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DELICATELY PLAYFUL, PLAYFULLY GRIM AND JUST HAVING FUN WITH HATS E. A. Markham reviews poems from Scotland, New England and London |
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| ROBERT CRAWFORD ANNE STEVENSON KEN SMITH Robert Crawford is one of those clever (or lucky) poets able to claim local and metropolitan identities, an ideal habitat for the poet which he describes as ‘cosmopolibackofbeyondism’. In an essay bearing that title he declares: ‘Poets should be simultaneously central and marginal, to such a degree that it is no longer clear which is which’. It would be too crude (and politically incorrect) to say that in Crawford, Scottishness represents part of that local or marginal space and that what one might call his ‘Establishment’ presence — Oxford, Radio 4, LRB, joint-editorship of The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945, his own poetry published by Cape, etc — represents, in an important sense, the central. But there is something seductive about this poet which turns you away
from literary sparring. His 1999 book, Spirit Machines still lives in
the memory for its quirky humour The Tip of My Tongue refines Crawford’s strengths, the delicately-playful poems to family or just evidence that the poet is having fun (‘Ferrari’). And, yes, there is the tendency to continent-hopping (name-dropping? Or, if you prefer, an unusually wide range of reference) within the poems, but there is a sense here, as in the poem for Iain Crichton Smith, that this serves the need to situate the importantly-local into an international context. The political poems here seem more than political statements, more subtle than the hint of literary archaeology that one got, say, from that early anthology-piece, ‘The Herr-Knitt Bunnett’. From the good-hearted send-up of ‘the auld enemy’, in nation-language to the commentary on foot ‘n mouth in ‘The Bad Shepherd’ where ‘all / Diseases of sheep go huddled together in one / Beltane burn ...’, we are taken beyond mere cheering or jeering. And even that (from the margins?) need to proclaim ownership of the world, as in ‘Planatest’, brings unexpected pay-off: Roads, keep right on to the end of yourselves, Overall, there is an upbeat quality, an expansiveness — of vocabulary, of vision, of wanting to embrace the world — all held firmly but lightly in check by the poet’s (in many cases) neat couplets. So, if this poetic flight is sometimes plumbed by stubborn ‘Scots and off-Scots words’ we stumble over, the balloon — if that’s the metaphor — nevertheless still carries this ambitious poet sailing over much of the known world. Cosmopolybacktobeyondism, indeed. Anne Stevenson is your ideal drawing-room guest, intelligent but not too strenuous. This (born in Britain) American’s suspicion of America was articulated way back in the 1960s, where she had a nightmarish image of that vast country threatening its own citizens’ living space, its two shores ‘hurrying towards each other’ while those in the middle ‘Pray to the mountains and deserts to keep them apart’ — this from her first book, Living in America (1965). Nearly 40 years later, in A Report from the Border she seems concerned not to be trapped within boundaries — of taste, of geography, of inherited guilt, etc. The collection is subtitled ‘New and rescued poems’, and the rescued element is evident in a sort of reworked tidiness in poems like ‘At the Grave of Ezra Pound’’ and ‘Cashpoint Charlie’, a fun poem about a dosser next to the hole in the wall (that form of convenience to people with money, that affront to others). What does the ‘reworked’ hint tell us? An early, printed extract from what might be the central poem here, ‘Green Mountain, Black Mountain’ reads After April snow This becomes: After April snow, such a green thaw. It’s not that this section of the poem (there are two verses) has been reduced from 17 to 13 lines, it’s the sense that what seemed a satisfactory line-by-line pay-off earlier, (justifying the breaks) now gives way to a new tone, ‘reflecting’ given equal weight to ‘experiencing’, a sense of something recurring. The private grief of the death of a mother is plugged in to the current of the natural world in a more secure way. In the process, that suspect image of ‘brown Japanese muscles’ is somewhat de-emphasized — the new line helps — from suggesting something possibly racial, now to something possibly cultural. (We — of a certain age — have all got old poems we want to rework, so this is not a casual interest.) Someone in a review paid Stevenson a backhanded compliment for outwriting her younger contemporaries. Curious: would we suddenly expect Walcott, at 73, to start writing less well than persons half his age who haven’t yet perfected the craft? But there is something autumny about sections of A Report from the Border: when that feel is represented, say, by the poem ‘Without Me’, (things living on after I’m dead, sort of thing) the effect is wistful. On the other hand we get a poem like ‘Branch: Line’, not, alas, an indictment of Mr. Branson, but a metaphor for a life (for Life!) leading nowhere much. Meaningless. ‘Rooks squabble in a maple. / A blackbird ferries an enormous worm to a nest. / Staring cows bend again to their munching. // Meaningless life, I’m reading in the TLS, / a nexus of competing purposes… // God is impossible. // Life is impossible. // But here it is.’ Reassuring, this. There are those poems like ‘Red Hot Sex’ and the sensual ‘Skin Deep’ that rebel with playfully-grim fun or with irony. Then, there is the poem about terror. It’s not actually the one entitled ‘New York Is Crying’, invoking Whitman, el al., responding to the events of (according to the American calendar) 9.11; it’s the title poem of the collection, that shows us daily, endlessly at war, the ‘havenots’ and the ‘havelots’. In the two middle stanzas we get a brutal restatement of why the poor must help the rich. As the poem ends, note the role of ‘Literature’: This from the party of useful words. From the other The most substantial piece is the eight-page meditation, referred to earlier, that ends the collection. ‘Green Mountain, Black Mountain’ in a pleasing and unstrained variety of forms, revisits a childhood New England, contemplates the Welsh landscape (at times in a somewhat mystical way); and inhabits a mother’s space, perhaps to exorcise the mother who died, her writing ambition unfulfilled. And more. A Report from the Border is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Ken Smith is one of the few poets around whom you could take in large doses. In this new selected (Poems 1980-2001), the first idle interest for this reader was whether it included ‘Fox Running’, the poem — which brought Smith’s work, really, to the awareness of other poets — where a man symbolically called Fox tries to survive in 1970s London/England. So, this collection is post ‘Fox Running’. Flicking through — a poem for Eddie Linden here — portraits from the past we think we know. Smith’s reputation as a poet of the ‘city’ is deserved, the ‘London Poems’ here — a sequence of 30 twelve-liners in unrhymed quatrains — revealing an environment that is unwelcoming, an existence that is precarious — a world of rusting cranes, broken streets, the threat (in some cases the reality) of violence. ‘I own’, says the dosser, ‘two wrong shoes and a tartan blanket’. It’s often night, the pubs might be shut, the last bus gone, ‘couples’ going their separate ways, parting sharp-edged as the poet’s wit (‘Leaving the Angel’); and, of course, there is prison. These stories hint at resistance; there could be hope — if people managed to break out of their ‘Circle Line’ mentality. (‘Not talking on the Circle Line’.) But, balancing London is Smith’s, what one might call, Foreign Correspondent mission — from a South America that might have been a joint creation of Garcia Marquez and Graham Greene, to a more journalistically-recognizable Eastern Europe. There is something a bit James Fentonish here, this need to report back from far reaches of the world. But this suits Smith’s style, as he is essentially a story-teller. This in no way diminishes the value of the ‘report’. Among these substantial 'mini-epics', is ‘The Shadow of God’, recalling the martial exploits of the Ottoman emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent (1494(?)-1566) on his march from Constantinople to Belgrade and beyond. Of course due reference is made of 16th century history repeating itself in the 20th century: ‘Overhead the high jets in the clear blue / corridor of cloudless sky above Serbia, / flying the line of the great rivers / whose names are the same...’, and the poem debunks the heroic pretensions that make war attractive. This is in no way an attempt (I believe) to absolve the Serbs from their own spectacular acts of barbarism. The unsettling quality, for me, of this poem, is that it shadows so successfully the flame of those classic ‘songs from the Serbian people’ (Collected most recently by Milne Holton and Vasa Mihailovich, U. of Pittsburgh Press) that we find so hard to credit. (Remember, Suleyman captured Belgrade in 1521.) On another note, we see the poet having fun. The five-page, ‘The Great Hat Project’, which Smith performs magnificently, though, perhaps a trifle long (and these Bloodaxe pages are especially large) redeems itself as a ‘list’ poem by the quality of its wit. This is better than trawling the internet for material which would hardly give you a greater range of quotable hat (‘Into the valley of hats rode the six hundred’. Or ‘The hat in the poetry of Andrew Locomotion’, etc.) Boys having clean fun. If one’s mother had been a reader of this poetry, and had co-opted the phrase ‘The hat up hat creek... without a paddle’, she might have been more expressive of her discontents. Enough of hats. A similar comic pattern can be discerned in ‘The Chicken Variations’, but the pay-off is much greater. First, the chickens are on their CB Radio (‘Whisky Oscar Chicken. Whisky Oscar Chicken /calling Foxtrot, come in Foxtrot.’ Then we get a bit of theology, and the confusions of translation from one language to another; then the philosophy and the folklore, etc. The result is faultless comedy, yes, but also a reminder of the vanity of human wishes, and an admission of the tenuousness of human life. The delights of this volume continue to unfold: what a brave man to write a love poem to Kate Adie? (‘a bronze leathery sort of lady, dressed for disaster’s season, / a tough mouth woman, and like me a nighthawk. Ah, Katie,’) and the ‘Lovesong for Kate Adie’ ends We fuck all night, Katie & me, I never flag, And if that’s not enough, who on the circuit could deliver a Tommy Cooper like the man himself! One section of the poem-sequence ‘Abel Baker Charlie Delta’ starts: Manwalked in to a bar Get well, Ken Smith.
E.A. Markham's last book of poems, A Rough Climate, was short-listed for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize. His new publication this year is the long poem, John Lewis & Co. (Anvil), premiered at this year's Hay Festival.
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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