BERNARD O’DONOGHUE
Outliving
Chatto & Windus £8.99

DANIEL WEISSBORT
Letters to Ted
Anvil £8.95

JUDY GAHAGAN
Night Calling
Enitharmon £7.95

PETER REDGROVE
Sheen
Stride £10.00

Bernard O’Donoghue‘s previous collections have been recognised for his ability to make what is daily and apparently uneventful seem remarkable. Outliving does not just repeat the achievement; it consciously works on a larger canvas. In the not-quite title poem, ‘The Day I Outlived My Father’, it is the fact that the day is uneventful that O’Donoghue comments upon: ‘… no one sent me flowers, or even / asked me out for a drink’. Then, in the second stanza, the dailiness is transformed through a combination of proverb and metaphor: the obligation to ‘set a good face to the future’ becomes the liberty ‘to cultivate the wind, to hunt the bull / on hare back’. Striking though this is, it is in a sense familiar territory — yet Outliving frequently juxtaposes the home landscape and the home truth with global concerns. In ‘Vanishing- Points’, for example, the view of a child feet up and head down in a dentist’s chair is disconcertingly elided with the photograph of a dead Taliban soldier. In ‘The Potato- Gatherers’ , the subject shifts from the figures in a painting by George Russell to the poet and his companions, engaged in the same activity, and back to the original gatherers, but this time with a twist:

In that impressionist twilight, you can’t make out
their fingers; even their bent backs you’d see better
with our millennial 20-20 sight
from a west-bound jet over Belmullet.

The poet controls the view, bringing together things that would otherwise be unconnected. In doing so, he creates less a moral than a palimpsest; the poems do not offer a comment on recent horrors so much as question how we see to draw a moral at all. Although several poems are concerned with the importance of writing (and recording in other forms), for O’Donoghue writing alone is an inadequate witness. The speaker in ‘The Education of Jim Fallon’ recognizes the importance of a poem only when he connects it with his own experience. ‘The Wind in the Willows’ too demonstrates the need to link experience and authority, though more light heartedly: the whole poem is a delighted excursion from the premises of the novel, beginning with observations on local nomenclature, sidetracking round ‘Courtmacsherry, at the haunted house / where the poltergeist or poltergeists / cooked sausages at the mid-hour of night’, and concluding that in this context ‘There is nothing, simply nothing, quite so worth doing / as messing around with waterside debris.’

But in the context of this book the reader is never allowed to rest in enjoyment of such transformations. Part of its careful recording process is the inclusion of dates. The effect is sometimes scrupulously to delimit the occasion of a poem, as in ‘The City at Shrone’, where ‘April/May 1999’ following the reference to a city whose ‘long-past citizens sleep well, / Unvisited by showers of high explosive’ seems purposely to rule out reference to 9/11 New York. At other times the date seems rather to invite comparison, as when ‘For Ellen (20) in County Cork’, with its mention of an anniversary ‘which wakes with nothing but enthusiasm’, is ominously dated ‘11 September 1998’. Both kinds of notation draw attention to the way in which meaning necessarily changes over time; unsettlingly, they propose that ‘outliving’ is less a fact than a process of changing perspective.

Daniel Weissbort, too, is concerned with outliving: specifically with his own survival of his friend from undergraduate days, Ted Hughes. As its title announces, the collection takes the form of letters to the laureate, written between Hughes’ death and the end of the century. Central is the looming absence of the man who was once as overwhelmingly present: ‘too big for the corridor’, too big for the car — and in many ways, it seems, too big for Weissbort. Some poems handle the fact of absence effectively; in ‘Hartland’, the memory of the view — ‘the world writ large’ — is tellingly dwarfed by that of Hughes, ‘lounging on the shingle beach below’.

However, the majority do not seem intended for an audience beyond the addressee . The difficulty is not a lack of information. Given the short and helpful introduction, most of the poems are self-explanatory, yet Weissbort nonetheless supplies notes — which generally tell us nothing that we could not deduce from the text of the poems. There are of course exceptions: the notes to ‘Art Confused’, and ‘Translation’, for example, give interesting glimpses of Hughes as a reader and translator — yet this in itself raises the question of the purpose of this book. While it is clearly a record of the process of grieving for a friend, it derives its interest primarily from the fact that the friend is Hughes, whose history is in the loosest sense already over-familiar. The fact that his friend is also a public figure makes the moral difficulties inherent in writing about the dead still more acute for Weissbort.

Some of the most interesting poems question whether the writer’s first responsibility is to write or be silent: on one occasion Weissbort denounces this very book as ‘betrayal’. To counter these fears, he is scrupulous not to put words in his dead friend’s mouth, visibly scrupulous too in choosing his own words. Writing that ‘I dare not eye the inner dark / where your likeness vanishes’ he promptly corrects: ‘Well, dare not isn’t quite right either. / Do not’; when he speculates on Hughes’ desire to visit Australia, he adds the note: ‘My conjecture of course.’ Ironically, such fears may be the reason this book ultimately fails either to illuminate or to engage.

Judy Gahagan’s Night Calling is not so hampered by doubts. It too is concerned with death, but in various and surprising guises: reflections from a limousine following a hearse, the epiphany of waking to hoar frost transformed into a vision of ageing, and the wrily inconsequential ‘Then He Orders Up the Moon’, which opens with the poet ‘… thinking about death, / just idly, just a furtive touch about it’ and ends with her autocratic dinner companion pointing ‘…with his steak-knife / at Perseus, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades / and other once enigmatic constellations’.

At best, Gahagan is able to hold and fuse several layers of experience at once: ‘The Lightness of Not Being’ takes as its starting-point the poet’s discovery of the death of a cobbler, Emilio, and then takes off, interweaving sensuous and evocative but quite disparate images (shoes that need mending, sunlight and butterflies in Emilio’s room, photographs on a gravestone, the blue of Emilio’s eyes) into a meditation that delights in its own transformative abilities: ‘… I remember / how down a different river / they were launching dead souls / in coloured paper lanterns’.

There are times when the observing eye and the meditating voice are too readily separable, and the effect is disconcertingly like stumbling on the moral at the end of a fable, but Gahagan more often fuses observation and reflection, ‘confusing clear-cut issues’ in a way that makes this a very enjoyable collection.

In Peter Redgrove’s last book, Sheen, the relationship between the writer and the world he observes is even closer. It is a commonplace to say that Redgrove’s writing is that of a seer; it appears that the very layout of the poems on the page, in three-part descending lines, reflects something of the structure of the world as revealed to him — and as he fervently desires to pass on the revelation. Sometimes he is rather too much the magician; in ‘Millennial Entreaty’, for example, the circles that he conjures about the reader’s imagination are quite deliberately laid bare:

                                                                            But your eyes
Shall see your teachers,
                                                          your ears
                                                                                            shall hear a word
behind
Saying:
                                                          this is the way.

Other times, I suffer what the religious might call doubts that sex really benefits by being put into words so frequently and so directly. Essentially, though, both these points are quibbles. Redgrove’s vision of body and spirit as interconnected frequently yields astonishing and witty results. ‘Gentlemen’, for example, begins in a flooded public lavatory, and transforms it into the site of a near-religious experience, as doves are ‘… wings astonished at Gents / rising out of the ground’, and the reek of the urinal gives onto ‘Men ascending and praising the sunlight’, while the men descending are described with only half parodic reverence as ‘water-carriers’.

The effect is dizzying; the metaphors multiply so that it becomes impossible to see something reductively ‘as it really is’. Instead, there is an astonishing confluence of ‘what is’ with the poet’s intelligence, characteristic of this volume, as in a final twist the chalice-fountain of the opening line is transformed into ‘the head-bone fountain / where the whole scene swims.’ Other poems are quieter , delighting less in what they can do with their material than in the material itself. ‘Tom as a Supernatural Presence’ is a glorious example, in celebration of a cat who has something in common with the visionary Smart’s cat Jeffreye:

I have seen him retexture his coat
                                                      to make it fascinating;
                                                                                                               it
glows subvisibly;
Or he causes each hair
                                                      to declare itself separately,
                                                                                                               each
like a black ray
From an invisible star; as though
                                                      it were the nerve-endings
                                                                                                               he
combed with his tongue,
                                                      …
Or in the shadows
                                                      at the stair-foot
                                                                                                               this
pair of jewels
Floating a few inches above
                                                      the carpet, as though darkness
                                                                                                               were
crouching to inspect
For night-mice
                                                      at the house-root.

Throughout the collection, Redgrove is interested both in what he sees and in re-creating the conditions of this sight in the reader. It would be possible to read these poems as manifestos or mythography, but they are far more than that: there is scarcely one without a phrase that is breath-taking in its accuracy – one which demands both re-reading itself, and reconsideration of that which it describes.

Jane Griffiths is Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her first collection of poetry is A Grip on Thin Air (Bloodaxe).

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