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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 in 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.

 

 

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.