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Here are poems at the service of a human life, while others caper and dance, and some float and sting George Szirtes’ close reading of three extraordinary new collections |
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ELAINE FEINSTEIN IAN DUHIG ELIZABETH COOK
Not that it is that simple. Milton’s feeling for his drowned friend Edward King is the occasion of his poem ‘Lycidas’, though ‘Lycidas’ is not exclusively personal mourning or celebration. Ben Jonson’s two wonderfully touching poems on the deaths of his children, ‘On My First Son’ and ‘On My First Daughter’, are somewhat more so, though even here the flourish: ‘Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry’ is a cry out of the morass of personal sorrow intended to resound in the res publica of literature. And we accept this. We understand that the rituals of ingenuity, performance, mastery are fit for the purpose, if for no other reason that a personal death is also a symbolic death, and because we have reasons of our own for summoning words on occasions that seem to defeat ingenuity, performance and mastery. And that is a vital aspect of poetry: the personal understanding through public language of the terrors and delights of life. That is why hundreds of thousands are driven to write verses for births, loves, weddings, sicknesses and funerals. The verses may be bad but the understanding of the functions of verse is faultless. The great disaster of time overwhelms the brief candle: we have nothing but our words to stand up in. In 1985, after the death of his wife Lesley in 1981, the poet Douglas Dunn published his book, Elegies, which won the Whitbread Prize. ‘Sympathy vote’, complained some who were doubtful about the relationship between the real pain of a real person and the real poems of a real poet. The real person’s real pain must surely disable critical judgement, they feared. The rush of sympathy for the person would sweep away the fragile yet vital parallel world of the poem: the reader would become not only the chief addressee of the poem but an implicated witness to an event in the life of the poet. This is not altogether sheer bloody cold-heartedness. The realm of the imagination that leaves both writer and reader free, detached yet exalted, is, in such cases, more than usually yoked to the world of the real, warm, suffering presence. Maybe Dunn himself feared this for when his large New Selected Poems appeared in 1999 only about half the Elegies poems were included. In the long term, poems of grief and loss are simply poems and have to survive as such. Unwrapping the significance of the personal, the avowedly personal and what we take to be personal from a book of poems, is a task beyond this review, and I only raise the question because Elaine Feinstein’s Talking to the Dead is, like Dunn’s Elegies, or indeed like Jonson’s brief poems, quite specifically about the death of someone close and loved, in this case her husband. Too personal? But that is precisely the power of the Ben Jonson poems, isn’t it? Isn’t it the most natural thing for a poet to sing his or her life to the best? And the best is when it is our own lives being sung. So Elaine Feinstein sings it through a series of poems, in a range of modes from tightly rhyming couplets like ‘Father and Son’: ‘One night in the multi-storey car park / near Jesus Green, it was silent and dark’; and quatrains like the opening poem, ‘Winter’: ‘The clock’s gone back. The shop lights spill / over the wet street, these broken streaks / of traffic signals and white headlights fill / the afternoon. My thoughts are bleak’; through personal memories of her husband’s life, such as ‘Folk Song’: ‘We were hiring a twin tub at five shillings a week’ and ‘Stuff’: ‘Here we came in hot July...’; and through addresses to others such as Ezra Pound: ‘I loved the syllables of Lustra and Cathay, / even while knowing you would casually / have seen me done for as a child of nine...’ There are meditations on being Jewish including a marvellous account of the diaspora in a longer poem, ‘Scattering’. There are versions or translations out of the Russian of Akhmatova and Olga Martynova, memories of the funeral itself, reflections on being alone and even a kind of prayer in the last poem, ‘London’, in which her grandchild comes to sleep over and wants to keep the curtains open at night to see ‘my London’, the last verse of which goes: Have you seen London from above? she asks me. That is the note the book ends on. Various individual poems in it will shine brightly for various individual readers but there is an overall sense of something plainspoken that is looking for order but is happier with informality, something a little naked and open, indeed forced open, to concerns beyond the immediately poetic but being all the more poetry for that. Talking to the dead is a vital part of what we do, the dead who in ‘Winter’ ‘lie peaceful and curled / like an embryo under the squelchy ground / without a birth to wait for’. It is not in the coffin that they lie curled – the coffin prevents that – but in the mind, in language. Of course the poems are beautifully crafted but they do not proclaim their craft: their quiet intensity is at the service of a human life.
The new book is mostly the result of a commission, as Duhig explains in the notes at the end, to write new poems around the 14th-century French poem, the Roman de Fauvel, a commission that suited his talents perfectly. The Roman de Fauvel is an anonymous work, a kind of allegory concerning a creature half-man/half-horse whose name is an acrostic, says Duhig, ‘for Flaterie, Vilanie, Varieté and Lacheté, also suggesting faus-vel (“false veil”) and fawn, a colour of evil narcissism.’ Duhig also refers to writings by Eco and Tuchman regarding the problems engendered by the Crusades, Tuchman’s work being titled A Distant Mirror, a mirror that, for Duhig, ‘did not seem so distant’. From the Crusades we quickly work our way to Bush and to the war, as he sees it, for oil. Duhig identifies George Bush with Islam’s Antichrist, Dajjal. ‘A trawl of the Internet’, he says, ‘will reveal perceived connections between Dajjal, Templars and George Bush’. The epigraph to the book comes from Thomas Arnold who said: ‘If I were called upon to name what spirit of evil predominantly deserved the name of Antichrist, I should name the spirit of chivalry.’ Chivalry leads to Crusades, and we know who spoke of a crusade most recently. So the cosmology of the book is that America really is what the Ayatollah Khomeini said it was in 1979, the Great Satan, the government of Hell, and that in the bottom-most pit of that Hell dwells Dajjal-Bush, forever feasting on, presumably, Tony Blair. I confidently expect to see the state of Israel dowsed in oil and burning in the background with President Ahmadinejad elevated to glory and George Galloway as his prophet chastising the Jewish Neo-cons. It has quite a nice traditional Catholic feel. ‘But thou read’st black where I read white’, Duhig quotes Blake. That is where you go from. Go from there. And you do go, a wonderful rollicking, technically brilliant and indeed humane romp of a route between song and scholarship, between carnival and library. Personally I can’t quite go from there, I’m afraid, being a loather of cosmologies, not giving tuppence whether black reads white or white reads black. Nevertheless I cannot help loving the poet who can caper and dance in such a virtuosic fashion if only because I think that virtuosity is sometimes behovely for poets, language being the perilously thin integument on which capering is a heroic enterprise. I cannot help loathing the cosmology because I have a reasonable suspicion that cosmologies justify everything – and I mean Bush’s cosmology as much as Osama Bin Laden’s. There are no easy equivalences in poetry. And as some said that Dunn’s Elegies could not be judged because of extrinsic interest, so the reading of political verse is also likely to be influenced by extrinsic factors such as whether we subscribe to the views expressed and so forth. It may be that verse, at its best, transcends cosmology. I trust it does. I think it does. So, as will be clear by now, it is hard for me to write about this superbly written book that gladdens my heart with the joy of its knowledge and dancing. Nor can I, for my comfort, suppose the book would have been as gladdening if there had been no cosmology. Cosmology lends direction and fire, setting the native virtues alight. Let me illustrate a fraction of those virtues with a pitifully few examples. In ‘Fauvel’s Prologue’ Duhig provides a feisty exercise in Hudibrastics, beginning: Seigneurs et dames, you’re welcome all! That touch of Mel Brooks is a brave piece of comedy, the verse is expert, Fauvel is firmly in the saddle of himself. But Mel Brooks is capable of offering us a soupçon of parodied rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, mes chères) L-A-N- G-U-A-G-E poetry too in ‘love me a little’, the poem beginning:
on the school ranch holidays and other serious jokes on such matters, such as ‘The Graft of Verse: Closure’ whose verses include: POEM: Pre-Osteoblastic Egf repeat protein The poem refuses to come to a closure by simply leaving the last line unfinished. There are marvellous songs, consistent word-play, remarkable felicities of ear. And what is more if you agree with the cosmology of Bush-in-Hell you will really like it. And many do, of course. I would be very surprised to find a poll of university students, dons, poets, playwrights, goodhearted intellectual folk generally that doesn’t. As for me, somewhere in the background I still hear the voice of Elaine Feinstein in her poem ‘Lissom Grove’: I feel like someone except that I don’t altogether escape, my shoes knock lonely notes from the pavement,
Then Fauvel gallops on, hot with cosmology.
Cook is not entirely a newcomer. As well as being a poet, she is the author of a highly praised novel about the Greek hero, Achilles, and she is also a reviewer, a librettist and the editor of the Oxford John Keats. Her collection bears traces of much of this. There is a poem on Keats and Virgil, there are various references to classical literature, there are elements of song and elements of something rather like commentary or notation. In the Keats and Virgil poem for instance, which is itself part of a series titled ‘Essays in Restoration’, a nicely scholarly title, she includes a footnote – and a rather lovely one too – as the third verse of the poem. The poem is musing on Keats’s childhood translation of the Aeneid when it inserts: I remember a man in Pentonville Prison The whole is printed in small type, as above. As the notes at the back remind us, Keats himself also stood up straight at the mention of anything oppressive. Cook is not always as formally adventurous as this. Her poems, which are often shadowed with memories or premonitions of death, tend to talk plainly – more plainly than Feinstein does in Talking to the Dead – and only occasionally lend themselves to afflatus or display, their lyricism being concentrated in shorter passages that are quickly nipped back, blossoming occasionally in poems of remembered sensuality, like ‘Farm’, in which recollections of bathing at the ages of seven, ten and thirteen are brought together to embody the shift from innocence, through an account of violent death, and finally to tentative sex. At seven for instance: At night their mother But these are occasional, delimited sensualities: Keats on a tight leash. Of the three sections of the book, the central one, ‘The Twelve Degrees of Loneliness’, is a sequence of poems about a grandfather presumably killed in 1914. Here, the Keatsian sensitivity is bent to examine the roots of loneliness. One poem, ‘Bullet’, imagines the bullet that kills him travelling on, ‘skimming the Himalayas’ getting tangled in ‘a prayer flag / strung up like bunting / above a white rush of water / that spills down Kachenjunga’ and moving ever onwards until it finally reaches Kynoch in Birmingham where, we presume, the grandfather was born or lived. It is a splendid and moving conceit that switches to Aristotle’s notion of dreams like small frogs travelling through the body. There is in fact an apprehension of violence and danger in the poems, and the scholarly nipping back is a form of discipline. Often the poems are prepared to rely on narrative that is close to prose, but one can hear something quite original going on there, albeit in fragments, like something assembled with difficulty. That sort of difficulty is no bad thing. The blurb on the back cover describes Cook as being like Marianne Moore but tougher (my italics). I am not sure that saying such things does Cook any favours. I don’t think I would put her in the ring against Marianne Moore. Miss Moore would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, or as Miss Moore might put it, float lepidopteral and sting like a blurting jacketed fellow. Elizabeth Cook is, nevertheless, something to be reckoned with. The short lyrical poems in the third section have taken their corsets off. They float and sting. The desired Bowl of her title is described by her as ‘wide and shallow’, turning ‘for ever on a curve / so gentle a child / could bear it and beasts / lap fearless at its low rim.’ Wide, shallow with a low rim then. But capacious.
George Szirtes’ book of poems Reel (Bloodaxe) won the TS Eliot Prize in 2004. His New and Collected Poems will be published by Bloodaxe in 2008, together with John Sears’ study of his work.
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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 Tel / Fax: 00 44 (0)20 8521 0776
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