gairnet provides: space of bill

(This account of a visit to the Guangzhou Poetry Festival dates back to the cusp of 2007/8. It was written for the British Council, but I've never seen any trace of them using it -- though other mysterious me-related pieces do crop up on their site(s) from time to time. For instance, I came across an account of an anthology of translations into French named after one of my poems: La Comète d'Halcyon. Poésie en Ecosse aujourd'hui, which, apparently, John Glenday edited. I'd never heard of it before.)

There is something perverse about arriving in Hong Kong just to leave it. But then there is something indecent about the hunger of the traveller to confirm sights they have seen prefigured in the media, instead of extending their vocabulary of the eye. When our plane dropped from the clouds and began its descent over that great harbour I was cricking my neck to see the famous skyline and squinting at dots in the water, trying to resolve them into junks – the whole opening sequence of You Only Live Twice was stubbornly refusing to flash before my eyes.

Then, whilst waiting for my flight to Guangzhou (eating a bright green blueberry muffin and serially mispronouncing ‘Guangzhou’ to anyone I asked), my only ‘view’ of Hong Kong was a sepulchral blood orange sun hanging in the smog over by a control tower. By the time I arrived in Guangzhou it was so dark all I could see (apart from the intermittent roadside blasts of character-dotted neon which indicate restaurants) was a very tired man being bumped about the back of the truck in front of me. I felt I knew how he felt, though a day’s travelling doesn’t really equate with a day’s labour, and, on reflection, I was probably looking for something, anything, that could ground me in this new environment.

This was not helped by arriving in a hotel complex modelled on a possibly Castro-less Cuba – more American than Cuban, though still subtly Chinese. All the staff wore Hawaiian shirts, and we were transported through the muggy night air in grandiose golf buggies. At breakfast, cigars and coffee supplemented the usual green tea and rice gruel, and outside, the shopping precinct included a ‘spirit hall’ (church to you) hung with banner-sized images of we poets like latter day saints. I wandered up to a hotel room to meet the organiser, Hu Xudong, a bustling, energetic young professor of Spanish literature I had last seen at a banquet in the Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture in faraway Xinjiang Province – an event which featured too much rice spirit and, not to put too fine a point on it, horse. He was thankfully pleased to see me, probably as he hadn’t expected me to survive both the hangover and the digestive process.

The theme of the festival was ‘Back to Classic’ – a term with, perhaps, even more layers of resonance for the Chinese writers than the varied international guests – French, Brazilian, US, and an acquaintance from a previous trip, the Venezuelan poet José Manuel Briceo Guerrero. For our Chinese colleagues, the issue is how to engage, in such a powerfully monocultural unit as China, with a contemporary multiculturalism that seems to fragment heritage. Can they reach back through a century so disrupted by cultural upheaval towards the work of predecessors which, in the case of the Tang and Song Dynasty poets, seem both as immediate and as unsurpassable as ever? It puts British poetry’s squabbles over risk and readability into a certain perspective.

As is often the way at such events, we were gathered together with representatives of the press, a couple of microphones were passed around, translators heroically attempted to maintain links across sometimes three languages, and the surface of the theme was gamely scratched. I had the misfortune to be handed the mike first, and set forward the thesis that the most severe critic of the Classics in any language was Oblivion; that those works which survived to attained ‘classical’ status often owed it equally to luck and to their innate translatability: their capacity to be imaginatively re-read and rewritten by each successive generation. Both premisses were comprehensively demolished by my fellow speakers, so all ended happily.

Readings at Chinese literary festivals tend to be communal affairs, in which, unlike the separate (and subtly hierarchical) events of their Western equivalents, everyone pitches in, reading a poem or two with a PowerPoint accompaniment helpfully displaying (what you hope are) your biographical details and a translation of the relevant work. The readings are frequently interrupted by singers, dancers, or, as in one of the events this time, prizegivings.

These included an award for an old friend of mine, the Szechuan poet Zhai Yongming, with whom I had worked on a translation project several years ago. I emphasised strongly yet again how good it would be to give a reading in her famous bar in Chengdu, and she politely explained once more that I didn’t need the excuse of poetry to visit and, anyway, it was theoretically possible to have good Szechuan food elsewhere on the planet without her ordering it for me. This seemed highly unlikely to me, but we still parted friends.

Before the second reading we visited one of the main archaeological sites in Guangzhou, the two thousand year old tomb of the Nanyue king, Zhao Mei, which was concealed until 1983 beneath a hill in the centre of this huge city. This sounds physically impossible, till you reflect that the tomb of his more famous grandfather, Zhao Tuo, the founder of this breakaway Han Dynasty kingdom, is also a ‘mountain’, also somewhere within the city -- and still undiscovered. It makes you look twice at any nearby knoll.

The tomb is laid out in the shape of the character for ‘warrior’ -- somewhat ironically, as the king appears to have been anything but, and actually died of poisoning from taking his ‘immortality’ pills. Each of its chambers held the remains of real warriors, eunuchs, musicians, cooks and concubines, who were all obliged to accompany their liege, who was discovered laced into a suit of jade, to the next world or, as we would term it, a custom-built museum where gaggles of visiting poets can gawp at intricate bronze ceremonial discs, a chariot, and some musical bells. Oblivion, temporarily, has been defeated.

Our reading that night was in a gigantic new hotel which appeared to have the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate at its entrance, and the Pantheon for its foyer. The scale and mock-Mittel Europa feel was every bit as discombobulating as the pseudo-Cuban effect of our ‘home’ hotel. Directly beneath the middle of the dome was a familiar-looking little stage with a screen set up for the PowerPoint, while serried ranks of schoolchildren solicited our autographs despite never having heard of us before.

Directly next to this tribute to the glory that was Rome was a huge busy, loud, delicious fish restaurant with one wall devoted to tanks full of that evening’s oblivious supper – twelve bone-suckingly good dishes later and we were ready for the show…

After which we had been promised a trip in moonlight (and neon) down the Pearl River -- by paddle steamer no less (though perhaps I dreamed the paddles). Instead, our bus managed to get lost on the dusty lanes between two stretches of flyovers, and we trundled for what seemed hours down a bumpy backstreet lined by an inordinate number of late-night barbershops – a midnight chorus rather than a quartet. At this point, it seemed to me for the first time, watching a score of sleepy scissors in action, catching the pearly glint of mirrors, eyes and steel, that I was finally ‘here’.

The rest of the trip offered up sight after sight for the starving gaze: an extraordinary feat of carving-within-carving in the Chen Family Temple which had over twenty crabs and lobsters struggling within a net, all formed from a single piece of honey-coloured wood; a stupefied pig, jammed into an iron frame on the back of a motorcycle we overtook on my way to a lecture; the ‘fragrant’ durian marshmallow I ate before giving said lecture (on contemporary British poetry); my evening in the hot springs afterwards, where I wandered through a park dotted with pools and mosquitos, the pools filled with a mixture of hot water and wine, or tea, or ginger, or milk (I’m not kidding), the mosquitos filled with a mixture of businessmen’s and a visiting poet’s blood.

My favourite moment was culinary, nocturnal, and particularly Cantonese. Hu Xudong was determined he would ‘persuade’ one of the award-winning poets, Zang Di (with whom I later climbed Yellow Mountain) to pay for a banquet (only the fourth of the day). Zang Di was too sharp to be located, but a party set out anyway shortly after midnight. We crossed a sleepy river and a busy highway, leaving the Cuban territories, and ended up in a roadside bar with low-slung deckchairs and cold beer, a dusty pool table with a singular slope to it, and dish after dish of local specialities including long black-shelled periwinkles and chilli-strewn clams.

I had better meals elsewhere – chickens’ feet in a dim sum restaurant, speckled frogs’ legs on lotus leaves – but sprawled beneath the stars, singing in the darkness everything from parodies of Cantonese opera to badly-remembered Beatles songs, I began to realise that not only did I not want to go home, I didn’t even feel the need to go to Hong Kong.

from the introduction to Lit: New Writing from the School of English, Newcastle University 

(I thought it might be worth posting an edited version of this intro, especially as it attempts to make a historical argument for the integrity of the North East as a literary region. (An argument, incidentally, echoed by Seamus Heaney when interviewed during his visit.) Also, even though it's only a year old, events have already begun revising the teritory under discussion, so I've added a couple of paragraphs of update [these are the ones in square brackets]. It's not the principle intention of posting this piece to promote the anthology, though it is a very fine anthology. Those whose interest is piqued, however, can find find details of how to buy it here.)

When I first moved to Newcastle in 1994, I took the train down from Elgin, in the North East of Scotland, and noticed two things: that the North East of England, from my perspective, seemed to be in the centre of these islands (I make no claims for my grasp of geography); and that it had the most thriving and longest-standing literary community I'd experienced outside these islands' various capitals. Further acquaintance has persuaded me that both of these observations were truer than I realised.

There are still those who think literature functions at two poles, the capital and the province. Writers of national significance, it is assumed, gravitate towards the capitals, where the edge is presumed to be cutting. Those understood to be producing merely derivative, old-fashioned or local work, on the other hand, stay put. But for a place to be as magnetic as the North East has proven, drawing writers for decades and, now, increasingly, students of writing, implies there must be a cultural unit between such extremes.

This would be the region, a quasi-autonomous area which stands comparison in quality if not in scale with the nation. According to this argument, London is a region, as is Northern Ireland; Oxbridge and Liverpool-Manchester form curious dyadic regions; Scotland and Wales are composed of several -- and the North East of England is the latest significant centre of literary activity to acquire this status.

One reason this may be the case is that everything that is happening now is built on extremely sure foundations. The work of Basil Bunting, Sid Chaplin, Tom Hadaway and Alan Plater established Tyneside as a significant site for regional literature. Because of their presence, Northern Arts (now ACE NE), in collaboration with Newcastle and Durham universities, invested in a supportive environment that led to new generations of writers developing and settling here. 

Firstly through the Northern Literary Fellowship (the oldest writers' residency in the country), and latterly through setting up the pioneering writers' agency New Writing North, the Arts Council has long recognised that this is a flagship region for literature. Newcastle University, initially through the Fellowship, and now through the founding of the Northern Writers' Centre, has similarly displayed its strong commitment to the written arts. The long-term presence of a figure like Tony Harrison, and the prominence of David Almond and the late Julia Darling, are partly due to that investment.

[It’s regrettable to note that the Arts Council appear to be planning a step back from that close engagement with region, as administration for the north – a larger, vaguer concept – is to be consolidated in Manchester. As with similar centralising contractions in organisations like the British Council, an economic agenda appears to be turning back the clock on, in this case, decades of developing contacts and expertise.]

In the work of Sid Chaplin and its influence on contemporary writers we see how a region's literary identity is first formed, and then developed to the point where it acquires national significance. The strong presence of contemporary women novelists such as Pat Barker, Kitty Fitzgerald and Debbie Taylor, has in recent years been augmented by the arrival of writers like Val MacDermid.

Tom Hadaway's early influence on Live Theatre is just one benefit the area is continuing to reap dividends from. Playwrights like Lee Hall, Peter Straughan and Margaret Wilkinson, have all been nurtured here. In the work of Sean O'Brien and others, Newcastle has become a centre for the unlikely medium of verse drama, catching the attention of the RSC and the National Theatre.

The presence of Basil Bunting led not only to the setting up of the Northern Literary Fellowship, but was an instrumental factor in Tom and Connie Pickard starting up the Morden Tower -- one of the prime if not primal sites for the Sixties' explosion in poetry readings. One result is the region has filled with poets, including Anne Stevenson, Gillian Allnutt and Linda France.

The role of Newcastle University has been augmented by the development of a strong Creative Writing section, which has sought out its staff from writers across all the aforementioned areas -- poetry, prose and drama. It has developed its own cultural agenda, breaking down the town-campus divide, promoting local authors, bringing in writers of international significance for readings and talks, launching new books by its writer-teachers (often to audiences in their hundreds -- the region has a uniquely supportive environment in this respect).

Writers collaborate on performances both with each other, and with film-makers and musicians; there is an unusual amount of cross-fertilisation (novelists writing plays, poets writing novels); and each year a prestigious contemporary poet gives the Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures.

As one of the contributors to this anthology notes in her biographical note, the MA at Newcastle has been in existence since 2000. In that period Creative Writing at Newcastle University has grown, incorporating not only undergraduate but Postgraduate Certificate, MLitt and PhD teaching. Our graduates go on to teach, organise events, and, most importantly, publish.

We are all contemplating the opportunities offered by the Northern Writers' Centre, a dedicated new build on campus open to the public, which will literally cement the relationships we have been attempting to foster between the academic and the literary community of the North East, between new and established writers, and between the School of English and New Writing North.

[History, as this introduction goes on to examine, has an inbuilt reluctance to be predictable, and the Northern Writers’ Centre, due to the recession’s bite on all such necessary luxuries, is no more. So in its place we have set up the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, a research grouping, an events organiser, a publisher, a gallery, an archive and an instrument for outreach into the community through short courses and other teaching. It’s had a spectacular first season, with audiences in their hundreds packing out venues to hear Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. But events continue to range from such heady spectaculars to the steadier work of supporting local authors and initiatives.]

 …Transformation, in its most benign aspect, is the proper goal of education, and to achieve it, an institution itself must also be subject to transformation, development, reform. There is a tipping point for organisations as for regions, and we feel this anthology makes a modest, emphatic contribution towards Creative Writing at Newcastle reaching that point.

Over the last eight years we have seen writers of real ability emerge across all three of the strands we teach -- poetry, fiction and scriptwriting. The push up the rungs of the ladder that all such courses promise has long been realised here: poets have been shortlisted for national prizes; novelists have found agents and publishers; playwrights have been offered read-through, feedback and performance…

One of the common themes recurring throughout this anthology is how we cope with the unexpected, be it a sudden revelation or simply the unlikely way things have turned out. Illnesses, relationships, ageing, breakdowns, bereavements, even imprisonment, are all explored: all the seismic shifts that take us away from what we know of ourselves or those most close to us, and set us down in the same place, but as though we've never seen it before.

This type of intense transformation (though not as yet imprisonment!) is essentially what writers in North East -- and Creative Writing at Newcastle University -- have been living through. So it turns out that, in this as in much else, our students are instructing their tutors. It is our hope that, in doing so, they will also engage and enlighten you, their newest reader.

(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.