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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.
A little flock of reading dates – replacing the swifts that have left our skies recently – have gathered themselves into something that almost resembles a brief Autumn Reading Tour. Admittedly, not going too far beyond the Greater London area – but to Maidstone and (briefly) Winchester – but of course I’m very happy to be granted these opportunities to read my work. Live links to these events are provided in the details below. And, as you’ll see from the details below, the chance to read with some really talented, inventive and entertaining poets along the way. In particular, I’ll be launching my new chapbook of poems – Walking Away – published by Paul O’Prey’s excellent Dare-Gale Press. If you are in any of the vicinities mentioned – I’d be delighted to see you there – Martyn
Wednesday 10th September– 8pm @ Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution, 11 South Grove, London N6 6BS – reading w/ Tim Ades and Maggie Brookes-Butt. HLSI Fundraising Event: Tickets £10 https://hlsi.org.uk/whats-on/poetry-please/
Saturday 25th October – 1pm @ The Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion St, London WC1R 4RL reading w/ David Harsent. Free Event. This is a Dare-Gale Press reading, launching my chapbook which they are publishing: Walking Away. Free Event: https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/
And on the SAME DAY I’ll be second launching the chapbook Walking Away…
Saturday 25th October – 7pm @ The Ship Poetry Reading Series, organised by Chris Beckett, 134 New Cavendish St. London W1W 6YB – reading w/ Barbara Cumbers, Jack Cooper, Anthony Joseph, + Fawzia Muradali Kane: £5 https://www.chrisbeckettpoems.com/news.html
I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge – one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people’s stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person – and a mercifully short one at that – turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title Cargo of Limbs. Originating in events almost 10 years ago now, it is utterly depressing that the longish poem that constitutes most of the book remains relevant. Now – as then – the news is full of people in small boats. Then, refugees and migrants were embarking in the Mediterranean. Now, most of the talk here is of people embarking from the coast of France to risk the real dangers of the English Channel. The book remains in print and can be bought from Hercules here or by contacting me directly.
I posted a short piece about the chapbook during the Covid lockdown in April 2020. I was preoccupied then with what writers can/cannot do in such dire circumstances as pandemics and wars: ‘Beyond feeling helpless, what do writers do in a crisis? I think of Shelley hearing news of the Manchester Massacre from his seclusion in Italy in 1822; Whitman’s close-up hospital journals and poems during the American Civil War; Edward Thomas hearing grass rustling on his helmet in the trenches near Ficheux; Ahkmatova’s painfully clear-sighted stoicism in Leningrad in the 1930s; MacNeice’s montage of “neither final nor balanced” thoughts in his Autumn Journal of 1938; Carolyn Forche witnessing events in 1970s El Salvador; Heaney’s re-location and reinvention of himself as “an inner émigré, grown long-haired / And thoughtful” in 1975; Brian Turner’s raw responses to his experience as a US soldier in Iraq in 2003′. You can read more of that piece – and hear me read the opening of the poem – here.
In the chapbook I wrote a ‘How I Wrote the Poem’ type of discussion and it’s that that I felt would be worth posting in full here because, though times have changed, nothing seems very different about the refugee crisis and the moral issues surrounding it . . .
It’s early in 2016 and I am on a train crossing southern England. On my headphones, Ian McKellen is reading Seamus Heaney’s just-published translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is the book in which Aeneas journeys into the Underworld. As he descends, he encounters terror, war and violence before the house of the dead. He finds a tree filled with “[f]alse dreams”, then grotesque beasts, centaurs, gorgons, harpies. At the river Acheron, he sees crowds of people thronging towards a boat. These people are desperate to cross, yet the ferryman, Charon, only allows some to embark, rejecting others. At this point, in Heaney’s translation, Aeneas cries out to his Sibyl guide: “What does it mean [. . . ] / This push to the riverbank? What do these souls desire? / What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy waters?”
The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries. The timing is crucial. It’s just six months since the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body – drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey – had filled the media. In the summer of 2015, this three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes of their planned flight across the Aegean, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.
Beyond my train window, the fields of England swept past; Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family. It struck me that some form of versioning of these ancient lines might be a way of addressing – as a poet – such difficult, contemporary events. I hoped they might offer a means of support as Tony Harrison has spoken of using rhyme and metre to negotiate, to pass through the “fire” of painful material. I also saw a further aspect to these dove-tailing elements that interested me: the power of the image. The death of Alan Kurdi made the headlines because photographs of his drowned body, washed up on the beach, had been taken. When Nilüfer Demir, a Turkish photographer for the Dogan News Agency, arrived on the beach that day, she said it was like a “children’s graveyard”. She took pictures of Alan’s lifeless body; a child’s body washed up along the shore, half in the sand and half in the water, his trainers still on his feet. Demir’s photographs, shared by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch on social media, became world news.
Demir’s images were indeed shocking, breaking established, unspoken conventions about showing the bodies of dead children. I remember passionate online debates about the rights and wrongs of disseminating such images. Yet the power of the images, without doubt, contributed to a shift in opinion, marked to some degree by a shift in language as those people moving towards Europe came to be termed “refugees” more often than the othering word, “migrants”. This tension between the desire to draw attention to suffering and the risks of exploitation has arisen more recently. In June 2019, the hull of a rusty fishing boat arrived in Venice to form part of an installation at the Biennale by the artist, Christoph Buchel. The vessel had foundered off the Italian island of Lampedusa in April 2015 with 700 people aboard. They too were refugees seeking a better life. Only 28 people survived. When the Italian authorities recovered the vessel in 2016 there were 300 bodies still trapped inside. Buchel called his exhibit Barca Nostra (Our Boat) and there is little doubting his (and the Biennale organisers’) good intentions to raise public awareness of the continuing plight of refugees travelling across the Mediterranean. Yet Lorenzo Tondo, for example, has argued that Buchel’s exhibit diminishes, even exploits, the suffering of those who died, “losing any sense of political denunciation, transforming it into a piece [of art] in which provocation prevails over the goal of sensitising the viewer’s mind” (The Observer, 12.05.19).
Interestingly, in Book 6, Virgil asks the Gods to strengthen his resolve to report back the horrifying truths he’s about to witness and I came to realise that the narrative voice in my new version ought to be the voice of a witnessing photojournalist. It is this narrator who accompanies my Aeneas (renamed Andras) through a more contemporary ‘underworld’. I imagine Andras also as a journalist, though he is a man of words rather than images. At some distance now from the writing of the poem, I see that the two western journalists have differing reactions to what they encounter. The photographer holds firm to recording events with a distanced objectivity. He considers it his role, his duty, to deliver such truths (perhaps as Nilüfer Demir felt on the beach at Bodrum; perhaps as Amel El Zakout felt on her own harrowing journey from Istanbul in 2015, the extraordinary images of which accompany this poem). My photographer’s partner, Andras, has a lot less poem-time, yet – following the outline of Virgil’s poem closely – he has a more emotional, empathetic response. By turns, he is fearful and compassionate. I think he has more moral scruple. As well as presenting the plight of contemporary refugees, between them I hope they are also debating, in part, the role of any artist impelled to bear witness to the suffering of others.
So Virgil’s original lines provided guidance but I have changed some things. As I have said, early on he apostrophises the Gods, asking for assistance in accurately reporting his journey to the Underworld. I saw no justification for my own narrator to be appealing to divine powers, though he understands those people fleeing might well put their trust in their own God. So it’s with tongue in cheek that he asks to be allowed to “file” his work in a way that is accurate (“what / happens is what’s true”) and these lines become his moment to make his faith in objectivity clear: “let me file // untroubled as I’m able”. The “brother” he alludes to is one-time journalist, Ernest Hemingway, who would often risk gunfire to file his despatches in Madrid, during the Spanish Civil War.
Later, Virgil describes the journey of Aeneas and the Sibyl through an ill-lit landscape, drained of colour, approaching the jaws of Hell. All around are personifications of Grief, Care, Disease, Old Age, Fear, Hunger, War and Death itself (Heaney’s translation buries these personifications to a large degree; in general, I prefer Allen Mandelbaum’s 1961 translation). I wanted to retain the device of personification but shifted the physical contexts of the actions to evoke the kind of experiences refugees are still fleeing from: bombing, persecution, the use of chemical weapons (“yellow dust of poison breeze running // into the trunks of trees” – an image I have borrowed from Choman Hardi’s fine poem ‘Gas Attack’). Aeneas then discovers “a giant shaded elm” (tr. Mandelbaum). Heaney’s translation associates this with “False dreams”; Mandelbaum has “empty Dreams”. All around the tree are grotesque beasts (centaurs, gorgons, harpies) which frighten Aeneas and he draws his sword against them. In my version, the tree of false dreams becomes an image of the often vain hopes that drive people to flee their homes, while Virgil’s menagerie of beasts suggest the kinds of distortions, the physical and mental lengths to which such people are driven and the dangers they face in such extremities: “bestialised women // girls groomed to new shape”. It’s here my Andras reveals his more volatile emotional nature in fearing what he sees, thinking these figures may be a threat to him. In the original, it is the Sibyl who calms Aeneas; in my version it is the less emotionally engaged narrator/photojournalist who lends Andras the defence of more emotional “distance”.
Virgil’s Aeneas begins to descend towards the River Acheron and the “squalid ferryman”, Charon. The landscape of my version is a portrait of routes overland to the sea’s edge and my figure of Charon, “the guardian of the crossing”, becomes an inscrutable and unscrupulous people smuggler. Virgil makes it clear he is aged, “but old age in a god is tough and green”. I took this hint of ambiguity further in terms of Charon’s eyes, his outstretched hand, even his physical appearance and presence: “young and attentive / yet from the choppy tide / he’s older gazing / a while then—ah— // gone—”. Virgil describes the “multitude” rushing eagerly to Charon’s boat and makes use of two epic similes comparing the human figures to falling autumn leaves and flocks of migrating birds. I’ve kept the ghosts of these images and extended the people’s approach to the ferryman as an opportunity to describe the kinds of perilous vessels that since 2015 have been launched into the Mediterranean: “they long to stagger // into the dinghy’s wet mouth / the oil-stinking holds / where shuttered waters / pool”. Virgil’s Charon permits some to board but bars others. As Book 6 proceeds, it is made clear those who are rejected are the dead who remain as yet unburied. In my version, the people smuggler also retains the power to choose who travels, but his reasons for doing so are not clear (probably money, possibly caprice). The irony is that in not permitting some to embark he may also be saving lives.
In Virgil’s poem, before he hears the full explanation of Charon’s selection process, Aeneas is baffled and deeply moved by it. He cries out – this time in Mandelbaum’s translation – for an explanation to the guiding Sibyl: “by what rule / must some keep off the bank while others sweep / the blue-black waters with their oars?” I wanted my Andras to be equally moved by their plight and the seeming injustice. But the question he tries to articulate is directed not merely at those who make a living from such dangerous journeys but also (I hope) to those in more official, political, public capacities – those who represent us – who also possess the power to accept or deny entry to people fleeing for their lives. There is no Virgilian equivalent to my final five lines but I wanted to accentuate the growing disparity between the ways the two western journalists are responding to what they witness. The narrator still wants to take good images. But Andras is moved enough to see the need for less distance, to dash the camera to the ground, to engage with those who are fleeing, to try to help.
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.
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. The collection, Rhizodont, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2024.
The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. Here’s the title poem in full, plus a video of the author reading it:
#rhizodont
Then, in a flash,
It claps shut – an ambush –
Teeth, fangs, tusks – crunch, rip,
x
Snap. The rhizodont,
Dragging itself out of water.
The old world sinks and slips
x
Beneath its tilted strata.
We’re all on a journey.
This one’s about us
x
Unearthing ourselves from a place –
Somatic, interlaced –
To be conjured from light, and sent
x
Invisible, everywhere,
For everyone to possess.
The children stare at their phones,
x
A fervent, lit up,
Incorporeal congregation,
Some deep, residual
x
Root in a life everlasting
Outlasting them, like a fossil
Sarcopterygian fish.
The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).
The poems also portray the natural wildlife of the region – dragonflies, sandhoppers, crabs and a wide variety of birds and plants. Despite coastal erosion and industrial pollution, Porteous focuses on such ‘small and local’ species as have been around for (often) millions of years. The glowworms in ‘Tiny Lights’ are ‘alien, ancient’ and for most residents of the area, completely ignored, though their continuing existence offers some sense of a continuity amidst vast change. The sounds and sights of the birds in ‘Goldcrests’ are marvellously observed, and they serve both to mark the season and, ‘bringing // Wildness’, they remind us of the natural world’s wider perspectives. The ‘Grey Heron’ is likewise superbly captured in the course of 18 shortish lines, but does the poem really need its 25 line prose Note, detailing the setting’s geographical history, the life cycle of Atlantic salmon, conservation measures being taken and the poet’s intention to place ‘the timeless drama of the ‘prehistoric’ grey heron against [the town of] Amble’s history, first as a coal port then as a salmon fishing harbour, and depict the bird as an explorer, venturing into Amble’s still-to-be-decided future’? I’m not convinced, though you don’t have to read them, and it’s true Porteous’ stated intent is merely to inform, and stimulate further reading.
But can a poet’s commitment and enthusiasm spill over too much? Rhizodont contains 111 pages of poetry and 30 pages of Notes and explicatory Introduction, containing lots of interesting facts and figures, but also a good deal of over-explanation as in the Note to the poem ‘Wishbone’: ‘The poem juxtaposes recent cultural evolution with this enormous timescale, and asks what we, with our plastic waste, will leave behind us’. Most poets would leave such interpretation up to the reader and Porteous’ (admirable) compulsion to write about things she believes are important, is also conducive to poems being written under less than compelling conditions, perhaps to fill a gap in a sequence, or to make a point not yet covered elsewhere. It’s almost certainly deliberately excluded, but this reader misses a bit more of the poet’s involvement, either personally, as in ‘Begin Again’ in which, confronted with the vastness of geological time and Nature’s endurance, the speaker’s suddenly ‘ glad / Of tea-cups, hands, companionable laughter’, or of the poet’s love of words and music as in the several balladlike pieces included here ( like ‘The Tide Clock’ and ‘Low Light’).
The collection’s second section ‘considers aspects of the latest waves of industrial and technological revolution’ and, rather than dwelling on alternative energy sources, Porteous writes about technologies which ‘extend human senses and reasoning’, by which she means remote sensing devices, robotics, autonomous systems and AI. She is unusually optimistic about such developments, arguing (in poems and Notes) that such technology will be used to ‘understand more’ about the world we live in (but there’s precious little here about the commercial exploitation of such developments). And the poems themselves? They often suffer from the abstract nature of scientific terminology and don’t convincingly convey much emotion about the tech. It’s interesting how often personification / anthropomorphism is used in these poems; the Antarctic ice speaks, or is spoken to, and here is the voice of a Miniature Robot for Restricted Access Exploration (‘MIRRAX’): ‘Omnidirectional – versatile, nimble, [I] glide / On four independent wheels, weasel my way / In continual metamorphosis, changing form, // Amorphous’. Other poems versify descriptions of analytical processes (‘Sample Analysis on Mars’) or praise certain aspects of the natural world from which science gains understanding (‘Cosmogenic Nuclide’, ‘Basal Shear’). It is this ingenuity that is the point, but the poems fall short on informativeness (hence the need for Notes), but also fall short on emotional engagement (poetry?), failing in the end to convey Porteous’ stated intention: to reflect ‘in awe and wonder that human consciousness is able to gather and interpret [all this] information’ [my italics]. The people and landscapes of ‘Carboniferous’ are far more successful as poems to be read and enjoyed, while ‘Invisible Everywhere’ is a bold, well-intentioned experiment that fails.
Please Note: this blog and website are now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive held at The British Museum. Many thanks to them.
The highlight of last week was attending Durs Grünbein’s reading at The Goethe- Institute, where he was in discussion with his English translator, Karen Leeder. At the beginning of the evening, Grünbein joked that he’d not been in the UK for a few years and this was the first time he’d had to produce his passport (the blessings of Brexit). Interestingly, in the light of last weekend’s German election results, Grünbeinhas often been described as a poet of the reunified Germany, having been born in Dresden and now living with his family in eastern Berlin. Grünbein’s poetry is witty, wry, perceptive, and influenced by a broad range of literary texts and often presents the disillusionment of having grown up in East Germany and explores Germany’s identity in post-Cold War Europe. He has been very vocal in recent years on the issues of immigration and the defence of Ukraine. Helen Vendler commented on the ‘sardonic humour, the savagery, the violent candor—all expressed in lines of cool formal elegance’ and Philip Ottermann, in The Independent, noted ‘Grünbein loves to jump from one register to another—one moment he is the street poet of Berlin, the next … all marble and ancient philosophy’.
Grünbein’s earlier poems were translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published in Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (Faber, 2005). Karen Leeder has now published Psyche Running, a selection of more recent poems from 2005–2022 (Seagull Books). During the evening, Grünbein commented on the process of those earlier translations as ‘strange’ and the results (as is Hofmann’s wont) as being very free, very sparky, and Leeder suggested there was a particular excitement in the ‘to and fro’ between author and translator to be found in them. She then suggested her approach has been rather different, perhaps a more dutiful one, still needing to make the poems ‘live’ in the target language, but also demanding a fidelity, to capture the original’s form and architecture as closely as possible. The work read during the evening suggests that her translations triumphantly achieve these goals.
Leeder said that his work can have a ‘marble’-like quality, a firm (unbending?) Classicism, and also that he has himself been labelled a ‘poeta doctus’, given the learned, wide-ranging references he incorporates. Grünbein rather demurred at these descriptions and (an idea he repeated a couple of times in slightly different forms) any interesting poem must be the result of two steps, the first poetic, the second, a more critical, a process of reflection (a later formulation suggested the two steps were ‘perceptual’ and ‘conceptual’). These two phases result in the finished poem as ‘a form of knowledge’; Grünbein pointed out that philosophy arose out of poetry in Classical times (not the other way round). The first poem he read, ‘Childhood in the Diorama’, does have a ‘marble’-like quality to it: longish, unrhymed lines in a solid verse paragraph and the child’s preference for the posed scenes of a museum’s diorama, their ‘inert’ quality. But on one occasion, the boy sensed some movement, a ‘draught, perhaps, had blown through the displays’, perhaps suggestive of the child’s development into a more unstable, fluid view of the world.
Other poems read that evening included ‘Nee Wachtel’, ‘Exaltations in Sleep’, and ‘Inspector Kobold’ which is a ‘Martian’ sort of piece describing seahorses, in ‘their whalebone corsets, like ‘tiny ocean Lipizzaners’ (here’s an alternative translation by Michael Eskin). If we are to take Grünbein’s poems as ‘forms of knowledge’ then they certainly range widely through the natural sciences, language, science more generally, astronomy, history and politics. He felt what binds all this together is the one individual life, the single life perspective, poetry as a sort of anthropological study, at which Leeder suggested there was a ‘fragility’ to much of his work, the vulnerability of the single life as much as all life (ecologically?). The poet was happy to agree to this, suggesting ‘marble’ was not at all the right term for his poetry, that there was always something ‘flowing’ about it, multiple angles and perspectives. He once claimed not to be a ‘German’ poet, but simply someone who wrote in the German language. This evening he stood by that statement: his own identity is wrapped up in language use, the mother’s language, used daily for years, and is not a function of birthplace alone (remember Grünbein grew up in East Germany and now lives in the unified Germany).
But his birthplace has been undoubtedly important in Porcelain (Seagull, 2020), the long sequence of poems (written slowly, we learned, on the February anniversaries of the Allies’ bombing of his hometown, Dresden). I reviewed this book here, when it was published). Grünbein read 10 poems from this sequence (some poems were read only in German with the English translation projected above), other poems read in both languages. Porcelain is an elegy the poet suggested, a Classical form, longing for what is lost. Poem #7 is one of the most remarkable, another museum visit by the young poet, who’d stare at a cherry stone from the 16th century, carved with 185 tiny heads. The poem comes to regard the curious object as an ‘emblem of the future’ of Dresden, presenting as it seemed to, faces, ‘eyes wide with terror, on every tiny screaming face, / inferno on a needle tip’.
The poet suggested the whole sequence of poems is also a kind of ‘sound system’ containing echoes or samples of other poets’ work, including Paul Celan, with Grünbein’s title (Porce-lain) being a pun on the earlier poet’s name. Leeder added that it should not be read in a narrowly nationalistic fashion, that a lot more (bombed) cities than just Dresden were alluded to by the poem (Coventry, Warsaw, Odessa, Guernica). She asked Grünbein what was it that kept drawing him back to Dresden as a subject matter for poems. He thought it had something to do with the moment when he realised that his own childhood was ‘historical’, in the sense of being intimately connected to major historical events. He recalls seeing truckloads of Russian soldiers passing where he grew up, heading to the nearby Russian military barracks. This produced a sense in the young boy that much in (his) life had been determined before his arrival on the scene. In this sense, his hometown acquired a ‘mythic’ quality.
KL: You mean it was a ‘world place’?
DG: Yes – I realised it was a reference point, worldwide, its splendour and its ruins. From the city of Dresden one can draw out a lot of history, a seed point, or like a jigsaw, that can be slowly pieced together.
Perhaps half a dozen more poems were presented from more recent collections. ‘Flea Market’ is a peerless poem about German history, starting from the bric-a-brac found in such markets – the spoons, brooches, bird cages, tables – and wondering ‘what / do they say, what do they hide’? Quiet allusions to ‘uniforms and daggers of honour’, seque into the next, even more troubling, question: ‘How can one’s thoughts not go astray / faced with the piles of glasses, / and old leather suitcases?’ The poem ‘Lumière’ also alludes to the Holocaust and starts out from descriptions of the Lumière brothers’ 1896 film of a train pulling into a station. The first film-goers were frightened at the image of the train’s approach, ‘but not yet the horror / at all the implacable trains / that have criss-crossed the century, / the endless rows of sealed trucks.’
Asked where his poetry might be heading, Grünbein surprisingly suggested that he felt a more prose-like quality entering his work – not so Classical then! A soberness in some ways – but with flashes of magic, magic spells even. His earlier suggestion that the good poem is a 2-step process – perceptual, conceptual – seems to be still important, though in the final result (I’m guessing Grünbein would agree with this) the two stages must be simultaneously present in the reader’s experience.
I have to say, one of the great pleasures of the evening was the way in which both participants took the poetry seriously and gave it a good outing. This may sound odd for a poetry reading, but often these days, I find too many readings/launches contain too little poetry and rather too much gossiping, drinking and networking (all of which can be excluding for those not in the swim). Can I make a plea for more reading at readings, a little less career-building? Of course, at The Goethe-Institute we were listening to two writers at the very top of their game and what they are creating – in German and in English – is vital, lasting stuff. But, if we are publishing poetry, we should not be shy of reading it (remember, not everyone attending will be able to afford to buy the book and take it home).
I’ve recently seen announced a celebration of the work of Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985), scheduled to take place at 7.30pm, on Tuesday March 4th at West Greenwich Library. The event is called ‘In His Own Voice: Geoffrey’s Grigson’s Poetry’ and is being organised by John Greening with contributions from Grigson’s daughter, Caroline, his grandson, Joe Banks, and poets Graham High and Blake Morrison (and archive recordings of the poet himself). The event is free to attend (donations welcome), plus refreshments and books on sale. Texts will be projected on screen. As the event blurb reminds us, Grigson lived and worked through amazing times, culturally and politically, and was a prolific poet, writer, critic and editor. At the centre of English intellectual life, he knew the poetry grandees of his days and greatly admired those of the past. When he was only 27, he founded the bi-monthly journal ‘New Verse’, thus becoming hugely influential in the poetry world. I reviewed John Greening’s selection of Grigson’s work when it came out in 2017, and this seems an opportune moment to re-post it here and on my new Substack.
Surely we all have one or two Faber anthologies edited by Geoffrey Grigson on our shelves? Love Poems, Popular Verse, Reflective Verse, Nonsense Verse, Poems and Places, Epigrams and Epitaphs . . . As a critic he often wielded a savage power through his magazine New Verse. And as a big beast on the literary scene of the early 1980s, Hermione Lee interviewed him on Channel 4. But since his death in 1985, he’s better known merely as the husband of Jane Grigson, the celebrated cookery writer. His own poetry has been neglected which made John Greening’s 2017 Selected Poems from Greenwich Exchange a welcome opportunity to re-consider it. I think Grigson’s contrasting themes were established early on. The influence of two great poets (not Eliot, not Yeats) is clear from the start and it may be that the limits of Grigson’s poetic achievement and the absence of much development in his style, are because he never chose one path or fully escaped either.
The influence of Auden was very clear in Grigson’s first collection, Several Observations (1939). ‘Meeting by the Gjulika Meadow’ presents an enigmatic narrative in a “frontier” landscape; a meeting between two men whose conversation is in large part concerned with “the thunder / about Europe”. There are sketched fragments of personal dependencies and guilts but the whole reads as a slice of narrative that has been carefully shorn of its explicatory elements. A poem from 1946 shows Grigson using similar methods but on matters much closer to home; ‘In a Dark Passage’ draws material from the deaths of two of Grigson’s brothers in WW1 and the early death of his first wife, Frances. The situations are still relatively distanced by being told in the third person and the timings of the incidents are compressed to form a litany of heartfelt if rhetorical griefs: “O floes of ice, you float downstream / But do not disappear”.
There is certainly a very dark river running through Grigson’s work. ‘Two A.M.’, from the 1970s, records a wakefulness at night filled – as so often – by nothing but questions: “all emptiness, all gravity, / Ultimacy, nothingness”. He captures vividly the way this kind of mood, at such an hour, insists on expanding exponentially, racing to fill the world’s “Sierras, monadnocks, lakes, prairies, taiga, ice”. On this occasion, there is the possibility of an erotic reply: “At least now, with our bodies close, / Be comforted”. But even that response is absent from ‘Again Discard the Night’ from the 1980 collection, History of Him. Written as a first person narrative this time, the poem pulls no punches in its flinty and unforgiving portrait of old age waking:
… you call, the kettle gathers
And talks, and Are you all right? comes your
Usual cry, and my habit insists, without sound, Reply,
Be bright, wash, shave, dress, and this once,
Again discard the night.
Of course, Grigson’s sense of an ungoverned and likely meaningless universe matched with his frequent backward glances also calls to mind Hardy’s work. One of Grigson’s earliest poems, ‘The Children’, has an 11-line stanza of complex rhyming that Hardy would have been proud of. The children are portrayed as playing in a natural environment and in a state of temporal innocence: “They looked for no clocks, noticed no hours”. But ending each stanza, the triple rhyme words with “hours” are (ambiguously) “sours” and “flowers”. Between the third and fourth stanza, there is the kind leap in time often found in folk song (and Hardy). We have instantaneously passed many years: “The rooms were pulled down, but they always abide / In the minds of the children born in them”. These are the best lines in the poem with the much cooler closing lines rather falling flat:
They see the clocks and notice the hour
And aware that restriction of love turns sour,
They feel the cold wind and consider the flower.
It is certainly Hardy that Grigson is thinking of in ‘In View of the Fleet’. The Fleet is the lagoon behind Chesil Beach in Dorset and the poem borrows phrases from Hardy, empathetically suggesting that each poet’s vision has the same sequential locus: “Things not as firstly well, a sparkling day, and / tolling of a bell”.
John Greening suggests in his very helpful Introduction that Grigson is also capable of an “extraordinary lyricism” and these are moments when he captures this “sparkling” quality of the natural world. In ‘A New Tree’, helped by the holding up of a child to a window, the narrator sees again with a newly cleansed perception, “a sun / being fiercely / let loose again”. Delight in the natural world recurs in a key poem, ‘Note on Grunewald’. In it, Grigson also expresses the scepticism about literary achievements which must have driven much of his own, often acerbic, critical comments on the work of others. In a man who devoted a lifetime to literary endeavours, it’s hard to take wholly seriously the poem’s assertion that he’d rather live to sniff the “scent of the flowers of lime” than to create lasting “poems”. But the scent is praised in contrast to the art of “Grunewald’s spotted green-rotted Christ”. Grigson sides with (“I join”) Cowper in deciding that death holds no attraction and that he too would choose to “leave this world never”. The perceived dichotomy between a vivid inhabiting of the world of the senses and the ‘rotten’ achievement of artists is by no means Grigson’s final comment on these issues, but the poem certainly expresses unresolved tensions.
As Greening reminds us, Grigson as a critic was a feared and fearsome creature, liable to “dismissiveness and intolerance of shoddy work”. Perhaps, in his own mind, he never quite resolved his assessment of his own poems. A lovely translation from Tu Fu was perhaps chosen because it laments lack of achievement, or at least of recognition: “Writing gives me no name”.* More vigorously, ‘Lecture Note: Elizabethan period’ is an hilarious and outrageous account of a poet’s final work. While the ink was still wet on the page, he dropped dead. The poem fell to the floor only for the maid to drop it in “the jakes”. The final lines laugh cynically, sarcastically, as if this illustrates the fate of most artistic endeavours: “Now irretrievably beshitten, it was, dear sirs, / The one immortal poem he had written”. Yet this is delicate stuff compared to Grigson taking aim with both barrels in ‘Perhaps So’. The premise is that too much is being written:
Too much is told. Banish polymath Steiners
And seventy-seven other British Shiners,
Naturalists, archaeologists, publishers
Of publications in parts,
Norman Mailer
And all long-winded farts . . .
It’s hard to reconcile this voice with that of ‘A New Tree’. Interestingly, Grigson’s address to an ancestor whose name was ‘Nazareth Pitcher’ is critical on the surface, disparaging of Nazareth’s “pride”, suggesting his “lips were too thin”, that he might “be pleased” if he was to witness the parlous state of the world now (1960s). But it’s also difficult to dismiss the feeling that Grigson chose to address Nazareth because he sensed a kinship with this judgemental, sceptical and meanly satirical man.
Having said that, Grigson did admire, if very judiciously. Greening draws attention to an Eliotesque belief in tradition, that the best poems are made by “members of a long narrow community through time”. The word “narrow” here indicates Grigson felt that much of what was truly best was not appreciated by many. In one word perhaps, we see here his motivation to be harsh with what he felt not good enough and his hard work in anthologising what was. There are two tribute poems in Greening’s selection which show Grigson at his complimenting best. ‘A Painter of Our Day’ is about Ben Nicholson and has the feel of a Coleridgean conversation poem. Its tone is confiding, admiring, ranging from observations about playing with children, shared days out, discussions of Nicholson’s work, ageing and the nature of art. Nicholson seems to teach an appreciation of “what is” and an avoidance of nostalgia. But at the same time, he recognises the value of the “reiterated wisdom of perceiving”. That both poet and artist set the bar of achievement very high indeed is suggested by Grigson’s admission that, of their chosen role models, “most have been / Long dead”. I find it hard to pin down a more precisely articulated aesthetic, but these lines are revealing of any artist’s relation to his/her elders:
Suddenly when young or in our first ability
We find them, slowly we find the reasons
For our love, finding ourselves, and what we lack
As well or need the most
Finally, ‘To Wystan Auden’ records the moment Grigson learned of Auden’s death in the “English September” of 1973. His admiration for the younger poet is fulsome. With the appearance of his early work, Auden became “living’s healer, loving’s / Magician”. From the other end of the temporal telescope, we can now see what the young Grigson gleaned from Auden’s poetry:
You were our fixture, our rhythm,
Speaker, bestower, of love for us all
And forgiving, not condemning, extending
To all who would read or would hear
Your endowment of words.
For all Auden’s own protesting about poetry making nothing happen, for Grigson, “time, after you, by you / Is different by your defiance”. One might ungratefully gripe that these are rather vague compliments from one poet to another. But Greening quotes Grigson suggesting that Auden’s achievement was in destroying “a too familiar, too settled monotony in manner and subject”. This is undeniable and this selection shows Grigson following Auden’s lead, yet at the same time, through his life, also being drawn back to a different, more traditional poetic style in the model of Hardy. Here, for example, in his last years, he recalls his childhood in Cornwall:
Staring down from that broken, one-arched bridge,
In that vale of water-mint, saint, lead-mine and midge,
I was amazed by that fat black-and-white water bird
Hunting under the current, not at all disturbed.
How could I tell that what I saw then and there
Would live for me still in my eightieth year?
*As a labouring translator myself, I have long remembered Grigson’s brilliant put-down in his Introduction to the Faber Book of Love Poems (1973). Explaining why he has not included any translations at all, he declares that their “unmeasured, thin-rolled short crust” would prove detrimental to the health of the nation’s poetic taste. Times have changed, thank goodness.
I recently attended the launch of Philip Gross’ new collection, The Shores of Vaikus (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) at the Estonian Embassy (the poems and prose pieces in the book refer to Gross’ father’s Estonian heritage and the poet’s visits to that country). I’ve followed his poetry since Faber published The Ice Factory in 1984. Neither of us could recall when we’d last met up but, after the event, I remembered that Philip was one of the first poets to read at the series of poetry readings (and associated workshops) I helped curate in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the Blue Nose Poetry series in London. I introduced him on the occasion (I still have the notes I made for the event in a Notebook for Spring 1989). I checked out the precise date in The Blue Nose Poetry Anthology (1993) which has sat on my shelves for many years now. The Blue Nose Poets (for personnel see below) invited all those who had read in the series to submit work and it strikes me now that it would be a shame if a record of our endeavours over a number of years was lost to sight completely. So, I’m posting here the Introduction to the Anthology and the full list of readers who appeared (often being paid nothing or a mere pittance) between 1989 and 1993. Interesting? I think so – given we hosted the likes of Dannie Abse, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, Simon Armitage, James Berry, Robert Creeley, Fred D’Aguiar, Michael Donaghy, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Horowitz, Jackie Kay, Adrian Mitchell, Peter Porter, Peter Reading, Michèle Roberts, Ken Smith, and many more.
Introduction to The Blue Nose Poetry Anthology
This anthology celebrates four years of Blue Nose Poetry in London. Its beginnings can be traced back to 1988, when Sue Hubbard advertised for members to join a small poetry workshop at her house in Highbury. Amongst others who began meeting regularly were the four founder members of the Blue Nose: Sue, Martyn Crucefix, Mick Kinshott and Denis Timm. At that time, poetry readings in London seemed to be in the doldrums. Uninviting rooms and draughty halls with chairs in impersonal ranks were often depressingly matched by poor organisation. The Blue Nose Poetry activities were set up with the express intention of providing workshops and readings in a friendly, accessible and organised atmosphere for new voices, up and coming writers and the already established. We were convinced that a cabaret setting of tables, candles and a drink with other enthusiasts could make poetry enjoyable. It was only with the discovery of The Blue Nose Cafe in Mountgrove Road, close to Highbury Stadium, that we found a name for the project and the real success of the Blue Nose began.
Our first poets came to the Cafe and read out of the goodness of their hearts. We thank them all once again. The first event with Michèle Roberts was packed and exceeded our wildest expectations. Within the course of one evening we had proved that exciting contemporary poetry could be presented really successfully. Soon, in response to Blue Nose’s track record of commitment and quality, GLA (later LAB) and Islington Borough agreed to support the project. Since then, there have been various changes. Mick Kinshott felt unable to continue as an organiser in 1990 and his commitment and humour was a great loss. His place was taken for two years by Bruce Barnes, whose knowledge of the poetry and arts funding world in London proved invaluable to the development of the project. More recently, Mimi Khalvati and Mario Petrucci have joined the three original members. In the middle of the Spring 1991 season, the Cafe where we held the events went into liquidation and a reading by Tom Pickard and Rosemary Norman sadly had to be called off. Regular events did not begin again until May 1991, when we moved into the more accessible, roomy and centrally located Market Tavern in Islington. Despite the many advantages of this new venue, there are a few who still regret the passing of the old Café which, though tiny, disorganised and terminally broke, did have a superb atmosphere for poetry.
In an appendix to this anthology, we list all the readers who have appeared at the venue/s – a genuinely comprehensive survey of poetry in recent years. This, of course, does not include the many poets who have had the opportunity to read from the floor at Blue Nose events. More importantly, this book contains no record of the hundreds and hundreds of people who have enjoyed and supported Blue Nose Poetry. This book is dedicated to them.
Martyn Crucefix / Sue Hubbard / Mimi Khalvati / Mario Petrucci / Denis Timm
Full List of Main/Support Readers for Blue Nose Poetry Seasons 1989 – 1993
March – July 1989
Michèle Roberts read with Martyn Crucefix; Philip Gross read with Sue Hubbard; Jeremy Silver read with Mick Kinshott; Jo Shapcott read with Denis Timm; Leo Aylen read with Gerda Mayer; Alison Fell read with Hume Cronyn; The Blue Nose Poets; Carole Satyamurti read with Barbara Zanditon; Michael Donaghy read with Rupert Slade; Adam Thorpe read with Al Celestine.
Philip Gross
September – December 1989
Ken Smith read with Mimi Khalvati; Anna Adams and Julian May; Gerda Mayer read with Chris Powici; The Blue Nose Poets; The Performing Oscars; Maura Dooley read with Sara Boyes; Fred D’Aguiar read with Matt Caley; Matthew Sweeney read with Hilary Davies.
January – April 1990
Fleur Adcock read with John Harvey; Dannie Abse read with Myra Schneider; Elaine Randell read with Frances Presley; Hugo Williams read with Keith Spencer; Pitika Ntuli read with Bruce Barnes; John Cotton read with Bridget Bard; Michele Roberts read with Peter Daniels.
Robert Creeley
May – July 1990
The Blue Nose Poets; Sarah Maguire read with Vicki Feaver; Jeni Couzyn read with W N Herbert; James Berry read with Susan McGarry; Simon Armitage read with Chris Gutkind; E A Markham read with Mimi Khalvati; Brian Patten.
September – December 1990
In the Gold of Flesh anthology with Valerie Sinason, Dinah Livingstone, Pascal Petit, Jenny Vuglar; George Szirtes read with Gabriel Chanan; Kit Wright read with Candice Lange; The Blue Nose Poets; Michael Horovitz read with Raggy Farmer; Patience Agbabi and Judi Benson; Jenako Arts Writers; Carol Ann Duffy read with Steve Griffiths.
January – March 1991
Judith Kazantzis read with Mario Petrucci; Robert Creeley read with Mick Kinshott; Jackie Kay read with the Speech Painters; Peter Forbes and Eva Salzman; [Blue Nose Cafe in Highbury suddenly closes]; Lemn Sissay read with Adam Acidophilus.
May – July 1991
Peter Porter read with Elizabeth Garrett; The Blue Nose Poets; Carole Satyamurti read with Leon Cych; Peter Scupham read with Lucien Jenkins; Leo Aylen read with Rosemary Norman.
October – December 1991
Sylvia Kantaris read with Andrew Jordan; Gillian Allnutt read with Helen Kidd; Alan Jenkins read with Eric Heretic; Sean Street and Hubert Moore; Lee Harwood and Richard Cadell; Xmas Party – Tony Maude, Speech Painters and music from Dean Carter.
January – April 1992
Adrian Mitchell; David Constantine read with Tim Gallagher; David Morley with Martyn Crucefix; Sue Stewart read with Bruce Barnes; Glyn Maxwell read with Sue Hubbard; Peter Abbs read with Nicky Rice.
Adrian Mitchell
May – July 1992
Jo Shapcott read with Mick Kinshott; Bobbie Louise Hawkins read with Robert Sheppard; Birdyak – Bob Cobbing and Hugh Metcalfe; Colin Rowbotham read with Richard Tyrrell; Ken Smith read with Eric Heretic.
October – December 1992
Connie Bensley and Felicity Napier; The Poetry Show at Rebecca Hossack Gallery; Donald Atkinson read with Jane Duran; Ruth Fainlight read with Moniza Alvi.
January – April 1993
Peter Reading read with Briar Wood; Ruth Valentine; Myra Schneider read with Mario Petrucci; Carol Rumens read with Daphne Rock.
Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical wobbling often made him have to take his seat again; but the humour and mischievous twinkle were as powerful as ever. Over the years, I have to admit it took me a while to really come to appreciate his work; I think I did not really ‘get’ the force of his brevity, his precision. If you have not seen it yet, do watch the brilliant, moving, inspiring BBC programme about him, his life and work here. I’m posting below my review of his 2014 collection, The Stairwell (the review originally published in Poetry London) and I hope it manages to say something useful to both new and older readers of this wonderful poet.Here he is reading ‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’ on The Poetry Archive.
Keeper, custodian, traditionalist whose work is stringent, formalist, always elegant: critical judgments on Michael Longley’s work fence him round too closely, running the risk of misleading, even discouraging, new readers. It’s true, as a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s Group in Belfast in the 1960s, Longley’s poems were criticized for their elegance of form, rhetorical grace and verbal eloquence, though he found something of a kindred spirit in Derek Mahon. Longley wrote poems that were “polished, metrical and rhymed; oblique rather than head-on; imagistic and symbolic rather than rawly factual; rhetorical rather than documentary” (The Honest Ulsterman, November, 1976). But Seamus Heaney’s different aesthetic was Hobsbaum’s star turn and quickly became a national, then international preference. Attitudes solidified around Longley although (perhaps in the cause of self-definition) this was not something he resisted, casting himself and Mahon in the 1973 poem ‘Letters’ as “poetic conservatives”.
‘Epithalamium’, the poem that since 1969 has opened Longley’s selections and collecteds reinforces the caricature and in ‘Emily Dickinson’ he sees the need to dress “with care for the act of poetry”. But Longley’s long standing admiration of Edward Thomas was not for nothing and he shared a desire to dismiss Swinburnian “musical jargon that [. . . ] is not and never could be speech” so that in The Echo Gate (1979) he is experimenting, on the one hand with the plainly Frostian ‘Mayo Monologues’, and on the other with short, imagistic pieces in which the authorial voice seems to have taken a vow of non-intervention. ‘Thaw’ reads, in its entirety:
Snow curls into the coalhouse, flecks the coal.
We burn the snow as well in bad weather
As though to spring-clean that darkening hole.
The thaw’s a blackbird with one white feather.
This is a mode that Longley has continued to explore in accordance with another (surprisingly) early statement of poetic intent. The poet’s duty is to “celebrate life in all its aspects, to commemorate normal human activities. Art is itself a normal human activity. The more normal it appears in the eyes of the artist and his audience, the more potent a force it becomes” (Longley, ed. Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, 1971).
Subsequent collections have become concerned to list, to name, as it were ‘merely’ to record experience for its own sake, often in vivid short poems which run the risk of seeming inconsequence, though Longley has never lost his unerring eye and ear for the poetic line. Nor has he ever seriously questioned the adequacy of language (within conventional bounds) to represent experience. It’s in these ways that his work is conservative but his poems’ intention to encompass and witness is far more radical. To witness – whether it is the song of a wren near Longley’s beloved Carrigskeewaun, a Belfast bombing, or the camp at Terezin – is to acknowledge that we are bound together by what happens. From Gorse Fires (1991) to The Weather in Japan (2000) Longley comes to sound like Eliot’s Tereisias who, as the pages turn, has “seen and foresuffered all”. The beauty of nature, the horrors of mankind, birth and death, the present and the distant past are all absorbed into his steady gaze, a steady voice, intent on an anatomy of connection.
One such connection is the way Longley has been re-visiting the Iliad and Odyssey for years now, producing vivid, contemporary accounts of key scenes. Priam’s visit to Achilles tent in Book 24 of the Iliad famously became Longley’s poem ‘Ceasefire’, appearing in The Irish Times in 1994 when the IRA were considering a ceasefire themselves. The poem forges links and connections between enemies and across millennia. As ‘All of these people’ puts it, “the opposite of war / Is not so much peace as civilization” and civilization needs to be founded on a right relationship with even the smallest of things. Among many poems that articulate an ars poetica, ‘The Waterfall’ envisages the best place to read his own collected works as “this half-hearted waterfall / That allows each pebbly basin its separate say”. It is such civilized allowance, rather than the much-vaunted preservation of a tradition, that is the mark of Longley’s aesthetic, moral and political outlook.
His new collection, The Stairwell, is much obsessed with death though its inevitable reality has already been embraced by the poet’s allowance. An Exploded View (1973) already contained ‘Three Posthumous Pieces’ and twenty years later, ‘Detour’ mapped out his own funeral procession. Here, Longley has been “thinking about the music for my funeral” (‘The Stairwell’) and much of the book has the feeling of an ageing figure readying to depart. Longley himself refers to his “unassuming nunc dimittis” (‘Birth-Bed’) and the only ceremonial he anticipates is to be provided by robins, wrens, blackbirds: “I’ll leave the window open for my soul-birds” (‘Deathbed’). The counterweight to civilized allowance, even in the approach of death, is modesty and humility. If gifts are to be handed on to the future then they ought to include a little poem about a wren: “Its cotton-wool soul, / Wire skeleton [. . . ] / Its tumultuous / Aria in C” (‘Another Wren’).
Such unassuming gifts to future generations are balanced, in the civilized society Longley seeks out, by the commemoration of the past. This is something his poems continue to do with his re-imagining of his father’s experiences in the Great War and this new collection contains more of these poems; his father at ‘High Wood’ among “unburied dead”, befriending the future Hollywood star, Ronald Colman, or taking an ironic “breather before Passchendaele” (‘Second Lieutenant Tooke’). Whether looking forwards or backwards, the true gift lies in the specific, not the generalized. ‘Insomnia’ recalls Helen Thomas calming and consoling the mad Ivor Gurney, by guiding his “lonely finger down the lanes” of her husband’s map of Gloucestershire. Longley looks for this too. Here is the whole of ‘Wild Raspberries’:
Following the ponies’ hoof-prints
And your own muddy track, I find
Sweet pink nipples, wild raspberries,
A surprise among the brambles.
Having translated a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, Longley goes on to wonder what his “understated” neighbours around Carrigskeewaun would make of such “grandiloquence” (‘After Mikhail Lermontov’). It’s in the avoidance of a hyper-inflated language and tone that Longley’s re-makings of Homer are so good. The new book contains a fair sampling of these too, many of them in the second half which forms an extended elegy, commemorating Longley’s twin brother, Peter. The Homeric paralleling works less well in this context, though the unrhymed double sonnet, ‘The Apparition’, in which the ghost of Patroclus pleads to be buried by Achilles, addressing him as his “dear brother” is powerful. But I’m reminded of Heaney’s Station Island (1984) in which he revised and regretted his earlier use of “the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio” in writing a poem about the murder of Colum McCartney in Field Work (1979). Longley’s Homeric material casts such a strong shadow and the vital life of Peter is insufficiently conveyed, except in a few recollections of their shared childhood, tree-climbing, bows and arrows, boxing, visiting the zoo. Nevertheless, Longley’s determination to commemorate his twin, with whom he shared “our gloomy womb-tangle” (‘The Feet’), re-confirms human closeness, allowance, the giving of space to others, to nature, is what has driven this poet’s work for more than forty years.
Martyn Crucefix 