Month: February 2015

How Do You Judge a Poem?

martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry competitions, writing , , , , , , , , , , ,

I am half way through the process of judging this year’s Torriano Poetry Competition (https://torrianomeetinghouse.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/torriano-poetry-competition-2015/). I’ve been lucky enough to judge a few such competitions in the last few years and what follows is a compilation of thoughts on the judging process. Though the initial sifting can be a slog, the latter stages are fascinating as poems that set little hooks in you at first reading, gradually become more clear, their internal coherence emerging alongside their skills with language and form. What follows is inevitably a personal take on the business – more so as the process unfolds – but I hope it may cast some light on it for those (of us) tempted to spend hard-earned cash on entering the numerous competitions now running (here are a few . . . http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/competitions/).

In the 2003 comedy film Bruce Almighty, Jim Carey plays God and, alongside with more obviously useful powers, he has to respond to the prayers of the world. But people are always praying; he rapidly approaches a kind of madness as voices swim around him, clamouring for attention.  He takes to reading the prayers in the form of e-mails. He tries to answer them individually but is receiving them faster than he can respond. He sets his e-mail account to automatically answer “yes” to all, assuming this will make everybody happy. Of course, it does not.

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A poetry competition judge comparing himself to a character playing God lays himself open to criticism – but I have indeed found the initial phases of judging rather like Jim Carey’s experience. There are so many and such a variety of voices clamouring to be heard and every one of them is heart-felt, recording significant moments in people’s lives. There is a similar sense of responsibility too – the raw nature of much of the writing is impossible to deny. I’d like to set my response mechanism to say yes to everybody, but the judge’s task has to be how to distinguish submissions as poetry.

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The numbers are always frightening. Many hundreds of poems will be submitted. Perhaps only 10% of these will demand a further reading after the brutal first sifting. Poems face an early red light from most judges because basic elements are not competently done:

  • Competitions are full of pieces where a particular verse form or rhyme pattern tyrannises the sentiment. The writer’s submission to this tyranny becomes clear quickly through the contortions imposed on the language to achieve a rhyme.
  • The writer’s choice of language can be devastating to the life of the poem. It just isn’t right to opt for forms of language or abbreviations that died out early in the nineteenth century.
  • Choice of diction also derails an entry if it is doggedly abstract. Sure, there remains much debate about whether it is the narrow English tradition that insists on things rather than ideas – but poems about Fear, Ignorance, Poverty, Eternity and Love which refuse to dip a toe into anything resembling a real life situation are going to find progress hard.

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  • A fourth error is using language without being fully aware of its likely resonance with a possible reader. A poem called ‘Mother’s Pride’ which turns out not to be aware of the loaf of bread is going to have unanticipated clutter to climb over in the reader’s mind. Louis MacNeice wanted the poet not to be an ivory tower type, but rather “able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics . . . actively interested in politics”. All a bit Boys Own perhaps, but if this means the poet stays up to date with the way words live then he’s right.

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If you are thinking of submitting to a competition, it’s worth recalling Wordsworth’s formulation – familiar though it will feel – that poetry is built from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Poems made in the heat of the moment (and not revised and reviewed in the name of not tainting spontaneity) are seldom without their flaws. This is the kind of distinction Rilke also makes when he denies poetry is composed of feelings. Its constituents are rather “experiences” which he clarifies as “memories” though even with these, we “must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the immense patience to wait until they come again . . . Only when they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them”. On the other hand, such recollection can sometimes create an intellectualised distance that may do harm to a good poem. Who said writing a poem was easy?

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Stephen Spender argues that a poet should try to acquire skill and virtuosity through the study and interpretation of other poetic works in the way Mozart and Beethoven did in playing the music of their predecessors.  Spender suggests translating poetry is the best possible exercise in interpretation. But the really important lessons (Spender says) are those of the eye, the ear, the athletic/poetic muscles. A poet can go a long way without a developed heart, but, he says, can get nowhere at all without these skills. The poet must ask continually of his lines: ‘Do they make the reader see, or hear, or feel, this experience which I am trying to re-create?’

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Reaching the final stages, the judge will be focusing more positively and more clearly on the sense, the story, the thought of a poem. Personally, I like poems that focus on small things and, in effect, make arguments for the ways in which they communicate the bigger issues that concern us all. I’m with Thomas Hardy in believing that “he used to notice such things” is one of the greatest of compliments. Edward Thomas’ poem about Spring, ‘But these things also’, likewise echoes this focus on what most people tend to overlook:

The shell of a little snail bleached

In the grass; chip of flint, and mite

Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung

In splashes of purest white . . .

Perhaps one explanation of why the question ‘what is poetry?’ is difficult to answer is because it is an art of the negative, of avoidance. The Daodejing says what is rigid and inflexible is a companion of death; what is flexible is a companion of life. I’d guess there would be general agreement that poetry is an art on the side of life. So poetry must eschew the inflexible; we must avoid the posture. And that’s very hard. In judging a competition one comes across the Wordsworth-posture, the Ginsberg-posture, alongside those of Betjeman, Hughes, Plath, Duffy . . . But we also posture like mad in ‘real life’. We may take up the pose of grief, melancholy, love, liberalism, environmentalism . . . The mark of the absence of posturing is an instability, an openness, an awareness of time (which posture tries to deny) and this is something I look for in a good poem. If a poem strikes an attitude my attention diminishes (even the attitude that wants to show a rejection of attitudinising through the hall of mirrors of ironic distancing). When the poem unearths a pulsing, shifting, live relationship between the self and the other, then I am captivated, recognising something that is both commonly human and uniquely personal.

But having said all this, I’d assure potential competition entrants that anything resembling a rule is there to be broken. Philip Pullman has said, “We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”

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So any poem in any form can work its magic. It will haunt its reader for days; it will make me change the way I think and feel; make me see the world differently. Ultimately, a poem contributes to who the reader is becoming. That is an exciting prospect for the writer. It is an even more exciting one for the judge who settles down to read.

The Death of Philip Levine

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The death of Philip Levine, one of the greats of modern American poetry, was announced yesterday. Bloodaxe published his selected poems, Stranger to Nothing, in 2006: http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852247371. Astonishingly, this was his first UK publication since Secker produced an earlier Selected Poems in 1984. Not as well known as he should have been in this country, there has been a good deal more attention given to him in very recent years.

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I’m ashamed to say I only came across him when Poetry London asked me to review Stranger to Nothing alongside Dan Chiasson’s Natural History and Other Poems (Bloodaxe, 2006). It was on the strength of the review that Anne-Marie Fyfe asked me to contribute to a Troubadour Poetry event in London celebrating Levine’s work. Sadly Levine was unable to attend on the evening due to illness and I had the honour of reading some of his work in his stead. For what they are worth, I’ll append the notes I made to myself on the poems I selected to read that evening at the end of this blog. Happily, I think I remember Anne-Marie later reporting back that Levine approved of my brief selection.

Some time later, Naomi Jaffa discussed his life and work with him at Aldeburgh in 2009. The Poetry Channel’s blurb for the recording of that conversation gives a flavour of Levine as follows: A giant of American poetry and now the newly appointed US Poet Laureate, Philip Levine memorably appeared at Aldeburgh in 2009 where he enjoyed a 45-minute conversation with Naomi Jaffa, The Poetry Trust director. In this absorbing, funny and wide-ranging interview, Levine covers growing up as a Jew in anti-semitic Detroit, working for General Motors, finding his voice as a poet, life at college with teachers Lowell and Berryman, his fascination with Lorca and Spain, his love of jazz (and loathing of Wagner), and which four writers he could bear to be stuck in a lift with: listen to that here: http://thepoetrytrust.libsyn.com/philip-levine-s-journeys

And as tribute to a truly great poet here is my September 2006 review of Stranger to Nothing:

On the face of it, the contrast between Dan Chiasson and Philip Levine could hardly be more striking. Bloodaxe have produced a fascinating selection from a poet whose relative absence from discussions of US poetry on this side of the Atlantic is a huge loss. Born in 1928 in Detroit, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the first poems included here were not published until 1963. Like Raymond Carver, to whom he bears some resemblance, Levine spent many years labouring in industry  and much of his later poetry recalls these experiences and the people with whom he worked. Whereas Chiasson is urbane and metropolitan, Levine is urban and industrial. Though encompassing a long writing career, this is not a selection that reveals very much in the way of artistic development; Levine’s characteristic style and tone seems to have come to him fully formed and he has seen little need to alter it. One reason must be the premium he clearly places upon being true to his materials – and in particular the experience of the American working people he portrays.

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Accordingly, there are poems in which Levine doubts the value of the imagination in its tendency to romanticise real experience. ‘Salt and Oils’ from the mid-eighties moves rapidly through moments in a life, but then concludes:

“These were not

the labours of Hercules, these were not

of meat or moment to anyone but me

or destined for story or to learn from

or to make me fit to take the hand

of a toad or a toad princess”

With very different results this might be seen as another attempt to achieve the “transparent eyeball” that Chiasson refers to. Things are what they are and it is in this sense that the collection title works. The phrase comes from an early poem in which a visit to a graveyard leads the narrator to contemplate the realities of life so that “in time one comes / to be a stranger to nothing”. This is also typical of Levine’s style – a loosely constructed, colloquial blank verse, driven along powerfully by the syntax across lengthy sentences that work by slow accumulation rather than the local explosions of linguistic surprises.

But if the fantasies of imagination are dismissed, Levine holds firmly to its role in the re-creation of the past. Often precisely dated, he vividly and lovingly portrays scenes and people from his past. A truck-driving uncle from “black Detroit” is sketched through telling detail – his “two hands kneading / each other at the sink” – and this summoning up into a type of art remote from the original life is, Levine seems to suggest, a kind of redemption or dignifying, so that the Uncle can at last “rise / above Belle Isle and the Straits, / your clear eye / rid of our rooms forever”. Throughout this book, lives are invoked in this fashion in finely-judged poems that neither underplay the poverty and misery within them, nor uncomfortably rose-tint the strength and humour such individuals need to survive.

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Perhaps for some, there will be something too fatalistic in these portraits of working-class America. Ought there not to have been more overt political agitation? But Levine works the vein of the individual, the idiosyncratically human and, I’m sure, for him that represents political position enough. In the very recent poem ‘Our Reds’, he again memorialises three characters from school days (1930s/40s?) and their promotion of Communist doctrine. Though the poem indeed acknowledges that what the future brought was “an America no one wanted” it is to “bless” the three that the poem intends: “bless / their certainties, their fiery voices / we so easily resisted . . . their faith in us, especially / that faith, that hideous innocence”. It is perhaps only in moments that working lives are felt redeemed as in the stunning ‘An Ordinary Morning’ with its plain recounting of workers arriving in the city on a bus. The driver and a passenger strike up a song – “O heavy hangs the head” – and as dawn breaks the other passengers wake, momentarily allowed the nobility that their exterior lives seem to deny:

“the brakes

gasp and take hold, and we are

the living, newly arrived

in Detroit, city of dreams,

each on his black throne”

Levine has said that the tradition of poetry he inherited in the 1940s was “utterly lacking” in the kind of people and experiences he had grown up with. His intention was to add to US poetry “what wasn’t there” before. To have done this so consistently – to record the plight and resilience of the poor and inarticulate in America without breaking into the angry simplicities of blame or party politics or caricature is a monumental achievement. This is a collection that deserves to become a significant feature in the twenty-first century landscape of UK poetry.

And here are my notes from the Troubadour event (page numbers here refer to the Bloodaxe edition of Stranger to Nothing):

Reading Philip Levine’s poetry I was immediately put in mind of Carver’s admiration for Chekhov – he quotes Chekhov’s letter again and again in which he says “you don’t have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds”. Also like Carver, Levine worked in industry for many years – born in 1928, his first book didn’t appear till 1963. Both seem fully paid up members of the working classes – Carver said he could never write down to his own people. ‘Saturday Sweeping’ – p 26

I like the way Levine’s poems seem to meander organically from one thing to another – without a hint of irrelevance. He also plays great tricks with chronology – memory of his working years often playing such a large part in his current thinking and writing. ‘Sweet Will’ – p 84

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Levine – like Carver – would sign up to Pound’s dictum that the only worthwhile morality in writing is “fundamental accuracy of statement”. But there is another current in Levine which can take him towards the surreal. This poem reminds me of Ken Smith’s ‘Fox Running’ (both 1981). ‘The Fox’ – p 68

In later Levine, the political anger is often transmuted into a kind of less deceived tenderness – an amazed sense of good fortune. ‘Philosophy Lesson’ – p 150

Levine often writes of visits to Europe – particularly Spain – and the Civil War clearly stimulated his imagination. Here though – I take it – he is also commenting on one of the great American poets who came to Europe – one I guess temperamentally very contrasting to Levine and I think this has to be intended partly as literary critical comment. ‘The Trade’ – p 127

Levine is also unfashionably willing to walk naked – emotionally. Some will think he sails the wrong side of sentimentality but I’d disagree.’Starlight’ – p 55

Working on Rilke for so long in recent years – I see him everywhere. In the Elegies he claims that even the street girls – prostitutes – are momentarily aware of the visionary possibilities his poems are concerned with. But here – lastly – is Levine working from a position of a good deal of factual knowledge and communicating the same thing – moments of vision without the religious baggage. ‘An Ordinary Morning’ – p 86

The Poetry of Tom Rawling

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In the early 1980s I arrived in Oxford as a self-absorbed post-graduate and promptly sought out student poets wherever I could find them. The group I joined was then (I think) meeting in rooms in Hertford College, opposite the Bodleian Library (and happily very close to the Kings Arms). Bill (W N) Herbert was there, as was Keith Jebb and Paul Mountain. The group, with changing personnel – I remember Elise Paschen was a member for a while – continued to meet throughout my 4 year stint among the dribbling spires, but we would supplement it by decamping to the Old Fire Station on George Street where Tom Rawling was running a public workshop. Tom had taken over when Anne Stevenson moved north. As a retired headmaster, Tom ran us all as a well organised and disciplined class. Elizabeth Garret joined later and I think Peter Forbes was already a member, as was Helen Kidd. Jeremy Round, who was soon to achieve short-lived fame for his cookery writing, was also a regular. My poem ‘In Memory of Jeremy Round’ (eventually published in Beneath Tremendous Rain (Enitharmon, 1990) https://martyncrucefix.com/publications/beneath-tremendous-rain-1990/) is a lament for his tragic early death, but also tries to paint a vivid picture of the workshop and its members:

We’d wrangle inconclusively

between the beers and crossfire from Tom,

elder statesman who’d slip quietly glittering

poems from his tackle bag like fish; from Helen,

whose pages always seemed typed under earthquake

conditions, whose baggy poems had more passion

than most of us could muster; from Peter’s

exactitude, schooled on a diet of science, he held

each piece like a prism till it shed eloquent

rainbows; from Bill and Keith, the ferocious

tyros, the university wits, who minced nothing

but their language into strange sweet things;

from Paul whose poems were amazed not to find

themselves loosed into a more graceful age

than the one we live in.

There were others writers, of course, to whom I apologise for not recalling them clearly. Bill has also written about these few years with great eloquence and insight: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/poets/herbert/dec_2.htm.

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But rather than his aspiring students, it’s Tom Rawling’s own poetry that I want to highlight. A pamphlet called A Sort of Killing appeared in 1978 (an historical event now as this was one of the first publications by a young Neil Astley). OUP published Ghosts at My Back (1982). Two other books followed: The Old Showfield (Taxus, 1984) and The Names of the Sea-Trout (Littlewood Arc, 1993).

Grevel Lindop has long been a fan of Tom’s work (http://grevel.co.uk/poetry/tom-rawling-rediscovering-ennerdales-poet/). There is an audio recording of Tom reading many of his best poems (you can listen to one of them here: http://listenupnorth.typepad.com/listenupnorth/tom-rawling-poet.html). Listening to him again, what what comes over is his modesty, his sharp intelligence, his confidence in his own work and the vivid recall he had of his formative years, growing up in Ennerdale, Cumbria. Tom’s poems, in their accessibility, boldness with language, natural and ecological themes are (as my review concludes) ideal for the classroom and it is still a cherished hope of mine that they might be taken up by a mainstream publisher and presented to a new generation (a Rosemary Tonks of the western valleys of Cumbria, wielding his fly-fishing rod). Perhaps the best way to sing my praise of Tom’s work is to post up a review I wrote of his posthumous collection How Hall (2009).

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I recommend you search out more of his work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Rawling). Here is my review:

Tom Rawling, How Hall: Poems and Memories, a passion for Ennerdale (Lamplugh and District Heritage Society, 2009), £7.50, ISBN 978-0-9547482-1-0

Tom Rawling, How Hall: selected poems of Ennerdale poet Tom Rawling, read by the author (Lamplugh and District Heritage Society, 2009), £5, CD audio recording

As a child in the 1920s, Tom Rawling grew up in the Ennerdale valley in what was then called Cumberland. It was not until his retirement in the shallow decades of the 1970s and ‘80s that he began to write poetry as a man “haunted . . . even bullied by his memories” as Anne Stevenson’s insightful introduction to this new selection explains. A marvellous collection was published by OUP in 1982 and two further publications from smaller presses resulted, but at his death in 1996 Rawling had not attracted the kind of attention he had hoped for and certainly deserved.

How Hall is a new edition of more than 70 poems, three pieces of autobiographical prose and some wonderfully evocative photographs. The accompanying CD is an audio recording of an extended reading given in 1983 and the passion and precision of his voice and his humble and insightful comments add further invaluable dimensions to any appreciation of his work. Rawling shares with Heaney the kind of vivid recall of childhood that yielded the title of his first book, Ghosts at My Back. An early poem has the young Rawling playing “squire” to the village blacksmith who also introduced him to his life-long passion, fishing – both are described as “tying knots / That didn’t slip” (‘Johnny’). Yet home life was not always so easy and there are poems that bitterly lament the repressed and repressive life of his mother (‘Hands’), his father’s drinking (‘Honour thy Father and thy Mother’) and the son’s rebellious, divisive “radical words” (‘Clipping Day’).

His rebellion took him away from home, but ironically it is for the authenticity of Rawling’s responses to the farm life and countryside of the Ennerdale of his youth that we should continue to read him. Perhaps it has taken us 25 years to understand what he felt intuitively, the importance of our relationships with the natural world and the kind of folklore that once bound man and nature together. Even in the 1920s, it was only Rawling’s grandmother who “glimpsed beyond the byre” to the atavistic fertility beliefs that lay behind “ritual no longer understood” (‘Grandmother’); it was she who knew the spell to complete a whistle carved from hedgerow sycamore (‘Sap-Whistle’). ‘The Barn’ vividly evokes the thrill of the hay harvest: “Bright prongs pierced and unpicked, ash handles / bent, they launched the bundles we embraced” and as the barn filled it was only when “heads bumped the slates / we came down the ladder in triumph”.

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Anne Stevenson – who met Rawling in Oxford in the late 1970s – rightly directs us not to dismiss his work as “romantic retrospection” because he really “wrote poems to tell the truth and in them rehearsed the daily rituals of life and death”. ‘Rumbutter’ characteristically revels in that recipe’s “sweet beginning” as well as, “not quite hidden, the cinnamon / of the coming funeral feast”.  There is certainly no room for sentimentality in Rawling’s view of nature: a pig is to be cared for only till the “pole-axe fell” (‘Hooks in the Ceiling’) and chickens are nurtured carefully, but in their “due season, each neck pulled / . . . the admired knack of killing” (‘Feathers’). Rawling also shares with Heaney a fascination with the insights embedded in idiom and dialect. ‘Hearthwords’ addresses the younger Irish poet with their shared belief that “the naming spell / gives the thing itself / into our hands” And then, as his own poetry began to flow, he swiftly developed a precise, lean, direct form of free verse, capable of moving from the joyous observations of “cloud and sun pursu[ing] / Their steeplechase across the land (‘I Am What I Was’) to the shockingly frank recording of the realities of the cow shed: “ a column of piss / cascades to the cobbles . . . a face gurning, whistling and whispering soft farts” (‘Privy’).

But Rawling’s reach is not confined to the material. Perhaps his most distinctive poems are those that deal with angling, especially fly-fishing for salmon and sea-trout which his poems transform into an almost religious questing and testing of the individual’s devotion, skill and subterfuge. His own first encounter with the power of the sea-trout he recalled as a moment when he had “waded / into mystery, tampered with Leviathan” (‘Leviathan’). One function of any poem is to offer us profound if vicarious experiences and these poems succeed so well in this evocation, taking us to the riverside at night, “to the dub / where sea-trout rest” where we might “hear an old ewe’s husky cough, / the water slopping, slapping” (‘Night Fisherman’).

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Poem after poem makes it clear that to fish in this way is to engage differently, intimately with the world and to embark on the difficult process of laying aside our humanity’s hobbling self-consciousness, to cast off the accretions of civilisation until we allow “the body [to] flow into the rod” (‘Torridge Salmon’), achieving a different form of consciousness as we “wade in deeper, / Share with the fish / Its lateral line / The current’s push” (‘Only the Body’). It’s easy to understand why Ted Hughes came to admire these poems as Rawling triumphantly celebrates the efforts and occasions when we encounter the Other in what becomes a frankly spiritual communion. So in ‘A Shared Rod’, a kingfisher perches on the “bamboo rod-tip” as the angler waits in the reed bed:

His great eye turns, a moment’s stare,

then, blue-green whirr,

the arrow skims downstream,

leaving an emptied space,

a shared rod quivering.

It is really this kind of encounter – with all that is not bounded by ourselves – that Rawling is conjuring in ‘The Names of the Sea-Trout’, a spell for fishermen that revises and revivifies his grandmother’s superstitious connections with the natural world:

Bender of steel, the breaker, the smasher,

The strong wench, the cartwheeler,

The curve of the world,

She who doesn’t want to surrender,

The desired, the sweet one.

Profound, vivid, honest, accessible – these are poems that at once connect us to a lost past and prepare us for a world in which the environment must again become our close companion. Rawling’s work would be wonderful to teach in schools if it were more easily available and a mainstream publisher would do well to bring him nearer centre stage. For the time being we must thank Michael Baron, Stan Buck and the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society for the very many pleasures of this marvellous book.

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A Holocaust poem – my Dad’s desert war and one of the Magi

martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Last week, the 27 January 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I have only once tried to address the subject – in a poem dedicated to my father who served in WW2 in the RAF, mostly in the deserts of Egypt (he was with 80 Squadron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._80_Squadron_RAF).

He was an engineer by trade and – as far as I know – saw no hand to hand combat. His brief was to maintain the Hawker Hurricanes that were a major component of Allied air power in North Africa. The poem records his only war injury: badly burned legs from jumping too quickly onto the nose of an aircraft after it had landed, straddling its still blisteringly hot twin exhausts. In the 1960s, he’d tell us about this while we sat at the dining table gluing together Airfix models of Hurries (as he calls them), Spits and Lancs.

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The poem was finally published in 1994 in On Whistler Mountain (see https://martyncrucefix.com/publications/on-whistler-mountain/) It opens with a less than complimentary picture of my father’s unreconstructed political and racial views which I wanted to link to the birth of Christ and the Holocaust. Ironically, given his attitude to people of colour, my father dreams in the poem that he is one of the Magi, Caspar, often depicted as a King from the Indian sub-continent. The poem’s narrative folds over to encompass both the first stirrings of Caspar’s dream about the birth of Christ as well as his last days which I imagine him spending in northern Europe.

Being a King of sorts, my-father-as-Caspar imagines the birth of a conventional king, one of conventional powers, but the child’s family turns out to be of no “consequence”. The child he finds in Bethlehem (I was thinking of course of T S Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’) seems little more than a “futile gesture”. More dreams – which the poem takes as shorthand/short-cuts to the life of the imagination – then drive Caspar north to settle in northern Europe, himself facing racist attitudes among the native peoples there.

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My father’s imagined bafflement before this strange dream in which he plays the role of a non-white king is – I’m sure now – partly his son’s liberal conscience obliquely criticizing his politics. My poem leaves Caspar to die in the northern forests, himself bewildered by what his own dreams have driven him to. The Christ child he dismissed years earlier, continues to visit him in dreams where he goes weeping over that “precise, god-forsaken ground”. The visionary child sees into the future, is a prescient witness to his own Jewish people rounded up by the Nazis’ similarly repellent attitudes to power and racial difference, finally entering “incinerators smoking in the German forest”. Of course, Auschwitz itself and many other camps were not built on German soil, but it was important to use the ‘G’ word at the end of the poem. In the strict pursuit of truth, I was imagining Caspar’s long-house on German soil in the locality of Dachau or Buchenwald, the name of the latter translating as ‘beech forest’.

A Long-House in the Forest

for my father

1.

His war happened in the blazing Middle East.

When he was young, far from the mud of Europe

and the wired camps, his thighs were burned

by too much bravado, sitting astride

the exhausts of a Hurricane that hadn’t cooled.

He picked up the language. Never liked Arabs.

Any dark skin’s still a nigger to this day.

So he votes for the Right, though he’s careless

of politics and takes it as read: we all

long for power and we all need to be led.

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2.

In his dream, he is Caspar. He has chosen

to wait in the draughty long-house, watching

the yard collect its ragged slush of leaves.

He knows the corn-bins are flooded and rotten.

He knows this month is the anniversary

of nights when Caspar rolled in distress, youth,

dream illumination – an excited showing

of power’s open hearth, its air-gulping fire –

his sleep filled with the birth of a king

whose strong arm would invigorate the world.

At once, Caspar instructed a journey. His gift

for this new king, of course, was gold.

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3.

A wretched child asleep on that year’s straw.

Neither mother nor father people of consequence,

but simple Jews – trouble-making, deluded.

This was nothing worth his understanding.

(He knows Caspar is a man of wisdom and books).

What could be the need for this powerless figure?

Why this pot-bellied brat? This futile gesture?

Shepherds stood with doting faces for the boy.

He turned his back, dropped the derisory gift.

4.

Without wishing, Caspar gleaned what became

of the lad from travellers’ unlikely tales.

How he saw no reason to cloak humility.

Nor saw the need to make a show of strength.

No surprise the authorities destroyed him.

And on that day, Caspar, his dream-self,

was driven by dreams again, north this time,

to the Black Sea, fighting the Danube inland,

to this blond-haired, beer-drunk, long-limbed place,

whose people mistake him for a piece of Hell

with his blackened face and barbarian tongue.

5.

Sitting by the squadron’s crest, a photograph

of the kids, he sees no reason to dream himself

black and ignorant, plagued by dreams. But he is

Caspar, has chosen the long-house and struggles

at night – not with dreams of the hot south,

of home, courtyards, frescoes and fountains-

but with a dream that has no place yet, though

he searches for it, now that same, futile boy

in the straw has grown his only dream-guide

and weeps over this precise, god-forsaken ground.

He finds it ruled by those whose failure is to see

no need for an icon of the weak, the needful.

Here, the boy’s deluded people prove no trouble at all,

filing from wooden huts ranged like inland galleys,

to incinerators smoking in the German forest.

260px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1983-0825-303,_Gedenkstätte_Buchenwald,_Wachturm,_Stacheldrahtzaun