Luke Kennard Difficult for the Poet, Not the Reader

CAROLINE BIRD
Watering Can
Carcanet £9.95

ANTHONY HOWELL
The Ogre’s Wife
Anvil £7.95

JOHN ASH
In The Wake of the Day
Carcanet £9.95

Those already familiar with Caroline Bird’s work will be delighted by the scale and range of her new collection. Watering Can is as inventive and poignantly funny as Trouble Came to the Turnip, but feels somehow intensified, the themes richer and sadder: a move from the bar at night to its café in the evening.

                                          …Sometimes
I feel like one tiny lightbulb in a huge flashing poster
advertising peanuts.
(‘Detox’)

It’s no minor stroke to draw creation out of weariness – and the cast of Watering Can is decidedly heavy-laden. Even the bit-players are ‘on the 5,000th day of their temporary job’. Bird’s incidental asides are always just as well crafted as the overall conceits, poem by poem, which is as it should be: the kids listening to the sound of gunfire on their iPods, Mr Bird’s tattoo which ‘has its own weight-lifting programme’. Presently it strikes me that I would have to make whole sequences out of the number of ideas in just one of Bird’s stanzas and I hiss with jealousy.

She works extremely well with conceits, refrains and inverted cliché. In one of my favourites, ‘The Monogamy Optician’, it’s the shop-worn phrase ‘I only have eyes for you’ that gets the once-over:

He sent for the nurse in the living-mushroom apron.
She said, ‘Your peripheries will be surgically removed’.
I said, ‘Do you never sneak a glimpse on the underground?’
She caught my words in the gas-mask like a baseball glove.

Or the exquisite comic timing of ‘Bow Your Head and Cry’, which takes the metaphor of love between two people ‘dying’ and dramatizes it with ambulances, curious old women and the narrator’s attempts to save face:

‘It’s not dead yet. Look, its legs are still moving’.
Just then its legs stopped moving.

There is playfulness here – as in ‘Wedding Guest’ with its epigraph ‘to be read in an indignant voice’ – but this is ultimately serious stuff. Bird never makes you smile inwardly without tying that smile into a knot, and hitting you with a sad, bittersweet truth. ‘The Videos’, for instance (‘Someone gave me a video of your entire life’), is creepy, surreal and immediately engaging – the perfect opening poem – but it’s also as contorted (and as cruel) as a Nabokov narrative. At times the sadness is more redolent. The heartbreaking coda of ‘The Doom’, for instance, where ‘I am writing myself off.’ repeats until fade. Or the fates of those said to show promise in ‘The Golden Kids’, a series of final sentences:

He waited for his mum to die
then started playing drums in a band
called ‘mad for the mad’, wearing eyeshadow.

[…]

He became the thought of his wife in a bar with a man.

[…]

She went to build an orphanage on the other side of the planet
and left her goldfish behind. By goldfish, I mean children.

It’s bold, original, emotionally raw work and there aren’t many places to hide as a reader. Maybe in satire. You can feel momentarily superior to the poltroons and gadflies of ‘University Poetry Society’ (‘I’ve got more flair than most public school boys, / I’ve leapt train-barriers wearing a kimono…’), but you’re ultimately as uncomfortable as the ‘Poet in the Class’, patronized by your audience’s passive-aggressive teacher ‘Aren’t we lucky to be here?’. There is no comfort, for instance, in art; I have never seen the unavoidable irony of trying to ‘make a name for yourself’ as a writer skewered so effectively as in a single line from ‘Poetry as Competitive Sport’: ‘Firemen flip coins for a burnt child: “heads I’m hero” ’. ‘Peaked’ (and it’s in the shape of a peak) tackles artistic insecurity through childhood disappointments: ‘my fifth birthday bombed. / “I preferred your early work”, said a girl with measles’. On my third reading I was especially struck by a number of the shorter poems, which felt like ultra-condensed short stories:

When the shivers of shame have stopped, she said,
I’ll just hop on a bus and go back to my husband
but first – this might sound odd – I want to sit
in your airing cupboard for a couple of hours.
(‘Closet Affair’)

There’s a kind of satire which says ‘Isn’t this person ridiculous?’ But the best stuff, such as that found here, pokes you in the ribs as you laugh with it, your eyes shut, and says ‘Uh, sorry, but I was talking about you’. And it’s much funnier – generously, bitterly, terrifyingly funny.

The theme of imprisonment runs through The Ogre’s Wife like the hard metal stick in a rubber cosh. Anthony Howell is an underrated, veteran poet who spent five years last decade teaching creative writing in prisons, and some of the poems here feel directly inspired by that stretch. Take the raw humour of ‘Counselling’:

My advice is this: if you must assault a person,
Offer them a hand up afterwards. Others don’t.
And if you will add rape to the assault,
Never indulge on a regular basis.

The poem concludes that, well, at least you’re not genocidal: ‘A decent person does it by surprise’. ‘Bacon’ (prison slang, as the endnote informs us, for sex offender) begins in eerie, murderous fantasy and concludes in ‘the grate of gates, / Verrucas, and the sour stench of age’. Elsewhere the prisons are civilian, self-made. ‘Childhood’ uses the conceit brilliantly to capture the strange blankness of early youth:

Other children … They were other lands.
Between release and re-arrest for tea,
God knows what we got up to.

And that’s what it feels like looking back, almost fondly, on boredom. Oh, to be bored by the blank expanse of time! ‘Ode to a Routine’, the long poem which makes up the second section of the book is a malediction on the daily commute, starting with waking up, the morning ritual with its dull pains and small compensations, coffee, toast…

What’s ahead but the heaviness of what lies
Ahead? The whole day, the whole fucking
Day of it…

With the panoply of rush-hour workers, ‘Teachers, nurses, plumbers, tea-boys, chefs…’, we are herded by our own routines, ‘Duplicates of those at the other end / Of the city hurrying across the lights’. What makes the poem resonate is Howell’s honesty. The constant minuscule lusts and irritations that dull our powers of observation are here meticulously observed:

No need to change though. That at least’s a relief.
No stampeded steps or gradient passages,
Or girl ahead, who reaches round to tug
Her top down at the back, to read your mind.

This isn’t to say the whole thing’s gloomy. The Ogre’s Wife’s first section is all nature, wine, sex, and ideas. The freedom, I suppose, before re-arrest by routine, duty or the state. ‘A Kingfisher’ begins:

Frequenting a corner of an eye,
Like a thing one didn’t really see,
Its dodges reconcile me
To the way you get undressed
Affording less than a glimpse!

I have a lot of time for that exclamation mark, simultaneously evoking a Clare-like exultation and a somewhat less Clare-like sexual impatience. Howell has a lovely, natural sense of metre too (‘Our first blue sky is laced with spring-tipped twigs’), which feels as hard-won as it is fluent. And ‘Wittgenstein’ is an accomplished sestina which makes you kick yourself for not noticing how ideally suited Wittgenstein’s ideas are to the form before.

Although Robert Nye has called him ‘the best of Ashbery’s disciples’, I can’t say I detected much of an influence in the work itself. Howell’s poetry is earthy and straightforward and, critically, sounds like Howell: a British poet writing poetry round about now. Ashbery’s poetry sounds like a sack full of politicians, eighteenth-century romantics, journalists, robots and clowns thrown off a bridge with a Dictaphone. Maybe ‘Parable’, with its collective-first-person abstractions in the style of Ashbery’s Three Poems, starts in that mode:

No one had given it much thought before,
Supposedly it went on, as everything must, somewhere,
Occupying its place in the mazy tarantella
Of existence…

But the ‘it’ in question is a deliberately vague human act reclassified as a crime (and the poem could be set in the present or the future); once it’s been labelled illegal people take a certain transgressive pleasure in committing it. This is the titular ‘Parable’, the poem becoming a critique of the justice system:

That is why we are queuing here to be sentenced,
Or wreaking on you all an excess of illegality
In this growth area generating horror and employment.

On the surface that may look like a postmodern deconstruction, but it’s actually something much more morally committed. The long title poem ‘The Ogre’s Wife’ is at once a departure and of a piece with the rest of the collection. Rendered in perfect terza rima, Howell riffs on a theme from Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, an apologia for a mass-murdering rapist from the perspective of his wife – who, unable to stop him killing, witnesses many of his murders from the front of the car:

The view

Gave me a way to assess her worth. Did she tarry at
The stake, or did she embrace it greedily? And did she
Seek my glance in the glass? Oh, I was worse than Iscariot,
In her estimation, I guessed; but if she succumbed too easily
Then I’d report to our Lord that she was not for Paradise.

This is occasionally couched in contemporary terms (‘Psychiatrists may learnedly insist…’). It feels one part grisly period drama to two parts stricken meditation on the contemporary and the personal: that our talent, as human beings, is to justify to ourselves almost anything.

If you’re anything like me you’ll have converted your cowardice and chronic inability to save money into a chippy disdain for the well travelled. ‘Oh yeah?’, you’ll sneer, ‘Broadened your mind, did it? Changed your life, did it? Learned how to juggle fire, did you? Pshaw!’. I’ve never felt this way about John Ash; with Ash you feel as though you’re in the company of Bashō rather than someone who’s just come back from a gap year. He can share his discernment, often in architecture or music, with even as unrefined a reader as myself; his intellectual curiosity is contagious. I now know more about Alexander Zemlinsky, about Byzantine history, about the women of Kars. And I’m glad that I do.

‘Tramway’ documents the burgeoning public transport system of Istanbul, a development Ash formerly deplored, but appreciates now that it’s arriving; no need to argue with an obstinate taxi driver:

There will be nothing improvisatory,
No anarchic detours in the style of Charles Ives.

Ash’s earlier collections were characterized by a surreal spin on traditional travel poetics – the actual appears as another effect within fantastic anti-narratives and digressive linguistic meditations, thousands of glittering, fictional Byzantiums. So it feels like an imposition to enter Ash’s house in ‘Partial Explanation’:

What do I do? I look out the window
At the windows opposite and admire their keystones,
Which are adorned with fronds and scrolls, but am
Disappointed to observe that they are painted
An ugly shade of oxblood red…

To an extent this is a direction Ash has been moving in since The Anatolikon. There are still eccentric, tangential journeys, external and internal, but as in ‘Finding Prostanna’, they feel that much more real, no longer filtered through the dream-like screens of the early work:

It was easy to find. It was only five kilometres
Away, but they had told us what they thought
We wanted to hear, not anything they knew.
So, benignly misinformed…

That said, Ash’s uniquely evocative way with imagery is in as fine form as ever; check out ‘Prose for Ebubekir Akbulut’:

These are powerful enigmas occluded from sense
Like the lump in the floor at the foot of the stairs
That looks as if it ‘heaved a sigh’, and then froze.

Ash’s analogies have always made me want to run through the streets yelling how good they are. Fans like me will and should be pleased that this is another brilliant John Ash collection where the ancient rubs along with the modern, where civilizations crumble into a teacup, where the honesty of the tone is matched by the arrestingly surreal description. What stands out this time though, perhaps more than ever, is the confessional tone:

I never really wanted
To put my thing into anything,
Or anyone. The prospect seemed
About as exciting as, say,
A logarithmic table, and I
Am not of a mathematical bent.
( ‘Poem: I Never Really Wanted’)

In ‘Impossible’, Ash portrays his child self as, ‘thin, but greedy’, capturing those moments of self-recollection when you want to cram your whole hand into your mouth and howl silently.

I told my kind and sentimental English teacher
That Wordsworth wrote a poem about an idiot,
Because that was what he was. On

Another occasion I was so bad my mother
Fled the house to spend a night with her sister.

He can no longer recall exactly what he did. This strain of autobiography is something of a departure for Ash, but everything about the expression is customarily perfect, right down to the placement of the italics.

The short midsection of the book contains some versions of Cavafy’s poems. I’m usually wary of ‘Afters’, but a brief comparison with Aliki Barnstone’s 2006 translation reveals subtle but significant differences. Compare, for instance, the exquisitely petty, wounded tone of ‘A Byzantine Nobleman Writing in Exile’. Ash has ‘But now, / In exile (may that viper, Irene Doukas, / Rot in Hell for it), and quite appallingly bored’, which seems to me pitch-perfect. This is translated in Barnstone as ‘But in exile here (may the vicious Irini Doukas / Burn in hell) and terribly bored’ – to lesser effect, I feel. The nobleman, an expert on synodical law and the desert fathers, has now taken to writing about classical mythology (the Byzantine equivalent to Paganism) in, by his own judgment, brilliantly formed octets and sestets. In Barnstone’s version, he concludes ‘This correctness, perhaps, is the reason they condemn me’. In Ash (again, far stronger): ‘It is this very perfection that – / If I may hazard a guess – makes them traduce me so’. Nobody praises a line of poetry by calling it ‘correct’– and the prissiness of the tone of Ash’s nobleman is so much richer. The Barnstone, perhaps like the original poem, explores a concept. Ash’s rendition gives us a breathing, blinking, immediately recognizable character. The main thing, of course, is that these Cavafy poems fit so well in the middle of In the Wake of the Day, presenting our own vanity, dissembling, sadness and beauty unchanged over however many centuries.

The collection rounds off with some thoroughly touching poems in memory of Kenneth Koch. Ash has never been a poet of multiple masks and personas. His voice has always been consistent and recognizable, whether on an impossible journey to a fictional shrine or pastiching Manchester’s town planning. So maybe what’s new here is the directness. This is the real city, the real man, and these are the decisions he’s made to get there.

Directness is a virtue in poetics as much as life, and all three of these poets are an absolute pleasure to read. These are the kind of books you can throw at people who don’t really get poetry and say, ‘Well that’s because you never bloody read any, isn’t it?’. I’ll leave you with the opening lines of ‘Difficult’:

Poetry is always difficult
Like a maladjusted child,
But perhaps it should only be
Difficult for the poet, not the reader.