MARTHA KAPOS
My Nights in Cupid’s Palace
Enitharmon £7.95

SARAH WARDLE
Fields Away
Bloodaxe £7.95

A poem is an invention, in the old and in the current sense of that word: a thing found (composition being then an uncovering of what is already there); and a thing made up. A similar dialectic is revealed in the fact that Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, is also the goddess of memory. A poem is an act of imagining and of remembering. The sense that the poem is already there and wants discovering or recovering by the act of fitting words together may lend conviction and persuasiveness to the enterprise. The sense that, in fitting words together, we are making it all up, making something out of nothing, may incline us to be sceptical about the product. For what status does it have? It is only made up, an idea, a figment, ultimately arbitrary. In practice a poet might (and perhaps should) feel drawn both ways: towards the conviction that the thing is already there, to be remembered, recovered, uncovered; and towards the uneasy knowledge of being its only begetter.

Conceits are a particular form of inventiveness in poetry and must constantly face the sceptical question: how do they stand in truth? Because, I take it, the premise for any poet is an obligation to try to tell the truth about the realities we live in. Conceits have to be asked whether they really serve that attempt to tell the truth. Or are they an end in themselves, not binding, arbitrary, proof only of the facility of their author’s mind?

A poem in its entirety usually works to defamiliarize the subject it is treating; and a conceit may be one strategy among many serving that end. Why the need to defamiliarize? Because we grow insensible. We need to be continually shown things anew; then we recognize them, with a shock, for what they really are. So a conceit, properly understood, has a serious purpose and will be part of the poem’s whole essential endeavour, which is to quicken us to new experiences or to what we think we know already, but no longer feel.

And feeling, in this matter, is all important. John Donne, a highly intelligent and even intellectual poet, invariably enlivens the reader’s feelings by his conceits. We can ask more of a conceit than that it give us the little thrill of a passing bright idea. We want a sustained effect, a lingering, developing, troubling reanimation. Altogether, we can ask more of a poem than that it make a point. A poem exhausted as soon as its point is made, is a poor thing. We want an enlivening opening up of our imagination and our moral being, not a decisive closure on one point.

All this by way of preamble to a discussion of two first collections in which defamiliarization, often by ingenious conceits, is programmatic. I mean, it seems a principle constantly practised. Sarah Wardle’s sponsors are right to call her book ‘a propitious debut’ and ‘a highly auspicious beginning’. She has great strengths. She is ingenious and inventive, which helps her to be also abundant and various. But all gifts in poetry come with a risk. She has more than 90 poems here, half of which, I feel sure, will not survive her own critical scrutiny in a year or so.

In the least successful her inventive faculty produces something merely whimsical (‘Poets’ Parliament’, ‘Chained Library’, ‘Latin Love’, for example); or inventiveness becomes an end in itself, the idea (and it is only an idea) runs on and on, merely because it can, the conceit mainly illuminates itself, its own facility. Thus in ‘Underground’, ‘Toast’ or ‘Word Tasting’. Facility of intelligence is a perilous gift and wants watching, by its possessor and practitioner, with massive scepticism.

There is no guaranteed value in merely inventing what you are able to invent. The invention must in some way be binding; it must fill with life, it must strengthen our grasp of realities. If a poem does not come from life but only from an idea, its effect is terminated with the working out of that idea. Satire too may be only an idea. Wardle’s ‘After Blake’ seems so. It exhausts itself in the mere transfer: ‘And will chainsaws in modern times / Roar among England’s forests green?’ The rest follows pat. Or a conceit, a clever idea, may follow its own course further and further away from living experience, into abstruseness, bloodless abstraction, merely mental. Her ‘In the Beginning’ and ‘If Nature’, for example.

These failures (as I think them) are worth dwelling on because they are the characteristic and likely casualties of Sarah Wardle’s particular gifts. Such poems feel unnecessary, she and the reader could do without them; and they feel unnecessary precisely because they feel repeatable: many more of the same could easily come from that particular bent and gift. These poems do not feel as though they have forced themselves into being; the space they now occupy is imaginable without them.

Several of Sarah Wardle’s poems have to do with her terrible passage through schizophrenia, and they are of a different order, though often they employ the same techniques. An indisputable seriousness of experience is, of course, no guarantor of a poem’s success; but in this collection, where so much seems to me inconsequential or whimsical, it is striking that her inventiveness in the service of that seriousness really does achieve something valuable. She seems to need that coupling. The conceits, at times by their very inadequacy, make a poignant effect; the intelligence seems a brave fighter against what would overwhelm it. She illuminates a horror, and combats it by main force of intelligence and imagination. This is wit in the service of life — a means of staying alive, altogether admirable and moving. In ‘Flight’ she likens her own recent history to the panic of a blackbird trapped inside a house against the window. The image, strikingly apt, aids the poem to the release it seeks:

I cup the bird gently in my hands, like water,
carry her out, as if a Section order
has been lifted, give her to the air,
then watch her spread her wings and soar.

And — a good sign — the book contains other and equal successes on subjects not so immediately certain to claim our sympathy. ‘Nocturne’, for example, which comes to real feeling through the language almost of pastiche; or ‘Gabriel’, ‘Single Volume’, ‘Solitaire’, compassionate studies in the third person.

The centenarian tells how his grandmother
put wool in his granddad’s hand in his coffin,
so when he arrived at the gates of heaven,
he would have on his person proof for St Peter
that seven days a week he’d done shepherd’s work
and in the lambing season had to miss church.

(‘Gabriel’)

The book’s first poem, ‘Arcadia’, tries out an idea (‘As if …’) but works its way towards a real illumination; that is, it does not allow a strategy — the ‘As if…’ — to become an end in itself but contains it in the whole search for a truth. A good model at the outset.

Sarah Wardle read classics and must know about Antaeus who was invincible so long as he kept one foot touching the ground. Conceits, fancy, ideas, want grounding in a lived reality, or they float the poem away and it doesn’t matter.

The mythopoeic imagination imposes sense on a universe essentially averse to having sense imposed upon it. Poetry strives all the while to make its fictions binding; and fears they never will be. Martha Kapos, among the 35 poems in this collection, has one entitled ‘Cosmology’; and really most of her poems do as that one does: they make a world, in metaphor. She encourages the tendency in metaphor towards autonomy.

Almost every poem here begins the world again, makes another myth, is a new cosmology, confronts us with another almost autonomous metaphor. The reader doesn’t want arbitrariness in a poem, is made uneasy by the mere suspicion of it; and autonomy may have a similar effect. We don’t quite like it, we don’t want the thing to be there entirely in its own right, for its own delight, meaning only what it says, having no application to us, the humans.

Kapos’s poems occupy that borderland between autonomy and applicability; and from there exert a productively unsettling, enlivening, revelatory effect. Thus ‘Mute’, ‘Dog Rose’ and ‘Fruit Tree’: the images have intrinsic autonomous life, but there is something in them for our lives too, if we contemplate them patiently and keenly. They seem to require of us that ‘passive attending upon the event’ which Eliot thought the proper disposition of the poet towards the writing of a poem:

Little tree as empty as a house
when your mother is not at home
few or yellow or promising
they will come back, your syllables
are loose circles blown about
barely forming words, your leaves
amount to nothing without her saying
You look lovely standing there
in your hair and your dress.

(‘Mute’)

Several of Kapos’s poems are intrinsically exploratory. The metaphor, tending towards becoming an end in itself, seems at the same time to be inducing us into a development and ramification of feelings. As though only by disassembling the known and too familiar world and reassembling it strangely could we be brought anywhere near its occluded truth.

A flood is a great defamiliarizer; so also is the deliberate focusing on one part of the human body — the hand — as though it were autonomous, a creature in its own right. The serious purpose behind such games (in ‘The Flood’ and ‘Don’t put your Hand on the Table’) is to bring us through disorientation closer to the truth. The poems seek revelation, they are the act of seeking it; they are, as Lowell said poems should be, the event, not the record of an event. Thus in ‘The Sun at the Table’:

But look both ways. Flames play
over the backs of your hands.
Even as we sit faces facing,

bushes break apart and it comes
out into the open.

Or, by the joining forces of memory and imagination, most beautifully in ‘The Narrow Kiss’:

An aching line reaches all the way
to remind me: this is where we went
taking a map that was only a wish.

It is where we were always together.
Come again into the open
inside of the fruit, into the white
inexhaustible milk. Come again into

the quick.

They are not easy poems; but the care, the precision, the restraint of the lines encourages the reader to feel confident that the endeavour will be worthwhile. The risks are much the same as those Sarah Wardle runs: of cleverness for its own sake, of being merely ingenious and intriguing. There are one or two such lapses, but as a whole the collection seems to have undergone the most critical scrutiny precisely in that intent: to disallow what cannot be vouched for in reality. Poetry has to be agile and inventive, to circumvent our apathy and reluctance to be moved.

Martha Kapos’s metaphors, her fictions that seem to be leading away into worlds of their own, in practice stalk the world we live in and the dealings we have with one another, the real nexus of human life, very closely indeed.

David Constantine has published half a dozen collections of poems, the most recent of which is Something for the Ghosts, and all are published by Bloodaxe.

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