|
The transient impress of foot and hand; and poetry as spontaneous combustion stolen from the gods Bernard O’Donoghue’s admiration for two powerful new collections |
|
CAROLE SATYAMURTI GREVEL LINDOP
A line will take us hours maybe; In the felicitous title of one of his earlier books, The Blind Stitch, Greg Delanty has a variant of the same image for the technical precision required. Carole Satyamurti’s title provides the mythological underpinning for this figure, but she also suggests eloquently what the major difficulty is – to make poetry’s careful stitching correspond to the darkness and uncertainty that is often poetry’s topic for the modern humanist poet. And the blurb also raises a further sense of ‘stitching’, beyond Yeats’s formal exactitude: ‘the attempt to repair, illuminate, and give form to what is unknown, fearful, perplexing’, claiming for poetry something like Heaney’s ‘redress’. Satyamurti’s substantial new book reminds us what a presence she has become in her relatively short and latedeveloping career, since her acclaimed debut with Broken Moon in 1987. Her work has always been admired for its humanity, expressed with an unflinching directness which has been proof against any charge of sentimentality or exploitativeness. Among the poems reprinted here are the wonderful series about her handicapped child and her brother who died too young. These poems are so effective because they are seen in the context of Satyamurti’s – and everyone else’s – great subject, the fragility and transience of things, expressed for example in her classic line, ‘the transient impress of foot and hand’ (‘Leasehold’). The other strength in her treatment of such subjects is a steely facing up to the isolation and self-centredness at the heart of our lives, behind the grace and sympathy so evident in this poetry. ‘The Woman Next Door’, whose roof leaks, is left to fend for herself during the stormy early hours, even as the narrator imaginatively pictures what miseries she is suffering (in one of several poems that make the reader think of Edward Thomas’s ‘The Owl’). And there is a severely imposed limit to the imaginative projections: the withering contrast between the poor of the earth and the fat clergymen in their ‘ample chasubles’ (‘The Archbishop and the Cardinal’) is as fierce as Fellini or Chaucer. Even if in this case the scorn seems a bit unkind and its objects rather rigged, Satyamurti’s deep compassion is always balanced with a sense of fair play. If we are to seek a philosophy in Satyamurti’s writing (and it is not such an absurd idea: she is a sociologist with an interest in the links between poetry and psychology), it might be called an ethics of the material. To make one more comparison, her steady-eyed view of humanity recalls the Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll in its refusal to be comforted by otherworldly perspectives. This was most memorably and grimly expressed in Satyamurti’s ‘Les Autres or Mr Bleaney’s Other Room’, where the other room is a bleak hotel bedroom with its uncomfortable consciousness of previous occupants ‘who’ve spat in this basin, interrogated this / toilet bowl for signs…’ But there is no disdain or even distance from these ‘others’: in true Larkin spirit, the poem goes on past your own ‘mucus, dandruff, pubic hairs and sweat’ to conclude: and though to swallow your disgust and breathe Even the syntax here shadows Larkin’s grimly inconclusive ending. The effect of it in Satyamurti’s poem is to pardon all, not so much by understanding all as by bearing in mind the basic invariables of existence. The structure of this new book is strange but effective: the selections from three previous volumes is preceded by 68 pages of new poems which, in the tightly fonted Bloodaxe format, would have been a quite substantial single volume on their own. (Part of the exercise is, yet again, an attempt to bring back into print the major poems of Satyamurti’s first two volumes, frozen – like many others – by the abandonment of the Oxford University Press’s list.) Stitching the Dark is the title both of the new section and of the whole book. The blurb claims, with some justification, that the new poems are the writer’s ‘strongest and most formally adventurous’. It is interesting to read them in the light of the humane and materialist earlier work, as I have represented it here. There is no doubt that Satyamurti’s capacity to deal with tragic circumstances is as good as ever: the cancer in ‘The Power of Prayer’; the inadequacy of elegiac sympathy in ‘The Wood Turner of Jaubertie’. The first of these is a haunting reassertion of material reality against the ironic prayer of the title: the woman, suffering from stomach cancer, hears of a cure effected by an exclusive diet of grapes. Grapes are too expensive, so she confines herself to grapefruit instead, reassured by the fact that ‘grapefruit’ (except for an ‘f’) is an anagram of ‘Repair-gut’. People at the end did not know whether she died of the tumour or malnutrition. The despair here is at both the material reality of cancer and the failure of art or language to help: ‘All metaphor was out’. ‘The Wood Turner’ elegy follows the same pattern of the helpless inefficacy of compassion. The wood-carver weeps ‘utterly without embarrassment’; his nine-year old daughter has died: ‘ “aneurysm” he says (he’d never heard of it); / a secret fault that snatched her from him’. Words, whether known or not (‘he’d never heard of it’), are again no consolation, and the narrator says ‘I wish I wasn’t there’; words of sympathy can be no more ‘than a clatter of small change thrown at catastrophe’. But then, miraculously, the wood-turner shapes an apple from a briar-root, maybe ‘compelled by suffering, into terrain where craft / encounters art’. It is hard to be convinced by artistic consolation; but perhaps the practice of art, rather than its verbalization, can help. This possibility is put further to the test in two political poems later in the section. Although the poems by the sociologist in Satyamurti have often had a strong, if unlaboured, political subtext, she has rarely ventured such an explicit area of politics as this. The two Iraq poems pull no punches. ‘The War Games’ has an epigraph from a ‘U.S. Marine preparing for the assault on Baghdad’ who says ‘Peacekeeping’s for pansies. This is Last of the Mohicans stuff’. The reality of war is put very starkly: ‘the poor pitched against the poorer, not understanding’. It goes on to the same theme as in the elegies, the inadequacy of words to explain: Chances are, you’ll never find the words to tell
it However, the next poem does not remain so even-handed between the poor and poorer; ‘Playing with Words at Abu Ghraib’ is an angry outburst at the appalling – perhaps perception-changing – events there, ending in the Dr Seussian terms of infantile language-teaching: This is Lynndie This is after we have seen ‘Shoes, bodies, piled up without shame’ and reflected ‘but even at Auschwitz-Birkenau the guards / taking photographs for souvenirs / didn’t put themselves in the frame’. The mystery now is the lack of a sense of shame, not just of the capacity to express it. It should be emphasized that Satyamurti’s cultural politics are still far from monothematic. She has always been a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, and never more so than in the wonderful Buddhist funeral sequence that opens this book. I have dwelt mostly on her new poems’ subjects because they are of such moment, and because humane responsibility has always been what her poems have stood for. But of course they could not work so effectively if they were not stitched together with the artistry that the title claims for them. As if to remind us of this, the Abu Ghraib poem, ending with the crude brutality of a line of increasing font size (‘Fun fun fun fun fun says Chip’) is followed by two poems of striking technical accomplishment, of two very different kinds. The first is ‘On the Map’, a beautiful somatic allegory of life as filtering on to a motorway which is never a starting-point, and the elegant medieval-style ‘Ballade’ which continues the driving theme into ‘the wordless, silvered air’, an independent no-place which faces solitude, another established Satyamurti ideal.
Many of the poems in his opening section return to this Promethean theme: poetry as a piece of spontaneous combustion, stolen from the gods. The theme becomes wholly explicit in ‘Renaissance’, a poem that shows the Titans supplanting the gods on behalf of human endeavour, with a coda of power and terror. If Satyamurti often concedes that there are things in the world more urgent than poetry, Lindop never does. The centrality of poetry is unyielding. This is most successfully expressed in ‘Five Lemons’ where you feel Lindop is on his home ground of exact formal and figurative control. It describes a visit to Robert Graves’ house in Majorca after the poet’s death, and the gift of five lemons by ‘the poet’s widow’ (who might have merited a more individualizing identification). Again, it ends by conceding the inadequacy of language in some urgent circumstances: ‘I press the waxy feel to my face and breathe it. / There are no words for what the fragrance tells me’. If there is something that, on the evidence of this book, rivals poetry for centrality in Lindop’s interest, it is sex. This of course is a time-honoured poetic associate of poetry, and Lindop has touched on it more passingly before. But the two middle sections of this book are devoted single-mindedly to it, responding alertly to another sense of the title: playing with fire means taking risks, here ideologically as well as physically. In a celebrated study of Romantic poetry, Keats and Embarrassment, Christopher Ricks located Keats’s success often on the margins of embarrassment. Lindop is operating in those areas here. Not so much in section two which, after all, has a very respectable epigraph from Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘the fire and the rose are one’; but even there I think Eliot might have been mildly perturbed by the wit of ‘The Snowball’, two pages later: Taking a long time was a virtue then, It is already a long way from ‘Vignettes’, say – the lovely series of sonnets for Bewick woodcuts in Lindop’s Selected, though it is all done with the same linguistic care and a ruefully self-ironizing wit. The section culminates with ‘That Month’, a finely judged and wistful account of the end of marital reproduction, particularly after the poet’s vasectomy – another variation on a theme, this time maybe recalling Leopold Bloom in his bath, reflecting on his potential ‘father of thousands’. Section three, though, is even more adventurous in its fencing with embarrassment. The epigraph this time takes us closer to a world of romance-fantasy: Lorca’s Why do you go so far I go in search of magicians The location, away from the little square, is a Brazilian poledancing bar, in or near Clerkenwell; but the first poem that places it there reminds us of the main theme by its somewhat surprising title ‘Ars Poetica’. The narrator is there as a kind of anthropologist of erotica (or ‘erotics’, as modern critical theory would say). The sequence ends with a sequence of 23 sonnets (two more than the Bewick series, and equally adept), celebrating with a cool eye the charms and beauties of the dancers. To give you the idea, this is the climax of ‘Christina’:
She leans
back on the pole, Clearly something is being challenged in this disconcerting piece of épater les bourgeois (for example by the brave enjambment before ‘knickers’: it recalls those ancient sonnet competitions which say that ‘enjambment is allowed between lines eight and nine’ – though here it is between 10 and 11). But what exactly is being challenged? And who does call this ‘style’, weird or not? The poems seem to attempt to reclaim for normal attention something which is normally given over to furtiveness or sleaze: a kind of updated Catullan enterprise maybe, or a new area for Sappho. One poem fitted into the sequence is ‘After Baudelaire, “Les Bijous”’, and the Phorcys episode from Odyssey XIII is brilliantly reinterpreted by incorporation into Lindop’s series: ‘Two are the entrances: one up toward the north wind – / and by that mortals descend. But another faces the south – divine, and not for humans. That is the path of immortal’. By various routes Lindop is weaving his strange and doubtful pilgrimage into the canonical mainstream of poetry, and he is doing it invariably with accomplishment. Early in the fourth section, the poet recalls – wistfully or with a sense of release? – ‘Those were the days of dope and LSD’. I may be saying more about me than about Lindop or his avatar, but it is a relief to find yourself in this last section, starting with the beautifully modulated, unsensational description of the scattering of the poet’s father’s ashes in a ‘barley-field’. This is not just prudishness I think; the last section marks a return to the kind of poem of unforced reflection in which Lindop is unsurpassed (‘Summer Pudding’ in Tourists in 1987 is a classic example), and this last section is very rich in them, especially the autumn poems ‘Towards Michaelmas’ and ‘Total Eclipse’. What these poems do so perfectly is to catch the wistfulness of autumns – of the year or of your life. And the second-last poem, ‘A Dog at the Threshold’, is a masterly mini-epic about the approach to the underworld or afterlife or whatever we call it, ‘a sop for Cerberus’. The writer who comes to mind here is MacNeice in The Burning Perch: the route is unknown but the destination certain, FR Leavis made the famous demand of the modern writer, that they must give evidence of having lived in our time. These two books meet that requirement admirably, and across a wide range of contemporary experience: political, amorous, erotic, familial. Lindop expresses epigrammatically the hospitality of poetry to all matters, as we live ‘among the nothings and the silences / which are not nothing and are never silent’ (‘Hen Felin’). He expresses it most fully in the fine poem ‘How Long Is the Coast of Britain?’ which says again ‘Nothing gets lost or ends’. Poetry in our time must be ready to face vasectomies, television torture, sordid hotel rooms, tuna salads and knickers (the last three times in Lindop; once even in Satyamurti). At the centre of their concerns at all times is the adequacy of poetry and its language to our complicated modern predicament, in Heaney’s terms. The very different skills and concerns of these two committed writers equip them well to access the potential of poetry in our time. Not the least of their virtues is that they don’t see poetry as a fenced-off area, or deliberation about its adequacy as a foregone conclusion.
Bernard O’Donoghue’s most recent book of poems is Outliving (Chatto 2003). His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will be published in Penguin Classics in August.
|
|
Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
|
|