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This is the fifth – and final – instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared inHurt(Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second 3 poems can be read here. The third 3 poems can be read here. The fourth 3 poems can be read here. In these concluding 3 poems, Odysseus catches sight –on the street –of a woman he used to love, who left him, who hurt him. Telemachus’s own erotic encounters with women never come to anything, yielding for him only further frustration and unanswerable questions. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Teiresias tells Odysseus, after he has killed the suitors, to continue on his travels, but this time to head inland, carrying an oar, in search of a people who know nothing of the sea.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
This is the fourth instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared inHurt(Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second 3 poems can be read here. The third 3 poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope tries to work out her understanding of the black, volcanic fields which lie high up at the centre of the island of Ithaca, but she feels the limitations of the life she has been expected to live make this impossible. Odysseus is wrestling with the facts of change and suffering. He thinks of his dog, Argos (who features a good deal in Nolan’s film), not merely their recognising each other, but their being capable of loving the apparently unlovable. Later, Penelope, knowing she is ill, drives up into the Ithacan hills in search of a shaman, in search of a cure.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
This is the third instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared inHurt(Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second three poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope finds herself thinking about the island’s volcanic past and about the tourists who come to this modern version of Ithaca. What are they looking for? Odysseus has taken to reading Ibsen (of all writers) and questions his old attitudes to language, purpose, to the ‘things / laid open around him’. Telemachus, meanwhile, can only bitterly see reflections of himself in the island’s schoolchildren, even in the island’s desolate landscape.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
This is the second instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Odysseus considers Ithaca’s rise to fame – or notoriety – as a tourist destination, mirroring the decline in the kind of values to which he once aspired. The decommissioning of a lighthouse on the island reflects this – as does the plight of the now unemployed keeper of the lighthouse. Father and son often argue: Telemachus’ angry, cynical, frustrated searching for ‘definition’, versus his ageing father’s long-gestating, baffling, acceptance of ‘what is’.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
This is the first instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. In these 3 poems, Odysseus, now an old man, walks the Ithacan landscape in search of an old grave stele he recalls as presenting an heroic image of a young fighting man, only to find the passage of time has changed his view of it. Meanwhile, Telemachus is still searching for opportunities to prove his own idealistic, militaristic, heroism in service to a clear-cut purpose (that he has yet to discover). Penelope dreams (again) of her own childhood, her husband appearing suddenly as an eagle, intent on marrying her, changing her life forever.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
Watching Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey on the IMAX screen at Swiss Cottage recently reminded me of this …. Back in 2008, I was struggling to complete a sequence of poems – called ‘Essays in Island Logic’ – in which I had taken the three central figures of Homer’s The Odyssey and placed them on a modern Ithaca, by now become a popular holiday destination. On reflection, I realised I was struggling with the poems because I was labouring under a strong a desire to exert too much authorial control over a piece that in fact wanted to be set free. What follows derives from notes I made at the time, having discovered some of Boris Pasternak’s ideas about the writing of poetry which influenced my approach to the poem sequence which was completed and eventually published in my collection Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010).
Over the next couple two weeks, I will publish here 15 poems from the sequence that resulted – featuring an ageing Odysseus, a frustrated and ill Penelope, and their son, the angry, unfulfilled, edgy Telemachus.
There is an early – now lost – paper by Boris Pasternak called ‘Symbolism and Immortality’ which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being ‘the common property of man’. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his ‘Essay in Autobiography’ written in 1956 and he goes on, ‘I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity – the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content’. He then remembers concluding that ‘the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience’ (tr. Manya Harari, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).
In Pasternak’s own work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as ‘I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings’ (‘I want the heart of the matter’) and ‘Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self’ (‘Fame’s not a pretty sight’). In struggling to complete ‘Essays in Island Logic’ I felt I had been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain, or assert, its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I felt more sanguine about this – chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience – it’s not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh – my set of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised, according to my personal self. As Pasternak argues though, each individual self has sufficient in common with all mankind so that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.
It strikes me this is not far from Keats’ valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being – a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship – and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more and try to understand it far less – the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It short cuts the truth – at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive at times (of trouble) but it is always an error. Odysseus learns this I think in the ‘Essays’ sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous – the perceiver of vivid contrast of necessity, us and them, victory and defeat). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade but rather to take life as a whole.
In contrast, his son, Telemachus, remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism – what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house etc) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical with her portrayal – yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poem sequence, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution – if we can speak in such terms – is an openness of soul. There: I’ve said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.
So we process our own experience. We find a locale, a niche for it within ourselves, thus adding it to ourselves, to our growing uniqueness. As a teacher, this has long been my model of the educative process and ought to find its way more often from my daily business into poems. And death? As Pasternak suggests, the artist leaves behind something of their own ‘take’ on their life experience – a poem, a piece of music, a painting. Did M——– leave something when she died in January 2006? (or more recently, rawly, tragically, K——– in April 2026?) Of course – her words, her way of life, her perception of things such as food, children, gardens, her husband. She contributed and still contributes to our ongoing life and thought processes. She remains one of the counterpoint of voices, part of the collaborative nature of life, incorporated (though bodiless) into our matrix, into our souls. Of course, we are aware of blind-spots in her individual perception of the world – these are part of her individual nature, her character. But this merely suggests that it is the most powerful personalities who are capable of incorporating most. Shakespeare – oh, Bill! – and Keats’ concept of negative capability. Then the driving force behind this emergence from the shell of the self into the world is surely what we call ‘love’. We are all artists of differing abilities in our everyday lives. What marks the ‘real’ artists? Surely only the choice of medium as a particular, recognisable form of expression. I have always been drawn to Virginia Woolf’s idea of the dinner-party as an art form as in Mrs Dalloway – perfectly valid, but seldom recognised. And my beef with work, the grind of the 9-to-5, is the way it demands and delivers the narrowing of experience. So my ‘Essays’ is a meaningless sequence – merely three souls engaged, at differing stages, on the common work of the creation of their own selves.
And so, more generally, to write a poem? It is the slow uncovering of these forged connections in our own minds. This is why it happens. It begins, unbidden, so often. But the process of recovery itself, with the intention of bringing it into the public sphere, so that it can be taken up and experienced by others, that is a process towards self-knowledge and is never (should never be) a representation of the already familiarly known, the preconceived. Writing a poem resembles the process of self-justification – but is not that. It is a process of analysis, discovery, comprehension of the negotiated ground between self and other. In Dr Zhivago, Pasternak attacks two types of journalists. The first has a pre-prepared construct, an agenda about the ‘people’ and, claiming to be an observer, in reality only collects supporting evidence of his own views. The second (and more recognisably modern type), is all clipped speech, sketches, and scenes of reality, scepticism and misanthropy. But Pasternak argues again: facts do not truly exist for us until man puts into them something of his own, some measure of his own wilful, human genius, of fairy tale and myth. As before, this seeming rampant individualism is counter-balanced by Pasternak’s unshakable belief that – for the most part (and I’m afraid it is this vague) – there does remain a sufficient commonality for art to speak.
This review has just appeared on the Everybody’s Reviewing site. Many thanks for giving this new collection such an insightful and concise reading, Gary Day.
There’s something about Martyn Crucefix’s poetry that reminds me of a theremin, an early electronic musical instrument that was played without being touched. Two antenna detected hand movements and translated them into eerie, vocal sounds. So these poems, without quite touching the substantial world, nevertheless register it in all its oddly ephemeral density. “Our Weird Regiment,” the title work of the collection, recounts a visit to a stately home. It is an exquisite poem, mixing up past and present in images of quiet but devastating power. Who are “the weird regiment”? Tourists, the dead, the conformist crowd and more, all forming a splendid enigma.
“Heal Thyself,” a reference to Christ’s remark in Luke 4:23, serves as a preface to the three sections which make up the collection: “Ida Belle,” “Flint” and “Homespun.” The poem articulates themes of, among others, direction, displacement, timing, loss, self-disintegration and self-renewal. The imagery is a mixture of the surreal, the matter of fact, the biblical and more. Metaphysical poets were known for their startling conceits and Crucefix is part of that tradition. In an ICU “the emptying beds / cleared swiftly as a busy table service” (“Olly and Pepper Are Safe”). He is also a brilliant imagist. In the same poem we have “the dazzling fireflies of raised phones” and in “He Made This” “naked willows / will be upholstered in inches of snow.”
No contemporary poet makes more use of allusions than Crucefix. St Augustine, Bede, Easter Island statues, Breughel, Brecht, Henry de Montherlant are just a few examples. They are integral, not decorative, stitching together past and present, amplifying the value of both. Crucefix is a highly intelligent poet acutely attuned to the multiple disintegrations of our time. He offers little in the way of consolation but these poems, these oscillations, are one reason not to despair.
About the reviewer: Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy Comedy and Sacrifice. He is also co-editor of The Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. His poetry has been highly commended in a number of competitions, most recently in the Write Out Loud Echoes competition. His poem “Spooky Action at a Distance” won last year’s International Brilliant Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in The High Window, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawn Treader as well as various other magazines.
This review is an extended version of the one which first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it.
Considered by Thomas Mann as ‘the first lady of German letters’ and as the first woman to receive the prestigious Goethe Award (1931), Ricarda Huch (1864-1947) was a literary superstar of her time, yet remains little known in English. She was an historian who published novels, philosophy, drama and poetry. With the rise of Hitler, she made her rejection of Nazi doctrine clear, remaining in Germany as an ‘inner émigré’, but surviving the war years. Autumn Fire (Poetry Salzberg, 2024) is her last collection, published in 1944, and powerfully reflects her lifelong fascination with the Romantic movement. As Karen Leeder’s scene-setting Introduction explains, this is evidenced in the poems’ formal choices as well as imagery, ‘a repertoire of sprites, flowers, scents, birdsong, gardens, moons, fairy tales, and love’. An English poetry reader would initially place this work in parallel to the least challenging of the Georgian poets of 1914.
There is frequently a faux medievalism at work, as in ‘The trees of autumn murmur’ which tells the story of a Prince who wanders into the woods and is bewitched by ‘fairies wild’ to live a sad, unloving, unhappy life. Other poems remind us of Hardy’s folkloric, time-obsessed lyrics in similarly challenging stanza forms:
On far-off floors the dancers face the middle,
The hems swing stiffly to the threshers’ drum.
Accordion and bass and fiddle
Ethereal hum.
(‘Autumn’)
Also from the stock Romantic image bank comes the isolated, tortured figure of the poet who, as spring days arrive, remains unmoved by them because mysteriously ‘troubled’ and when called upon to sing his songs (this is Huch’s own masculine gendering), finds that his creative efforts are ‘unwelcome’ to society at large (‘Morning of twittering birds’).
However, a closer reading of Huch’s poems clarifies their curiously hybrid effects, as in ‘The Old Minstrel’ in which the violent early years of the twentieth century come forward dressed in medieval garb. The narrative voice encourages the minstrel to sing and play his harp: ‘songs of golden treasure, / Times of playfulness and pleasure’. But the final lines of the poem are spoken (we must assume) by the minstrel who warns that what may come from him demands powerful trigger warnings:
Woe betide ye when I call
Forth my lions, every string,
Dumb in dusty ambuscade,
Torpid now, glistening
Thick with matted blood!
Huch boldly leaves the poem there, without any return to a possibly moderating, narrative voice. ‘The Heroes’ Tomb’ also makes use of familiar images (a tomb, a blustery November day, an old man, a passing shepherd, a youngster asking questions) to address a distanced ‘wicked war’. This poem similarly ends bloodily (though note, we are still in the era of swords rather than machine guns), as those who are inclined to stoop and listen at the tomb, can ‘make out far below the clash of swords, / And tell the drip, drip, drip, and hear the sound. / Can it be blood?’
Such lines contrast the lark’s song, the perfumed jasmine, the poplars and lime trees inhabiting so many of these pages and Huch herself seems to shuttle between a religious-based optimism and a much more modern sounding despair. In ‘Moonlit Night’, an owl flies through a wood and takes a mouse as prey. The moon seems to be portrayed as looking on, wholly indifferent, as it picks its way through the branches, ‘twinkle-toed and light’. Only the form and language here makes the poem feel less than genuinely Modern. As for the owl, it becomes proleptic of technological advances in air warfare as she sweeps off through the wood, ‘the murderess, / whose claws the victim hold, / airborne above black treetops’ emptiness’. Another predator image later provides the reader with a further shock. In ‘My heart, my lion, grasps its prey’, the latter is identified as ‘the hated’. And the passionate nature of Huch’s antagonism – though the object of her hate is never named – is startling, and she uses repetition, shortened lines and rhyme to make her point:
My heart hates yet the hated,
My heart holds fast its prey,
That none may palter or gainsay,
No liar gild the worst,
Nor lift the curse from the accursed.
Almost inevitably you feel, the elements of modern warfare seep into Huch’s poems. In the midst of another Hardyesque stanzaic poem, between the ‘honey-brown’ buds on the trees and the lark’s ‘music-making’, more familiar ‘war poem’ sounds provide the base notes: ‘The earth shakes with battle, the air with shellfire heaves’ (‘War Winter’). The ABAB quatrains of ‘The Young Fallen’ mourn those taken by war by first evoking the innocence of their childhoods, schooldays, their unfulfilled worldly ambitions. Then ‘War came’. And though much of the detail and imagery could be applied to wars fought anytime in the last few centuries, there are moments when the realities of the mid-twentieth century cannot be denied. The young men’s hands are a focus, as they ‘Not long ago reached out for toys and fun. / Those hands, conversant with the tools of murder, / Control the howitzer and grip the gun’.
In fact, Huch was living in Jena when the city was bombed by the Allies and ‘The Flying Death’ comes closer than any other poem in conveying her experiences of modern warfare. Though the Flying Death is an old-fashioned personification, its modus operandi is up to date: ‘The chimney reels, the roof-beams groan, / By distant thunder he is known’. Even as the air bombardment is imaged as approaching on ‘iron steeds’, its impact is plainly conveyed as ‘A whistling, hissing din, and more, / A jarring shriek is heard, a roar, / As if the earth would burst.’ This Poetry Salzberg publication unfortunately does not give the reader the original German, but Timothy Adès’ translations are quite brilliant in their preservation of form and rhyme, while at the same time conveying both the sweetness and the violence in Huch’s curious, powerful, under-appreciated poetry.
Excerpts from Autumn Fire, tr. Timothy Adès
Stralsund
The old grey town that blue sea girds: The swell of rust-red sails, The squawking, tumbling salt-sea birds, The flash of clean fish-scales.
On this church wall the pounding wave And tempest waste their fire: Though organ-thunder shakes the nave, No foe hurls down the spire.
The clouds with tender beating wing Caress its head, that dreams Of fierce-fought battles reddening Its foot with gory streams.
The dead are sleeping, stone by stone, The sounding bells request: Eternal memory, my son, Be thine, eternal rest!
Music
Melodies heal up our every smart; Happiness, Lost to us, they redress; They are balsam to our ailing heart.
From the earth where we without respite Toil enslaved, As on wings of blessed angels saved They transport us to a land of light.
Sound, sound forth, ye songs of mystery! Worlds fly far; Earth sinks down, our red and bloodstained star; Love distils its essence from on high.
With the sad news of the passing of Tony Harrison, who as a working class poet had a great impact on me during my formative years of writing in the 1980s, I went back to a piece I was commissioned to write for an OUP collection of essays on his writing – both poetic and dramatic – in 1997. The book, Tony Harrison: Loiner, was edited by Sandie Byrne and included articles from Richard Eyre, Melvyn Bragg, Alan Rusbridger, Rick Rylance, and Bernard O’Donoghue. This is the full text of what I contributed: an intense focus on and close analysis of two of Harrison’s key poems, ‘A Cold Coming’ (for Harrison reading this poem click here) and ‘Them & [uz]’ (for the text of this poem click here).
The Drunken Porter Does Poetry:Metre and Voice in the Poems of Tony Harrison
Part I
Harrison’s first full collection, entitled The Loiners after the inhabitants of his native Leeds, was published in 1970 and contained this limerick:
There was a young man from Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
A pure white rose grew out of his nose
And his arse was covered in weeds.
Without losing sight of the essential comedy of this snatch, it can be seen as suggestive of aspects of Harrison’s career. For example, the comic inappropriateness of the Leeds boy swallowing seeds becomes the poet’s own ironic image of his classical grammar school education. As a result of this, in a deliberately grotesque image, arises the growth of the white rose of poetry – from the boy’s nose, of course, since Harrison in the same volume gave credence to the idea that the true poet is born without a mouth (1). The bizarrely contrasting weed-covered arse owes less to the intake of seeds (rose seeds wherever transplanted will never yield weeds) than to the harsh conditions Harrison premises in the Loiner’s life, as indicated in an early introduction to his work, where he defines the term as referring to “citizens of Leeds, citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, ‘loners'”(2).
Harrison’s now-legendary seed-master on the staff of Leeds Grammar School was the one who humiliated him for reciting Keats in a Yorkshire accent, who felt it more appropriate if the boy played the garrulous, drunken Porter in Macbeth.(3) The truth is that the master’s attitudes determined the kind of poetic rose that grew, in particular its technical facility which Harrison worked at to show his ‘betters’ that Loiners could do it as well as (better than?) they could. Yet this was no sterile technical exercise and Harrison’s success lies in the integrity with which he has remained true to those regions “covered with weeds” and in the fact that his work has always struggled to find ways to unite the weed and the rose. Perhaps the most important of these, as the limerick’s anatomical geography already predicted in 1970, is via the rhythms of his own body.
Harrison has declared his commitment to metrical verse because “it’s associated with the heartbeat, with the sexual instinct, with all those physical rhythms which go on despite the moments when you feel suicidal” (4). In conversation with Richard Hoggart, he explains that without the rhythmical formality of poetry he would be less able to confront, without losing hope, the unweeded gardens of death, time and social injustice which form his main concerns. “That rhythmical thing is like a life-support system. It means I feel I can go closer to the fire, deeper into the darkness . . . I know I have this rhythm to carry me to the other side” (5). There are few of Harrison’s poems that go closer to the fire than the second of his Gulf War poems, ‘A Cold Coming’ (6). Its initial stimulus, reproduced on the cover of the original Bloodaxe pamphlet, was a photograph by Kenneth Jarecke in The Observer. The picture graphically showed the charred head of an Iraqi soldier leaning through the windscreen of his burned-out truck which had been hit by Allied Forces in the infamous ‘turkey-shoot’ as Saddam’s forces retreated from Kuwait City. In the poem, Harrison makes the Iraqi himself speak both with a brutal self-recognition (“a skull half roast, half bone”) as well as a scornful envy of three American soldiers who were reported to have banked their sperm for posterity before the war began (hence, with a scatological nod to Eliot, the title of the poem). There are undoubtedly echoes in the Iraqi’s speech of the hooligan alter ego in the poem ‘V’, yet Harrison worries little over any narrow authenticity of voice in this case, and he does triumphantly pull off the balancing act between the reader’s emotional engagement with this fierce personal voice and a more universalising portrayal of a victim of modern warfare. Furthermore, it is Harrison’s establishment and then variation of the poem’s metrical “life-support system” that enables him to achieve this balance, to complete a poem which weighs in against Adorno’s view that lyric poetry has become an impossibility in the shadow of this century’s brutality.
The poem’s form – rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets – seems in itself chosen with restraint in mind, as if the photographic evidence of the horror lying in front of him led Harrison to opt for a particularly firm rhythmical base “to carry [him] to the other side”. Indeed, the opening five stanzas are remarkable in their regularity with only a brief reversed foot in the fourth line foreshadowing the more erratic energies soon to be released by the Iraqi soldier’s speech:
I saw the charred Iraqi lean
towards me from bomb-blasted screen,
his windscreen wiper like a pen
ready to write down thoughts for men.
The instant the Iraqi’s voice breaks in, the metre is under threat. Each of his first four stanzas opens with trochaic imperatives or questions and at one point he asks if the “gadget” Harrison has (apparently a tape-recorder but a transparent image of poetry itself) has the power to record “words from such scorched vocal chords”. Apart from the drumming of stresses in lines such as this, Harrison deploys sibilance, the alliteration of g’s and d’s, followed by an horrific mumbling of m’s to suggest the charred figure’s effortful speech in the first moments of the encounter. Regularity is re-established the moment the tape-recorder’s mike is held “closer to the crumbling bone” and there is a strong sense of release from the dead man’s initial aggressive buttonholing as his voice (and the verse) now speeds away:
I read the news of three wise men
who left their sperm in nitrogen,
three foes of ours, three wise Marines,
with sample flasks and magazines . . .
In the stanzas that follow, the dead man’s angry, envious sarcasm is controlled within the bounds of the form and it is rather Harrison’s rhymes which provide much of the kick: God/wad, Kuwait/procreate, fate/ejaculate, high tech’s/sex. It is only when the man demands that Harrison/the reader imagines him in a sexual embrace with his wife back home in Baghdad that the metrical propulsion again begins to fail. It is in moments such as this that the difficult emotional work in the poem is to be done. This is our identification with these ghastly remains, with the enemy, and it is as if the difficulty of it brings the verse juddering and gasping to an incomplete line with “the image of me beside my wife / closely clasped creating life . . .”
The difficulty of this moment is further attested to by the way the whole poem turns its back upon it. Harrison inserts a parenthetical section, preoccupied not with the empathic effort the dead Iraqi has asked for but with chilly, ironic deliberations on “the sperm in one ejaculation”. Yet all is not well, since this section stumbles and hesitates metrically as if Harrison himself (or rather the persona he has adopted in the poem) is half-conscious of retreating into safe, calculative and ratiocinative processes. Eventually, a conclusion yields itself up, but it is once again the metrical change of gear into smooth regularity (my italics below) that suggests this is a false, defensive even cynical avoidance of the difficult issues raised by the charred body in the photograph:
Whichever way Death seems outflanked
by one tube of cold bloblings banked.
Poor bloblings, maybe you’ve been blessed
with, of all fates possible, the best
according to Sophocles i.e.
‘the best of fates is not to be’
a philosophy that’s maybe bleak
for any but an ancient Greek . . .
That this is the way to read this passage is confirmed by the renewed aggression of the Iraqi soldier who hears these thoughts and stops the recorder with a thundering of alliterative stresses: “I never thought life futile, fool! // Though all Hell began to drop / I never wanted life to stop”. What follows is the Iraqi soldier’s longest and most impassioned speech, by turns a plea for attention and a sarcastic commentary on the collusion of the media whose behaviour will not “help peace in future ages”. Particular mention is given to the “true to bold-type-setting Sun” and, as can be seen from such a phrase, Harrison once more allows particular moments of anger and high emotion to burst through the fluid metrical surface like jagged rocks. There is also a sudden increase in feminine rhyme endings in this section which serves to give a barely-caged impression, as if the voice is trembling on the verge of bursting its metrical limits and racing across the page. This impression is further reinforced in the series of imperatives – again in the form of snapping trochees at the opening of several stanzas – that form the climax to this section of the poem:
Lie that you saw me and I smiled
to see the soldier hug his child.
Lie and pretend that I excuse
my bombing by B52s.
The final ten stanzas culminate in a fine example of the way in which Harrison manipulates metrical form to good effect. In a kind of atheistic religious insight, the “cold spunk” so carefully preserved becomes a promise, or perhaps an eternal teasing reminder, of the moment when “the World renounces War”. However, emphasis falls far more heavily on the seemingly insatiable hunger of the present for destruction because of the way Harrison rhythmically clogs the penultimate stanza, bringing it almost to a complete halt. The frozen semen is “a bottled Bethlehem of this come- /curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium”. Yet, as we have seen, Harrison understands the need to come through “to the other side” of such horrors and the final stanza does shakily re-establish the form (though the final line opens with two weak stresses and does not close). However, any naive understanding of the poet’s comments about coming through the fire can be firmly dismissed. This is not the place for any sentimental or rational synthetic solution. Simply, we are returned to the charred face whose painful, personal testament this poem has managed to encompass and movingly dramatise but without losing its form, thus ensuring a simultaneous sense of the universality of its art and message:
I went. I pressed REWIND and PLAY
and I heard the charred man say:
Part II
It was Wordsworth whose sense of physical rhythm in his verse was so powerful that he is reported to have often composed at a walk. It should come as no surprise that Harrison has been known to do the same. Though it was Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Harrison ‘mispronounced’ at school, it is actually Wordsworth who is more important to him because both share a belief in poetry as the voice of a man speaking to men. This conception of poetry as speech is a powerful constituent in Harrison’s work and perhaps one not clearly understood. John Lucas, for example, has attacked what he sees as loose metrics in the poem ‘V’ (7) but, to reverse Harrison’s comment that all his writing (theatrical or otherwise) is poetry, all his poetry needs to be read as essentially dramatic and deserves to be tested in the spoken voice as much as in the study. On occasions, Harrison, only half-humourously, draws attention to the fact that two uncles – one a stammerer, the other dumb – had considerable influence on his becoming a poet and it is the struggling into and with voice that such a claim highlights.(8) I have already mentioned Harrison’s interest in the curious idea that the true poet is born without a mouth. This too, implies the difficult battling for a voice or voices which can be found everywhere in his work and it is in this clamour that I find its dramatic quality. In a public poem like ‘A Cold Coming’, Harrison makes use of the contrasting and conflicting voices by playing them off against a regular form. This is almost always the case, but in what follows I prefer to concentrate less on metrical effects than on the way voices interweave, in this case, in more personal work from The School of Eloquence sequence.
The very title of the pair of sonnets, ‘Them & [uz]’, seems to promise conflict, at best dialogue, and it opens with what could be taken as the howl of inarticulacy. In fact each pair of these opening syllables gestures towards crucial worlds in Harrison’s universe. The αίαι of classical dramatic lament is echoed by the “ay, ay!” of the musical hall comedian cheekily working up an audience. Immediately, the reader is plunged into the unresolved drama of two differing voices, instantly implying the two cultures of the sonnets’ title. The line and a half which follows, sketching Demosthenes practicing eloquence on the beach, is intriguing in that its locus as speech is hard to pin down. It is perhaps intended at this stage (apart from introducing the poems’ central issue) to hover in an Olympian fashion above the ruck of dialogue that follows, implying the heroic stance which will be taken up in the second sonnet.
Line 3 opens again into a dramatic situation with the voice of the narrator (the adult Harrison), repeating his own interrupted recital of Keats in the classroom, while the master’s scornful comments appear fresh, unreported, as if still raw and present, in speech marks. The narratorial comment on this – “He was nicely spoken” – confirms this poem’s tendency to switch voices for its effects, this time its brief sarcasm barely obscuring the unironic comment likely to be made by an aspiring Loiner, or by an ambitious parent. The example of nice speaking given (again in direct quotes in the following line) is the master’s claim to possession, to authority in matters of language and culture and the separated-off reply of the narrator – “I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth – with its full rhyme and sudden regular iambic pentameter, implies both a causal link between the two lines, painting Harrison as dispossessed specifically by the master’s attitudes, as well as conveying the tone of resignation in the young schoolboy.
It will be clear that much of the tension and success of the poem has already arisen from the dramatic interchange of voices and the master’s voice asserts itself again in line 7, ironically claiming a kind of monolithic, aristocratic purity to poetry which this poem has already attempted to subvert:
Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!”
The following lines contain a curious wavering in the clear interplay of dramatic voices, only part of which is resolved as the poem proceeds. Evidently, the intrusive, even hectoring, parenthesis (at line 9) is the narrator’s questioning of what appears to be the master’s voice’s continuing argument that “All poetry” belongs to Received Pronunciation. Yet the aggression of this attack, with its harsh alliteration and sarcastic question mark, is out of key with the other narratorial comments in part I, though the tone is re-established in part II. In addition, I have some difficulty in accepting the master’s words as appropriate to the situation which – with no break – continues the speech made to the young Harrison. For example, the word “dubbed”, with its implication of the deliberate laying of a second voice over an ‘original’, already hands victory in the argument to Harrison’s claim for the authenticity of ‘dialect’ and, as such, would not be used by the believer in “the speech of kings”. Equally, the apparent plea, “please believe [Λs] / your speech is in the hands of the Receivers”, does not accord with the voice that summarily dismissed the pupil as a “barbarian” 7 lines earlier. In this case, Harrison’s desire for the dramatic has foundered momentarily on that old dramatist’s rock, the necessity for exposition which compromises the integrity of the speaking voice.
The true note of the master returns – interestingly, following one of Harrison’s moveable stanza breaks, as if confirming a shift in voice though the speech actually continues across the break – with “We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.!” The tone of the responding voice, after the suggestion of a more spirited response in the Keats comment, has returned to the resignation of the brow-beaten pupil. This is reinforced by the more distant comparison of the boy to the ancient Greek of the opening lines, heroically “outshouting seas”, while the young Harrison’s mouth is “all stuffed with glottals, great / lumps to hawk up and spit out”. This first sonnet draws to a close with this tone of frustrated defeat for the boy, yet the drama has one final twist, as the voice of the master, sneering, precise and italicised, has the last word – “E-nun-ci-ate!“. There can be little doubt that the boy must have felt as his father is reported to have done in another sonnet from The School of Eloquence, “like some dull oaf”. (9)
The second part of ‘Them & [uz]’ contrasts dramatically with the first, though the seeds of it lie in the image of heroic Demosthenes and the accusatory tone of the reference to Keats which seemed a little out of place in part I. This second sonnet’s opening expletive aggression strikes a new tone of voice altogether. “So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy / your lousy leasehold Poetry”. The poem’s premise is that it will redress the defeat suffered in part I in an assertive, unopposed manner. Not the master, nor any spokesman for RP is allowed a direct voice, yet the interchange of speech and implied situation can still be found to ensure a dramatic quality to the verse.
Demosthenes
The passionate and confrontational situation of the opening challenge is clear enough, yet it’s striking how it has taken the autobiographical incident in part I and multiplied it (“yer buggers . . . We’ll occupy”) to present the wider political and cultural context as a future battlefield. Even so, there is no let up in the clamour of voices raised in the poem. Immediately, the narratorial voice shifts to a more reflective, past tense (at line 3) as the rebel reports actions already taken – and with some success, judging from the tone of pride and defiance: “[I] used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz]”. Even within this one line, the final three syllables are spat out in a vivid reenactment of Harrison’s defiant spoken self-assertion. It is this slippery elision of voice and situation which creates the undoubted excitement of these and many of Harrison’s poems as they try to draw the rapidity and short-hand nature of real speech, its miniature dramas and dramatisations into lyric poetry. A further shift can be found in lines 9 and 10, in that the voice now turns to address a different subject. The addressee is not immediately obvious as the staccato initials in the line are blurted out in what looks like a return to the situation and voice with which this sonnet opened. Only at the end of line 10 does it become clear that the addressee is the poet’s younger self, or the self created as the “dull oaf” by the kind of cultural repression practised by the schoolmaster. The reader is further drawn into the drama of the situation by this momentary uncertainty: RIP RP, RIP T.W. / “I’m Tony Harrison no longer you!”.
The remaining 6 lines are, as a speech act, more difficult to locate. There is an initial ambiguity in that they may continue to address “T.W.”, though the stanza break suggests a change and, anyway, this makes little sense as T.W. is now dead (“RIP T.W.”). In fact, these lines use the second person pronoun in the impersonal sense of ‘one’, addressing non-RP speakers in general, and it is the generalised nature of these lines which disarms the effectiveness of the passage. This is particularly important in line 14, “[uz] can be loving as well as funny”, the tone of which, commentators like John Haffenden have questioned. (10) The difficulty here is that if Harrison is addressing those who might use [uz] anyway, though there may well be many amongst them for whom the fact that “Wordsworth’s matter / water are full rhymes” is useful ammunition and reassurance, the same cannot be said of the “loving as well as funny” line which might be variously construed as patronising, sentimental or just plain unnecessary. Nevertheless, the poem regains a surer touch in the final lines in its use of the reported ‘voice’ of The Times in renaming the poet “Anthony“. The effect here is both humorous (this, after all the poet’s passionate efforts!) and yet ominous in that the bastions of cultural and linguistic power are recognised as stubborn, conservative forces, still intent on re-defining the poet according to their own agenda, imposing their own voice where there are many.
Harrison’s use of both metre and voice reflect the struggle in much of his work between the passion for articulation, especially of experiences capable of overwhelming verse of less conviction, and the demands of control which preserve the poet’s utterance as art. Harrison’s more recent work – especially that written in America – is more relaxed, meditative, less inhabited by differing and different voices, more easily contained in its forms. There are undoubtedly great successes amongst these (‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, ‘The Mother of the Muses’, part III of ‘Following Pine’) but there are moments when Harrison seems to idle within his technique, perhaps too able to ruminate aloud without the clamour of voices rising around him. It is likely that Harrison’s legacy will eventually be seen as a reassessment of the uses of formal verse and an exploration of the dramatic potential of lyric verse. These elements are rooted ultimately in his attempts to unite the rose of poetry with the weeds of truth and (often painful) experience, by trusting to the measures of his own body and to a language he returns to the mouth.
Footnotes
1. In a note to section III of ‘The White Queen’, Harrison records that “Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483-1553), the author of Syphilis, was born, as perhaps befits a true poet, without a mouth”. Selected Poems, p.30.
2. ‘The Inkwell of Dr. Agrippa’, reproduced in Tony Harrison: Critical Anthology, p.34.
3. See Richard Hoggart, ‘In Conversation with Tony Harrison’, Critical Anthology, p.40.
4. John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Tony Harrison’, Critical Anthology, p.236.
5. Hoggart, Critical Anthology, p.43.
6. The Gaze of the Gorgon, pp.48-54.
7. John Lucas, ‘Speaking for England?’, Critical Anthology, pp.359/60.
An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it.
As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.
Even Reed’s earliest work arrived fully formed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the urban, neurasthenic wanderer appears in ‘Claustrophobia (Kings Cross)’, the narrator’s need being ‘so strong it might involve the police’. In contrast, ‘Dwight’s Brother’ is an early stanzaic, sci-fi piece, a character from the future obsessed with Manson’s and Nixon’s careers, and ‘the monomania that burns planets’. And the magnificent ‘John Clare’s Journal’ ventriloquises the nature poet’s concerns for the natural world of Helpston, his stumbling literary repute, and fear for the future of his children, ‘laid / out as corpses’. Reed’s ambition is clear from the start, and in a poem like ‘Visit to George Barker’ he evidently empathises with the older poet’s withdrawal and seclusion, his writing contemporaries being harshly judged for a lack of ambition as ‘poets whose very aim is minimal / gesture, earning [Barker’s] dismissal’.
My own first acquaintance with Reed’s writing was in the two volumes from Cape in 1984/5, By the Fisheries and Nero, when James Lasdun edited him. These particularly highlighted the Nature poems, for example ‘Conger’ which outdid Ted Hughes: ‘They’ll shave a finger off with precision, / clean as a horse bite, or close round a hand / and leave it as taut gristle strung on bone.’ In a quieter poem, the narrator is fishing in a harbour, near a ‘desalination plant’, the tautly strung reactions of a shoal of mullet seemingly reflected in the fisherman’s own alertness and nerves (‘By the Fisheries’). ‘Spider Fire’ plays brilliantly with perspectives as every sort of tiny beast and insect flees a wildfire, while the narrator, at a distance, observes ‘a black hoop / ironed into the shire’. Though the first-person pronoun recurs in many poems, Reed is usually not much interested in self-revelation. One wonders, if he was/had been, he might be more widely appreciated, because it’s not that he can’t do it. ‘Visiting Hours’, for example, is enough to make a grown wo/man weep as the narrator visits his father in hospital, economical with the truth that this is ‘terminal’, the child compelled to play the father, the father, ‘like a diver gone on down // to find an exit that was always there, / but never used’. In characteristic ABCB quatrains, ‘Changes’ perhaps records the poet’s re-visiting Jersey and a brother, or boyhood friend, who stayed behind as a farmer, both recognising ‘our youth survives, the present is a gap’. And Lindop includes two remarkable poems from the Nineties collection, in which we seem to get close to Reed’s own autobiographical difficulties, when personal survival seems ‘to be the question’ (‘Samaritans’), and, in ‘Prayer’, Reed addresses a divinity of an uncertain variety, pleading for illumination, for help, a hearing, a pointing of a way out, from guilt, dread, self-injury, poverty, ‘the unappeasable, involuntary / inheritance of lucklessness’.
But Reed deals with topics, rather than ‘issues’, and his work is descriptive in character, never preachy or judgemental, so he seldom offers us his ‘views’. The work is driven by his ‘curiosity’, which both ‘holds us to life and feeds us to the flame’ (‘Moth-Trapper’). His praise of the artist, in ‘Cezanne’, is revealing of his fascination for the ‘ordinary’ and for the shared knowledge that ‘the beautiful / is inherent in all that lives, / and once externalised in its true form, / remains as that’. Over and over again, Reed captures – hence externalises – the true form of things in the colourful, vigorous, unblinking poems selected here. And as the millennium approached, Reed extended his range even further towards ‘all that lives’. There are uncharacteristic political poems (Tony Blair is a particular target), but Reed also writes of the experience of AIDS, and with a Baudelairean dwelling on sexuality, in poems like ‘Transsexual’ and ‘Brothels’, and is drawn closer to popular culture, its fashions, music, and iconic figures. But many of the poems on Madonna, Billie Holiday, Elvis and The Rolling Stones drift to looser forms of summary and the decade from 1993 to the early 2000s contains less brilliant work, though 2006’s Orange Sunshine with its evocations of 1960s London marks a return to form.
Reed as elegist, as in This Is How You Disappear (Enitharmon Press, 2007), was perhaps unexpected, but poems like ‘Paula Stratton’ and ‘John Berger’ (not the art critic) must rate amongst the finest in that genre produced in the last 100 years. The honesty, attention to detail, the empathy extended to his subjects (Stratton was a drug addict; Berger a difficult Jersey friend and Nazi-collaborator), and the apparent ease and beauty of the writing, mean these poems ought to have been anthologised everywhere. The elegiac note is hardly surprising as Reed moves through his seventh decade and poems about socks, potted plants, tea, honey, and cupcakes seem to mark shifts in focus though Reed remains true to his repeated maxim that ‘everything I see [is] poetry’ (‘London Flowers’). The poems retain the vigour and speed that he admires in Plath’s work: ‘her fast ball imagery / on speed-trajectories [. . .] her plugged-in dare-all energies’ (‘Re-reading Sylvia Plath’). As he puts it in an extract from ‘White Bear and Francis Bacon’, Reed has remained true to his early ambitions ‘to kick poetry into near sci-fi / [. . .] like dirty-bombing the dictionary into my face’ and there are thrills to be had by any reader on every one of these 300 pages in which Reed makes so many contemporary poets look sluggish, mired in virtue signalling, lumbering in form, and monotone compared to his vivid technicolours.
Here is the whole of ‘Elegy for a Polka Dot Shirt’ from Orange Sunshine (2006):
Unreconstructed 60s ostentation snowed on blue labelled Jacques Fath, tailored fit, fished from Retro on a simmmery cloud hung-over August day, bought for pop connotations – high collar with flouncy points, cotton married to the skin. Medium size: 38 cm: structured for a defined waist sexless to the vanity of ownership. Affordable at £15, the item begged me to retrieve its showy staginess. Outside, airless haze, W11 backpacking crowds random like footage spilled into a documentary.
Later I tore a fragile seam tracking towards left underarm, the fissure sounding like hot oil pronouncing itself in a pan. The tear backtracked through history to the anonymous wearer, who bought sensation, sold it on into a chain, the onion skin thinning from use; the scar re-sewn, but evident, a little glitch caught in the fabric like a blues lament, the singer head-bowed on a stool, cooking up trouble, while the club tug at his vulnerability and modulate applause from hot to cool.
