On This Day: December 5th 1830

Christina Rossetti was born in London

Bitter for Sweet                                 



Summer is gone with all its roses,
  Its sun and perfumes and sweet flowers,
  Its warm air and refreshing showers:
    And even Autumn closes.

Yea, Autumn’s chilly self is going,
  And Winter comes which is yet colder,
  Each day the hoar-frost waxes bolder
    And the last buds cease blowing.

Christina Rossetti

It’s that time of year again: officially winter by the calendar and the weather forecasts are mentioning the S word. Expect traffic havoc, the country grinding to a halt and politicians making great play of a £50 energy bill giveaway. (£50 from average rises of £120 is still a £70 rise, right?)

So, anyway, Christina Rossetti is giving us a good dose of pathetic fallacy; ascribing human emotions and sympathies to nature. Except that in this poem there is no explicit mention of human emotion, just the relentless march of the year: Summer is gone, Autumn closes followed by the colder winter. The feelings of doom and gloom you have to add for yourself, but that’s not too difficult, is it?

On This Day…October 5th 1995

 Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature

 

 The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark

 (in memory of David Hammond)


The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

Seamus Heaney

 1939 – 2013

 

 

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Seamus Heaney described poetry as “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable.”


I once went to a reading of Seamus Heaney's which was a complete disaster from an organisational point of view. Despite being a ticketed event, the organisers seemed surprised by the number of people who had turned up. They seemed equally surprised that a crowded room in midsummer would generate heat. The giant fans which were turned on were noisy affairs drowning out the poet's voice, a neat precursor to a fault in the sound system. Heaney was offered a hand held microphone which was fine until he wanted to turn the page of the book he was holding in the other hand. Enough for some poets I know to throw something of a hissy fit but not our man. Not only did he genially contend with all of these mishaps but he somehow, rode all the problems and carried on to give a reading which was good-humoured, thought provoking and inspirational. In fact the reading is remembered for those qualities rather than the nonsense which preceded it. And it is a memory which is particularly poignant now after his death in September.


A good man and a great poet gone.  

A meditation upon time and ageing in the sonnet form kicks off this collection from Ian Whiteley in classical fashion and it bodes well for the reader that the poet finds, not shock, but beauty in the "seasons that lack colour in their eyes" For this is the pattern the collection will follow using a variety of form where the author constantly looks to the "flip side" for his conclusions.

Do not expect the ordinary or banal here; these are hard-hitting poems as titles like Class Action and Vermin would suggest. But the poet's engagement with form always comes to the fore: haikus intersperse the collection and repeatedly the poet returns to the sonnet. Composed at Braunau (April 20th 1889) pays homage to Wordsworth in its opening line but thereafter takes a bleakly ominous line as befits its subject matter:

"...when I look into his eyes,
I see premonitory flames of hell
and hear the deaths that echo in his cries." 

And it is the sonnet which rounds off some fifty two pages of poetry. A Step Towards Summer is an obvious bookend to the opening poem and is a rallying call to the reader to gird a fearless heart in the face of the passage of time.

Ian Whiteley refers to himself as a "hardcore troubadour" and it is a fitting title for one with such a hard-hitting edgy style. His reference to size zero models for instance, "Ribs poking out of white flesh/the colour of dead fish." But don't be fooled as this volume also demonstrates a craftsman at work, one who fashions his words in the most appropriate form for what he has to say. One who utilises the repetition in the villanelle for maximum effect in Gathering Winter Fuel: "Return to me and bring your loving flame."

My feeling is that readers will return to this collection and be rewarded with each visit. 

Pour your favourite drink, sit back in your most comfortable chair and settle back to enjoy this book. Crossing by Pete Lancaster, his second book, following his Blue Bridge in 2009, is a collection to savour.

On the face of it the same themes are evident, most prominently memories and philosophical musings prompted by wanderings in the watery edgelands of Wakefield, like in the title poem for instance:

"I crossed to the ice-laced washlands edge,
searching paths made strange by snow."

Wanderings which often lead to a final image or an event of subtle significance,

"...There was the frozen lake,
and there, as the sun held fast at noon,
the fox aflame quickening across the pane
of trackless white, never to look back."

But beyond these themes and pre-occupations there's a greater determination to explore the fullest extent of metaphor and symbol, and like the blackbird in In Ambleside Churchyard, Pete Lancaster is opening his throat and giving it all he's got, which he does to great effect.

How to Draw an Apple begins prosaically, "First sharpen your pencil," and develops with a typically tender simile, "Caressing gently as an approaching kiss/ the cheek of it." and then finally blooms with three lines which suggest that this poem is about much more than an art class:

"And then you'll capture it,
expose the sin deep under the skin,
discover the deep sad heart at its core."

This confidence in the way he handles his material is evident in New Year which lists observations around the trip to to an airport and eventual flight. But its conclusion:

"...the beds of cloud below us

We live in the electronic age. The white heat of Harold Wilson’s technological revolution has been realised and writers, painters and musicians can publicise their work to the world with the click of a mouse button. Those wishing to propagate their view can release their texts, music and images into the ether and let the world take note: the masses have been enfranchised and their choice of artistic medium is a rich one. Given these options, Jimmy Andrex has chosen the arcane route of publishing a slim volume of verse. (Jimmy Andrex, Gormless, Currock Press ISBN 978 954 337 352 9) and it begs the question, why?

With its layers of self-deprecation and irony, the title Gormless suggests that there is something very modern, if not post-modern, taking place here; Jimmy Andrex is laying down a false trail and at the crossroads we might well ask about which way we should turn.

Everyone might write it, but few people buy it. What is the current standing of poetry? Beware those who take themselves seriously in their poetic output with their seedy insinuations: “do you want to read some of my stuff?” And beware in particular those who consciously seek the aura of poet. As Blackadder so pithily explained to Mrs Miggins, “…there’s nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a big shirt trying to get laid.”

Wordsworth turned the whole world of English poetry on its head and announced in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1802, “Poetry is…the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Plenty argue that Wordsworth’s view still holds sway, aren’t we all, after all, still Romantics?” But over a hundred years later, T.S. Eliot, writer of the most influential poem of the twentieth century (The Waste Land) said, “poetry…is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity.” He goes on to say that poetry is an escape from emotion and personality.

This makes for a tricky template for poets looking for guiding principles. They could be forgiven for expressing confusion about how to go about their chosen craft particularly as almost another hundred years have passed since Eliot’s edict. What is certain is that the world, in MacNeice’s memorable phrase, is “suddener than we fancy it…crazier and more of it than we think.”

What now of poets and poetry? Does Shelley’s claim that poets are unacknowledged legislators have any sway? Can anyone argue against Auden’s claim that “my poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chambers?” What is Jimmy Andrex’s take on this sudden and crazy world, and how does he go about his response? Is he a recollector of emotion or a cool, detached observer? Crap Town provides some clues:

“…whining like a bitten, beaten bull

terrier in a pit,

studded choke chain a comfortable

suffocating fit,

slavering, alert right down to the white

eyes down for Oxfam thrills on Friday night.”

Evidence here of poetry continuing to evolve, and in order to chart the human condition, a poet continuing to harness powerful emotion but stay aloof in expression, allowing readers their chosen response to the individual and urban decay of the twenty-first century.

“while your frailties blossom like a field of sunset spires,

While some kid hooplas a lamppost with an old bike tyre.”

A Dog Called Tyson

This is Jimmy Andrex, the urban warrior with a notebook taking on and capturing the vicissitudes of late night taxi ranks and housing estates that are more than frayed around the edges. Here is the voice of an individual amongst the anonymous masses who have grasped the possibilities of the technological revolution and reveal themselves only by mobile phone conversations on trains:

“How you started with texts

met two Saturdays for sex,

you both said you were working.

Now you’re left dreaming

of dress down Friday, clutching

cardboard cups on a train.”

On a Train

How tempting to jump at a convenient peg or pigeon hole! Yet this image I’ve suggested is not anywhere near half the story. This collection has plenty of grit and it relentlessly reveals a grisly way of life for many, but there is also delight in the delicate, the beauty for instance inherent in a Leeds Station Winter Sunset:

“Satsuma reflected on a sun’s breath moisture,

ripped apart cotton wool,

in a quandary whether to remain

or give in to black.”

Or the inspiration to be found in the work of others:

“A small moored boat like a blank page

invites us to take up the oars.

Blood and lungs pumping while angel words

echo as bottomless ink ripples.”

The Reading

 

There is a range in this collection which shames those who make easy assumptions, there’s a depth of expression which defies a neat summary in a review as brief as this, and there is a voice revealed which encompasses powerful feelings and tranquil reflections, a voice which can engage and disengage the personality. Furthermore, the words are chosen with care, the poems, for all their raw energy, are finely crafted and the collection repays second, third and subsequent readings. Heaney spoke of poets as being “artful” voyeurs and Wordsworth and Eliot would both approve particularly when the place of poetry, that most ancient of art forms, is affirmed. And affirmation is necessary as poetry has been shaped and remodelled to suit notions of what is appropriate for our electronic age; always flexible, it has borne with patience image consultants asking it to try out rap, performance and slam as credible alter egos. It has even been asked for an embarrassing period to pose as the new rock and roll.

But poetry can shrug off modishness, it has survived canonisation in the school curriculum and it is still the turn-to art form when we are confronted by tragedy, personal crisis or love. It is hard-wired into our psyches as fundamentally as our mothers’ heartbeats. For it is words on the page, their rhythms and resonances, which allow both writer and reader to reflect, it is poetry which acts as that most compelling touchstone on experience. How else to approach the stored cask of infertility or the agony of grief:

“The chance to swap still life

for risking every bump

on a bike with no brakes,

gone like the perfect day out,

paper memories in a box.”

 

I Wasn’t Sure But I Could Tell

Poetry, as Gormless demonstrates is also the perfect medium for Andrex and his ability to capture shifts in relationships, ruptures and reconciliations, the nuances of ordinary talk which illuminate the big picture as in Runner Beans:

 

“When Summer’s temper cools, we can both walk

down whispering gravel paths, pick runners, talk

of plans for next year’s garden and savour

the harvest moment, the fresh beans flavour,”

And it is the words on the pages of Gormless which render redundant the question, why a slender volume of verse? Poetry has braved the ebb and flow of critical approaches, poetry is both arcane and cutting edge, but the age of an elite determining poetic taste has passed. Emancipated by the technological revolution and the ways and means at our disposal we can approach the signpost which is Gormless, be guided by it, but choose our own direction.