|
When you want to tie a donkey to someone asleep, or go fish in the Mississippi before it’s too late Antony Dunn’s acute observations of three new collections |
|
ESTHER MORGAN CHRISTINE EVANS GEOFF HATTERSLEY Four years since her Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for Beyond Calling Distance, Esther Morgan’s back with a new volume of what George Szirtes has called her ‘hints and mysteries’. The Silence Living in Houses is divided into three parts, the first of which, ‘The House Of’, is so extraordinarily redolent of Alejandro Amenabar’s spooky but slow movie, The Others, that it’s quite surprising to discover there’s no free DVD of it tucked into the book. Seventeen discrete poems make up this first section, each of which features ghost-women or ghostly women as protagonists. The atmosphere of a Victorian-era country pile populated by dead women and girls with names like Lily, Ivy and Violet, mingling unseen with the lonely living, is conjured from the start with all the right filmic props: ‘dolls nested stiffly in lace’, ‘locked rooms and skeleton keys’, blackberries ‘cooling under muslin in the scullery’ and so on. Even Amenabar’s device of giving the ghost-children in the film a photosensitive skin condition is borrowed here, in ‘Half Sister’: ‘I leave this house rarely / wrapped in white layers like a bee-keeper / to protect me from the swarms of light’. Similarly allowing mood and atmosphere the upper hand over narrative, they’re sadly pretty, in a gothic sort of way. But there’s a risk in this first section that, in their identical twilights of tone and pace, the only truly memorable moments are the inexcusable blunders. A ‘bowl of blackberries… inscrutable as eyes’, anyone? Or the last sighting of three girls, later found dead in mysterious circumstances, in which they’re described as being ‘sat like in church – / grave’, and which typifies the way this book’s similes are often swamped by the weight of their own puns. And yet, often, the weaknesses of these poems are restricted to the very last line, and to a pay-off which somehow misfires. ‘Bone China’ is a case in point – a marvellously mysterious tale of a maid who, one night, gathers up every item of the house’s dinner service, takes them outside ‘to the kitchen garden / where she stood between the soft fruit beds / and smashed each one against the wall’. Having opened with the lines, ‘I want to leave something behind / like the maid’, the poem ends with: and clearing the ground a hundred years later Visually, there’s nothing wrong here. Yes, the sharp whitenesses of the broken crockery are like teeth growing through the soil, but the likeness doesn’t seem to contain any emotional or intellectual challenge or revelation. It’s neat, but hollow. And this is only bothersome because, on the whole, Esther Morgan’s poetry is wonderfully elegant, poignant and wise. If the truism’s true, that a poet’s only worked hard enough if her poetry looks easily achieved, then she’s certainly put the work in. The poems of The Silence Living in Houses are not tricksy or convoluted, but their plain-speaking is richly allusive and, very often, unsettling. The second section, also titled ‘The Silence Living in Houses’, seems much informed by Morgan’s work for Social Services. It’s a collection of portraits – again, principally of women – for whom domestic and married life is a condition to be survived, against the odds. It’s packed with threats and acts of verbal abuse, in ‘Her Given Names’ for example: Next he says bitch and in an instant And with physical abuse in ‘House Rules’: Look what you made me do he says The terrible deforming of love itself in ‘Speciality’ begins with a description of cruel gastronomic delicacies – ‘the songbird drowned in cognac, trussed and roasted whole, / an oyster swallowed like a living tongue’ – and in which ‘he’ explains to ‘you’ that a lobster boiled alive feels nothing, ends: Feeling nothing has become your speciality, The sensuous horror of these last lines – the tender forcefeeding of the bird before it’s devoured – characterizes these poems and typifies their cool, unflinching empathy with the abuser as much as with the abused. Here are satisfyingly contradictory echoes of lines from earlier poems. For example, the names of
those who are lost: from the very first poem in the book become, in ‘Hiding Place’, a refuge from the home, in which to be at home again amongst the poisonous: And there are echoes everywhere in these houses of ‘silence’ – wasps, moons (about a dozen moons, actually – and plates like moons, clocks like moons, moons like balloons), buildings like sinking ships, feathers, bones and, of course, the women. But the women, while they don’t take names in the last of the three sections, do begin to solidify somewhat, to take flesh. ‘Are You Homesick for the House of Cards?’ tells tales that feel as if they’re taken from Morgan’s own family archive, and while the back-cover blurb insists that these poems are as much about love as they are about loss, there’s still an ambivalence here, as in the section’s title-poem: ‘How can you be [homesick] / when you’ve never escaped the palace of family [?]’ The argument in ‘Superimposed’ is that the author is a kind of photographic palimpsest – generation upon generation of women layered on top of each other ‘like plates of glass’, each successive plate blurring the sum of the features a little further until Morgan finds her own ‘image always softens’, eluding ‘definition’. ‘Ghostly’ seems a trite way to describe The Silence Living in Houses, but so it is. It is unusually moving and haunting, shot through with intangible sadnesses breathtakingly achieved. For all their nebulous qualities, the best of these poems are packed with wonderfully memorable images and linguistic constructions, but here and there bedevilled by flares of gaucherie, which could so easily have been edited out.
Much of the book is flavoured by the landscape of her native north Wales, particularly so in ‘Phantoms Over Wales’, in which her country is drawn as a series of defeated creatures: [it] could be crouching, wounded Another way, it’s collared Llyn is its foreclaw, clenched... It ends by suggesting that Welsh towns glittering on the jetfighter pilot’s screen are a ‘pattern of targets’. It’s an unusually affronted moment in a collection which, otherwise, has no flag of Welsh victimhood to wave at all. It’s ambiguous, but accusing – something’s also ‘madebarren’ the Irish sea – and it’s tempting to read the poem as a Celtic finger-pointing exercise at the RAF and, by tacit extension, at England. If the valleys, mountains and towns of Wales are here seriously being exhibited as targets of something, they’re surely not targets under fire. And if the complaint is about the noise pollution of training jet-pilots through the valleys, well, they do that in the Lake District and North Yorkshire, too. There’s a righteous indignation here whose nationalism is easy to buy into, but rather harder to explain. More quietly, Wales and its landscapes are celebrated through other airborne things. The collection sings litanies of names of the water-margin’s birds – goose, swan, widgeon, curlew, oystercatchers, the peregrine that ‘hunches / heavy with purpose on the cliff face’ – and, inland, skylarks, white owls, rooks, blackbird, chiffchaff, woodpecker, the ‘firstfall of winter thrushes’. This airborne observation extends upwards and outwards, and there is, beyond Wales, a real geographical eclecticism at work in the book. Its opening poem, ‘Growth Rings’, announces itself as a description of the ‘image sent by satellite of an earthquake on the San Andreas fault’ and wonderfully intensifies its telescopic focus: the tectonic vastness of the actual event is likened to the heart of an unfolding rose, the whorls on a thumb-tip and, in the end:
each tremor In a peculiar echo of Gwyneth Lewis’s long title-poem from Zero Gravity, which draws on her experience of watching her American cousin, Joe Tanner, helping to repair the Hubble space telescope, Evans presents ‘Adjusting the Focus’, a poem which draws on her experience of watching the astronaut Dr Kathryn Thornton help repair the Hubble space telescope, while hanging from the end of a remote-controlled arm. Here, too, the public events are projected through the prism of the protagonist’s personal drama, and through the poet’s own experience: as the space-walker hangs […] for a moment [I see] clear joyously or with regret In this fifth collection, which follows a Selected Poems, the letting go of the self is right at the heart of the poetry. Evans’ satellite-eye captures those moments in a variety of lives, in an orbit of places. ‘At Los Alamos’ is an extraordinarily moving account of a scientist bereaved of his wife – and, even after that, of his unborn son – whose were ‘the only human eyes / to witness that first bleaching flash’ of a nuclear test, and for whom: It was a year later, in New York ‘On The Train From Chester’ finds the poet overhearing a conversation in which one woman explains to another how she counsels people towards their deaths, and the poet furiously scribbles them down ‘on the flyleaf of my Pepys // in case the instructions come in useful’. From the self-harming anorexic teenager in ‘Giving Up’, through the victims of drowning and CJD in ‘Swimmers’, to the elderly couple living through the ‘sickroom gentleness […] as they wait for light to break // as another morning breaks’ in ‘Going Over’, and the poet’s own mother ‘nuzzling oblivion’ in ‘A Forging’, the people of these poems are somehow all slipping away. It’s a preoccupation that’s apparent in Evans’ earlier work, too, but as reviewer Margaret Lloyd has observed, she is a poet who ‘pays close attention to a world that is simultaneously seen as fleeting and everlasting’. The atheistic imperative that, in the book’s first poem, splits cells to recreate life, is echoed in its last, ‘The Whirlpool Arm’, which insists on the endurance of earthly matter and the cycles of nature despite our human arrivals and departures – ‘the slow migrations of the flesh’: It will see us out, Despite the poems’ very modern Hubble telescopes and Phantom fighter-jets, Growth Rings exists in a kind of everytime, out of time, in which nothing that has passed has failed to leave its mark. It’s a collection that radiates passion and pathos, heartbreak and hope, and which offers revelation after revelation in moments of ordinariness.
The girl is telling me she doesn’t like and now me. This is new and exciting For all the wry anecdotes and the self-deprecating winks in the book, there’s a real undertow of violence and anger. ‘Remembering Dennis’s Eyes’ tells of a robbery during which The iron bar bounced on It’s not long before the book has shifted from Yorkshire to the north/south poverty divide in Argentina, where the Malvinas is still referred to as ‘Thatcher’s war’, and on to a series of poems from Israel, populated by students approaching their time of national service and reading news stories of soldiers killed in drive-by shootings, and then back home to the busker in ‘black moustache and curly red wig’: They don’t know how I ache in these old bones.
This is one of the great strengths of Hattersley’s conversational style. His poems go about their everyday lives, burdened with everyday sorrows and secrets which give themselves up, for the most part, in hints and sighs. ‘I Was an Unarmed Teenager’ is a domestic set-piece: teenage boy wakes, hungover, to the sound of the Sally Army band outside, goes downstairs to find the dog in the kitchen waiting for a walk, and his mother warming herself by an open oven, asking ‘How do you die / like a cowboy… / four three four?’ And the amusingly self-pitying tone of the boy – ‘I roll my hangover / from one eye to the other’ – is unsettlingly undercut at the very last. Hattersley is unsentimental, but unafraid to face the human tragedies that cliché tells us Yorkshire folk don’t talk about. And yet that very wrestling match, the fight for a language to address these things, is at the heart of some of the most moving poems in this collection. Two pages after ‘I Was an Unarmed Teenager’ comes ‘Smoke’, in which the poet, still a teenager, lights a No. 6 in front of his father for the first time, in response to which his father ‘stood very slowly; / walked out and up the stairs / without a word / for months’. And another two pages later, Eight years later she was full of cancer, We took her home for the last month, she insisted.
This is a substantial book in every sense. Its characters have substance. For all the flippant, sometimes surreal tone of this poem or that poem, the collection gives real weight to the lives beset by poverty, racism, the tedium and pointlessness of work, illness, crime, boredom, the petty irritations of being alive, by their own habits, by each other – and draws rich, funny portraits of real communities. While many of these people are characterized by banality interestingly rendered, there’s a risk inherent in the close examination of them. Sometimes, the poems end up being, well, banal. Readers are likely to emerge from some of these poems thinking, ‘Well, aren’t people strange and interesting, eh?’ and then find that they’ve exhausted the poem entirely. ‘Chicken Bone Charlie’, for example, is a tale of a silent workplace huff, which doesn’t give up anything new on a second reading. Of course, there’s something to be said for the immediacy of these poems which must work tremendously well in performance, but here they feel disappointingly thin next to a poem like, say, ‘Spider’: The spider was completely unprepared It never had a friend it could count on. It continues in an extraordinary litany of things the spider never did, or experienced, or discovered. It’s long. You have to turn a number of pages. ‘It never felt like a paperclip / in a jar in a cupboard in a shed.’ You begin to wonder if Hattersley could spin this out forever. ‘It never had any wild ideas. / It never had any wild ideas drummed out of it.’ And then you start to identify with it, and it’s enough to make you want to put the book down, go out and tie a donkey to someone sleeping, or fish in the Mississippi before it’s too late. ‘Spider’ summarizes the achievement of this collection – turning our smallest and grandest failings into something rousing and quixotically heroic – which is fuelled, perhaps, by the impulse behind one of its last poems, ‘When You’re Pushing Fifty’: When you’re pushing fifty
Antony Dunn, born in 1973, has published two collections of poetry, Pilots and Navigators (Oxford Poets 1998) and Flying Fish (Carcanet Oxford Poets 2002). He is working towards completion of a third, Bugs. His website is www.antonydunn.org.
|
|
Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
|
|