On Yves Bonnefoy’s ‘The Tombs of Ravenna’

In my last blog I was discussing Keats’ ideas about Negative Capability, provoked by a visit to Keats House and a discussion there about Negative Capability and psychoanalysis. The speakers were Dr Margot Waddell, a child psychotherapist from the Tavistock Clinic, and Dr Toni Griffiths, Trustee of the Keats Foundation. Waddell focused on the acknowledged influence of Keats’ idea on the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. In the aftermath of such major stimulation, the new issue of PN Review fell through the front door, containing John Naughton’s excellent new translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s 1953 essay, The Tombs of Ravenna. Keats and Bonnefoy melded in my mind and I was reading the latter in terms of the former as follows.

Bonnefoy observes that though many philosophers have discussed death, few have bothered to ponder the places where we traditionally lodge the dead: sepulchers and tombs. The explanation he offers introduces a key term for both his prose and poetry from 1953 to the present day: the concept. The concept, as in conceptual thinking, is a human creation, abstracted from the plentitude, the flood and flux of actual, particular human experience. It is “always a means of escape” into a more fixed abode. The concept denies time and is “a profound rejection of death”. It denies the fact of death as our inevitable fate and constructs an illusory “dwelling place of logic”, a more alluring place of “permanence and identity”. Also, and crucially, the concept is “made of words”. Language is a similar construct, also seeming to promise the same sort of escape into the timeless, the unchanging. All forms of conceptual thinking seem to promise an achievable resolution but, Bonnefoy argues, “what is pondered is no longer the real object”. Instead, we contemplate “a dubious knowledge” though it may soothe our “initial anguish and trivialises that most somber melody with words that mask the reality of death”.

So the concept promises a “strange immortality” but only if we can “forget brutal reality” – which, of course, we can and readily do. One reason is that there are general truths in conceptual thinking and a particular kind of power derived from it. It “allows thinking” of a certain kind; it is linked with “the vast power of words”. But any gain is predicated on a significant loss, the abandonment of the actually existing “world of things”. Conceptual thinking is “systematized”, generalizing, categorizing; it’s in this that its “flight” from the real is found. The only sort of thing that can be held up to counter the concept are specific particularities of human experience: Bonnefoy asks “Is there a concept for footsteps in the night, for a cry, for a stone rolling in the brushwood? For the feeling evoked by an empty house? No [. . . ]”

In his letters, Keats calls this sort of non-particular thinking “preresolved” and he encountered it especially in his friend Charles Dilke: “a man who [. . . ] has made his Mind up about every thing” (303; page numbers in brackets are to John Keats: Selected Letters (Oxford World Classics, newly revised 2002)). Dilke is one of the “stubborn arguers” who never begin on any subject “they have not preresolved upon” (303). In contrast, Keats argues the only means of strengthening one’s intellect and identity “is to make up one’s mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts” (303). Keats’ best formulation of this idea arises when several things “dovetailed” in his mind after a frustrating debate with Dilke. The quality that marks out the artist – Shakespeare especially, he says – is Negative Capability. He defines this as consisting of a passive openness to the full range of particular human experience (“uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”) without any imposition of preconceived notions, preresolved ideas or language: “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (41/2). Bonnefoy’s insight is that rather than being an occasional tendency, this reaching after fact and reason (conceptual thinking rather than direct, particular, various experience) is our default status. We pass our days in a delusion of resolution and systematization because if we did not we might fry our brains with the overload. In his last ever letter, Keats laments “the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense)” as having become a great enemy to his “recovery” from his present state of illness. (369).

Yet the dully pragmatic ought not to be allowed to displace truth: Keats in better health argued this and Bonnefoy does the same in The Tombs of Ravenna. Bonnefoy’s essay for several paragraphs plays devil’s advocate, expecting to find “horror” in visiting the tombs of the dead, yet admitting that he felt “nothing but lightheartedness”. Initially, he locates this sense of up-lift in the ornamentation of the tombs, the “braids and interlacing [. . .] bows and foliage”. The essay playfully misleads its reader, suggesting that this effect of the ornamentation must be because it is comparable to the “concept” in denying the fact of death. Bonnefoy says he believed (note the past tense here) that ornamentation also abstracted towards the universal from the real, that the ornamentation presented “a closed world”, a world of “harmony”. Hence, just as the concept “seeks to establish truth without death [. . .] It seemed to me that ornamentation sought to build a dwelling place for us without death, and to have death no longer be here”. Visiting Ravenna, Bonnefoy felt lighthearted beside the tombs because its skilled and delicate ornamentation persuaded him of a world of permanence and consoling abstraction (beyond death, other than death).

But the essay now turns dramatically to deny the validity of such consoling sophistry. It’s invalid because Bonnefoy had failed to understand “the power of stone”. His insight is that it is not the ornamentation which is at the root of his lightheartedness but the very material out of which it has been carved. Stone is “unfathomable, and this abyss of plentitude, this night covered by an eternal light, is for [Bonnefoy] the exemplary form of the real”. What he means is that stone deflects the grasp of conceptual thought; conceptual thought distances itself from stone as it does from death. Stone is or represents “the difficult real” and it is or represents the “dawn of the sensory world”. Stone’s resistance, its very hardness, gestures towards the fullness and particularity of human experience (what Keats calls a “Life of Sensations”), towards “everything that has flesh, heartbeat, immanence”. The stone leads us towards the “truth tenaciously present beneath the truth of the concept”. And it is the latter ‘truth’ that Bonnefoy declares he must “tenaciously contest”.

The battle in Bonnefoy’s thought between the sensory world and the concept reflects Existentialism’s concern for existence rather than essence. His faith in a world resistant to and actually prior to the draining, withering forces of the intellect, his resistance to post-modernism, are reasons why he strikes many as such an inspiring figure. He says: “This world here exists, of that I am certain [. . .] It is simply with us. In what can be felt and sensed”. In The Tombs of Ravenna he names this underlying truth, not as existence, but “presence”. It is “what is perceived by the senses” and it was a dimly stirring awareness of this truth that constituted the “lightheartedness” he felt before the tombs of Ravenna. Through an encounter with the stone from which the tombs are constructed, the resistance of both life and death to the abstracting processes of conceptual thought was made clear and the pleasure induced arose from his closer approach to a fundamental truth.

Just as for Keats, such ideas have consequences for art and poetry. For Bonnefoy, poetry seeks to represent the real particular truths of human experience, to convey what it can of the “dawn of the sensory world”, as opposed to succumbing to the lure of conceptual thinking, even that conceptual thinking inherent in the very fabric of language itself. This specific paradox is not explored very far in The Tombs of Ravenna in which he confines himself to declaring that we require “another language than that of the concept” to articulate such truths. He concludes poetry’s only concern is “for that spot in the world I can sense” and because it must, as far as possible, resist the lure of conceptual truths (truth without death) it follows that “poetry and journey are of the same substance, the same blood”.

What such a poem might look like is suggested in those few moments when Bonnefoy himself resorts to “minute particulars”. On one such occasion, drawing from his own life, he tells us of “the cry of a bird I heard as a child, at the crest of a kind of cliff. I don’t know where that valley is anymore, or why or when I was there. The light is the light of dawn or of evening, it doesn’t matter. Through the brushwood runs the pungent smoke of a fire. The bird sang. Rather I should say, to be exact, it spoke, raucous on its misty height, for a moment of perfect solitude”.

Or as Keats put it in 1819, having listened to a nightingale singing on Hampstead Heath:

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Keats’ Negative Capability Clearly Explained

November 17, 2015November 24, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, Romantic poetry, teaching, writing David Constantine, John Keats, Keats Foundation, Keats House, Keats Letters, Margot Waddell, Negative Capability, PN Review, The Tombs of Ravenna, Toni Griffiths, Vale of Soul-Making, Yves Bonnefoy

Recently I went with some teaching colleagues to Keats House, London, to hear a discussion about the poet’s idea of Negative Capability and psychoanalysis. The speakers were Dr Margot Waddell, a child psychotherapist from the Tavistock Clinic, and Dr Toni Griffiths, Trustee of the Keats Foundation. Both were fascinating, condensing whole areas of scholarly knowledge into accessible (if intense) 45 minute talks. Waddell focused on the acknowledged influence of Keats’ idea on the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion.

I’m not sure I feel very qualified to comment on that intriguing area without a good deal further reading, but a memorable phrase arose from it: Waddell argued that Bion saw the way that preconception obstructs perception and how this must adversely affect the therapist/patient relationship. Toni Griffiths’ elegant and economical discussion of Keats’ work (not merely the Negative Capability idea) set off several days of thought for me and has produced what I think will be two blog posts. Firstly, and perhaps largely for myself, I wanted to clarify my own understanding of Keats’ idea which has long meant a great deal to me. In my next post, I want to explain how those thoughts have “dove-tailed” (Keats’ own brilliant phrase in the Negative Capability letter to his brothers George and Tom, December 1817) with a recent translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s 1953 essay The Tombs of Ravenna (in the most recent PN Review (No. 226, Nov-Dec 2015, pp. 58-63).

This second blog is now available to be read here.

What follows below is my assemblage of observations from Keats’ letters, hopefully into a clear argument, indeed, into Keats’ coherent theory of poetic achievement and practice (though Negative Capability of course eschews all such systematizing). Page numbers in brackets are to John Keats: Selected Letters (Oxford World Classics, newly revised 2002).

In his 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey, Keats wishes for “a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” (36). Just a year later, in a letter to James Hessey, he clarifies this distinction, suggesting that poetry is not “matured by law & precept, but by sensation and watchfulness” (146). The language use Keats associates with law and precept is evidently a fixed, a “preresolved” (303) language. What he seeks inits place is rather a language sufficiently flexuous and responsive to “watchfulness”, to attentiveness and often, when Keats discusses this, there is a strong sense of passivity. Writing to Bailey, characteristically using the phrase that an idea had “pressed upon” him (35), he says it has “increased my Humility and capability of submission”. The idea he is referring to is that artists (“Men of Genius”) “have not any individuality, any determined character”, as opposed to “Men of Power” who are replete and resolved in “a proper self” (35).

Keats’ distrust of such self-confident preresolution famously emerges in the 1818 letter to John Reynolds, as his dislike and distrust of poetry that has a “palpable design” on us (58) and to Bailey he contrasts this with an alertness to the “holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination” (36/7). Preresolution pre-packages or pre-limits our emotional and spiritual life, whereas Keats is intent on welcoming “all”. This is what he means in the phrase “a Life of Sensations”, the latter word (rather misleadingly) encompassing both emotional and spiritual life as well as a full, open and alert response to the world about us. Such a full engagement with present experience is where we feel Imagination at work: Keats asks Bailey if he has not felt this in even such common experiences as listening to “an old Melody” and in the “elevation of the Moment” Keats declares we are “mounted on the Wings of Imagination” (37).

This ideal of a radical openness to present experience and its passive acceptance, was further clarified for Keats in his later dealings with his friend, Charles Dilke, who was becoming something of a political bore (spouting Godwinian philosophy and politics), a man who had resolved upon most issues. Keats again links this state to identity: Dilke is “a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made his Mind up about every thing” (303). Dilke is one of the “stubborn arguers” who never begin upon any subject “they have not preresolved upon” (303). In contrast, Keats argues the only means of strengthening one’s intellect and identity “is to make up one’s mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts” (303).

Keats’ best formulation of this idea arises when several things “dovetailed” in his mind after another frustrating debate with Dilke. The quality that marks out the artist – Shakespeare especially, he says – is Negative Capability. He defines this as consisting of a passive openness to the full range of human experience (“uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”) without any imposition of preconceived notions, preresolved ideas or language: “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (41/2). Once again, the best way to understand this is through Keats’ word “watchfulness”, an attentiveness to the true nature of experiences. In yet another foray into these ideas, he experiments with the word “disinterestedness”. This again implies the absence of a forceful or dominating self, full of preconceived ideas, words, precepts. Writing to his brother George, he says “complete disinterestedness” is a difficult goal. He admits he is himself “far” from it though personally and in social terms he believes it “ought to be carried to its highest pitch” (213).

Such moments of disinterested perception occur in his observation of a sparrow picking about on the gravel (37). Approached with Negative Capability this mundane moment becomes something that “startles” and Keats says “I take part in its existince [sic]” (37). In this way, the poet is continually “filling some other body” (148). Such is the truth in a “Life of Sensations”, fuelled by Imagination, and one of the delights of a human life is that these happy moments will continue to be “repeated in a finer tone and so repeated”. The mind develops in this way through the repetition “of its own silent Working” (36). These refinements of the mind can occur only when experience is encountered openly, nakedly, even dangerously. To Reynolds, Keats wrote that to become fully “fit for this world”, with all its pains and hardship, a man would have to have “the fine point of his soul taken off” (39). But the poet or artist cannot afford to be so blunted by experiences but must remain radically open, even submissive to them. In the same letter to Reynolds, Keats quotes Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis: “As the snail, whose tender horns being hit, / Shrinks back into his shelly cave with pain”. Such a reaction of withdrawal must not be countenanced by the would be artist. To Richard Woodhouse, Keats wrote “What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [sic] Poet” (148). The work of the poet experiences “no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one” (148).

Keats recognizes and accepts the personal, experiential conclusion of such thoughts as he records his own sensation of feeling annihilated in a crowded room because “the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me” (148). Yet this absence of a resolved self (pushing and barging over-confidently outwards) leaves room for such delicate encounters as that with the sparrow and on other occasions, catching a glimpse “of a stoat or fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass – the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it” (213). Keats regards such escape from or evasion of this confinement to self as a form of purification: “there is an ellectric [sic] fire in human nature tending to purify” (213). He names Socrates and Jesus as perfections of this state, though “it is to be lamented that the history of the latter was written and revised by men interested in the pious fraud of Religion” (214). Of course, poetry must also aspire to this state and (as David Constantine has argued in his Bloodaxe lectures, A Living Language 2004)) Keats’ “gymnastics” in trying to broaden his native language-use (with its preresolutions) through a variety of foreign poetic experiments suggests he knew this well enough.

By the spring of 1819, Keats was further developing his ideas about the role and nature of the self with the letter discussing life as a “vale of Soul-making”. He dismisses naïve ideas of the “perfectibility” (232) of mankind, even doubting the real progress made by any “seldom appearing Socrates”. He jokes that fish are as likely to “philosophise the ice away from the Rivers” as man is likely to arrive at a perfect state because “the nature of the world will not admit it” (232). However much happiness a man can experience, there will still be worldly elements that “prey upon his nature”. It is from this conviction that Keats proposes – in stark contrast to any Christian reading of man’s life –the idea that we are born as intelligences (“sparks of the divinity” or “atoms of perception” (232)). Then through a system of “Spirit-creation”, the intelligence develops into a Soul by refining an individuality or identity. This process is an educative one, fuelled by Negative Capability, in that the world is allowed to impact fully on the human heart which is led to “feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways” (233). Man can never achieve a state of perfection but as the world’s school of hard knocks is openly, vulnerably embraced so the process of individuation occurs via emotional experience. It follows that the human heart is “the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity” (233). As various as the lives of all individuals are, so “various become their souls” since individual emotional experiences are the “fortifiers or alterers” of our ever-developing nature (234).

So Keats’ ideal poet must possess Negative Capability to fully experience the world before him without preresolution. Armed with sufficient language skills to express the plenitude of these experiences, the poet’s role is then to re-present them to the reader in such a way that the poem itself contributes to the reader’s own developing emotional life. The work of art is therefore an important contribution to the reader’s own on-going process of Spirit creation or individuation (though this is only going to occur if the reader too is possessed of Negative Capability and is not someone who opens a book of poems with firmly preresolved expectations and ideas).

Review: Kate Bingham’s ‘Infragreen’ (2015)

November 4, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Infragreen, Kate Bingham, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, Seren, The Art of Losing, The Spirit Level, Tony Harrison

There is a side to Kate Bingham’s poetry that might be (and has been) described as steady, calmly observed, dispassionate, elegant and formally accomplished. But I also see another writer – one largely unacknowledged in Seren’s blurb to Infragreen and the many critical comments arrayed in her praise – for whom the world is endlessly atilt, above lethal undertows, aching distances, the formal wizardry in large part a white-knuckled hanging on in fear of letting go. I don’t mean the latter in any silly psycho-babble way but in relation to that moment when the black gulfs open up under all we thought we knew.

The more conventional part of this new book is the second section which seems to be visiting a landscape, a house and wooded countryside where the poet perhaps spent time in her youth. We are given reflections on early love, motherhood, the daughter becoming a mother herself, the English countryside, cattle, blackberrying. Most of these poems are obviously viewed through the perspective-glass of time past and time present and this somewhat disrupts Bingham’s more characteristic way of seeing things which is from within and without. One really marvelous poem here assumes the stance of the innocent younger girl encountering an apparently friendly farmer who keeps a bunch of string in his pocket to entertain the child while also using it to keep “his trousers up” (‘String’). It’s the humming, obsessive, ground-base of end-rhyming (string, string, twine, string, mine, strings, string, hem, string, hen, string, him) that evokes the worrying undertow of adult threat without anything explicit being said at all: “He didn’t need the string. / I tugged his arm and trotted after him”.

It’s the clash of viewpoints or perspectives – using that unsuspecting, unreliable narrative voice – that makes this gem of a poem so disturbing to read. And it is the manipulation of viewpoints that yields such rich dividends elsewhere in Infragreen. On a domestic level this is played out in ‘Next Door’ where the tone is one of some surprise that the neighbours “experience life to the full”, the latter word forming on this occasion the repeating ground-base rhyme that imports irony into the seeming admiration for the “bang and slam” of their lives. But the collection is carefully opened with two brief, curiously abstract treatments of perspective. ‘Ultragreen’ takes the ‘above and beyond’ implication of the prefix to have the narrator observe a water drop “at the end of the garden”. Through a disturbing synaesthetic travelling, the drop instantaneously appears “in my brain”, indeed takes up the narrator’s perspective precisely as it “looks out / and sees what I have seen”. What was without is now within and something “like photosynthesis begins”. As a way of announcing this poet’s basic strategies and as a metaphor for (artistic) generative fecundity this is brilliant.

This is followed by the six cryptic lines of ‘Infragreen’ itself. I take Ultra to suggest ‘out there’ so Infra is more ‘within’ and here suggests a more harmonious coincidence of perception in which “the sun and I see eye to eye”. However, this frail connection seems always in danger of being broken, “half letting go of itself / half hanging on” and though Bingham does write occasionally of the fertile experience of such connectedness (see below) she more often writes in the throes of its breakdown, of distance and the accompanying sense of loss of control. So the archetypal ‘feel-good’ season of ‘Spring’ seems to be remotely occurring rather than directly experienced, the sun (again) “rising above its various nationalities / and making things grow”. The romantic gift of flowers is undercut in a meditation on tulip harvesting in Holland and the deliberate wrenching cliché of “the international language of flowers”. Even the self, viewed from deep within, has to be recognized through experience and even then not reliably: “it is her face my face projects / and for a moment I look strange” (‘Look’).

Seamus Heaney has a number of car poems in which the vehicle seems to be working benignly as a mode of travelling into wider experience (my favourite is ‘Postscript’ from The Spirit Level (1996): “As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open”). For Bingham, in contrast, the narrator’s car is a place “I have to return to”, a place of (admittedly rather dull) security, “somewhere to look from” (‘Silt’). So much so that there are occasions, even when “London at night is a blaze of company”, when sitting alone in a stationery car, “seat belt on / and the engine running”, seems the best thing to do, or even the most that can be done. This is from ‘Between’, another of Bingham’s best poems in this collection, opening in the familiar only to end in another dizzying, atomised gulf.

The familiar surroundings, the container of the car, perhaps works in the way that Bingham’s use of rhyme can be seen to work, as providing a firm base from which the poem gazes outwards into the truly disturbing (Tony Harrison has said something similar about his use of metre and rhyme; it also makes me think of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Art of Losing’). So the lulling rhymes of ‘On Highgate Hill’ make the stabbing on a London bus more shocking than a more informal, realist treatment. The hypnotic, mono-rhymes of ‘At Night’ (night, white, light, sight, tight, right, bright and so on) evoke a drowsy, sleepiness of thought that ventures closer and closer to the edge. On this occasion, the vision is a brighter one of something (like Edward Thomas, Bingham enjoys the nonspecific of such a word), something “mine and right / and unconditional”.

The unconditional is an escape from the binaries of perspective. It is a fleeting moment – impossible really to be written about because impossible to be disciplined into language – when self and other, those distinctions we lean on and then find ourselves manacled to, vanish. Bingham approaches such moments cautiously, “my hairs on end, my senses trespassing”, occasionally there are successes: [I] look back from where I am at where I stood / and see the wood for the trees, the trees for the wood” (‘The Wood’). On other occasions the plenitude is more overwhelming like the fisherman faced with an overflowing fish farm: “tongue-torn, foul-hooked, half tame / when there was nothing more to take more came” (‘Cull’).

But there are also a few untitled experimental pieces scattered through Infragreen that seem to be approaching this state of the unconditional in a lower-case, unpunctuated tentativeness. On page 24, a couple wake into a sleepy uncertainty in which bird song and growing buds seem one, as do thoughts and birds on a branch, the human and the natural, “one listening one listening to itself”. The final poem too, page 63, starts by undermining language (“call it what you like”) and proceeds to a car crossing Exmoor, an unaccountable stopping, the driver leaping out into a gale force wind, a slammed door offering a brief framing device, the observing voice trying to “make what I can” of it all, though within and without are bewilderingly blurred, “the other side of the force in the fence // of the foreground”.

Kate Bingham’s skill in tacking the vessel of form against the breeze of colloquial language is certainly to be marveled at. There is great pleasure to be had from the rightness of her positioning of words on the page. But I also admire her willingness to gaze past what Seren’s blurb refers to as “necessarily” her subjects, “the familiar, the seen again, and the returned to”, to glimpse something far more terrifying and in this she reminds me less of Edward Thomas, less of Elizabeth Bishop, more of Robert Frost.

Review: Tamar Yoseloff’s New and Selected Poems (2015)

October 28, 2015October 28, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing A Formula for Night, Barnard's Star, Enitharmon Press, Fetch, Jackson Pollock, John Burnside, Robert Lowell, Seren, Sweatheart, Tamar Yoseloff, The City with Horns

Last week, I went to the London launch of Tamar Yoseloff’s new and selected poems, A Formula for Night, published by Seren. I have reviewed a couple of her earlier collections and she asked me to contribute a blurb to The City with Horns (Salt, 2011). We’ve known each other for many years and it has been interesting to see her work develop. What follows is a review of the new book, collaged together from new and old thoughts.

Tamar Yoseloff’s first book, Sweetheart, was published by Slow Dancer Press in 1998. The new Seren collection is dedicated to Lauretta Yoseloff, the poet’s mother, and right from the outset, in ‘Selfridges’ for example, she is a powerfully evoked figure. Here, she leads her young daughter around the up-market department store, brisk and efficient. As often later, the daughter’s priorities lie elsewhere, she drifts away, gets lost, ends standing mesmerized by the butcher’s counter: “lambs’ kidneys, calves’ livers, / sweetbreads, hearts”. The moment becomes a blood-stained Wordsworthian spot of time as even years later the child recalls the meat, “indelicate, hearty, more real laid out there / than anything that beat inside me”. The mother’s preference for delicacy and propriety and her daughter’s haunting sense of inadequacy and a fascination with death are articulated for the first, but by no means the last, time.

A second collection, Barnard’s Star (Enitharmon, 2004) contained many successful pieces presided over by the Robert Lowell of Life Studies. This went beyond the drawing on personal material (often from the poet’s American childhood), to the seemingly casual forms of the poems, the telling details, the tentative observer, the reined-in emotional tone, the particulars implying a wider social malaise. In ‘The Atlantic at Asbury Park’, the narrator re-visits a childhood scene now dilapidated (like Lowell’s Boston aquarium). Being told that “Annie and I would sit cross legged / in the bandstand, making plans” is as near as we are allowed to the emotional crux of the poem. Youth, ambition, friendship – Yoseloff’s vision is a mostly melancholic one as now only “the ocean is the same, / black for miles, white caps, grey sky”.

In the poem ‘Partobar’ (sadly not included in the new selection), the narrator rides the horse of that name, watched by an unsympathetic instructor and “the other girls . . . their blonde ponytails / neat down their backs, their jackets perfect”. The social as well as personal battle-lines are effectively drawn up and the poem proceeds in utterly convincing, tangible detail: “I hit the ground, / dirt and blood in my mouth, my head like a bell clap / inside the hard hat”. The sense of ignominy is powerfully real – and frighteningly permanent. Even as an adult, she watches “braver girls trot around the field, / chins up, asses out”. She sees them at parties, with men who “whinny” their approval, while the narrator remains, re-living her failure, still daunted by the explicitly male horse, “my breasts like acorns beneath my vest”.

A series of poems about her mother conjures a ghostly, curiously unphysical maternal image through the enumeration of clothes and other possessions. In ‘The Delaware and Raritan Canal’ she strides once more ahead of her daughter along the canal. There is no conventional closeness or emotional warmth; the reader gets the impression of a demanding, fierce maternal personality. The final stanza makes the daughter’s admiration clear: “But when she hits her stride, she could walk / all the way to the sea, arms sailing / forward, her course certain”. Yet even here the demands of the heart, of the human seem deflected as she sweeps past “the houses of ten thousand people”.

In Tamar Yoseloff’s first book with Salt, Fetch, a fetch was defined as a stratagem by which a thing is indirectly brought to pass and (the more obscure meaning of the word) a wraith or double. Using direct and punchy quatrains, in ‘Fetch’ poems scattered throughout the book (but collected together in the new selection), the narrator casts herself as a stay-at-home girl while sending her double out “into the cold dark night”. The fetch cruises bars and is ordered to trail an unidentified man and later sleeps with him. This stratagem seems to allow for the playing out of the narrator’s illicit desires, though the double runs out of control and develops her own independence, leaving the narrator lonely, then resentful, finally murderous. These racy, blunt narratives are thrilling and the exploration of female freedom, restraint and taboo makes for vivid, exciting reading.

Salt’s blurb emphasised the dark, edgy, sexy qualities of Yoseloff’s work and other pieces such as ‘Silk’ and ‘Tiger’ and ‘The Dentist’ reinforce this impression, though the latter is as much a study in masculine menace as eroticism:

He is trying not to breathe, and I am trying

not to swallow, as my saliva rises around his

finger, a foreign body. He inserts his mirror

to examine my every crevice . . .

She also continues to experiment in Fetch with a more allusive, imagistic style at its most effective in the sequence ‘The Firing’. Inspired by Julian Stair’s funerary pieces, it opens breathily once again:

I am a vessel, open

to your body. If only you could

move through me, enter

the spleen, the coiled intestine . . .

The sequence moves seamlessly and a little shockingly from passionate flesh to flesh and bone as it arrives at the collapse of a hill-top cemetery: “the graves / fall in on themselves, / marble crumbles to dust. // loved ones tumble / into each others arms, their bones / knit and form a whole”.

This apocalyptic darkness reflects an essential part of Yoseloff’s gift. She places an impressive series of poems at the beginning of Fetch that reveals preoccupations with time, loss, the inability to hold the moment. Experience is always leaking, objects losing their definition (‘Black Water’); monastic illumination only points up the fact that words fail to hold “that moment” (‘Illumination’). If we look behind us, there is shadow, “that / darkness of ourselves born / of days when the sun was blinding” (‘Shadow’). The culmination of these themes is the sequence ‘Marks’. Pushing the imagistic fragmentation close to its limits, the narrative echoes aspects of John Burnside’s work of the early 1990s. Here is the whole of part 3:

A finger blades a line

straight from throat to womb

peel back my skin reveal

the workhouse of heart and lung

blood

slogging through my veins

my discontented bones

It is this tension between the sassy and the sepulchral that is so interesting in the book. Poets create out of the matrix of their own nature and both elements are integral to Yoseloff’s vision. The choice of the concluding poem of this collection suggests she is clear-eyed on such matters: ‘The Sea at Aberystwyth’ is magnificent. The narrative voice embraces both the impersonal, heart-breaking cry “Oh rain, wash them clean” as well as humour about Norwegian tourists soaked by Welsh rain. The book closes with an unfrequented Indian restaurant as an image of metaphysical bleakness:

What we want

lies broken on the shore, what we can’t have

stays black on the horizon;

the moon of the zebra crossing

flashing for no one.

The City with Horns continued to break new ground with poems that flow and rush and fizz in ways reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and his declaration that the good artist must paint what he or she is. From the turmoil of Pollock’s life, Yoseloff powerfully re-creates a vision in which everything knots together, a way of seeing that is intoxicated by embracing “the gift of the street, / the glare of chaos”. But the horns of this next collection are profoundly ambivalent. If the central sequence (responding to Pollock’s life and work) overflows with plenty, then the outer sections of the triptych speak of emptiness and pain in a poetic voice more familiar, curbed and astringent. Here, Yoseloff continues to explore territory she has made her own in earlier collections: snap-shots and “little fables” of up-rooted individuals whose tokens, found objects and souvenirs struggle towards articulacy just as the concrete in her cityscape possesses “no lyric dimensions” (‘Concrete’).

The more recent poems in A Formula for Night continue to offer few consolations. But the pay back for Yoseloff’s reader lies in the works chastening honesty, its ability to evoke a sensibility that feels never less than modern and – a notable achievement paradoxically – not immediately recognisable as the work of a woman. ‘Lace’ and ‘Swimmer of Lethe’ continue the preoccupation with death, treated now so directly that the haunting of Plath’s work is even more evident. ‘Construction’ paints a cityscape in which “the wrecking ball / opens another new vista” and is undeceived in counting the “[m]inutes to trash”. ‘Ruin’ invents a new poetic form in which a text is gradually shot to pieces as phrases, even letters, are gradually edited out, enacting the very process of ruination. Yoseloff perhaps finds her heraldic device in the rampaging habits of the ‘Knotweed’ with its “line of destruction // that moles its way beneath foundations”. Again echoing Plath’s tone of address to her mushrooms, Yoseloff admires the plant’s “calling: the felling / of our failing structures”.

There are final poems here too about the mother figure. Her death in ‘Clear Water’ is movingly contrasted to another hospital visitor reading Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Anahorish’ aloud in the ward. But even now, facing last things, the attentions of mother and daughter are at variance. The daughter knows and responds to the poetry; the mother sleeps through the whole incident and dies the following day. True to her vision, the poet notes Heaney’s death a few months later; she expresses an on-going concern about the other patient, “if he made it”; but the poem ends with nothing more said about the author’s mother. In ‘Skull’ the mother’s dead body is regarded as “a hollow case, all the life pulled out”. If this is shocking, it also represents a heroic devotion to telling the truth as it is experienced. A Formula for Night is a major collection and career summary and really ought to be both on your wish list and on prize shortlists in the coming 12 months.

Douglas Dunn’s ‘Terry Street’ and Thoughts of 1969

October 20, 2015October 22, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry in performance 1969 Poetry International, Barbarians, Douglas Dunn, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Book Society, Robert Bly, Terry Eagleton, Terry Street, The Movement, Tony Harrison, W H Auden

Recently, in my local Oxfam shop, I found a remarkably well-preserved hardback first edition of Douglas Dunn’s debut collection, Terry Street (Faber, 1969). Since living in a very similar street in Lancaster exactly 10 years after Dunn’s book was published (Aberdeen Road, up on the northwest-facing terraced streets above the town, looking out across Morecambe Bay to the – occasionally snow-capped – peaks of Cumbria), I’ve always had a soft spot for the book. But I hadn’t read it in years, I now realise.

images — Aberdeen Road, Lancaster, in a recent photo

The particular copy I bought (for £2.50) still had the Poetry Book Society’s Bulletin in it as Terry Street was the PBS Choice for Autumn 1969. It printed a review by Julian Jebb of the PBS’s second Poetry International staged at the QEH, South Bank, in July 1969. Jebb praises the organisers for attending to the faults of the first such event (noted as an over-crowded audience and over-running readings by poets). WH Auden is there in the “blackest of spectacles”, reciting recent work from memory including ‘On the Circuit’ (1963) in which he satirises the lecture/reading round he has been treading in the USA: “so large / So friendly, and so rich”. He read precisely: “15 minutes and hardly a fluff”, reports Jebb.

He was followed by “a ponchoed American poet, Robert Bly”. Jebb’s tone here will have been addressed to the original readership of his review (it appeared in The Financial Times) but it’s still an interesting period piece. Bly seems to have flailed his arms while reading “in tragic-comic, uncoordinated circles, strongly reminiscent of Peter Cook’s imitation of Macmillan in Beyond the Fringe”. Later he over-ran shockingly with 20 minutes of his “sloppy, deranged images about Vietnam”. This was delivered, Jebb tells us, to a growing slow hand-clap.

Later in the evening, Edward Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Ogden Nash, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa and Janos Pilinszky also read. Few details are given on these contributions unfortunately, but the experience of the latter three poets of the Second World War and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20^th century prompts Jebb to observe: “We have felt safer than these three men and we are grateful to them for their eloquence in telling us so”. Here is evidence that poetry was making very little happen when it came to the heavy lifting required to shift the entrenched sense of superiority and national egocentricity of the period.

So the review both evokes an earlier age of extraordinary poetry and also shows how far we have come. With Ted Hughes’ and Daniel Wiessbort’s founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. British poetry was just at this moment becoming exposed to worldwide influences (even if some were hardly listening). In this light, Douglas Dunn’s PBS Choice reads like the dying edge of the 1950s, of The Movement. The Terry Street poems themselves may be memorable evocations of working class life in Hull but what I notice now more than anything is Dunn’s obsessive use of the plural subject: young women, girls, the children, mothers, old men, the chatty women, men of Terry Street, old women, revellers, neighbours, street tarts, trawlermen, young women, the people who live here, men on bikes. These are versions of Larkin’s typological “cut-price crowd” (‘Here’), the women in ‘Faith Healing’ and the fathers and mothers and newly married couples of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. The difference is that Larkin would as often turn his acerbic gaze on himself. In Terry Street, Dunn makes the choice to keep himself out of the picture (behind glass) and there are hardly any delineated individuals in the book (though we all remember the man who wheels an optimistic lawnmower down Terry Street).

Dunn viewed ‘these people’ through a window – “our window” says a self-lacerating, retrospective poem of mourning addressed to his late wife, Lesley (‘Envoi’ in 1981). While the belief that these people were a fit subject for poetry is admirable, many of the poems now read as patronising, still mired in the English class system (despite Dunn’s Scottishness). To that extent I disagree with Terry Eagleton who, in 1970, praised Dunn for being able to “transcend the two major pitfalls of poetry concerned with working people – bourgeois voyeurism or sympathetic mythification”. Dunn seems to me to fall foul of both of these.

In the 1969 PBS Bulletin, the young Dunn himself wrote “Terry Street became for me a place of sad sanity . . . an alternative to the gaudy shams everywhere”. It was this sense of the real that Dunn needed (for himself) as a mature student in Hull, pursuing an English degree, and perhaps was a substitute for what he was already declaring: “Scotland is what I most want to write about and what I am least able to”. Later, Morrison and Motion’s 1982 Penguin anthology of contemporary British poets, pigeon-holed Dunn with Tony Harrison in being “sharply conscious of background and upbringing, which sets them at an angle to the cultural establishment”. But Dunn’s chosen strategy in the longer run was to acquire the ‘language’ of the poetic establishment in formal terms and try to speak up for those men and women of Terry Street (or their Scottish equivalent) rather than merely observe them from afar. ‘The Come-On’ appeared in Barbarians (1979):

Our level is the popular, the media,

The sensational columns,

Unless we enter through a narrow gate

In a wall they have built

To join them in the ‘disinterested tradition’

Of tea, of couplets dipped

In sherry, and the decanted, portentous remark.

Therefore, we will deafen them

With the dull staccato of our typewriters.

But do not misbehave –

Threats and thrashings won’t work: we’re outnumbered.

Whatever piece it was Bly read that night in July 1969, the voice of the establishment regarded it as threats and thrashings and was too easily able to dismiss it.

How far have we come? Is it still the case that alternative poetic voices look to disguise themselves – whether with formal display like Dunn’s or with an obscuring erudition – to pass through the narrow gate into poetic acceptability? Or is it now that we anxiously seek out and fetishise what is different so poets and their publishers feel the need to define and confine work with USPs like race, gender, sexual orientation, locality, even disease – whole books focused on life events that begin to sound like the prose genre known as ‘misery memoirs’? Do poets actually articulate this to themselves: in my Creative Writing graduation ceremony, how do I ensure I stand out?

My Brief Career in Medicine

October 13, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing 1974, Agnes Arber, autobiography, beginning to write poetry, Guys Hospital Medical School, Leonard Cohen, Moorgate train crash, Peter Hammill, Studying Medicine, The Manifold and the One

Last week I posted about my daughter’s absence, away now studying Medicine. As some of you will know, this is where I once began too, many years ago. Without any shred of exaggeration, it was a formative time and the following account of it (which first appeared in an earlier version in Agenda) tries to make some sense of it.

It was a hot August and I had a vision of a child, a baby staring at me, wanting to be lifted up. It lasted only a few seconds but I returned to the red-roofed Wiltshire house where I’d spent most of my 18 years, happier and now resolved. I could not turn my back on such an opportunity.

I’d applied to study Medicine for reasons I cannot now recover and may not have been clear even at the time. I’d had a series of interviews during the Upper Sixth year but only rejections had come back though I was held on a short list at Guys in London. Yet I’d already been struggling to focus on Biology, Chemistry and Physics, preferring to pick up the blonde, resonant body of a guitar and play Neil Young, David Bowie, Lindisfarne, you know the sort of thing. I had written songs but very few poems and those few from an almost complete ignorance of poetry. Shakespeare and Chaucer at O-level really was about it. My models were exclusively song lyrics which I listened to intently, following them on the lyric sheets inside the unfolding gates of album covers. My head was unhelpfully full of phrases from Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill and Jon Anderson of Yes – one a merchant of genuine, existential, gothic angst, the other a lyrical fantasist. Then Guys rang to offer me a reserve place to start in ten days time. Then came the vision of the child.

Because of the lateness of the arrangements in getting to London, I lodged in a room in Crookston Road, Eltham Park and commuted into London Bridge. The city I’d been parachuted into was in the midst of the Provisional IRA bombing campaign. The Medical School worked us hard though I never found it easy, or easy to devote myself to it. Within a week or so, we filed into the long upper room overlooking the inner quad. The windows down one side were filled with pallid light, a cloud-light flooding in from the London morning. We had watched a film which included queasy moments of blades easing through human skin though, even as I watched, it struck me as less informative, more likely to be readying us for the shock of encountering our first lifeless body.

His head was to the pale light of the morning. His feet were dry and yellowy and up-turned from the horizontal table where he lay. Though he’d once been human, he hardly seemed to be any longer. His skin was tough and thick-seeming, exactly like leather. The mound of a belly rose and fell to his groin dusted with greying pubic hair, a shrivelled prick and half-hidden balls. His legs ran on, thin and bony at the knee down to the up-turned toes. We all avoided looking at his face.

I wish I could remember who made the first cut. One of us must have done: into the leathery skin above the sternum. The blade needed pressing firmly and the upper layers peeled open a bit like a zip fastener, down towards the abdomen. We did not give him a name though we turned up to visit him every week for the rest of term. But then, he wasn’t ours alone. As we gradually opened up thorax and abdomen, arms and legs, students in the year above us were coming at other times and we’d arrive to find his skull opened, his cheeks slipping down his face, his eyes suddenly gaping and exposed to the light that greyed and wizened as the winter term progressed.

By November, I’d already bolted back to Wiltshire a couple of times and instead of medical text books, I’d started reading Hardy, Lawrence and H.E. Bates. In a poignant reminder of happier times, the school asked me to choose books for a prize-giving at Christmas. On a trip to Bath, I bought Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Lawrence’s England, My England. In Trowbridge, I scoured the second-hand bookshelves of Newbury’s, a bric-a-brac shop long since demolished and one morning I found a copy of George Eliot’s Silas Marner and a book called The Manifold and the One by Agnes Arber. I knew nothing of the latter but must have been attracted to the philosophical sounding title. In my growing tribulations at Guys, I was becoming deep. The questions I seemed to ask myself more and more yielded no easy answers and I had a notion this was called philosophy.

The Arber book is a wide-ranging and syncretic survey, drawing on literary, scientific, religious, mystical and philosophical traditions, in pursuit of the experience which Arber defines as “that direct and unmediated contemplation which is characterised by a peculiarly intense awareness of a Whole as the Unity of all things”. Amidst the dissections, test tubes, bunsens, the red- and blue-dyed lung trees and chemical equations with which I uneasily engaged back in Southwark, I found consolation in Arber’s idea that life is an imperfect struggle. In those winter months, failing to work hard enough or get a firm footing in a bewildering city, I did not read passages about the “inevitable appearance of the awry and the fragmentary which we isolate in our minds” in a philosophical fashion. Rather this was my daily diet, strap-hanging on a delayed train into London Bridge, sneaking into emergency exits to catch the second half of Diana Rigg in Pygmalion on St Martin’s Lane, trudging up a drizzly Charing Cross Road to buy sheet music I could ill afford, drinking with others in The Bunch of Grapes on St Thomas Street, complaining how much work I had yet to do. Not doing it.

Already letters to old school friends were raising the prospect of leaving Medical School. When Arber wrote of the limited and artificial confinement of conventional thought (“a hard and fast orthodox system of logical regulations – many of which resemble the rules of a complicated game and have little concern with the attainment of truth”) I felt she was talking of my current studies. I had developed an attraction to the esoteric – it made me feel more justifiably the outsider I felt myself to be – and I got untold pleasure from hearing that masters of Zen Buddhism might declare to my lecturers, “Supreme Enlightenment goes beyond the narrow range of intellection – Cease from measuring heaven with a tiny piece of reed”.

But work piled up rapidly in the new term and after renewed attempts to devote myself to it, the old patterns of neglect and procrastination returned. Even though there were months left before I managed to act on my desire to leave, to beat a retreat from the big city, to set a new and more deliberate course, still the length of remembered time seems short. After Lawrence’s Apocalypse and Sartre’s The Age of Reason, I raced through Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, bewildered by its episodic narrative, its explicit sexuality. But it was Arber’s utterly different book that haunted me. One evening, staring out at Eltham, I wrote: “Down in the street / the puddles turn to raging light / night-time folds away the day / packing up the sun. Turning / through the broken stars, over, under / the chosen Far, making for homeward”. I listened to Radio Caroline in the evenings when I’d managed – not always and increasingly less often – a couple of hours of legitimate work. Dylan’s “keep on keeping on” fell on reluctant ears.

Then travelling blearily east from London Bridge, I forgot to grab my briefcase before stepping down onto the platform. It was a self-inflicted injury but had little real influence on the string of failures I achieved in the final exams. On another day – it was my nineteenth birthday – Margaret Thatcher defeated Ted Heath for the Conservative leadership. One day – it was a Friday – a train from Drayton Park failed to stop at Moorgate, overshooting the platform into a dead-end tunnel at 8.46 in the morning. As I walked gloomily from London Bridge through the black, wrought-iron gates of Guys, forty-three people had died.

Three months later I found myself sitting in my bedroom in Crookston Road, the growl of the busy A2 in the distance. I stared at packed bags and felt calm if utterly becalmed. One day, months later again – this was now the end of a second strangely untethered summer – the thought had begun to form that I might see myself as a student of philosophy, maybe work harder at the writing.

Into the Swims – or She’s Leaving Home

October 8, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing autobiography, Enitharmon Press, Hurt, Margaret Atwood, Milton, One thing after another, Paradise Lost, Sedburgh, Toronto, Wilderness

A remarkable thing has happened in our house this week. My daughter’s room has been tidied – and it has remained that way.

The duvet is unrumpled on the bed. A phone charger remains thoughtfully unplugged on the floor beside the bed. The pages of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend have not been turned any further. The few coins on the desk wait to be spent. No rubbish is accumulating in the plastic bin beside the desk. A laundry basket has been emptied and seems not to be refilling as it usually does. There are few clothes hanging in the wardrobe. The door stands open onto the landing for days on end. There is hardly a movement in the wave-shaped mirror beside which, vertically, a friend wrote in pencil ‘Don’t crack the mirror’. Actually, to be truthful, there is the slightest of motions to be seen there – it’s me standing in the centre of the room, staring around.

We took her to university last weekend. We miss her. And in the absence of more detailed news we’re pretty sure she’s having a good time. She’s never friended us on Facebook but she somehow did so ages ago with my parents. So we hear remotely about smiling pictures, roseate cheeks in flashlight, black backdrops. I think yesterday she was supposed to be attending her first dissection (I remember that vividly – more of that in a later post perhaps).

In the mean time, to wish her well and permit myself some lovely sentimental thoughts of her in younger days, I thought I’d post a couple of older pieces I wrote which feature her.

Both these poems originally appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010). The first derives from a walk we pursued when she was about 5, I think. By walk I mean, she walked a bit and I carried her on my shoulders the rest of the way. This was probably in the hills near Sedburgh – sheep country, close-cropped grass, heather, little stony paths. I suspect we plotted a waterfall or two into the route for a few squares of chocolate (temptation) for her and her older brother.

One thing after another

The ivory, angular vertebra I found
the day after the day my daughter found

and tried out her new word – fuck –
was bony, spiky to touch, rough as fuck.

I thought: Depths! Essence! Bone!
She bent to it, touched it, turning bone.

Leave it, I called. She said, Is it real?
White in the grass the contrast was real.

The second poem is later, from an occasion when we were visiting Canadian cousins, staying in a house in the Lake Country north of Toronto. To me it felt like something out of early Margaret Atwood and we spent ages fishing from the rickety wooden dock, paddling in a rowing boat and (as here) swimming out to a tethered raft (she has always been a good swimmer).

There is a well-buried allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost in the middle of this poem – from the description in Book 1 of the fallen angels or devils closing in around Satan (“their doubl’d ranks they bend / From wing to wing, and half enclose him round / With all his peers” ll. 616-8). This is the second part of a sequence called Wilderness:

See my flesh and blood

here, bright and true

as a sun on the rise,

she launches herself

from the anchored platform,

flies into the air

over the blue-lit water,

unaware of tethers

beneath the surface,

of ropes, trailing weed,

slime, mud and scales

stiffening in reaction

to her vigorous action.

Here she is, hanging,

all parts my daughter,

curling like a ball,

the sudden black water,

while the white trunks

of ten thousand trees

cram the lake shore

and enclose her round.

All sounds hang back

as she arcs and peaks,

begins her slow bow

to the pull of gravity,

the smash of water,

the great churning

of foam and white limbs

yellowing as they spread

to carve out stroke

after buoyant stroke

into the swims of joy

and grief she’ll tread.

Forward First Collections: Some Early Results 2015/2014

September 25, 2015September 25, 2015 martyn crucefix blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry competitions, writing Andrew McMillan, Black Country, Cape Poetry, Carcanet Press, CB Editions, Chatto Poetry, Forward Poetry prize, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Liverpool University Press, Liz Berry, Matthew Siegel, Mona Arshi, Sarah Howe, Thom Gunn

The 2015 Forward Prizes Felix Dennis award for Best First Collection (with its £5000 cheque) will be awarded finally on 28th September. I have been reviewing the shortlisted books this summer as follows:

Mona Arshi – Small Hands (Liverpool University Press) reviewed here;
Sarah Howe – Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus); reviewed here;
Andrew McMillan – physical (Cape Poetry); reviewed here;
Matthew Siegel – Blood Work (CB Editions) reviewed here;
Karen McCarthy Woolf – An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet) reviewed here.

Who will win? I can give you what blog-mathematics tells me and I can give you my own modest opinion and I can give you a prediction of who I think might be picked by the judges who are A L Kennedy (Chair), Colette Bryce, Carrie Etter, Emma Harding & Warsan Shire.

Judging merely by hits on the reviews on this blog (statistically wholly unreliable) the winner will be Andrew McMillan – agreed this might just reflect the fact that he and his supports are more social media savvy than others but I suspect it reveals an real interest in his work out there. (And for completists among you, the remaining rank order was then Arshi, Howe, Siegel, McCarthy Woolf).
Who do I think should win? All five books have been hung on topic-hooks by their publishers (illness, ancestry, cultural difference, sexuality, miscarriage) though only Howe and McMillan really justify this as complete volumes. It’s a sign of the need to market a book these days and I’m sure this trend will grow more powerful though I don’t think it’s a great idea for either writer or reader (is it an appeal to the ‘general’ reader?). But the ground being broken by McMillan has been thoroughly ploughed by his (acknowledged) hero Thom Gunn and Howe’s cross-cultural explorations and formal experiments I find interesting but not necessarily volume-coherent. My favoured book was actually the American one, Blood Work by Matthew Siegel which I thought was a wonderfully coherent, moving, funny and achieved collection (despite being a first book). So he’s my pick – and I’ll be wrong on the night!
Who will the judges choose? McMillan – that combination of (sufficient) controversy and accessibility.

Whoever it is in the end, congratulations to them and to all the shortlisted poets. It’s been a feast and thanks to those who have been following my travels through these books.

As a final footnote, in October last year (somewhat after the event, I confess), I reviewed Liz Berry’s winning first collection and as a bit of context I’ll post that again below. For the record, I think her book is better than any of this year’s five.

Liz Berry, Black Country (Chatto Poetry, 2014)

If a reputation can be earned through the writing of half a dozen poems of real worth then Liz Berry has probably already written them, earning her place in the landscape of early 21st century British poetry. Her debut collection (containing 14 poems from the earlier chapbook The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls (tall-lighthouse, 2010) has charm, accessibility and a humour that belies the serious ways in which she exerts pressure to counter the hegemonies of language, gender, locality, even of perception. Berry is a teacher by profession and will, no doubt, have equivocal feelings about her work appearing in classrooms – but it will rapidly and rightfully find a place there.

We resist what tries to define and suffocate us in part by declaring who we are. Berry’s confident, natural, even uninhibited use of her own Black Country dialect is one of the most superficially striking things about this book. Against “hours of elocution”, she opts for “vowels ferrous as nails, consonants // you could lick the coal from” (‘Homing’). Variously her grandmother and mother influence her in this and, in ‘The Sea of Talk’, her father also urges her never to forget the place of her birth with “its babble never caught by ink or book”. The definition of a community against the pull of a conventional linguistic centre is explicit here. Her grandmother is a frequent role model and the growing girl studies “her careful craft”. “Right bostin fittle”, the older woman declares (ie. great food – brains, trotters, groaty pudding) and the budding poet willingly touches her “lips to the hide of the past” to inherit the authentic gift.

Other poems, making it clear that locality is as much a component of who we are, record and celebrate the Black Country as “a wingless Pegasus” composed of scrub, derelict factories, disused coal shafts, yet still a “gift from the underworld” whose nature and fate is enough literally to make grown men weep (‘Black Country’). Berry takes huge pleasure in enumerating the details of her locale. “Come wi’ me, bab, wum Tipton-on-Cut” invites one poem which then takes a tour of waterways, allotments, parks, mosques, steelworks and canals (‘Tipton-On-Cut’). Similarly, ‘Christmas Eve’ seems to improvise from the great concluding paragraphs of Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, using the ubiquitous fall of snow to lead the reader across the landscape of Beacon Hill, Bilston and Molineux.

We elude being imposed on and defined by others by changing. This, for me, is the more profound aspect of Berry’s work; so many poems unfold as processes of self-transformation. A mark of the book’s self-confidence can be found in ‘Bird’ which announces this motif of liberation: “When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could stop me”. Here, it is the mother’s voice urging, “Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the winter”. In keeping with this, the poems display a formal variety – free verse, short-lined quatrains, couplets, tercets, ballad forms, punctuation comes and goes. This is further reinforced by Berry’s bold, category-dissolving imagination which instinctively reaches for metamorphic possibilities. In ‘Birmingham Roller’ the escapee is a bird again, “jimmucking the breeze, somersaulting”; people become dogs, trees, pigs, fade to mere echoes, girls become boys. The donning of a pair of red shoes invigorates, eroticises: “rubies that glistened up a dress, / flushed thighs with fever” (‘The Red Shoes’).

Sexuality features so prominently in Black Country in part because of its potential for transgressive energy. I’m sure ‘Sow’ is anthology-bound with its “farmyardy sweet” female narrator, rejecting external definitions (“I’ve stopped denying meself”), accepting her true nature as a “guzzler, gilt. / Trollopy an’ canting”. This is a real tour de force of dialect, imaginative transformation and downright feminist self-realisation that “the sow I am / was squailin an’ biting to gerrout”, even daring the reader to “Root yer tongue beneath / me frock an’ gulp the brute stench of the sty”. Berry’s power of imaginative transformation is so powerful that the book creates mythic figures at will: the sow girl, the Black Country pegasus, the patron saint of school girls, Carmella the hairdresser, the Black Delph bride, the last lady ratcatcher. ‘Fishwife’ presents another of these figures like something from a quasi-pornographic Grimm’s tales. Attending a 17 year old girl’s wedding, she brings the gift of oysters, erotic energy, transgressive flirtation, power and ultimately pleasure:

I slipped
from my bare skin
alive oh alive all tail all fin
how the tide tossed
until alive ohhh alive
the waves flung my shining body upon the rock

She kisses the bride with “her tongue a plump trout” and other poems also resist categories to the extent of a sensation of gender-bending, or more accurately gender neutrality. I’ve already mentioned the girl who becomes a boy. ‘Trucker’s Mate’ reads like a homosexual “romance” and ‘In the Steam Room’ positively drips with sexuality – but of an explicitly “sexless” kind in which “any body / might give you pleasure”. ‘The Silver Birch’ achieves the extraordinary feat of evoking “sex [. . .] before sex” (eroticism before gender), “when I was neither girl or boy [. . .] a sheaf / of unwritten-upon paper”.

With so much dissolution of the normative, Berry dallies with the surreal and there can be dangers if the work does not also bear a weight of darkness. A poet like Tomaz Salamun writes in the tradition of Rimbaud’s systematic disorganisation of the senses, but combines, as Ed Hirsch suggests, “exuberant whimsy and fierce rebellion” to resist too easy a relationship with the pressures of the real. Happily, Black Country encompasses some richly productive tensions between the real and imagined, home and away, past and future, conformity and rebellion, sex and death. The latter rises to the surface through the middle of the book in poems like ‘The Bone Orchard Wench’, ‘Echo’ and the murder ballad ‘The Black Delph Bride’, acknowledging that the traffic between real and imagined contains plenty of irresolvable grit, impossible to wish away in any facile manner.

The collection concludes in more plainly autobiographical terms with the approach of the birth of a child and perhaps there is less imaginative pressure here, a risk of sentiment, “waiting [. . .] for the little creature that grew inside me”. Nevertheless, in reviewing first collections it’s traditional to look forward to achievements to come but this is inappropriate with Black Country simply because there is so much confidence, focus, shapeliness, already achieved uniqueness. Rather, this is a poet whose work presently demands our admiration. Oh yes . . . and what about those half dozen or so poems of real worth? I’d suggest ‘Bird’, ‘Bostin Fittle’, ‘Black Country’, ‘Tipton-On-Cut’, ‘The Silver Birch’, ‘Sow’, ‘Fishwife’. You’ll hear more of these in years to come.

A bundle of 50 sticks to start a fire

September 21, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, teaching, writing Birthday Letters, Blake Morrison, Daodejing, Enitharmon Press, Homer Simpson, Infragreen, John Wyndham, Kate Bingham, Lee Harwood, Muswell Hill, Nathanael West, Ted Hughes, Trowbridge

I have used this form – derived from Lee Harwood – for a blog-poem before. I rather like its loose encompassment and also as a welcome change to the often ‘lit crit’ nature of my usual blogs. Just roll with it . . . it’s what I say to myself. This one is dedicated to Stephen Stuart-Smith and all at Enitharmon Press.

A bundle of 50 sticks to start a fire

(for Stephen)

I did not break my fast Thursday last

Rose and showered at 7am before realizing and getting back under the covers for another 20 minutes

The street strangely lit there seemed to be so much more sky

The council have cut down flowering cherries claiming they are diseased but the word is it is to prevent – in both senses – claims against them for subsidence

At the surgery I was sixth in line

reading Blake Morrison on Ted Hughes published 5 September 1993 on yellowing newspaper pages that had tumbled out of a book I was re-shelving

As for his marriage to Plath, one day he may choose to speak about it, but for now –

I glimpse an old neighbor now divorced his wife and children have moved out we nod but very remotely

never watch when the blood is taken

Starbucks trade in the medical centre I watched being built years ago when I’d swim more often even then imagining myself at one of the windows waiting for news of some test or other

T. has woken by the time I return to eat but it’s me who puts away the groceries that have been delivered

handed me the bottle of wine laughing you don’t want to lose that he said my hesitation as I re-envisaged him as a romantic gift-bringer left an awkward pause I couldn’t cover

How does I have plenty of time transform itself swiftly into running late

hardly anywhere to park

Queens Wood stretches up behind these houses then bridges a road then sinks following its contours to the pond then rises again climbing to Muswell Hill and this is to be boxed into the word ‘topography’

A half empty carriage

‘Ultragreen’ in which what is out there seems to come inside in a process Kate cleverly likens to photosynthesis and cleverly this gets away from me

The Whitehill Food Market I have passed that place

Walking up from the Emirates when I can’t get my mind off the strange limps and weaves of the way other people walk they are not hell but merely unfamiliar ways of moving

the fountains flow in the centre of the square

A dog wets its feet and drops a red ball into the pool and I guess its owner will be irritated by that

Brecht refused to award the prize to any of the five hundred entries. In none, he said, was there any successful attempt to communicate anything of any value

‘Nothing makes me feel more like a poet than being unable to talk’

Pub date Isobel calls it pub date

The absence of punctuation is in the spirit of the Daodejing it is the water course way one drop of water in the ocean no trace of it but don’t tell me it’s not there

A house in Selbourne

An image of a child with arms outstretched fingers widespread so much he might be a tree

Ripples of damp sand are the footprints of the shaggy oceanic beast

‘To embrace’

A plain cheese and tomato brown bread roll and I am back madeleine-like to dinner-time sandwiches at Junior School during which we’d meet Mum from work and sit in Trowbridge Park why did we do that

It must have saved money

A timetable is the opposite of the way water flows and this grid dominates my life

Poems not even by rote but by the hour of the day

‘Pike’ so we watched YouTube clips of fish ducklings kittens being devoured it gets them started

Town kids city dwellers

as out of place as John Wyndham’s alien creatures like little pink M&Ms on four legs two of which are really arms they carry fire sticks

‘A sort of genocide’

The original Homer Simpson whose hands are uncontrollable

‘his thumb received a nasty cut. Although the wound must have hurt, the calm, slightly querulous expression he usually wore did not change’

Explore how far West’s presentation of Homer suggests he is a trapped man

The spider plant on the windowsill looks anaemic in its white pot against white painted window frames against thunderheads miles off

I am free at 17.10

I don’t need most of this

Occasionally there are evenings I can’t remember where I parked the car once I thought I’d left it on the garage forecourt after filling it up and I went in and got them to review the CCTV footage which told me that I had driven it away earlier that day and like some log-jam shifting slightly I had a vision of parking it on First Avenue and there it was all along

I need a framework perhaps

‘Echo Beach far away in time Echo Beach far away in time’

I like to change my clothes after a day’s work

So I asked them to bring in pictures of pike and this one brought in a picture of a cod

A Delia recipe

The evening is filled with cakes of varying heights

How to write about ‘sacred objects’

September 14, 2015September 14, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing holy, how to write a poem, Mossbawn, Myra Schneider, poetry workshop exercises, sacred, sacred objects, Seamus Heaney, Wiltshire

Recently, I spent a weekend at the house I now know as ‘Wiltshire’. It’s where I grew up through the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. I’ve been living elsewhere for so many years now and ‘home’ is in north London so the old county name suffices in most conversations to communicate what I mean: ‘I’m going back to stay in the house of my childhood’.

File 01-09-2015 09 18 16 — I’m doing the pedaling here – circa 1960

My parents still live there, both into their 90s, but managing with a little help to live independently. (See my earlier blog on memory and nostalgia here) It’s what has happened there over the years that makes me want to label it ‘sacred’ ground. From the Latin ‘sacer’ meaning holy, the word originally meant connected with God, sanctioned by religion, a valorisation that was religious rather than secular, a value determined from outside the sphere of the self and in the Latin words ‘sacerdos’ and ‘sanctum’ implying something cut off from the mundane, something distant.

But even in the continuing absence of any religious sense in my life, certainly any external religious authority that might determine this or that object or action as ‘sacred’ I still want to use the word – even as I confess this is a value determined solely by my own view of the world. But I do think that my sense of the ‘sacred’ is coupled with the passage of time. I don’t think anything can be instantly ‘sacred’. It has to be re-examined, worn, re-visited.

My Dad is well into that phase of old age when he wants to give everything away. There has never been very much to give, of course, and recently he has taken to wandering round the car-empty garage, picking out old tools and rather hopelessly asking myself and my two brothers whether we have any need of them, because he doesn’t any longer. The answer is really ‘no’ but occasionally I relent not to appear too ungrateful. However, on my last visit, I’d broken my flimsy Homebase-bought garden fork a couple of weeks earlier, trying to lever out a slab of paving. So when Dad offered me his old fork I took it.

It’s unpromising material for sacred eminence but because his hands have held it for over 60 years, wearing the shaft smooth, because his muscles and the instep of his right foot have pressed and shoved and pulled at it over that length of time it makes the grade. Sacredness is sort of metonymic here then. It stands for him. This is something I respond to in Seamus Heaney’s poems, in particular the first part of ‘Mossbawn’, dedicated to his aunt, Mary Heaney. (Read the full poem here)

Reading it over again I’m struck by its focus on particular ‘sacred’ objects – the “helmeted pump”, the “slung bucket”, the warm wall, the bakeboard, the stove projecting its “plaque” of heat (that perfect choice of word suggestive of decorative and commemorative without becoming over-blown or monumental). His aunt’s actions and her domestic implements are likewise noted and linguistically nailed (the poet’s precision echoes his aunt’s):

Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

The final quatrain reverses the more usual order of figurative language to begin with the abstraction which is said to be “like” the actual object, love embedded in its everyday setting as much as the meal scoop is submerged, absorbed, integral to the meal bin, sustaining domestic life:

And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

Heaney performs this magic in the present tense (a fact he rather flaunts with that “Now [. . .] now”) despite it being evidently a long-harboured, cherished memory. What might have been lost to the ravages of time is brought back into the present. I like to note that the word ‘holy’ dates back to the 11th century and the Old English word ‘hālig’, an adjective derived from hāl meaning “whole”, used to mean “uninjured, sound, healthy, entire, complete”. Lacking the authority of an external God, what is sunk deep into our past lives can be simultaneously brought back into the present, whole and holy, and this is what we might designate as ‘sacred’.

One object from ‘Wiltshire’ I once managed to write about is the garden gate. You can just glimpse it in the background of the picture above. The adult is my own aunt (not really an aunt but my mother’s best friend). I’m on the left of her here. The poem originated in workshop exercises directed by Myra Schneider (her website is here) a few years ago now. With thanks to her, what follows is my own formulation of her process.

This is an exercise in memory and tapping into feelings surrounding specific objects. It seems to work for most people and I have tried it among school children as well as with experienced writers.
List a few – 2 or 3 – objects which have significance to you. They may be possessions, objects once possessed now lost, toys, gifts, even houses or rooms, but try to think of specific objects – your sense of it needs to be precise rather than diffuse.
From your list select one you feel now particularly drawn to
Now write a description of it. Try to avoid infusing it with any particular feeling – the more objective the better to begin with.
Now underline a few phrases in what you have written which you find interesting.
Now write more freely around your object, allowing in specific memories and feelings which perhaps cluster around this object, people associated with it.
Again underline particular phrases and passages you like.
From all this material, especially what you have underlined, try to assemble a more finished piece.

And here’s my poem – originally published in ‘An English Nazareth’ (2004)

The gate

was inch-tubular for economy’s sake,

a post-war issue for a self-built house –

Hammerite black now, but once white,

earlier cream, its soft curves and corners

a rough square between cement gate-posts.

A big-thumbed latch on the left,

beside it, a schematic sun-rise of tubing,

beneath, the squared-off wire grid

I’d work my toes into, find the springy dip

of my weight on the straining hinges,

hook in elbows and I’d swing, I’d swing.

Then a jarring crash and decrescendo:

the muddy-booted, casual back-heel

of my brother after football on the grass.

Gentle click-clank of the sneck as Mum

bent to secure it with as much care as

she shook slippy fried eggs onto my plate.

The half-way firm, suddenly stunned

impact as Dad’s hand swiped, held shut –

his sluggish pirouette and up the path,

coming home with an empty Thermos.

And then me, arms shaking at the ridges

of concrete under my trike, Dad stooping

to frame the cream gate, the hedge beyond,

the telegraph wires converging on clouds,

wires dividing the bright air at my every

effort to remember until it appears

all that muddle of love has so long gone

unremarked between us, there is no need

to hearken to it, though a bad day shows

every possible latch broken while another

is effortless, finds the point of purchase

into the give and spring and swerve and space.

Martyn Crucefix

More than 10 years of blogging on poetry and translation – over 39,000 views in 2024 – now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive: 'one of the top 10 poetry blogs' (Rogue Strands)