gairnet provides: space of bill

(A version of this review appeared in the summer issue of Poetry London)

 

David Constantine, Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe), 88pp, £8.95; Peter Porter, Better Than God (Picador), 81pp, £8.99; Sheenagh Pugh, Long-Haul Travellers (Seren), 64pp, £7.99

 

One of the minor reliefs of the last decade has been a sense that contemporary poetry is at last moving on from its twentieth century obsession with beginnings. By this I mean seeing an art form solely in terms of myths of origins, those in which the world either comes into being without awareness of any past, or sees its old gods imprisoned, murdered or emasculated -- and, crucially, deposed.

 

Whether in the shape of modernism being characterised as simplistic rupture, or the impact of surrealism on Soho (if not the Scots), or the sixties and seventies engagement with US poetics as a social behaviour, rather than as a counter-tradition – our previous century’s poetry was continually attempting to begin again, like a serial monogamist, unable to commit to any muse for more than the few years in which a literary movement can persuade itself it is innovative.

 

This had the unfortunate effect of characterising that writing not intoxicated by a current excitement as antithetical, as reactionary rather than, as with key figures like Auden or, more recently Donaghy, part of a search for continuity, an attempt to arrive at the middle myths, those concerned with the quest, the labyrinth, the return.

 

Until acknowledgement is made that the anguished journeys of Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Dante are of continued, indeed especial relevance to the post-Baby Boom, postmodern, post-punk, post-theory culture in which we find (or fail to find) ourselves, there can be no meaningful appraisal of our elder masters, those poets who are now writing about the myths of ending, whether to resist or affirm the one definitive act of closure our culture has to agree on, death.

 

These three writers concern themselves in very different ways with the matter of the middle myths, and how they reconfigure our understanding of beginnings and prefigure to the point of occasionally ushering in our endings, whether characterised as oblivion or apocalypse.

 

Sheenagh Pugh’s use of the trope of travel to explore instabilities of identity engages partly with the cultural pressures of our period, and partly with the sheer impact of time, what it means, not just to exist in crisis, but to continue to exist through the passing and arrival of ideologies. David Constantine’s explorations of European sensibility are grounded as much in the ageing body as in his daring, darting syntax. Peter Porter’s marriage of wit (in both its metaphysical and satiric sense) with technical brilliance and a cultural reach that seemingly encompasses everything from broadband to the Bosphorus, is the very definition of what we must call Old Mastery.

 

Taken together they enable us to consider, yet again, the resonance of symbols that, if they cannot make sense of our world, at least deepen our response to it. The conceptual frameworks they assemble would suggest that poetry is not a matter of harmony or dissonance, of revolutionary rupture or untroubled conservatism, indeed that this kind of dialectic is itself a symptom of being stuck at the beginning.

 

If books have directions, Long-Haul Travellers would appear to point north. From an elegy to Mackay Brown to a hallucinatory poem possibly set in Leningrad, the northern light of the Scottish islands, of Norway and the Baltic, recur throughout the often short-lined, crisp descriptive verse of Sheenagh Pugh’s twelfth collection: everything seems to sit in the ‘vast white shallow bowl’ of Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura.

 

But this would be to overlook the injunction which opens the book:

 

The trick is to take only

what will be scarce

where you are going.

 

A long central sequence focuses on a northerner who travelled in a contrary direction, Murat Reis, a Dutch slave trader in Algeria, whose identity has undergone such radical shifts, no one, family or victim, can tell exactly who he is: ‘Such fluidity/he thinks in the end/may be a way/of staying the same.’

 

And the types of crises arising from such juxtaposition of opposites are also the theme of two poems set in the North East – in the Roman camp visible across the Tyne from my window, in fact, Arbeia, ‘fort of the Arab troops,’ where two gravestones depict the figures of Regina and Victor, one a local girl who married a Syrian, the other a Moor who died here aged just twenty:

 

the glow of triumph on him, this rising star

who’d won his freedom and his master’s love,

wearing his youth like armour. Ave, Victor.

 

Here, elegiac irony is well-balanced by the depiction without comment of an apparently untroubled multiculturalism. And that subtle exposure of underlying tensions in our sense of identity lies at the heart of Pugh’s oppositions of North and South, passion and intellect, Christian and Muslim. Murat Reis’ meditation on female identity – ‘how used they are/to change their names/…sleep with the enemy’ – is reflected in a poem which teases at a mythic concept, ‘The Girl Taken By An Eagle’.

 

Sudden mysterious flights have intrigued Pugh for some time – witness the early title ‘Beware Falling Tortoises’ with its allusion to the death of Sophocles. (One of the less successful pieces here is a monologue by a long-lived and therefore sententious tortoise.) Their analogous relation to the enigma of creation is bound up not just with the fluidity of female identity, but the issue of being regarded as subject as well as subjective:

 

Now it seems,

after all, I was in the wrong story.

The Girl Who Climbed A Mountain – she sounds

bolder, more fun. Maybe I should have been her,

if I’d known. If you ever know.

 

The ultimate source of this laconic perspective on interpretation and the passions is of course Cavafy, and there are several few points where he is evoked, as at the end of ‘The Opportune Moment’: ‘When you go/ashore, take nothing but the knowledge/that where you are, you never will be again…’ or this glimpse of the Romans on Hadrian’s Wall:

 

One day, someone looks out and admits

the enemy is not coming;

 

he has changed his ways, or maybe

he was never there at all…

 

David Constantine has long been a poet capable of the triumphant re-imagining of a distant viewpoint, literary, classical or otherwise, and this new collection is shot through with his characteristic marriage of the ecstatic with the marmoreal. The poems often seem to work in dialogic pairs, one piece picking up and amplifying or challenging the view obtained by another. There is a striking poem on the attempt to domesticate a ‘Roman Sarcophagus’: ‘And no, the idea

 

Of that in the living room doesn’t stop my blood,

Quite the opposite, several dead

I’d willingly give them house-room and be glad

 

This seems balanced by ‘Finder,’ in which, with the eighteenth century Scot, Sir William Hamilton, in mind -- and his multiple roles as ambassador to Naples, vulcanologist and archaeologist -- Constantine produces a delicate monologue in which the fragment of a statue (‘a woman’s breast, the left, with some/Clavicle and beginnings of the upper arm,’) is viewed first as a fossil, then imagined as regenerating the whole woman. Echoes of his young wife Emma, who famously danced without undergarments for Goethe as well as becoming the mistress of Nelson, are not hard to find.

 

Desire and the intellect are combined throughout the collection in a series of portraits of women or parts of women, from Courbet’s ‘L’Origine du monde’ to the translation of two of the poems removed by the censor from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Goethe appears in ’18 Via del Corso’ arriving in Rome with ‘his writing hand…desirous of learning the other arts.’ This poem is contrasted with ’26 Piazza di Spagna’ where ten minutes walk away and thirty odd years later Keats lies dying, clutching a flower from Fanny Brawne:

 

He swaps her white carnelian from hand to hand.

He will go under a roof of violets and daisies

(His friend has promised) holding her letters as though

In there he could bear to read them.

 

In that extraordinary ending, Constantine reveals again his gift for elegy without sentiment. He achieves such effects by juxtaposing human frailties and desire with the inhuman, often using lapidary imagery, but also drawing on the oceans, as his collection’s title suggests. Between a rock and a deep place his protagonists apprehend their needy interactions in poem after poem where they literally warm each other against the endless cold:

 

He is good in bed

For thawing your toes, he takes them

In at the top of his thighs and nothing

Delights him more than warmly eclipsing

Your cold bum.

 

That homely monosyllable recurs in an otherwise decorous translation of Baudelaire, ‘her arms, her legs, her bum, her thighs,/Smooth as oil, swanlike, serpentine,’ and points to another distinctive trait. He is drawn to a breadth of vocabulary and an open-ended, flowing syntax which contrasts strongly with the air of terse, classical finish we might otherwise associate with such subject matters. Unusual phrasings like ‘the creatures flair this’ and ‘breakable//As sparrowframe’, terms like ‘a poor wisht thing’ and ‘this little porth’, the repeated use of ‘cicatrice’, the deployment of restless dimeter lines, all illustrate something hinted at in his ‘Three Notes on Lear’:

 

He became Poor Tom, fished deep

And as in posh old people after as stroke

Up came the vernacular, the dirt, the baby talk,

The horrors.

 

This is what raises his work above many contemporary practitioners, the sense that here is a writer who has, in his own words, ‘deployed the spine like a diving rod’. The result is a daring collection which occasionally feels less integrated than it might – the savagery of some satiric quatrains doesn’t quite come off – but overall we feel like the

 

Amiable believer in Atlantis

Who rowed out over a possible upheaval

in 1712 and the boiling water

Uncaulked his boat.

 

Peter Porter provides his own epigraph to Better Than God, a tercet which reads

 

As He said of the orchestra

at the Creation, they can play

anything you put in front of them.

 

Here the relation between Creator and creation (shadowed by the slippage between God and Haydn) is presented as the latter outdoing the former by actually expressing what the former has ‘merely’ composed.  It is a statement of great metaphysical subtlety and, both in terms of its scale versus its scale of reference, and its position as the opening poem of a late collection – a beginning myth seen from a conclusive perspective – very funny.

 

Porter’s titles are always a delight in themselves – he is one of the few whose contents pages are a better read than most other’s poets’ actual works – and ‘That War is the Destruction of Restaurants’ ‘My Parents Were Walking Islands’ and ‘Henry James and Constipation’ are worthy additions to the catalogue, urbane, lyrical and waspish in turn.

 

What this collection establishes beyond its initial successes is that mastery of tone is partly mastery of the complex interaction between idea, syntax and (metrical) line, that verse is a method of generating and containing thought as a paradoxical energy, something at once disciplined and unconstrained. This is what enables Porter to engage with the assumptions which underlie our culture without surrendering that lightness of touch which we associate with the lyrical.

 

This is evidenced by his habit of taking a familiar phrase from philosophy and qualifying it radically. ‘Whereof We cannot Speak’ challenges that urge towards austerity and away from messy humanity we recognise in Wittgenstein. Remarking ‘There is nothing here “whereof”’ he presents language less as a tool for meaning and more as symbiotic part of our composite intellectual being (‘Under the microscope [our species] seems/to be covered in odd parasites/called words’), concluding ‘a philosopher feels on his cheek/the tears whereof he cannot speak.’

 

Another mark of his command of poetic register is that, although several poems claim to be light verse, none of them on closer examination actually is. ‘To Murder Sleep’ implies it is a satire on shallow experimentalism (‘Panopticon of all that’s new/It gleams in Weekend interview.’ But in its depiction of the poet locked in nightmare re-enactment of ‘some much-applauded dumbing-up’ the poem rejects easy oppositions in favour of miasmic complicities – Porter is not content to conjure the dread that ‘relevance may not go slow’ he must also confess ‘You’re still both Neophile and Dunce.’

 

Sleep is granted a voice in ‘In Bed with Oblomov’, another poem where the assumed irrelevance of the literary and the historically-distant is first metaphorised, then challenged:

 

Beyond your windows Russia sleeps

In snows, as drifts, which might not even be,

Surround your resting; vacant deeps

Soul-white but bled into the wintersea,

 

‘Give up the world, even when awake,’ Sleep cajoles, just as, in ‘Under the Rupe Tarpeia,’ the apparent unreality of real things is discovered to be both our doing, and our undoing: the self, regarding the rock from which traitors to Rome would be flung, remarks ‘“If death is deep,/Why does the fall appear so miniscule?”’

 

This collection is full of memories of relatives and ancestors, as well as literary heroes and classical antecedents, all of whom must face the same challenge: to be awake to the full complexity of circumstances, not merely clinging, as his great-grandfather, the architect Robert Porter, did, to reassuring ideals, finding ‘no reason why the sun/Now shining in the South changed one/Iota of the Law’ he designed pubs, churches and, as an anti-masterpiece, Boggo Road Gaol.

 

Two types of doppelgangers help to round out Porter’s portrayal of the truly awake, one comic, the other something more. The monologue ‘The Hungarian Producer goes to Lunch’ contains a perfervid and hilarious self-analysis: ‘Isaiah was Hungarian and Elijah/and Jesus was en route to Budapest/when a passing donkey led him to Jerusalem.’

 

‘Opus 77’ returns to Haydn and the musical motif of the title poem to deliver a series of poignant and precise utterances on what survives us: ‘What works you did will be yourself when you/have left the present…’.  Again, it finds images for language’s role in our passing, and finds in these a simultaneously moving and stabilising resonance, something which grounds the reader not merely in meaning, but in the meaningful:

 

They love me, all my words, despite how often

I made fools of them, betrayed them, begged

Forgiveness of them. They are like the million grubs

Which swarm around their Queen. I file them in

Wide boxes where they wait for their Master’s Voice,

Accusing and defending.

 

 

Over the years I've done a whole series of pieces in collaboration with visual artists including Bridget Jones (not that one), David Annand, David Edwick and David Paton. I don't know why so many of them are called David. I've worked on a variety of sites from Darlington to Ambleside, and Newcastle to Dumfries, but I've never really pulled this work together in terms of presenting it clearly as a strand in my writing. Yet collaboration, whether with artists, musicians, or other poets -- whether on shared projects or through translations -- is an important part of the way I see myself working.

 

Why I haven't explained that coherently must rank alongside why I write in Scots but live in England, and why my books aren't a neat exposition of two or three themes that everyone can see are punchy and/or  contemporary, ie I'm otaku, a withdrawn solipsistic geek who likes to make up artificial families he can then sulk about. But if you've come to this site through any of my writings you already knew that. The point is I wish, in WS Graham's immortal phrase, to 'try to be better'. Hence this.

 

*

 

This first posting is about a project I did as part of Graingertown's public art initiative in Newcastle city centre. This was 'Tyne Line of Txt Flow,' which you can see in Thornton Street, off the Westgate Road, a collaboration with artists Carol Sommer and Sue Downing completed in 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maura Dooley, Life Under Water (Bloodaxe), 64pp, £7.95; Leontia Flynn, Drives (Cape), 58pp, £9.00; Glyn Maxwell, Hide Now (Picador), 68pp, £8.99

 

(This appears in a slightly tighter form in the Spring 09 issue of Poetry London.)

 

What we might term the consolation of poetry is an old if not ancient theme, constantly being renewed. What use is high culture to us when we bring it to bear on loss, whether that loss is deeply personal or consists of the horrible sense that a whole way of life is slipping from us? What use is form, the springboards and restraints of metre, rhyme and stanza, the creation and shaping of language it enables and even induces, if what it is being brought to bear on is, on a moment to moment basis, unbearable? These two questions are explored in markedly different ways by the three collections under consideration here.

 

Many attempts at solutions have been announced for the first question, including the frequent declaration that such materials can no longer be deployed, that all cultural engagement which lacks immediate relevance to what we might term the two types of contemporaneity –youth and its informational equivalent, the news – is obsolete.

 

Glyn Maxwell’s new book gives the lie to this notion in an emphatic manner, by recurrently bringing a potent myth from our classical heritage into striking juxtaposition with contemporary issues. The role played by Cassandra, the Trojan princess cursed with the self-cancelling capacity for prophecy which will not be believed, is turned over by Maxwell in poem after poem, explored for possible parallels between truth- and tale-tellers of all sorts.

 

In truth, he nails this book’s colours to the mast in the first poem, where he presents the half-baked ideology that everything we do might be for the best of ends as, ‘Okay the ones like Cheyney, who you mustn’t name/and spoil the poem, do the motherfucking same/as ever…’ Here the knowing explicitness nods to decorum only to blow it out of the poem’s way and set us up for a bracing exploration of what exactly it is we do and, as Tonto asked the Lone Ranger, who this ‘we’ is anyway.

 

Storytellers and those who listen to stories abound, a recurrent theme in Maxwell’s work. The listeners, the subjects and sometimes the tellers, like Cheney, have guilts and violences of their own to deal with. They, including such figures as Agammemnon, Jim Jones and St Just, take interesting readings from their various moral compasses. Shahryār tells us what it is like to have to listen to the tales of Scheherezade every night; the narrator of ‘Hometown Mystery Cycle’ finishes on a blistering note of denial:

 

You know your own villages: write your own shit.

I’ve never done much and I didn’t do this,

but you asked where I come from and that’s where it is.

 

Black humour and the juxtaposition of the literary with the literally horrible are kept to the fore, as in ‘Tale of the Story-of-All-Stories,’ where the device of personifying different kinds of tales allows him to tell us about the nasty, brutish end of a set of short stories who mistake ‘a mindless bandit’ for ‘An interesting take on an old favourite.’ I’m not giving too much away to mention ‘bones/a-jingling in a market.’

 

Everywhere there is a trademark brilliance of phrasing – in particular the use of abrupt qualification as a sign of equivocation (‘till I envied my brother and I’ve not got a brother’; That’s what I make of what/I kept of it’; ‘Like somebody chronically stupid or clever’, ‘hours of talk I don’t forget and do forget’). His combination of strong rhythmic drive and the carefully manipulated diction of an everyman can make Maxwell’s voice seem confined to cracking the surface of a public discourse – it’s probably this which keeps bringing up the pat comparisons with Auden, yet another of which appears in the blurb.

 

But, as elsewhere in his work, The Nerve in particular, it is Maxwell’s other masters, Frost and Brodsky, which allow him to access a tender, personal voice which balances with the brusqueness and aggression exposed elsewhere. There is a witty, rueful memory of Brodsky in ‘A Walk by the Neva’, and the personification of a birthday, visiting the poet’s house after his death, emits ‘one puzzled o…kay then…’ The rather lovely ‘Thinking: Earth’ has this poised passage:

 

Earth. I have a daughter.

Heaven’s what I say it is for her.

Telling her is all it is so far

for me. My only use

for the word forever

 

is in those conversations.

 

Maura Dooley is much concerned with what she alludes to in one title as ‘the Blood Jet’. (The blood jet being Plath’s description, via Tsvetaeva, of poetry, and therefore carrying connotations of both wounding and suicide.) Poetry’s role as an articulation in extremis, at once the only expression and the only activity possible, is returned to again and again in this moving, intense volume, which is full of elegies and addresses to the dead, and the necessity for, as much as the ecstasy of, love.

 

It both explores and exemplifies the directness with which art speaks to us in troubled times, and breaks down the barriers between the crises of the individual and those of a society. That said, it opens with a wonderfully bizarre encounter with Leonard Cohen which resonates with all that artist’s lugubrious sense of the absurd:

 

As an oyster opens,

wondrous, and through mud

lets glitter that translucent

promise, so the lift doors

close and I am inside

alone with Leonard Cohen.

 

Elsewhere, her elegies allude with a kind of grave subtlety to the heritage of modern poetry in order to honour the dead. In ‘The Old Masters,’ Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ provides the title and the last line of a piece about the Twin Towers, finding a new tragic resonance in that ‘boy falling out of the sky’, and alluding to the Babel of nations which make up America, and their origins in such places as Breughel, painter of both Icarus and the biblical Tower, would have known. One line, which reads ingrained racist abuse as something approaching a doomed hubristic childishness, is especially daring:

 

You’ll know the photograph,

legs dangling from girders,

spik, polka, yid, paddy, nigger, wop,

the Rockefeller Building, rising like sap

 

In ‘Strange Meeting,’ Wilfred Owen’s nightmarish encounter with his enemy as doppelganger is echoed in a mysterious glimpse of the late Michael Donaghy, seen from a train in darkness, ‘our faces, all reflection, meeting in the glass’ – an image Dooley knows Donaghy would have loved. Here the quietness of the allusion to Owen just sends a shiver through the poem, as it makes a tentative gesture beyond religiosity and belief in an afterlife to ‘somewhere/out beyond the bended knee/that you and I were forged with…’

 

In that last, even more delicate allusion, via Catholicism, to Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’ we have an illustration of Dooley’s method, whereby poetry, the imagination’s attempt at an artefact without physical substance, can somehow hold us in a net of cultural reference, even when we cannot hold our world view together. As in ‘UnIrished,’ she keeps going beyond the markers of our identity into spaces where the familiar has become deeply unfamiliar, where ‘I even have to pause/to find the word/you grew with’ and we don’t even know the back of our own hand:

 

…the cross-hatched stars on your hand growing older,

or the real things, sparking still, as they cool,

it’s how they twinkle, how we wonder what they are.

(‘Familiar Object Seen from an Unusual Angle’)

 

The book finishes with a long poem, ‘The Source’ which moves between an account of the forming of landscape by water and the symbolic roles of water in terms of spiritual thirst and the ritual cleansing of sins. Auden’s ‘limestone landscape,’ Alice’s pool of tears, and the four tears of the Virgin which, spilt on Hampstead Heath, give rise to ‘a healing holy well,’ all come together in a redemptive appeal for us to engage fully with what we can still mean by a term like ‘faith’.

 

Those four tears, incidentally, neatly refer us back to an earlier description of the human heart as having ‘four rooms’: the number four (and the image of tears) echoing throughout the book. Thus we are reminded the significance of form in knitting together music, image and allusion into that very particular whole we call a poem.

 

This serves to refer us back to the second question posed at the beginning of this review: what use is form? This question is the half-understood descendent of a crisis of modernism, the idea that poetic form can no longer have any role to play in these difficult times, that all ‘traditional’ structures must be abandoned and new ones devised which, through virtue of being invented at the same time as the present series of problematic events, will therefore incorporate their difficulty and some hope of continued relevance.

 

Leontia Flynn’s second book builds instead on the triumphant engagement with form which distinguished her first collection, These Days. Drives amply demonstrates an understanding, perhaps derived from the examples of master technicians like Carson and Muldoon, that rhyme generates not just music but tone, a graph of attitude – these poems are full if not ripe with attitude. Exclamations, italics, bracketed digressions and, of course, rhyme that is both slant and sly, set these poems on their often perilous way:

 

You woke up just before the driver did.

Your cheapo, backpack, night-time ride through Turkey

shouldn’t have ended this way: on the road

(the bus had turned a corner on its side,

grinding up glass and bone. The driver died.

The girl behind you died…), half-scalped and bloody

and left, when you heard of bombs or trauma, since

with a sixth-sense of how soft it is, a body.

 

Journeys, estrangements, and the vulnerability both induce, haunt this book, particularly in its first half, which seems to race from capital to capital, to try on restlessly the masks of famous writers – Beckett, Proust, Bishop, Orwell, Plath, Baudelaire – as though pursued by some fury half-glimpsed in poems like ‘Milos’ (quoted above), or in the account of a suicidal leap in the Tate where the author’s ‘sympathetic trace’ is undercut by ‘(read ‘morbid instinct’)’.

 

If the first half of the book sometimes seems in too much of a hurry to allow the reader much to cling to, that unnerving interest in the suicide’s motivation is echoed in the second half, where, in ‘Spring Poem,’ the possibility of a ‘swallow dive/over the railing’ of a bridge is carefully if not completely rejected. The motivations for this, and for much in the first part, become clearer in two pivotal poems.

 

Just as the tonal and formal achievements of These Days coalesced in the fine sestina ’26,’ which focussed on her mother and father meeting at a dance, so too in this book there is another magisterial exploration of this riskiest of forms. ‘Drive’ (nearly but subtly not the title poem) again depicts her parents, but this time towards the end of her father’s life when he is stricken by what appears to be dementia, and her mother is reflecting on their life together as a series of repetitive car journeys.

 

Following the metamorphosis of a key end-word across the stanzas shows how Flynn poises herself between obeying and disobeying the strictures of the sestina: ‘motor’ becomes ‘mother,’ then ‘another,’ ‘together,’ back to ‘motor,’ on to ‘daughters,’ then finally back to ‘mother.’ This enacts the tight cycles of depersonalisation, duty and dissociation the mother experiences as she reviews their marriage.

 

The second poem, ‘Our Fathers,’ about her father’s declining mental condition, uses a short-lined quatrain, often limited to dimeter, to distend its syntax across stanzas, painfully drawing out its difficult conclusions about how we cling to and yet must release those we love. Cutting into this distension and delay is a simple and very effective quatrain:

 

my father holds open

the door of himself

and lets his old ghost

pass through

 

The momentary clarity of this stanza, occurring between others bound up in repetitions and interjections, achieves its undoubted poignancy because of the poet’s confidence in form, in its capacity to contain both the mimetic disruptions the poem enacts elsewhere and this succinct fulfilment of the quatrain’s capacity for balance and poise. This faith in form works in a manner similar to both Dooley and Maxwell’s faith in a cultural heritage which continues to yield new meaning, allowing Flynn to make work of great audacity and directness.

 

In this manner these books offer not just the consolations of three compassionate, sometimes fiercely literate intelligences, but another way to read our engagement with poetic heritage and form. These are not things to be alluded to as outmoded signifiers of refinement or elitism, but birthrights to be defended as a means of articulating that which does not seem susceptible to articulation, modes of allusion in themselves which lead to further insights, new approaches. Reinterpretation and reinvention in the terms offered by these writers presents the reader with both a continuity of, and a critique of what we mean by, culture.

(This piece, commissioned and -- expertly -- edited by Julian May, was broadcast on Dec 3rd on BBC Radio 3's slot The Essay: Under The Influence, alongside pieces by Alison Brackenbury and Michael Symmons Roberts, among others. This is the unedited version, without the texts for the Morgan poems, two of which were broadcast in the form of archive recordings by Morgan himself. I've indicated where the text can be found in his Collected Poems, and will fill it in later, when I get a chance. The texts of my two poems are edited for performance.)

 

The genealogy of poets, who considers themselves influenced by whom, is always a fraught subject. I know myself to be the only child of many parents, but the one whose poetry has meant most as I try to develop as a writer is Scotland’s laureate or makar, Edwin Morgan. 

 

Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920. After serving in the Medical Corps during World War Two, he returned to Glasgow University, eventually teaching English Literature. He knew the marvellous poet W.S. Graham from the 40s, but didn’t come fully into his own voice until reading the Beats. He helped to transform Glasgow into the literary capital of Scotland – a mantle it surely claimed from Edinburgh in the 70s when he, his contemporaries and successors began to dominate Scottish writing. He retired from teaching in 1980, and has recently embarked on a late career as dramatist and librettist.

 

Throughout his writing life he has made it his mission to celebrate, especially our social and technological progress, and to record loss stoically rather than to bewail it. His poetry, though responsive to local sectarian division and to global conflict, to much destruction and questionable renewal, has always hymned the human capacity for love, resolve and invention.

 

His work embodies a vivid throng of characteristics: amplitude, restlessness, compassion, energy. He demonstrates an engagement with language in its ephemeral, as well as classical, forms, being much drawn to its battered, colloquial beauties. He is receptive to the spell-making of arcane vocabularies, with an ear for the memorable phrase lurking in jargon. He looks eagerly overseas for both subject and solidarity, allowing other literatures to rejuvenate him through the hard graft of translation. Among his poetry’s many avatars, perhaps the figure of Cinquevalli comes closest to describing its creator’s nature:

 

Cinquevalli is falling, falling.
The shining trapeze kicks and flirts free,
solo performer at last.
The sawdust puffs up with a thump,
settles on a tangle of broken limbs.
St Petersburg screams and leans.
His pulse flickers with the gas-jets. He lives.

Cinquevalli has a therapy.
In his hospital bed, in his hospital chair
he holds a ball, lightly, lets it roll round his hand,
or grips it tight, gauging its weight and resistance,
begins to balance it, to feel its life attached to his
by will and knowledge, invisible strings
that only he can see. He throws it
from hand to hand, always different,
always the same, always
different, always the
same.
His muscles learn to think, his arms grow very strong.

Cinquevalli in sepia
looks at me from an old postcard: bundle of enigmas.
Half faun, half military man; almond eyes, curly hair,
conventional moustache; tights, and a tunic loaded
with embroideries, tassels, chains, fringes; hand on hip
with a large signet-ring winking at the camera
but a bull neck and shoulders and a cannon-ball
at his elbow as he stands by the posing pedestal;
half reluctant, half truculent,
half handsome, half absurd,
but let me see you forget him: not to be done.

Cinquevalli is a juggler.
In a thousand theatres, in every continent,
he is the best, the greatest. After eight years perfecting
he can balance one billiard ball on another billiard ball
on top of a cue on top of a third billiard ball
in a wine glass held in his mouth. To those
who say the balls are waxed, or flattened,
he patiently explains the trick will only work
because the spheres are absolutely true.
There is no deception in him. He is true.

(See CP (Carcanet, 1990), pp. 432-4)

 

He writes big books, full of diverse verses, some making high cultural gestures, like a piece in ottava rima about Byron surviving Missolonghi, others exploring a rougher, confrontational music, like the aggressive encounters of ‘Glasgow Green’. Some readers and reviewers, not all of them from England, have felt abashed by the the scale of his Scotocentric imagination, though Morgan is the most approachable of poets; being Scottish for him manifests itself in a love of language, engagement with history and joy in fine detail, the small print of being alive.

 

I first encountered his work as an adolescent in the anthology Worlds, where he was ranged alongside Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Hughes, Thom Gunn, Adrian Mitchell and Charles Causley. It was a generous book, full of sharp black and white photos and even sharper pronouncements by the poets. It made them, and Morgan in particular, seem unstuffy, curious, and engaged.

 

He observed there that, although he himself was clearly bookish, his background was not: ‘There is a poetry before poetry…the imagination of someone who is going to write poetry can be stirred in all sorts of preparatory ways.’ I liked and wanted to emulate that quiet confidence. In it I began to realise the importance of receptivity to what Heaney would later call ‘the music of what happens’.

 

I was reading this in Dundee, a town with no discernible literary tradition, in which very little seemed to be happening. I was a smart-alec singleton, whose family had risen from the working class to the lower middle, who got into university and through my first degree with what seemed like suspiciously little disciplined effort.

 

The little I knew about what sort of writer I was appeared initially to be informed by the subject of my doctorate, Hugh MacDiarmid. But, as I began to publish, it became clear my imagination was more aligned to Morgan’s. Like him, I thought centrifugally, moving out from a particular city to a small country to a continent and beyond. Like him I was fixated both on the resonant kick of words and how they were reconfigured by formal patterns. And like him my cultural context seemed full of beautiful but unacknowledged voices.

 

The Lament for Billy Mackenzie

 

The stranger in our city’s voice is dead

so keep all Dundee silent for a day,

sheathe all your spoons within their mourning cases,

fling all your florins in devalued Tay:

let every mirror hold his fourteen faces,

            our strangest voice is dead.

Our angel of the ragcart and the river,

the patron saint of tinkies, whose gold lips

could loose euphoric shrieks that split our hips –

but now he’s fallen out with song forever.

 

...

 

Praise to that voice, which spans the octaves as

the roadbridge spans the river’s range of tides

and snell winds, bullies of Siberia.

It holds the spheres together as they gride

and squeal, that mile-wide voice, in theory our

            town’s diapase, ya bass.

His gypsy holler was holy jabber-code,

our Bowie of Baldovan Terrace: hark

to Billy, Bacharach of Baxter Park.

He was the Shirley Bassey of Bonnybank Road.

 

...

 

Lament now for the father who must touch

a cheekbone in the barn at Auchterhouse,

who knows it in the darkness and knows why

it is so cold. Duveted in overdose,

a photo album, dumbed at thirty nine –

            lament for that numb touch.

Lament the kind of silence in that shed,

the absence of all further variation

on that one breathing theme thieved from creation:

lament MacKenzie’s lovely son is dead...

 

I had blundered into college: hoping to learn how to write poetry, it took me ten years to recover from an Oxford education. I then blundered into academe, happening onto the burgeoning discipline of creative writing without grasping its vocational consequences. I blundered into an exile in Newcastle I never thought would be as durable and nourishing as it continues to be.

 

Morgan, by contrast, seems always to have known about his craft, his vocation, his sexuality and his city, and to have fashioned for himself a life which, though his poetry betrays great lonelinesses, was always redeemed by a sense of centred literary purpose.

 

He has always been a master of the gestures of form, whether writing shocking sonnets, or teasing the reader’s brain with new varieties of genre – concrete poems, off-concrete poems, colour poems (and a few off-colour ones), computer poems, emergent poems, and, of course, sound poems.

 

[Loch Ness Monster’s Song. See CP, p.248]

 

That capacity to straddle the divide between the so-called traditional and the allegedly experimental is another of the lessons taught by this quietest of dominies. It isn’t, as I once thought, that there are two poetic camps, mainstream and experimental, and you have to declare for one of them – strophe or antistrophe, rather than the whole poem. I’ve encountered this entrenched position in England, America, Russia, and always feel alienated, shot by both sides.

 

What Morgan’s work implies is the imagination acknowledges no such divide, instead, many poets simply have the unpoetic desire to be right – and a more understandable need to belong, whether to an orthodoxy or an unorthodoxy. The original poet, however, only belongs to the work, to the next poem and the next.

 

I think his example grounds me, in a way Hugh MacDiarmid or many of the other poets to whom I claimed allegiance as a younger poet, did not. As I began to mature as a writer, to wish to interact with society other than through the jeremiad – I began to be haunted by an image of these poets, and of myself, as a species of giant baby.

 

The more MacDiarmid, for instance, clamoured for ‘The Kind of Poetry He Wanted’, as a late poem has it, the more he claimed to have achieved a Mature Art, the less clear I was as to what precisely such a thing could ever be.

 

Morgan has never opposed that type of grand statement, indeed he argued eloquently that it should be criticised responsibly, but the poetry of his maturity effortlessly digests and renews that which is verbally vibrant and ideationally daring about his peers and predecessors, dispensing with all the poisoned prejudice and bonny prince chauvinism.

 

His perspective, crucially, refuses to be partisan: he never excludes, in order to correct or castigate, any aspect of what it is to be human, and he never loses sight of our position in an unhuman, not inhumane, universe.

 

He effectively told me this in an interview back when I was the fledgling editor of a very tiny magazine, Gairfish, in the mid-eighties. It only took me the twenty years to grasp what he meant: variousness is, in itself, a resistance to dogma.

 

[In the 60s] I learned, really learned for the first time, however much I may have thought I believed it intellectually, that you can write poems about anything. You really can! The world, history, society, everything in it, pleads to become a voice, voices!

 

Morgan is our great poet of voices. He gives words to apples, to starlings, to sputniks, to Mercurians, to a mummy, to his old hero Jack London, and, in the most daring of his late poems, a piece possessed of grave and daring wit, to Gorgo, a cancer cell:

 

You may not even think I am a tempter,

But I am the insidious one, hissing Listen listen.

Every tumour begins with a single cell

Which divides and divides and is its own boss.

…

The joy of kicking decent cells away,

sucking their precious nutrients, piercing

Membranes that try to keep you from the waves

Of lymph and blood you long to navigate –

Through unimaginable dangers, be robust! –

Until you reach those Islands of the Blest –

…

The distant organs where you plant your flag

and start a colony. Those cells are heroes,

Homer would hymn them, but I do my best!

 

To consider that these lines were written by an eighty year old poet with terminal prostate cancer demonstrates the degree of integrity and lack of sentiment with which Morgan articulates what has hitherto been unsaid or even unsayable. His remains a considerable imagination in a heightened state of freedom.

 

I’m not a member of Edwin Morgan’s close circle of friends and supporters, and both temperamentally and professionally I favour distance over declaration, deference over dependence – something else I suspect I learnt from him. As these things are reckoned in the poetry world, I have not been a good son. But in the scale and structuring of my books, the range of language and tones I attempt to deploy, in my particular understanding of Dundonian-ness and indeed Scottishness, I remain indebted to his diction, his directness, and his audacity.

 

The Glacier

 

Scrambling among the hobo pebbles, pilgrim quartz,

we were speechless on the glacier’s black back,

surfing its slowest wave, listening to its Xhosa click,

its rhotic grind, its kilometre throat’s distracted rattle.

 

We’d diceboxed off the Karakoram highway up

a broadening valley between the Uigur villages,

their pease pudding walls, their carved palace doors,

corncobs drying on their roofs like giant pollen.

 

…

Then finally, parked by the concrete yurts painted

with scenes out of the cartoon past and walking

 

through the churr of magpies towards the first firs,

the first Swiss-eyed glimpse of gull-shouldered peaks,

breathless in the highland air as though we’d smoked

ourselves down to a quarter of our proper size;

 

there was a flight of steps up to a blind crest

you had to rest before, during, and at the climbing of –

and then it was before you, the blackberry tongue,

the exhausted shit lolly, the lava-stained granita.

 

It had something to tell us that we could only learn

by climbing on its dead whale belly and holding out

our mobile phones to record its auriculate melts.

There was a voice down in its rootlessness that knew

 

the root to all our travelling, the small dripping home

of our incomprehension. All our friends yelled at us,

and while their echoes put the eagles off their glide,

the glacier quietly carried on carrying us away.