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Poems of wintry futility, a chill atmosphere and learning about Autumn Sean O’Brien’s close reading of a twelfth, a second and a first collection |
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GEORGE SZIRTES TAMAR YOSELOFF PATRICK McGUINNESS
Szirtes’s body of work is now very large, and Reel is a formidable successor to some other substantial works, twice as long as most collections and full of the teeming imaginative fertility we have come to expect. This plenitude is also a work of crisis, however. In it we encounter with sometimes alarming force a middle aged man’s apprehension of the nature of history as a process to which no one and nothing is actually indispensable. The wintry futility which shadows some of the poems seems indeed to provoke the poet to further furious inventiveness. ‘Meeting Austerlitz’, is about an encounter, real or/and imagined, with the late W.G. Sebald, and like much of the first third of the book it has strong Dantean overtones. This is not simply a matter of Szirtes’s use of terza rima; there is a sense that any contemporary analogue of the cosmic order revealed to Dante by Virgil in the Commedia is being scrupulously negated in the encounter between poet and novelist. Sebald puts the matter concisely:
You can’t explain The book reveals the difference between an intellectual understanding of this state of affairs and a three-dimensional sense that it is, inescapably, the case. Szirtes’s work has long been full of doorways, stairs and courtyards, spaces enigmatically waiting to be entered, roads yet to be taken and so on. Here that realm of possibility itself seems to become a negation; the richness of change becomes evidence of its own lack of substance: Sooner or later roads come to an end. To their terminus. You reach the world’s edge The poet is in the process of passing from the sphere of politics and history into that of metaphysics. And even though the metaphysical has always had a significant place in Szirtes’s imagination, even though his work hitherto could be read precisely as preparation for such a confrontation with the major theme of his maturity, nothing has prepared the ground for this shift of emphasis. The result is impressive, poignant, brilliantly observed and at some points rather irritating. Production of detail is Szirtes’ strong suit — detail of cities, interiors, uneventful moments, transitions. It is the ‘slant door’ which gave the title to his first book, facing both ways, into the realm of real objects, and then into the symbolic; it is the foundation of his painterly aesthetics. Yet in the opening section of the book, ‘Flesh: An Early Family History’, though the ingenuity never slackens, there is a sense that Szirtes’s power is a trap and that the same poem is being obsessively re-composed. If this is the work of crisis, it is not, for all its indisputable power and frequent brilliance (particularly in the eclogues), the new work which the intensified apprehension of time and mortality seems to want to exact from the poet. There are points, too, especially in the first third of the book, where terza rima predominates, when the reader may ask if English is really the medium for what comes next. Szirtes’s ear has always been idiosyncratic; the effort to hear a line as he apparently does is part of what makes him interesting and at times exhilarating, but there are passages which seem hobbled by the formal obligation he has undertaken:
Above the lanterned dome Of legions of saloon cars purring by. With its peculiar imperative. The city glories in its element. Like a philosopher I watched Time’s arrow The uncomfortable elements here include the repeated ‘of’ at the beginnings of lines, the overlong series of weak-syllable endings that extends across eight of the last nine lines, and the unhappy rhyme of the four-syllable ‘imperative’ with the fivesyllable ‘authoritative’. These are kinds of compromise found in translation, admissions of the imperfect fit between source and target. They are also problems produced by the pursuit of scale. We don’t know the chronology of the poems’ composition, but Szirtes has end-loaded Reel with the best work. The closing section of the book, ‘Accounts’, includes the superb ‘Three Poems for Sebastiao Salgado’ and ‘The Morpheus Annotations’, a series of six poems about mythological figures, including the Minotaur. The latter might sound like a recipe for academicism, but the fury expended elsewhere seems to have helped Szirtes to clarify and streamline his imaginings. The new work is not unrecognisably strange — it still carries overtones of Auden and Porter at times — but it is manifestly refreshed.
They have been hoarding stuff ‘Isn’t such a reading taking it too seriously?’ Someone (someone English, probably) asks. ‘It’s only Woolworths.’ All this lovable obsolete crap comes to nothing, though, taking with it the meanings assigned to it by people in need of identities. As the man said, ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ Which is what they will be selling next. Pathos, for which a less interesting poet would immediately reach, is not excluded, but blended with the grotesque: ghosts play Henry Mancini and Laurence Welk, There are times, reading Barnard’s Star, when you wish Yoseloff had been bolder more often. The unrhymed sonnet ‘San Michele’, set in the Venetian graveyard, is perfectly fine in its closing contemplation of the fate of unlucky young Englishwomen: They never would have guessed, as they laid out Yet given Yoseloff’s abilities, she might perhaps have started from here. In places she seems to be seeking to conform to the contemporary convention of data-deftlyscrutinized- for-resonance, but her imagination seems less biddable, and rather more definite, than she pretends. In ‘The Atlantic at Asbury Park’, familiar solid notation of a kind many people could accomplish is simply outgrown by its desolate conclusion. ‘Studies for a Portrait of a Young Woman, Delft’ steps out of the ruck of poems-about-paintings by setting limits to its own power of interpretation and using these to depict a world which hardly admits the existence of its subject. The young woman ‘takes up her willow broom. It whispers / its small song against the brick. / She raises her face to the sun.’ Next instalment awaited with more than polite interest.
I spent autumn learning about autumn, would have preferred to be from somewhere else: (‘Begitude’) This is accomplished and enjoyable, if not wholly original (the tone owes something to Michael Hofmann). McGuinness works cleverly with ideas of a doubleness which manages both to cancel its components and to leave them in a state of (intolerable) mutual dependence. When he comments in ‘Leuwen’, ‘All is analogy, / everything is sensed first as something else’, we know that he’s ‘really’ talking about Ulster — a province imperfectly but at the same time (in this context) precisely analogous. In ‘Bruges’, he leaves himself room for painterly exultance at this realm of paradox and also for the disquiet which can be got at only indirectly: The real and the reflected swap dimensions; the swan signs the surface McGuinness doesn’t intervene in the complex (but as yet relatively pacific) politics of Belgium; but in ‘No’ he provides a damning summing up, full of exhaustion and pity, of the condition of working class loyalists in Ulster, left to nurse a refusal while history abandons them: The slow quotidien burrs in these hives It will be interesting to discover to which, if any of his poetic selves, McGuinness decides to commit himself. In the meantime The Canals of Mars is a vigorous, enjoyable beginning.
Sean O’Brien is a poet, critic, playwright, broadcaster, anthologist and editor. He is Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University and teaches on the MA Writing course. In 2002 his Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 was published by Picador. He is currently working on a new verse version of Dante’s Inferno, to be published in 2006.
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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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