Fanny’) Brawne -played here by Abbie Cornish. Certainly, miss Cornish looks the part: the one surviving ‘ambrotype’ of Brawne, taken when she was fifty, makes for a a startling resemblance -if the obvious time-lapse is taken into account. Bright Star is, self-evidently, a labour of love. For attention to detail and vivid imagery it bears comparison with The Piano (1993) for which Campion won her previous ‘oscar’ (for ‘Best Director’). Beautifully shot, it coincidently affords its cast the opportunity to rig themselves out in some of the late-Georgian wardrobe which must, surely, have been moth-balled after the glut of recent Jane Austen adaptations.

At just under two hours in length, Bright Star somehow feels rather longer. At its centre, Ben Whisaw’s ‘Keats’ seems far too foaty-floaty, poety-poety. We know, from the accounts of his contemporaries, that little Johnny Keats, the man, could be (contrary to later reputation) quite a pugnacious individual. Yet, for all that, he also proclaimed his desire to live ‘a life of sensation’, and Campion’s direction keeps this faith. Her focus is on a series of tableaux: from the sensuous opening shots of a needle piercing cloth, through vistas of billowing, Hampstead washing-lines, via a scene wallowing in luxuriant bluebells, to the artfully-contrived bedroom full of exquisitely tailored butterflies, this movie basks in its own gorgeousness. Well over half-way towards its predestined conclusion, Keats’ house-mate, Charles Armitage Brown (the cheerfully simian Paul Schneider) exclaims exasperatedly of his rival-in-the-poet’s-affection, Fanny: ‘Why don’t you just bed her?’ and, probably, by this point, most of the audience would cheerfully assent to this proposition. This is a film in search of a more rigorous edit.

One or two directorial/Screenwriting liberties have been perpetrated. For instance, Brawne’s own love-letters (given the ‘voice-over’ treatment here) were not preserved -some, apparently, being buried -unopened- in Keats’ Roman grave. Also, we are not told that miss Brawne did, indeed, eventually marry -some twelve years after her first fiancee’s death, bearing her husband two children and dying (by then in her mid-sixties) in London, after many years spent abroad. She did, though, keep -and wear- the poet’s ring: women can be funny like that.

Kevin Saving © 2010

Kevin Saving on

Clive James, Angels over Elsinore, collected verse 2003-2008, ISBN: 978-0-330-45740-8 and Opal Sunset, Selected Poems 1958-2008, ISBN: 978-0-330-46817-6
both Picador (2008)

For those of us of a certain age, there was a time when Clive James seemed to be almost everywhere. He once occupied that same t.v.-cultural ‘rent a larynx’ niche which Stephen Fry has more latterly usurped. Articulate, opinionated chaps, the both of them, linked only by their degrees in English Literature, courtesy of Cambridge university. Of the two, the Aussie, James, was always the practitioner -publishing poetry alongside his other musings on matters critical, autobiographical and televisual.
Though we might have dipped (briefly) into Other Passports: poems 1958-1985, it was the advent of The Book of my Enemy: collected verse 1958-2003 which allowed us to realise that Mr James now very much wanted to be taken seriously. He’d let it be known that he ‘hung out’ with the ‘heavyweights’; that he saw himself not simply as a transiently witty media personality, but as a genuine ‘contender’.
Angels over Elsinore (‘verse’, one notes, rather than ‘poetry’) compares favourably with other, earlier, offerings. ‘Publisher’s Party’ reads like a somewhat wittier companion/antidote to ‘The Book of my Enemy’ -in which the protagonist now finds himself admitting ‘my new book’s hopeless and I’m getting fat’. This, self-deprecatory, tone is continued with James disclosing (in ‘Literary Lunch’) that he once learnt poetry ‘by heart’ in order to woo women. Nowadays, ladies might

…take it as a compliment
  Unmixed with any claim to more delight
  Than [their] attention. Such was my intent
  This morning, as I planned what to recite
  Just so [they] might remember me tonight…

(…whilst in other men’s arms). ‘Tramps and Bowlers’ (in which he observes the disciplined realpolitik of local vagrants who bivvy-down in an adjacent park) has some good lines

  …no one reports their nightly stay.
  People like me who take an early walk
  Just after dawn will see them start the day
  By packing up. They barely even talk,

  Loading their duffel bags. They leave no trace,
  Thus proving some who sleep rough aren’t so dumb.
  Tramps blow their secret if they trash the place…

but ends-up more than a little ludicrously, contrasting the vagrant’s street-wisdom with the quiet complaisance of his Crown Green Bowling neighbours:

  Which way of life is better? Don’t ask me-
  I chose both, so I’d be the last to know.

‘Anniversary Serenade’ contains a nice conceit drawn out just a smidgen too far -something of a habit. As ‘The Carnival’ rightly asserts

These wonders get familiar by the last
  Night of the run. A miracle fades fast.
  You spot the pulled thread on a leotard.
  Those double somersaults don’t look so hard.

Elsewhere in Angels over Elsinore James reverts to his more customary fare -in which leaden weights (slightly obscure classical allusions, fustian imagery and shameless name-dropping) stand-in for weightier leads.
It is noticeable that over half of James’ Selected is drawn from work produced during the five years prior to 2008: an editorial decision reflecting shrewd self-assessment. The earlier poems are inclined to carry too many high-cultural references, with nods towards Donatello, Mayerhold, ‘Phaeton’ (and their like) degenerating into a wearisome palsy.

‘Reticent’ is one adjective unlikely ever to have been levelled at Clive James. In the author’s own seven and a half page introduction to Opal Sunset I counted over eighty appearances of the personal pronoun ‘I’, and 22 of the proprietorial ‘My’. Even the first person singular, ‘Me’, reached double figures (to say nothing of ‘one’, ‘the poet’ or ‘mine’ etc). This narcissism is a pity because James, the critic, has some interesting things to say about the primacy of the individual ‘poem’ over that of the rather more diffuse notion of ‘a body of work’; about a ‘name’ poet’s perceived need to be seen to be productive; and about the artist’s imperative to be memorable above all else.
Angels over Elsinore and Opal Sunset both reproduce two wholly memorable set-pieces. In the former collection’s title-poem, James advances upon some splendidly ripe conclusions:

Hamlet himself knew just what to expect:
  Steady reduction of his body mass
  Until the day, his very coffin wrecked,
  Some clown picked up his skull and said, ‘Alas’.

In ‘State Funeral’ (in memory of Shirley Strickland de la Hunty, 1925-2004) he laments the passing of an athlete (and environmentalist) who’d won ‘seven medals in three separate [Olympic] Games’ whilst disdaining to compromise either integrity or physiology via the crafty infusion of dubious ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs.

When Shirley raced, the wings on her spiked shoes
  Were merely mythical, like Mercury’s.
  She did it unassisted, win or lose.
  The world she did it in died by degrees

  While she looked on. Now she is spared the sight
  At last. The bobby-dazzler won’t be back,
  Who ran for love and jumped for sheer delight
  In a better world and on a different track…

The momentum here is important. In eulogising someone else, James has, for one moment, lost sight of himself. After half-a-lifetime spent in production of the mildly entertaining -if distinctly clever-clever- could it be that this writer has finally gotten wise?

Kevin Saving on

John Carey, The Essential Paradise Lost, Faber and Faber, 2017

Bernard Cornwell, Fools and Mortals, HarperCollins, 2017

Nigel Mellor, Peace and War, Dab Hand Press, 2017

Henry Marsh, Admissions, Orion, 2017

Whom, amongst its modern readers, has not -if totally honest with themselves- occasionally wanted to ‘dock’ some of the more tedious passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost? This reviewer (who was first constrained to study John Milton as part of his ‘A’ Level syllabus forty years ago) will admit to an admiration for the breadth of erudition, for the dazzling imaginative leaps and for the sheer ‘word music’ of which that great writer was capable -but is often driven to distraction by the attendant verbosity. If, like myself, you prefer to take your Milton in manageable doses, then professor John Carey‘s new, abridged edition (around one third of the original’s length) might well suit your taste. Carey’s avowed intention is to rescue the masterpiece from its perceived neglect and, given the least justice, he will be successful in this. The Essential Paradise Lost, with its helpful annotations, cries out to be adopted as a set book in the current syllabus -I certainly wish I’d possessed it all those years ago. If we are to fully appreciate the Epic, then we really ought to know that in the mid-seventeenth century ‘awful’ denoted ‘awe-inspiring’ and ‘amiable’, ‘desirable’; that ‘fatal’ meant ‘fated’ and ‘genial’, ‘related to generation’.

Professor Carey wears his renowned depth of scholarship lightly and seeks only to render his subject both accessible and comprehensible. If Milton is essentially an Old Testament figure -fulminating, discursive and more-than-a-touch forbidding, then Carey is his New Testament counterpart: warm, consoling and able to provide a form of ‘justification’ that is no longer -if it ever was- in the Miltonic gift.

If forced to confess to one particular ‘guilty pleasure’, then I might well choose the books of Bernard Cornwell. ‘Guilty’ because these are historical novels abounding in derring do, skulduggery and, more than occasionally, mayhem. Samuel Johnson wrote somewhere something along the lines of ‘every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier’ but Cornwell provides us with factually-based, believable characters- who, if they did not exist, at least might well have done so; whose actions (if never wholly impossible) often display a brand of heroic ingenuity we can delude ourselves that we might, in similar circumstances, call upon. The Sharpe, Starbuck and Uhtred series represent the next best in the genre to C.S. Forester’s peerless Hornblower books

In Fools and Mortals Cornwell narrates his tale in the first person and using the persona of Richard Shakespeare -William’s younger brother, who is known to have existed but about whom not much else has survived. This is a bit of a departure from Cornwell’s usual fare but he carries his story off with his customary immersive scene-setting and imaginative plotting plus an occasional, slightly sly humour not usually associated with him. The elder Shakespeare is given some traits which, though plausible, are not wholly attractive. Cornwell is, above all else, a redoubtable story-teller whose work would have garnered far more literary honours had it not been so damnably readable.

Dr Nigel Mellor -visiting lecturer in psychology at Newcastle and Northumberland universities- has produced a new volume of poetry which displays something of Tolstoy’s Olympian cast of mind. In the first section of Peace and War, ‘Peace’, he looks back -in a series of imagistic tableaux- at the evanescence of things. ‘Incident in the fishing grounds’ has something of the authority of a twelve line All Quiet on the Western Front -except that it takes the form of a witness statement on the abrupt demise of a trawlerman. ‘If you’d just told me’ (on the subject of environmentalism) hovers just on the acceptable side of ‘preachiness’ -redeemed solely by its transparent virtue of being ‘Right’. I liked the quirkiness of ‘Control Freak’

I did not know

There was a wrong way

To blow dandelion clocks

but is the voice of ‘Negativity’

I am really not bothered what you think/ And although your words depress me/ They will not stop me/ Because all my life/ I have seen distant hills

genuinely Mellor’s own?

The final paragraph from ‘The tin plate from the Victorian mine’ has an arresting urgency:

Months later/ The recovery team found/ Besides the bodies/ Scratched on a tin plate/ “I don’t want to die in the dark”.

but I’ve subsequently come to doubt the authenticity of that apostrophe. Similarly, I’m sceptical as to whether Dr Mellor genuinely had a sister called ‘Tasneem’ who died in a Turkish earthquake in 1999. If I’m wrong I hope that he will accept my sincerest apologies but, if I’m correct, then I’m caused to doubt what ‘August 1999 -an earthquake in Turkey’ is doing in a volume which apparently seeks to establish its author as some kind of moral arbiter or ‘guru’.

I take further issue with Dr Mellor when he writes (in ‘Iraq Libya Syria Brexit…’)

Bring up, bring up the guilty men/ Who fooled us all along/ Without a plan if things went right/ Or a plan if things went wrong.

I believe he is incorrect, here, to conflate the decisions taken by a cabal of ‘insider’ politicians -bereft of much in the way of logical forward thinking, certainly- with the democratically endorsed, bloodlessly arrived upon recommendations of a plebiscite. On the other hand I can heartily concur when he cautions (in ‘Austerity’)

There will come a day/ When you will work/ Not for wages/ But the bread to fill your belly/ And on that day/ Banks will, as usual,/ Fail disasterously/ And ask you to eat less bread.

In ‘Private Health Providers’ (which echoes Martin Niemoller’s ‘First they came for the Jews’) he writes, with neo-Brechtian irony

First they came for the glasses

And I said nothing because I could afford glasses

Then they came for the teeth

And I said nothing because I could afford teeth

(…)

Then they came for the heart surgery.

The second section of Peace and War is, unsurprisingly, about ‘war’ but (aside from his pacifism) it’s unclear what Dr Mellor brings to his subject. He frequently elects to write his monologues using the ‘voices’ of female protagonists and this, for obvious reasons, is only partially successful. Poets have always felt the need to ventriloquize yet tend to work more authentically if they are able to bring a depth of knowledge to their subject. For instance, Sylvia Plath knew far more -and wrote better- about bees than she did apropos the Holocaust. Dr Mellor has a definite gift for the weighty aphorism and demonstrates exemplary concision. There is, however, a distinct didacticism here which -no matter how worthy its aim- is occasionally undermined by a slight contrivance in its delivery. Pace Marshall McLuhan, the medium is not the message: the ‘message’ is the message and if it comes delivered by someone wearing an obviously false wig and moustache it will not be believed -regardless of any of its other qualities. Sometimes one finds oneself both inverting, and then watering-down, Voltaire to bleat ‘though I agree with almost everything you say, I’m profoundly dubious about the way you choose to say it’.

Admissions is the thought-provoking and highly articulate follow-up to Henry Marsh‘s outstanding previous medical memoir, Do No Harm.

Marsh, though not entirely without the personal vanity incumbent upon the lifestyle of a consultant neurosurgeon, (previously one of the cosseted ‘Big Beasts’ of the ever-hierarchical NHS) is self-reflective enough to acknowledge that his place in the peckingvorder has been usurped by the ever-expanding cadres of micromanagocracy who have burrowed, termite-like, into its infrastructure. Whilst this process has emphatically not worked to his own advantage, he highlights how the greater impact has fallen, cosh-like, upon his patients. He candidly describes medicine, in Britain, as a ‘game of musical chairs… the music (…being…) constantly changed, but not the number of chairs, and yet there are more and more of us running around (…) The wealthy will grab all the chairs and the poor will have to doss out on the floor’.

As in Do No Harm, his reflections on a lifetime spent cutting into other peoples’ brains are scrupulous, compassionate and wise -especially in the way he applies them to his own, ageing somatic and cognitive abilities- and they clinically dissect the specious solace to be found in religion. He has ‘thought through’ the impact of his own numerous surgical interventions and has the honesty to admit (the ‘admissions’ of the title) that -in the words of another surgeon- he carries a ‘cemetery’ within himself: the cemetery of his own fallibilities; the ‘risk/rewards’ poorly assessed; the catastrophic failures (some still ‘alive’).

Marsh’s tale is an exceptionally humane take on the human condition. The humanity is, ultimately, in the humility.

Kevin Saving © 2017

Kevin Saving on the BBC Poetry Weekend 30.9-1.10.17

Stop All the Clocks: W.H. Auden in an Age of Anxiety (BBC2, 9 pm, 30.09.2017)

Strong Language Live (BBC2, 10 pm, 30.09.2017)

Betjeman and Me (BBC4, 7.10 pm, 01.10.2017)

Cornwall’s Native Poet: Charles Causley (BBC4, 8 pm, 01.10.2017)

Men Who Sleep In Cars (BBC4, 9 pm, 01.10.2017)

Lest we forget: Saturday the thirtieth of September was National Poetry Day and the BBC accordingly gifted us over half-a-dozen themed programmes in swift succession over that weekend. A veritable feast after a prolonged, prosaic famine.

The first of these, Stop All the Clocks: W.H. Auden in an Age of Anxiety, was a documentary of the type the corporation once used to do so well -before they discovered that the ‘lowest common denominators’ (soaps, celebs and culinary operas) were infinitely easier to mass-produce. Film-maker Adam Low revisited the scene of his (1982) The Auden Landscape, this time assisted by a team of ‘Talking Heads’ including James Fenton, Alan Bennett, Richard Curtis, the rather waffling Alexander McCall Smith and Paul Muldoon -who’s looking increasingly like a slightly bulkier replication of his mentor, Seamus Heaney, and who offered us the classic reflection that ‘the great poet is a product of their moment. If they are true to their moment, they will be true to all moments’. (Next week Professor Paul will be sharing yet more of his insights into the Space/Time continuum AND speculating as to just why Doctor Who elected to take up the option of gender re-alignment…). 

As so often, it is the archive footage which enthrals. Auden in America; Auden with his lover, Chester Kallman, in Austria; Auden on Parkinson; Auden in Oxford. THAT incredible voice: a strange hybrid of posh public school and the unaffected North. THAT delivery: so confident, matter o’ fact yet ever-so-slightly smug (like the guy who just knows he’s the smartest person in the room). And THAT face: someone once described it as resembling a wedding cake which had been left overnight in the rain. 

Inevitably, some of the recollections were more interesting than others. Richard Curtis was good value reminiscing about how his Rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral rekindled people’s interest.  James Fenton, too, came across well- recounting some of The Great Man’s idiosyncratic domestic foibles in Kirchstettin and noting how Wystan was partially ostracised in later life at Oxford’s High Tables. However, it is the work itself (seemingly as relevant now as when it was first written) which will continue to resound. We must ‘love our crooked neighbour/ With our crooked heart not least because I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn:/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return’.

Strong Language Live (compiered by Simon Armitage) was a salutary reminder of just what it is that we have lost. A number of contemporary poets performed some of their own work ‘live’ -and, by and large, the performances were spot-on. Such a pity, though, about the content. Isaiah Hull came out with some extraordinary Rapper-type effects -but left us little clearer as to just what it was which so excited him. Helen Mort and Kate Fox were more coherent, but their material still seemed desperately parochial. W.H. Auden continues to engage us -at least in part because he is a poet of ideas; of the ‘universal’ rather than the merely ‘particular’. That is why he will still be read in a hundred years time and why most moderns -frankly- will not.

Betjeman and Me (a repeat) could have been, more grammatically, re-titled ‘Betjeman and I’ or, more truthfully, ‘Me, Me, Me, Betjeman and Me’. I feared the worst early on when its presenter, the noted restauranteur and bon vivant, Rick Stein, claimed for his subject an ancestry similarly Germanic to his own (actually, John Betjeman came of Dutch, not German, stock). Showmen, the both of them -and with a shared predilection for wide-angle panoramic shots of themselves panned-out from helicopters- it is difficult to think of much else the two men (who never met) had in common beyond their Oxford degrees and avowed love of Cornwall. The evocative West Country locations were exquisite but, unfortunately, Stein was unable to resist the dubious temptation to display his vaunted culinary skills -supposedly ‘in honour’ of the long-dead laureate. 

It was equally unfortunate that most of the footage of Betjeman was in black and white -making it difficult to discern any truth behind the enduring legend that the old boy’s teeth were actually green. This programme was very much of the ‘Celebration of a National Treasure’ type, yet even amongst all the over-stuffed offal two small, delicious morsels emerged. Firstly, ‘Sir’ John (it can now be revealed) heartily disliked dogs -which he would disparage, generically, as ‘Turd Droppers’. Secondly, we got a replay of the (apparently unrehearsed) scene in which the septuagenarian and Parkinsonian writer -upon being asked if he had any enduring regrets- replied that he would’ve liked to have had more sex. As they say in show business: ‘Follow that, if you can!’

Cornwall’s National Poet was, if anything, even more fascinating than Stop All the Clocks -if only because Charles Causley has previously enjoyed far less media attention than the internationally-recognised Auden (his elder by a decade). Andrew Motion, Roger McGough, Gillian Clarke, the ever-available Simon Armitage and a host of Launceston friends, colleagues and former pupils dutifully trooped out to testify as to the man’s poetic integrity and essential decency. 

A Cornishman to his core, Causley had escaped the circumscribed world of his parents for war-time service as a stenographer in the Royal Navy (even though he was ‘afraid of the sea’). Following this he would return to ‘thirty years in the chalk Siberias’ of a Launceston teaching career -coupled with the dutiful care of an invalid mother. 

Although there was far more archival material available than might’ve been suspected, the poet himself -whilst always courteous- seems somehow more ‘guarded’ or ‘elusive’ than his better-connected, Oxbridge-educated coevals. Perhaps he felt less ‘entitled’ than they. While his ‘legacy’ of really first-rate work is inevitably ‘slighter’ than Auden’s, his very best poems (notably the signature pieces ‘Timothy Winters’ and ‘Eden Rock’) remain unsurpassed in their clarity and humanity.

The verse-drama Men Who Sleep in Cars is, with ease, the best thing this reviewer has seen come from the pen of the Northern-based poetry professor, Michael Symmons Roberts. The tensile colloquialism of its rhyming -and off-rhyming- couplets evinces a new direction to his work which, one hopes, he will continue to explore. 

Three men (introduced by an initially anonymous narrator, the ever-wonderful Maxine Peake) hunker down in their separate vehicles within the great belly of the Mancunian night. ‘Antonio’ is a petty-pilfering ex-junkie/ex-soccer-starlet, currently working in a call centre and ‘roughing it’ nocturnally. ‘Marley’ (housed in a white Transit van) is married but has thrown-over his career as a hospital lab-technician for the dubious rewards of life as a jobbing/largely jobless labourer. ‘McCullough’, sits in his (uninsured/untaxed) Mercedes, wearing creased designer clothes, sipping whiskey and listening -like his unknown, seemingly unrelated compeers- to an all-night radio show. Though none of them know it, they are linked by ‘Sarah’ (Peake) in a way which is plausible, ingenious and -upon its revelation- deeply moving. 

Both well-shot and beautifully acted throughout, Men Who Sleep in Cars is something of an off-kilter paean to the city of Manchester where ‘all the canals are thickened to ink/ and serenaders’ lungs are jugged with drink’.  Socially engaged and, ultimately, uplifting, this was tip-top television, unashamed of its own intelligence and sensitivity. Let’s have much more of the same, please, and soon.

Kevin Saving © 2017

Kevin Saving on

A Quiet Passion 

(Hurricane Films, 2016)
Writer/Director Terence Davies’ reverential homage to the nineteenth century poetic recluse, Emily Dickinson, succeeds in at least one of its intentions. As the end credits finally begin to roll, it is easy for the audience to feel that they’ve achieved a closer relationship with Emily’s beloved Eternity. The difficulty, here, is that in order to be able to summon the patience necessary for Cynthia Nixon’s two-hour tour de force (metamorphosing from Emma Bell’s feisty young New England student into a pain-wracked moribund mystic) you’d have, already, to be a total Dickinsonian Tragic. And -that being so- you’d still then be able to find much to quibble at in the historical tweaks of a story which wilfully endeavours to ‘tell it slant’.

One character, Annette Badland’s disapproving Aunt Elizabeth, seems to be a composite, whilst another -the peripheral Vryland Buffam (Catherine Bailey)- has been lifted from her place in the factual ‘wings’ to dispense little bubbles of would-be Wildean wit which, all too often, fall splat. Improbably, the Rev. Charles Wadsworth is shoe-horned in to fill the vacancy that is Emily’s Secret Sharer/Master/Looming Man, whilst a confrontational scene, between the indignant poet and her brother’s paramour, simply never happened.

All this notwithstanding, there is much to appreciate in A Quiet Passion‘s tender attention to detail. The ever-excellent Keith Carradine pours himself into his role as the family’s bewhiskered patriarch and the under-rated Jodhi May brings a delicate gravity to Emily’s put-upon sister-in-law, Susan. The whole film (parts of which were shot on location in the Dickinson’s actual garden) is beautifully lit by Florian Hoffmeister and it is difficult not to admire the effort which Davies has taken to cut Emily’s determinedly idiosyncratic words into the weft of his screenplay. No classic, this, but a worthy effort nonetheless.

Kevin Saving © 2017Kevin Saving on

Deaths of the Poets

Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts

Jonathan Cape (2017) 

Apparently ‘there is nothing deader than a dead major poet’ (because they) ‘cannot add to or subtract from their life’s work and legacy’ -whilst politicians, poachers and potmen presumably can? Also, ‘some poets are so dead that it’s hard to believe that they ever lived…’ –another, dubious, assertion from our two northern-based poetry professors who single-out (the rather unfortunate) Lord Byron as an example of this, speculative, phenomenon.

Deaths of the Poets is a follow-up to the duo’s Edgelands (which I must confess I haven’t read). It is a two-handed travelogue around Europe and America, sniffing out the casting-off places for some of literature’s more resounding names. It is also a vehicle for the anecdotes and apophthegms of our latter day Virgils -who seek to guide us among the unsleeping and poetic dead. 

We visit (in order) Bristol, Rome, New York, Laugharne, Dun Laoghaire -quite why, I’m still not sure- Minneapolis, Primrose Hill, Cambridge, Athens, Missolonghi (Greece), Liverpool, San Francisco, Hull, Boston (Mass.), Buckfast (Devon), Palmers Green, Arromanches, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Birkenhead, New Jersey, Amherst (Mass.), Bournemouth, Hartford (Connecticut), Northampton, Leeds, Vienna, Kirchstetten (Austria) and -phew!!- Ravenna. 

On the way we pick up some juicy -if sometimes chilling- titbits (e.g. the ‘beach buggy’ which hit and fatally-injured the New York School poet Frank O’Hara was in fact a jeep travelling at a speed sufficient to rupture his liver). We’re treated to some quite winning self-deprecation: Farley/Roberts are themselves terrorised at one point by a car-driving seven-year-old. Whenever they can’t get to the requisite death or burial site, the pair gazes in awe at the relevant oil painting instead.

‘The deaths of poets’ we are cautioned ‘matter because they become a lens through which to look at the poems’. Roberts/Farley are highly exercised by the perception that ‘novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive’. While they acknowledge and accept that there are many big-name poets for whom this paradigm does not hold true (Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams et al) they tug at the myth that ‘great poems only come when a poet’s life is pushed right up to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security’. 

James W. Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, is quoted: ‘being a published poet is (statistically) more dangerous than being a deep sea diver’. James C. Kaufman (of California state university) opines ‘if you ruminate more, you’re more likely to be depressed… and poets ruminate. Poets peak young. They write alone.’ Hmm… perhaps thesauruses should now routinely be issued with a governmental health warning?

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) is cited as being the begetter of this enduring fantasia of the ‘doomed poet’ driven by an excessive lust for self-knowledge towards their tragically early death -but the unmentioned John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), might make for an equally self-destructive prototype -and with a larger body of substantive work to his credit. 

Farley/Symmons certainly make some impressive connections, self-consciously vaunting their exalted access to the likes of Dr Carol Jacobi, Curator of the Tate; to Richard Heseltine, current librarian at the Brynmor Jones library, Hull; to Kate Donahue (John Berryman’s highly articulate widow); to the British Ambassador John Kittmer’s Greek residence and to Paul Horsak, Kirchstettin’s burgomaster (and custodian of W.H. Auden’s VW Beetle).

As the discerning reader may already have surmised, this curious hybrid of a book (neither scholarly disquisition nor layperson’s critical guide) is something of a curate’s egg. Twice, within ten pages, Donald Davie is introduced as ‘the poet and critic Donald Davie’ and then (another page on) he is invoked as ‘the poet-critic’. 

Somewhat gossipy and lazily-written, nor does Deaths of the Poets appear to be especially slavish in its adherence to historical fact. Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ villanelle was written two-and-a-half years before its author’s demise -not six as we’re told here. David Jones served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers -not the Welsh: if you’re going to rehearse this sort of fact, you may as well get it right. 

Then there are the missed opportunities: Symmons/Farley chug into Northampton by train and even make it as far as St. Andrew’s Hospital where they (rightly) note that John Clare died after many years in residence as a patient. They remark on the ‘echoes’ between this and Ezra Pound being incarcerated in the (misspelt) ‘St Elizabeth’s’, Washington -but seem unaware that Robert Lowell -upon whom they’ve already devoted a goodly amount of text in a previous chapter- was also a one-time resident at St. Andrew’s, Northampton.

Michael Farley and Robert Symmons write as an ‘item’ -continuously utilising the plural pronoun ‘we’ (which, after a while, begins to grate in its assumption of an authorial -and quasi-regal- prerogative). Occasionally this yields amusing ambiguities. On the ferry passage over to Fire Island (scene of O’Hara’s accident) our two slightly-daunted travellers ‘have exactly the same thought at the same time: we are undercover straights, voyaging out to a gay haven. Should we pretend to be a couple? We must seem convincing enough’. So, at least that’s clearer now: or is it… ?

Between these somewhat journalistic efforts Deaths of the Poets can sometimes be quite moving. We’re transported to the last resting place of Captain Keith Douglas -a tank man well-at-ease with the wide panoramas of the North African desert war, but painfully ill-prepared for the nightmare of a claustrophobic Normandy bocage that will, all-too-quickly, be the death of him. 

Rev R.S. Thomas is memorialised in Aberdaron, West Wales -the nostalgia here modified by the fact that Paul Simon and Charley Farley have met with, and interviewed, this most reclusive and dark-visioned of churchmen. William Carlos Williams displayed a similar sense of extra-vocational ‘service’ (in the latter’s case, medical) which is usually -and lamentably- absent from the modern semi-professional poet (or should that be the professional semi-poet?). 

Personally, I’ve never warmed to Williams’ free verse -which manages simultaneously to be both ‘portentous’ and ‘sparse’- but one vignette of the doctor-in-practice, recounted here, proves revealing. ‘Bill’ Williams, visiting a patient, conducts an impromptu, premature home-birth. Rolling up his sleeves, he tells the mother-to-be, “Look, we’re in this together, and we’ll learn from each other. Let’s you and I help this future citizen of the world join us”. After delivering a healthy baby girl, he sings the National Anthem. Marvellous. 

Death comes to us all -but it will take us in so many different ways. Hart Crane, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and (probably) Weldon Kees were all suicides. The relatively unknown John Riley (murder), John Keats (consumption), Dylan Thomas (alcoholic excess coupled with medical incompetence), Byron (a ‘fever’ coupled with medical incompetence) and Thom Gunn (to what basically seems to have been excessive hedonism) are some of the more interesting case histories.

Philip Larkin (and what’s he doing here?) died of cancer. (Semi) interesting fact: ‘three or four years’ after Larkin had left his ‘High Windows’ Hull flat, Sean O’Brien moved in. Mr Bleaney became Prof. O’Brien.

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts have isolated a slightly ghoulish topic and brought their eccentric, possibly rather geekish, talents to bear. They worry that Cyril Connelly’s famous ‘enemies of promise’ may have somehow morphed from oppressive domesticity into ‘a new and insidious enemy (…) the paralysing and overbearing presence of the dead (and their visitor centres with free parking) in our midst. Has the pram in the hall been replaced by the plaque on the wall?’ 

Deaths of the Poets, concentrating as it does on some of the end-games played out beneath those mushrooming plaques, cannot be expected to arrest this putative trend. It may even, by its very nature, exacerbate it. Somewhat against my own inclinations, I have come to support this publication’s larger thesis, contradicting Alexander Pope at one-and-the-same time: the proper study of mankind is Mortality. Dylan Thomas’ ‘towering dead’ surround us and ultimately they carry, contain and comprise all that can possibly survive of us.

Kevin Saving © 2017

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The Bughouse: the poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound

by Daniel Swift

Harvill Secker (2017)

To be clear: this book does not purport to be a rounded biography of Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972), perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential poetry-propagandist -and an indispensable midwife to Modernism. It deals primarily with the twelve and a half years between December 1945 and May 1958, during which Pound was locked-up in a Washington asylum, St. Elizabeths (no apostrophe) Hospital, indicted for ‘Treason’ towards the United States and placed continually under assessment as to whether he was fit to stand trial in a court case which -if he had been found guilty- would potentially have led to his execution.

Swift shows us a number of different Ezras refracted through the assorted prisms of various visitors and physicians. This authorial policy can be a little disorientating and, indeed, no firm conclusions are drawn nor, by design, much in the way of a balanced judgement reached. But, before we enter its echoing corridors, it is probably helpful to learn just how Pound was brought, at the age of sixty, to that institution he was to christen ‘the bughouse’.

After settling in Italy in 1924 the previously itinerant writer began to conceive an admiration for Benito Mussolini which would lead him to make a large number of pro-fascist, anti-Semitic broadcasts throughout the Second World War. Turning himself over to the occupying U.S. forces in May 1945, he was placed in a steel cage, six foot square, within a Pisan detention centre (where he seems, unsurprisingly, to have experienced a form of nervous breakdown). Subsequently repatriated by plane to Washington, he was put under the direction of a psychiatrist with the rather Bond-villain name of Dr Winfred Overholser, medical superintendent of St. Elizabeths -under whose supervision he would remain throughout the years of his confinement.

The Bughouse grants us only a limited insight into Pound’s treatment regime or his medication. In the nineteen fifties these would have been quite limited: Chloropromazine (Largactil) was the first anti-psychotic -also known as a ‘major tranquilliser’- and was initially licensed in 1953. Other treatment options would have included Hydro-therapy and what we now call E.C.T. -though, due to privacy laws, we cannot know if Pound personally experienced any of these. We do know that he consistently refused to have anything to do with manual labour (or ‘occupational therapy’) whilst on the wards. In one way Pound may have been extremely fortunate: 1949 was the absolute peak year for lobotomies performed in the U.S. with 5,074 of these ‘psychosurgeries’ carried out. 

Similarly, diagnosis of Pound’s mental state has proved slippery. In 1945 four doctors testified that he was suffering from a ‘Paranoid state’. A 1946 report, following a Rorschach test, isolates pedantry, ‘personality disorder’ and misogyny, concluding ‘while many of these qualities are schizoid and some of his attitudes paranoid, there is no evidence of psychosis’. A slightly comic undertone is introduced when the patient discerns ‘Abyssinians with whiskers’ within the Rorschach ink-spots and queries mischievously ‘are these supposed to reveal sex perversions?’. 

By 1952, the implementation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) further complicated things. One psychiatrist, a Dr Cruvant, recorded ‘Narcissistic Personality type’; but by 1955, Dr Overholser was isolating a -slightly nebulous- ‘Psychotic disorder, undifferentiated’. This may likely have been in response to a letter of the previous year from the U.S. Attorney General regarding a patient who was deemed ‘mentally capable of translating and publishing poetry but allegedly (…) not mentally capable of being brought to justice’.

The problem hinged around those wartime broadcasts. ‘I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yidds IF you can do it by due legal process’ (E.L. Pound, Rome, April 1943). Against a more sinisterly vengeful backdrop, William Joyce (a.k.a. ‘Lord Haw-Haw’) had been rushed to trial in London and hanged, in the January of 1946, on a technicality  -possession of a false passport- because, as a non-British citizen, he could not strictly be arraigned for ‘treason’.

At the time of his own indictment, sales of Pound’s work had almost completely ‘dried up’ and his publisher/friend, James Laughlin, made the decision to ‘sanitise’ further editions by concentrating on their more aesthetic, rather than polemic, aspects. The unexpected success of the Pisan Cantos (1948), winner of the Bollingen Prize (its panel of judges including T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell) prompted a rush of visitors to the incarcerated celebrity: Pound could now, by special dispensation, entertain them on the hospital’s well-tended and tree-fringed lawn. 

This was the beginning of the so-called ‘Ezuversitry’ -although the professor’s seminars still tended towards monologues concerning the machinations of F.D. Roosevelt and the iniquity of international Jewry. The bi-polar ‘Cal’ Lowell had venerated Pound since 1936 when they had first corresponded. By 1947 (when Lowell was appointed Consultant in Poetry -in effect U.S. Laureate- to the Washington-based Library of Congress) they shared a common history of imprisonment and a penchant for ticking-off presidents. Lowell was to take his friends Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell to visit the man whom he dubbed as both ‘uncle Ezra’ and ‘the marvellous monster’. It seems almost like a scene from The Silence of the Lambs with Pound as an only-slightly-more-avuncular Hannibal Lecter pulling the strings, spider-like, from his cell.

Although ‘uncle Ezra’s first experience of St. Elizabeths (built 1855) must have been harrowing -initially he was based in Howard Hall for the criminally and violently insane- he soon settled into a more orderly routine. Among his first visitors were Charles Olson (later of the ‘Black Mountain poets’) and his own wife, Dorothy, who was granted ‘power of attorney’ over him in September, 1946. 

Thereafter things began appreciably to improve. He was moved into the main hospital and allocated a comfortable room (with views towards the Potomac River) where he often read, wrote -and sang- late into the night. He held court to such notables as ‘Tom’ Eliot (theirs a symbiotic relationship of mutual patronage); William Carlos Williams (a friendship of long standing, vexed by an intermittent settling of old scores); John Berryman (their meetings commissioned by Pound, who saw this interlocutor as his ‘spy-hole’ into the world: Pound would later be incorporated into the Dream Songs), and Sheri Martinelli (artist and model, featuring in the Cantos, with whom Pound may -or may not- have conducted an affair within the hospital grounds. Friend to a number of the ‘Beat’ generation of writers, she was also something of a ‘muse’ to this much older man).

By the later Fifties a wave of sympathy was building for Pound’s release (there may also have been a sense that he had ‘done his time’). Luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish and Robert Frost made statements in his support. In January 1958 he finalised Canto 100 (which he had stated previously would conclude the sequence -though, in the event, it did not). A motion, in mid-April, to dismiss his  indictment for Treason was upheld -but he chose to remain within his ‘bughouse’ for a few weeks longer so that its dentists could complete their treatment of his troublesome teeth.

Ezra Pound would return to Italy on the liner Christofore Colombo, which docked in Naples on July 9th. A number of reporters came on board and asked him what his internment in an American asylum had been like. He replied “All America is an insane asylum” and posed for the photographers with his hand raised in a fascist salute. (For these final details this reviewer has had to consult Humphrey Carpenter’s monumental 1988 biography, A Serious Character). Pound’s last years were something of an anti-climax: a free man at last, he could no longer occupy the spotlight and lapsed into a strangely apathetic silence well before his own death in Venice, aged 87.

The Bughouse is in its own, slightly narrow way a fascinating -if occasionally annoying- read. Its author adopts a technique of personal contextualization, continually writing himself into the narrative (rather like the approach used, more successfully, by Olivia Laing in her 2013 study of alcoholic writers, The Trip to Echo Spring). This can jar: we are here to learn about Ezra Pound, not his biographer. 

On the other hand, this is a story with so many, individually irresistible, strands: what precisely is meant by ‘insanity’? When does a system of beliefs become ‘actionable’? Who bestows the right/privilege of free speech? And when, if ever, should this be redacted? Perhaps rather perversely (as a non-believer) I hold the Bible’s paradoxical counsel to be as helpful as any: ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly lest thou be like unto him… Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his conceit’ (Proverbs, 26). 

Sometimes -perhaps once every generation- someone comes along who, by their willingness to express the previously-unthinkable, opens a debate. Often this person may be muddled-headed themselves, unable to proffer anything much by way of a coherent solution -but they can help to highlight a problem.

For example, in early twenty-first century Britain it was almost impossible to venture the opinion, in ‘educated’ company, that one’s own country had been deliberately subjected to unacknowledged and unprecedented levels of immigration (solely in order to artificially deflate wage-levels) without also being labelled a ‘racist’, a ‘xenophobe’ or a ‘fascist’. Now this view has won a widespread -if sometimes vulgarly expressed- acceptance.

Pound’s vituperations towards a ‘Georgian’ body of literature hopelessly in thrall to out-dated notions of ‘gentility’ served as a much-needed corrective. Yet his own work, and thought, have become undeservedly canonical. 

Was he a madman? Or a genius somehow touched by divine fire? Perhaps the safest answer to these questions (and one which helped, rightly I’d contend, to preserve his life) is to suggest that he was merely possessed of an ‘unsound mind’.

Kevin Saving © 2017

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Deaths of the Poets

By Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts

Jonathan Cape (2017)

Apparently ‘there is nothing deader than a dead major poet’ (because they) ‘cannot add to or subtract from their life’s work and legacy’ -whilst deceased politicians, poachers and potmen presumably can? Also, ‘some poets are so dead that it’s hard to believe that they ever lived…’  -another dubious assertion from our two northern-based poetry professors who single out (the rather unfortunate) Lord Byron as an example of this last speculative phenomenon.

Deaths of the Poets is a follow-up to the duo’s Edgelands (which I must confess I haven’t read). It is a two-handed travelogue around Europe and America, sniffing out the casting-off places for some of literature’s more resounding names. It is also a vehicle for the anecdotes and apophthegms of our latter day Virgils -who seek to guide us among the unsleeping and poetic dead. 

We visit (in order) Bristol, Rome, New York, Laugharne, Dun Laoghaire -quite why, I’m still not sure- Minneapolis, Primrose Hill, Cambridge, Athens, Missolonghi (Greece), Liverpool, San Francisco, Hull, Boston (Mass.), Buckfast (Devon), Palmers Green, Arromanches, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Birkenhead, New Jersey, Amherst (Mass.), Bournemouth, Hartford (Connecticut), Northampton, Leeds, Vienna, Kirchstetten (Austria) and -phew!!- Ravenna. 

On the way we pick up some juicy -if sometimes chilling- titbits (e.g. the ‘beach buggy’ which hit and fatally-injured the New York school poet Frank O’Hara was in fact a jeep travelling at a speed sufficient to rupture his liver). We’re treated to some quite winning self-deprecation: Farley/Roberts are themselves terrorised at one point by a car-driving seven-year-old. Whenever they can’t get to the requisite death or burial site the pair gaze in awe at the relevant oil painting instead.

‘The deaths of poets’ we are cautioned ‘matter because they become a lens through which to look at the poems’. Roberts/Farley are highly exercised by the perception that ‘novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive’. While they accept and acknowledge that there are many big-name poets for whom this paradigm does not hold true (Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams et al) they tug at the myth that ‘great poems only come when a poet’s life is pushed right up to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security’. 

James W. Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, is quoted: ‘…being a published poet is (statistically) more dangerous than being a deep sea diver’. James C. Kaufman of California State University opines: ‘if you ruminate more, you’re more likely to be depressed… and poets ruminate. Poets peak young. They write alone.’ Hmm… perhaps thesauruses should now routinely be issued with a governmental health warning?

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) is cited as being the begetter of this enduring fantasia of the ‘doomed poet’ driven by an excessive lust for self-knowledge towards their tragically early death; but the unmentioned John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) might make for an equally self-destructive prototype -and with a larger body of substantive work to his credit. 

Farley/Roberts certainly make some impressive connections, self-consciously vaunting their exalted access to the likes of Dr Carol Jacobi (Curator of the Tate); to Richard Heseltine (current Librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull); to Kate Donahue (John Berryman’s impressive widow); to the British Ambassador, John Kittmer’s Greek residence, and to Paul Horsak, Kirchstettin’s burgomaster (and custodian of W.H. Auden’s VW Beetle).

As the discerning reader may already have surmised, this curious hybrid of a book (neither scholarly disquisition nor layperson’s critical guide) is something of a curate’s egg. Twice, within ten pages, D. Davie is introduced as ‘the poet and critic Donald Davie’ and then, another page on, he is invoked as ‘the poet-critic’. 

Somewhat gossipy and lazily-written, nor does Deaths of the Poets appear to be especially slavish in its adherence to historical accuracy. Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ villanelle was written two-and-a-half years before its author’s demise -not six as we’re told here. David Jones served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers -not the Welsh: if you’re going to rehearse this sort of fact, you may as well get it right. 

Then there are the missed opportunities: Symmons Roberts/Farley chug into Northampton by train and even make it as far as St. Andrew’s Hospital where they (rightly) note that John Clare died after many years in residence as a patient. They remark on the ‘echoes’ between this and Ezra Pound being incarcerated in the (misspelt) ‘St Elizabeth’s’, Washington -but seem unaware that Robert Lowell -upon whom they’ve already devoted a goodly amount of text in a previous chapter- was also a one-time resident at St. Andrew’s, Northampton.

Farley and Symmons Roberts write as an ‘item’ -continuously utilising the plural pronoun ‘we’ (which, after a while, begins to grate in its assumption of an authorial -and quasi-regal- prerogative). Occasionally this yields amusing ambiguities. On the ferry passage over to Fire Island (scene of O’Hara’s accident) our two, slightly-daunted, travellers ‘have exactly the same thought at the same time: ‘we are undercover straights, voyaging out to a gay haven. Should we pretend to be a couple? We must seem convincing enough’. So, at least that’s clearer now: or is it…?

Between these somewhat journalistic efforts Deaths of the Poets can sometimes be quite moving. We’re transported to the last resting place of Captain Keith Douglas -a tank man well-at-ease with the wide panoramas of the North African desert war, but painfully ill-prepared for the nightmare of a claustrophobic Normandy bocage that will, all-too-quickly, be the death of him. R.S.Thomas is memorialised in Aberdaron, West Wales -the nostalgia here modified by the fact that Robert Michaels and Paul Symmons have met with, and interviewed, this most reclusive and dark-visioned of churchmen. 

W. C. Williams displayed a similar sense of extra-vocational ‘service’ (in the latter’s case, medical) which is usually -and lamentably- absent from the modern semi-professional poet (or should that be the professional semi-poet?). Personally, I’ve never warmed to Williams’ free verse -which manages at one-and-the-same-time to be both ‘portentous and ‘sparse’- but one vignette of the doctor-in-practice, recounted here, proves revealing. ‘Bill’ Williams, visiting a patient, conducts an impromptu premature home-birth. Rolling up his sleeves, he tells the mother-to-be: “Look, we’re in this together, and we’ll learn from each other. Let’s you and I help this future citizen of the world join us”. After delivering a healthy baby girl, he sings the National Anthem. Marvellous. 

Death comes to us all -but it will take us in so many different ways. Hart Crane, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and (probably) Weldon Kees were all suicides. The relatively unknown John Riley (murder), John Keats (consumption/tuberculosis), Dylan Thomas (alcoholic excess coupled with medical incompetence), Byron (a ‘fever’ coupled with medical incompetence) and Thom Gunn (to what seems basically to have been excessive hedonism) are some of the more interesting potted case histories. Philip Larkin (and what’s he doing here?) died of cancer. (Semi-) interesting fact: ‘three or four years’ after Larkin had left his ‘High Windows’ Hull flat, Sean O’Brien moved in. Mr Bleaney became Prof. O’Brien.

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts have isolated a slightly ghoulish topic and brought their eccentric, possibly rather geekish talents to bear. They worry that Cyril Connolly’s famous ‘enemies of promise’ may have somehow morphed from oppressive domesticity into ‘a new and insidious enemy (…) the paralysing and overbearing presence of the dead (and their visitor centres with free parking) in our midst. Has the pram in the hall been replaced by the plaque on the wall?’ 

Deaths of the Poets, concentrating as it does on some of the end-games played out beneath those mushrooming plaques, cannot be expected to arrest this putative trend. It may even, by its very nature, exacerbate it. Somewhat against my own inclinations, I have come to support this publication’s larger thesis, contradicting Alexander Pope at one-and-the-same time: the proper study of mankind is Mortality. Dylan Thomas’ ‘towering dead’ surround us and ultimately they carry, contain and comprise all that can possibly survive of us.

Kevin Saving © 2017

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Clive James, Poetry Notebook 2006-2014 (2014) and Sentenced To Life, Poems 2011-2014 (2015) both Picador.

 

Although his nearness to death is frequently advertised, the polymathic TV personality, essayist and novelist Clive James continues to publish his reflections on numerous poets, the current state of poetry (as well as the stuff itself). And, of course, long may he do so.

Poetry Notebook is something of a pot pouri of occasional pieces originally commissioned by the likes, inter alia, of Poetry (Chicago), Wall Street Journal, Quadrant, the Financial Times and TLS. Though it does not, as James freely admits, constitute a fully thought-through, unified theory of poetics, some interesting views emerge. James defines himself as a ‘die-hard formalist’ but allows that ‘too many poems without rhyme, without ascertainable rhythm -without almost everything- have been unarguably successful. Although he ‘loves’ John Ashbery’s ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ he declares that he is unable to understand large chunks of it. He finds the later Wallace Stevens too intent in writing after the manner of ‘Wallace Stevens’ and avows, perhaps incomprehensibly, that ‘nobody should mind incomprehensibility as long as incomprehensibility is not the aim’. Whether we should take this to mean that its okay to write impenetrably/obscurely/meaninglessly, but only if it happens through incompetence, is anybody’s guess. James professes to dislike the prevalent anglophone literary orthodoxy and takes an antithetical delight in the well-wrought, felicitous and, above all, startling phrase.  He observes, tellingly, that ‘today’s deliberately empty poetry can get a reputation for a time […] but it will never be as interesting as how it got there’. He seems to find the influence of William Carlos Williams to be particularly reprehensible: ‘When he realised, correctly, that everything was absent from [Walt] Whitman’s poetry except arresting observations Williams, instead of asking himself how he could put back what was missing, asked instead how he could get rid of the arresting observations. The result was a red wheelbarrow…’ He continually revels in analysing technique and tries to demonstrate how so many of the acknowledged masters were, above all else, resourceful technicians. Unfortunately, some of the more recent salon gunslingers whose cause he espouses (in book reviews) fail to establish themselves as quite the exemplars he would have us believe them to be.  Championing the reputations of Les Murray and Peter Porter may be excused as an act of Aussie-mateship, but little -at least in the extracts quoted here- justifies his encomium for the American Christian Wiman -erstwhile editor of Poetry (Chicago)- unless it is the sympathy flowing towards one very ill man from another.

 

Elsewhere, in ‘On a second Reading’ we find an in-depth analysis of a poem by yet another Antipodean, Stephen Edgar.

 

MAN ON THE MOON

     Hardly a feature in the evening sky 

As yet –near the horizon the cold glow

     Of rose and mauve which, as you look on high,

     Deepens to Giotto’s dream of indigo.

 

      Hardly a star as yet. And then that frail

      Sliver of moon like a thin peal of soap

      Gouged by a nail, or the pairings of a nail:

      Slender enough repository of hope.

 

      There was no lack of hope when thirty-five

      Full years ago they sent up the Apollo-

Two thirds of all the years I’ve been alive.

      They let us out of school, so we could follow

 

      The broadcast of that memorable scene,

      Crouching in Mr Langshaw’s tiny flat,

      The whole class huddled round the TV screen.

      There’s not much chance, then, of forgetting that.

 

      And for the first time ever I think now

      As though it were a memory, that you

      Were in the world then and alive, and how

      Down time’s long labyrinthine avenue

 

      Eventually you’d bring yourself to me

      With no excessive haste and none too soon-

      As memorable in my history

      As that small step for man on to the moon.

 

The poem continues satisfactorily enough towards its perfectly-acceptable two-point landing, but it has already reached its apex -and James is quite right (though, perhaps not harsh enough) in criticising Edgar’s decision to self-reference another of his own poems a few lines later. Thus a near-perfect flight-plan got tipped on to an unfortunate, and easily-preventable, trajectory. Ironically, James is commenting upon a number of his own characteristic flaws: the tendency to both personalise and over-elaborate, coupled with a compulsion to press on further into the territory of lesser reward. Yet he is also undoubtedly right in praising his compatriot’s ingenuity and under-appreciated talent. The rest of the poem can be found quoted in Poetry Notebook, together with further information on how to access Edgar’s other work.

 

James packs a lot (not always completely congruently) into his Poetry Notebook: reflections in ‘Listening to the Flavour’ as to how we got to ‘Here’; ‘Five Favourite Poetry Books’ (Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur and Larkin); an attempt at a re-evaluation of Louis MacNeice; ‘Product Placement in Modern Poetry’ (which examines the use of brand names in the work of E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot and Betjeman among others); ‘A Stretch of Verse’ considers the centrality of ‘the memorable bits’ within much longer work and some marginal -yet discernable- talents like those of Michael Donaghy and John Updike get their working-over. Eventually we recognise that James is constantly thinking about poets, poetic craftsmanship and Poetry -probably in that order- and still retains his extraordinary ability to conjure up, at short notice, a few thousand words, both impressively argued and wittily referenced, which can be positively guaranteed to hit their target approximately half the time.

 

*                              *                              *                              *                              *

 

Egotists can die hard. 29 out of the 37 poems contained within Sentenced To Life might be read as valedictory. They express sorrow at the transience of life; self-reproach for past misdemeanours; pleas for forgiveness; self-pity and, most memorably, a kind of puzzled joy at the unexpected vividness concomitant with an increasing certainty of imminent extinction. Clive James’ poetry, indeed much of his other output, has always displayed a tendency towards self-absorption -rather as if, like van Eyck in ‘The Arnolfini Wedding’, he can’t quite bear to paint himself out of the picture. Such flagrant egocentricity can be hard for others to take. Not since Thomas Hardy’s sequence, ‘Poems of 1912-’13’, has a writer so determinedly and publically charted his reactions to an event in his own personal -and presumably private- life. On occasion it can be salutary to remind ourselves of our own almost total lack of significance, although few worthwhile poems would get written from this perspective. 

 

Notwithstanding the afore-going remarks, I sense that ‘Japanese Maple’ may well establish itself as a classic:

 

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

     So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

     Breath growing short

     Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

     Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

 

     Enhanced, in fact. {…}

 

     My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.

     Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

     What I must do

     Is live to see that. That will end the game

     For me, though life continues all the same {…}

 

Slyly opening in the third person, the poem initially teases its reader that it is concerned with a deciduous scrub, Acer Palmatum, before abandoning the deception to reveal that, yes, it was really about its author, Clive James, all along. Still, there is a poignancy and beauty peeking through the rather ‘knowing’ craft:

 

     Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

     This glistening illuminates the air.

     It never ends.

     Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

     Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

 

Splendidly simply and  simply splendid.

 

James is highly exercised by fame. In the rather pointless ‘Only the Immortal Need Apply’ he appears to be fascinated by just how many art celebrities the adventurer and putative poet, Gabriele d’Annunzio, could have met in Paris in 1909. In ‘Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes’ he worries about the apparent incongruities that surround Asma al-Assad (British born and raised), her status as a fashion icon -and the malign practices of her husband, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader. Again, the poem’s attention is misplaced: despots have always chosen attractive trophy-consorts, and had them tricked out in the finest. The stocking-filler ‘One Elephant, Two Elephant’ is really just a 117 line vers libre safari-anecdote -half-interesting at best. ‘Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye’ takes 36 lines of free verse to do nothing more startling than to explain its own title. It is the ‘Valediction poems’ by which this collection must stand or fall (and it currently appears to be selling well -for a book of modern poetry, that is). Clive James’ status as an immediately-recognisable ‘Celebrity Brand’ is, for the moment, assured. He was, in the past, frequently ‘on the telly’, after all. He may even, quite possibly, be ‘The Last Formalist’ (Felix Dennis, who had long-since said everything he’d got to say -but who kept on saying it anyway, died in 2014). It is probable that James would like to be seen ‘signing off’ with something of the magnitude of Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ -though, of course, Larkin wasn’t actually dying when he wrote his own valediction (he had another seven years still to live). Even allowing for James’ mis-focus -he is like a man wearing reflective sunglasses with the mirrors facing the wrong way round- there is a kind of magnificent narcissism going on here:

 

I still can’t pass a mirror. Like a boy,

     I check my looks, and now I see the shell

     Of what I was. So why, then, this strange joy?

     Perhaps an old man dying would do well

     To smile as he rejoins the cosmic dust

     Life comes from, for resign himself he must.

 

(From ‘Star System’) and

 

And so begins another day of not

     Achieving much except to dent the cot

     {…}

 

     More/  And more I sit down to write less and less,

     Taking a half hour’s break from helplessness

     To craft a single stanza meant to give

     Thanks for the heartbeat which still lets me live:

     A consolation even now, so late-

     When soon my poor bed will be smooth and straight.

 

(From ‘Elementary Sonnet’) and

 

…I breath the air

     As if there were not much more of it there

 

     And write these poems, which are the funeral songs

     Which have been taught to me by vannished time:

     Not only to enumerate my wrongs

     But to pay homage to the late sublime

     That comes from seeing how the years have brought

     A fitting end, if not the one I sought.

 

(From the conclusion of ‘Lecons de tenebres’ [or ‘Lessons of darkness’]).

 

In ‘Sunset Hails a Rising’ James achieves a coda which touchingly encapsulates his acceptance of the inevitable with clarity, grace and wistfulness.

 

Very few people get to find the end they sought and James, at least, is fortunate in believing that his own might be somehow ‘fitting’. It can sometimes be helpful in assessing a writer’s work to enquire just what, if anything, were their intentions towards their readership (outside the obvious ones of attempting to elicit either ‘Admiration’ or ‘Financial Reward’). James, I fancy, is making the pardonably human effort to solicit -or ‘manipulate’- his reader’s sympathy -and committing the understandable error that this is even partially achievable. The traditional poetic virtues of self-abnegation and stoicism espoused by a number of the Victorians (W.E. Henley and Christina Rossetti for example) appear now to belong not only to a different century -but, almost, to a superseded species of humanity. Clive James in his own lifetime has enjoyed far more than Andy Warhol’s (infamous) ‘fifteen minutes of fame’  and it appears to have afforded him both the opportunity to find a form of self-justification and the vehicle from within which to express his belief in the justification of Self.

Kevin Saving © 2015

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The Poet’s Tale – Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales, Paul Strohm, (Profile Books. 2014)

Ours is -perhaps, paradoxically, rather shockingly- an ‘unshockable’ age. We have, nearly all of us, grown up listening to an increasingly raucous litany of revelations detailing the rapacity of our leaders: the parliamentary-expenses fiddles; the bankers’ bonuses; the serial depredations of police and health service ‘fat cat’ executives. It should not, therefore, come as any great surprise to find our nation’s first ‘major’ poet -still both widely read and admired- embedded in a fourteenth century farrago of graft and patronage, as documented here by professor Strohm in this fascinating and insightful examination of a single year in the career of Geoffrey Chaucer.

There have, of course, been previous -and similarly informative- dissections of literary anni mirabiles (notably from the Shakespearean scholar, James Shapiro) but 1386 was recognisably a pivotal moment in Chaucer’s life: a year in which he completed Troilus and Criseide; a year during which he lost nearly everything, but still the year he followed his own dictum by ‘maken vertu of necessitee’ and found the inspiration for his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales.

Not the least impressive aspect of this book is the manner in which Strohm interweaves evocations of late-medieval life with plausible conjecture as to the poet’s own very personal circumstances. By 1386 Chaucer had lived over London’s Aldgate south tower for a dozen years in what seems to have been a spartan, noisy, ‘tied’ quarters (probably only one sixteen by fourteen foot room) dingily-lit by a couple of arrow-slits in the wall. His job (held over the same time-frame) as ‘Controller of the Wool Custom’ -procured for him by a cabal led by John of Gaunt and the four-time mayor of London, Nicholas Brembre- was ‘demanding, moderately compensated’ and ‘mildly complicitous’. His duties would have required him to be present at the Wool Wharf on most days, and for the entirety of the daylight hours. They would have entailed meticulous record-keeping and accounting. Significantly, the wool trade was at that time the ‘kingdom’s principal money-spinner’, easily its biggest export commodity and a well-tapped source of revenue for the crown. Additionally, it was notoriously corrupt.

During his tenure Chaucer, a vintner’s son, would most-likely have lived apart from his socially-superior and even more upwardly-mobile wife, Philippa, and their children. By the end of it, already middle-aged, he had completed over half of his eventual literary output -though none of it appears to have enjoyed widespread circulation. He would, Strohm surmises, have possessed a reputation no greater than that of ‘a middling bureaucrat struggling to stay afloat in Westminster and London’s troubled factional waters’. As a parliamentary member for Kent he seems at best to have been a marginal Richardian place-man, unable to further his patron’s cause at a time when that monarch was the subject of repeated criticism. Certainly, if the satire The Parliament of Fowls is anything to go by, its author held no great regard for the practices or personalities of Westminster. In political terms, he had backed a number of the wrong horses: Richard the second’s star was on the wane, as was that of the wool-profiteer, Brembre (condemned to death by the ‘Merciless Parliament’ just two years later). The haughty John of Gaunt (Chaucer’s future brother-in-law) was absent in Spain, pursuing an ultimately futile claim to the throne of Castile.

Strohm judges that ‘a balanced view of Chaucer’s performance in office would have him neither as a hero nor as a villain, but as a man who kept his head down, an enabler. Unfortunately the activities he was enabling were those of Nicholas Brembre, a grasping, faultily principled, and ultimately deeply unpopular man’. At least the poet seems not to have benefitted greatly through peculation: he is known to have suffered financial difficulties in the late 1380s. The end of 1386 found him unemployed and having his ‘grace and favour’ Aldgate gatehouse -from within which he would, almost certainly, have witnessed the ‘peasant’s revolt’ of five years earlier- effectively repossessed. He would go on to live a curiously itinerant existence in Kent over the next three years, borrowing extensively from -though never ‘crediting’- the work of an Italian near-contemporary, Giovanni Boccaccio, while crafting his own timeless patchwork of stories, purportedly told by a gaggle of disparate pilgrims.

If we latter day pilgrims live in a period of near-universal political disenchantment, it might possibly be of comfort to reflect that our forebears, if no worse than ourselves, were demonstrably no better. Strohm’s Chaucer is someone we might relate to: a pawn among players; relatively-speaking, a victim; someone inextricably involved in -even compromised by- their times, without ever being wholly degraded by them.

Kevin Saving © 2016

Ted Hughes – The Unauthorised Life, Jonathan Bate (William Collins, 2015).

The way we judge our contemporaries reflects at least as much illumination upon ourselves as it does upon them. Ted Hughes’ ‘legacy’ seems to be both  ‘mythic’ as well as literary -with the preponderance now weighted firmly towards the former. His fraught marital relationship with Sylvia Plath continues to overwhelm his own poetic standing -so much so that when a 2003 study of the two writers was entitled Her Husband, the intended irony barely registered.

It is gradually becoming clearer that the vast majority of Hughes’ finest work occurred in his first two published collections, The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal (both written before he was thirty). For the remainder of a highly-prolific career his verse veered between the weirdly phantasmagorical (Crow), the unevenly confessional (Birthday Letters) and the downright bad (Gaudete).

Jonathan Bate, professor of English Literature at Oxford University, published a landmark biography of John Clare some years back, but here his touch seems much less certain -possibly because a good many of the people to whom Hughes was close are still very much alive. That said, although highly sympathetic towards its subject, this book is (thankfully) no hagiography. Hughes’ personal warts- his philandering (amounting almost to satyriasis), his somewhat kooky fixation with astrology, his hopelessly naïve flirtation with Thatcherism, all come through. But so, too, do the personal kindnesses, the passionate environmentalism and the quasi-mesmeric capacity to attract the enthusiasm of the young. The salient facts of Edward James Hughes’ life, a life encompassing many sadnesses, are already sufficiently well-known and this new biography rehearses those facts in an orderly, balanced and accurate -if sometimes exhaustive- manner. A feeling persists, however, that Hughes was at least partially culpable of attempting to manipulate his own ‘legend’ and that Bate has sedulously followed him in assigning a greatness of stature that was, somehow, never quite there.

Kevin Saving © 2016

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Guy Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen, Yale University Press (2014)

A small landslide of material has been published this centennial year to commemorate (or should that be ‘cash in on’?) the anniversary of the commencement of a war which was supposed to ‘end all wars’ -but ended up being the casus belli for more subsequent bloodshed than any other one previously. While I’m fairly certain that this slight (three hundred page) biography of that conflict’s star-testifier will not earn its author -a Senior Lecturer at Liverpool Hope University- either massive acclaim or great wealth, it will at least further publicise his subject’s testimony -and may even, perhaps, go someway towards highlighting the sheer plenitude of ‘the pity’.

 

To be clear: this Wilfred Owen does not add anything substantial to our knowledge of a man who was, after all, aged only twenty five when he was killed-in-action. Two decent biographies -Stallworthy’s (1974) and Hibberd’s (2003)- already exist. However, Cuthbertson has read around his subject eclectically and comes up with unexpected, if tangential, insights such as:

 

Britain’s two great anti-war icons of modern times, Wilfred Owen and John Lennon, were lower-middle class dreamers who longed for a    

   more glamorous elsewhere and began their artistic lives in unremarkable bedrooms in quiet semi-detached Merseyside homes, growing up

   about six miles and forty years apart.

 

One should note that their respective dates of birth were actually forty seven years apart, but the point is, I think, an interesting one.

 

If this volume’s early chapters present a few too many ‘he must have seen’ and ‘he would probably have witnessed’ type constructions (so well beloved of the modern biographer) -then speculation of this kind probably does have its place -especially in the case of the obscurely born or the under-documented. Not that Owen would have ever felt these categorisation applied to him. A colossal snob, he appears to have attempted to pass himself off as the son of a baronet whilst teaching English in Bordeaux -this may possibly have been a kind of homage to one of his heroes, Percy Shelley. 

 

Cuthbertson’s Owen is a short biography which both could, and perhaps should, have been shorter still. Its author displays an annoying tendency to throw in references to such luminaries as St. Bernadette Soubrious (of Lourdes), George Melly (the jazz singer) and sir John Hawkwood (the medieval knight/mercenary) who bear only the most tenuous of relationships to his doomed poet. Though evidencing a well-stocked mind, these disquisitions must ultimately be recognised for what they are: padding. Only when Owen eventually ‘joins up’ does Cuthbertson’s narrative become compelling. Prior to ‘The Front’ Owen comes across as a pretentious poseur (his early writings are largely execrable -though treated for the most part with kindness here). Now, at last, both Cuthbertson and Owen finally have something to say. If nothing else, the Great War introduced Wilfred to the sights, sounds, experiences -and perhaps more than anything else the personalities which, and who, would allow him to find both his own -and his generation’s- ‘voice’. The text includes some stimulating reflections concerning how Owen’s (for its time) oddly itinerant quasi-Welsh, Liverpudlian, Shrewsburian  upbringing would have made him look at vowel sounds in a slightly different outsiderly way. This may even, it is conjectured, have played a part in the writer’s discovery of ‘para-rhyme’. To this day (as in the current stage adaptation of Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Owen is routinely portrayed as having a Welsh accent. Though we are not in possession of any recording of his voice, all that we know of the man makes it likely that as a self-concious son of the provinces would have affected the clipped, received pronunciation  of the English ruling classes. Wilfred Owen ‘discovered’ para-rhyme (or half-rhyme or Slant-rhyme) and put it in his tool-kit because he listened and he read and he mimicked and because it was the right time for him (or someone else) to make that synaptic connection. And because he was -for just that one, final year- a great poet.

 

By the time of his death Owen’s senses were, he felt, ‘charred’: he no longer removed the cigarette from his mouth as he wrote his condolences to the next-of-kin. Though never wholly a pacifist, he had come to abhor war. In ‘Strange Meeting’ he writes of ‘The pity of war, the pity war distilled’ and in his draft preface to the book of his poems (which he would never see printed) he famously observed ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity’. This readable, well-researched and occasionally fascinating biography somehow never quite manages to flesh out the good-looking (almost ‘pretty’) moustachioed face that peers back at us eternally from the black and white photos. And that, too, is a pity.

Kevin Saving © 2014

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Four Smokestacks and a Joker

Ian McMillan, The Tale of Walter the Pencil Man (2013)

Tom Leonard (Trans), Mother Courage and her Children (2014)

Richard Skinner, the light user scheme (2013)

Pauline Plummer, From Here to Timbuktu (2012)

All published by ‘Smokestack Books’.

Domenico Iannaco, Galahad (2010), ‘Joker’.

 

 

The Tale of Walter the Pencil Man (words by Ian McMillan, Drawings by Tony Husband) is, at the very least, about something important: the futility and utter wastefulness of human conflict. It tells the fictional story (in Sesta Rima -ababcc) of two soldier-artists of the First World War -and is lodged securely in the O what a Lovely war!/ Blackadder 4 school of history. The ‘bard of Barnsley’s narrative sets off promisingly enough:

 

  Imagine this: A pit village, 1914;

  A row of houses standing in the cold.

  A covering of snow has settled on the green

  A winter sun is shining like fool’s gold.

 

but sags somewhat in the middle, with predictable rhymes and wavering, uncertain scansion. Some of the action is, militarily at least, unlikely -whilst Husband’s black and white artwork tends towards the schematic. If this production’s ‘Marketing-Target’  is the ‘Young Adult’ age-group -and this is uncertain- then The Tale of Walter the Pencil Man might well form a useful primer to the events of 1914-’18. It obviously means well.

 

*

Bertholt Brecht’s play, Mother Courage and Her Children has deservedly become a classic since it was first penned in the late thirties. This new translation -by the scottish writer Tom Leonard- sees the eponymous anti-heroine kitted-out with a Glaswegian patois, though this can seem intrusive. For instance, the Michael Hofmann/John Willett version (of 2006) renders Mother Courage’s closing song as follows:

 

The new year’s come. The watchmen shout.

  The thaw sets in. The dead remain.

  Wherever life has not died out

  It staggers to its feet again.

 

Leonard’s new text reads:

 

It’s springtime noo! move on your way

  the snow’s aw gone. the deid lie deid

  but you that huvny died as yet

  the powers that be, they still do need.

 

Two other examples (from the end of Scene Eight):

 

From Ulm to Metz, from Metz to Munich!

  Courage will see the war get fed.

  The war will show a well-filled tunic

  Given its daily shot of lead.

  But lead alone can hardly nourish

  It must have soldiers to subsist.

  It’s you it needs to make it flourish.

  The war’s still hungry. So enlist!

  (Willett)

 

From here to there, from there tae aw place

  Courage’s cart will aye be seen

  The war needs guns tae fill its bawface

  For guns and bullets always keen!

  But guns an bullets willny fill it

  Its regiments they still need you

  so join the ranks, get to your billet

  sign up yir name tae fight the noo!

  (Leonard)

 

Having no expertise with the German tongue -has, I wonder, Mr Leonard?- I feel unqualified to discuss which translation is the more authentically ‘Brechtian’. I do have decided views about the on-going corruption of standard-English for anything other than the most compelling reasons (Leonard has plenty of ‘previous’ here). Perhaps Brecht’s use of a highly idiosyncratic Hamburg dialect provides some excuse -and it is certainly possible to see how ‘dramatic’ or ‘comic’ tension might be enhanced by this stratagem. This new ‘take’ is definitely a very ‘free’ one, but I don’t believe that it represents much in the way of ‘improvement’ on versions already in existence. That said, I’m certain that Mr Leonard would readily concur with Brecht’s own  ‘notes’ to the play, which avow that (during wartime)

 

the big profits are not made by the little people. That war, which is a continuation of business by other means, makes the human virtues fatal even to their possessors. That no sacrifice is too great for the struggle against war.

 

*

 

the light user scheme, by Richard Skinner, consists of an imagistic series of 74 vignettes of which the first, ‘all she wants grows blue’ is, for me, the most successful:

 

She would stand alone in front of a mirror, stroking her belly,

      looking for signs.

  She was puzzled by the expression she saw there.

 

  Later, he climbed up to the bridge and looked out over the city.

  It was night and the city orange.

  The river swelled, folding in on itself, like muscles.

 

It is possible to see that this vignette is ‘about’ a failed pregnancy and its aftermath. Other examples, with titles like ‘the secret springs of action’ and ‘tanzania, 1903’ are more uncertain in their intentions.

 

‘Mule Tours’

 

  As a boy, he saw a white horse plummet into water

  and longed to join the circus in Colorado.

 

  As an old man, he saw a white horse standing

  just off Piccadilly Circus, with steam pluming from its back.

 

  He thought the horse had maybe lived a double life

  as he knew a crazy mother

  would suspect of her wicked daughter.

 

Of course, none of this is new: Ezra Pound was writing ‘observations’ like this over a hundred years ago, as In a Station of the Metro (1913)

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  petals on a wet, black bough.

 

The most dangerous drawbacks to this kind of novelistic technique are opacity and/or pretentiousness, coupled with an openness to parody by the likes of Tim Key (and, indeed, others).

 

Diana glides in her diaphanous gown

  towards those distant dunes;

  merging with the Saharan night

  she drops, swift as a falling star,

  to take a dump.

 

*

 

The best of the four ‘Smokestacks’ reviewed here has to be Pauline Plummer’s From Here to Timbuktu, which features a modern-day group of tourists/pilgrims travelling to the  west African town for an assortment of reasons. Plummer exhibits a sharp eye for both characterisation and telling detail, satirising her protagonists (mostly in Chaucerian Rime Royal). As her holiday-makers tell their tales and enact their little dramas, the writer makes no attempt to disguise her inspiration by Boccaccio and Chaucer. One is inclined to forgive Ms Plummer her occasional wrenched-rhymes for the trenchant points she makes regarding western consumerism and spiritual-bankruptcy. The Californian lawyer, Rick, is a good case in point:

 

He’s fifty but he doesn’t have a wife

  Just dates a string of pretty girl friends

  But dumps them when he’s bored -a fun-filled life

  Where thrilling pleasure doesn’t have to end.

  Commitment free. Like an oyster you depend

  Upon yourself -buy health, install a gym

  To build up pecs plus pool for daily swim.

 

Plummer has written a warm and witty, ultimately moving, narrative -and I even gained the impression that she may actually have been to Tombouctou. It helps.

 

*

Domenico Iannaco’s Galahad (Joker, 2010) is an intense, ambitious meditation suffused by a species of speculative, apocalyptic, quasi-Arthurian symbolism which inhabits a world far removed from any which this reviewer has encountered. A brief example will have to suffice (from ‘The Temptation. The Price’, -eighteenth of twenty four cantos):

 

The androgynous Dragon,

  comes full of the

  Tragic perverted Beauty of a suicide

  And bouncing

  On his knees, he sees the spiders

  And the snakes chewing the throat of a comic hero,

  In a vortex of dull surfaces,

  To be there and then.

 

That Iannaco is a talented illustrative artist is amply evidenced by this edition’s striking front cover, ‘Beatrix’ -depicting a girl who is at once both haunted and haunting. I love the illustration, but was less enamoured of the writing-style.

Kevin Saving © 2014