"Water Sessions" by James Lasdun (Cape, 2012)

Poems from The Atlantic, LRB, Poetry, TLS etc.

I probably don't understand most of these pieces - "Instead", "The Blight", "The Question", "To a pessimist" for example seem slight to me, and might as well be prose. A common template is a title using Greek/Biblical myths, a sophisticated male narrator, a loose rhyme scheme, and a disclosure that beneath the suave (albeit aging) exterior there are baser instincts. Some poems are about his reactions to his father's death. Several poems compare the present with a moment in the past.

• I like "The Skaters", how various social classes enjoy the "sheer effortless rapture" of an ice-rink's "frictionless surface" which "turns to a thick, grey, gravelly slurry which, we have to admit, is easier going, maybe because it reminds us, though for a moment, the page of ice still bare, we're just like them again".
• Poems like "Woodpile", about the value of mundane work, have been written by many people. I don't think this effort ("Mindless work - stooping, grabbing, chucking, stacking - but I like it: the guaranteed satisfaction, the exact ratio of effort to result; how you can't fail at this if you put in the effort", etc) is more noteworthy than many others about weeding, DIY, ironing, etc.
• "The Watcher" is a little observation that could pad out a good novel. The rhyme scheme is "abcbabc", "glance" and "dolphins" an example of his loose rhyming.
• "Mr W.H." includes "Of course every poet/ appoints his own ancestors/ but that's one thing if you're Auden/ enlisting Byron, another/ if you're nobody claiming Auden"
• "The Event" may have wordplay - "whose heart lives in its aches as in a peachstone the fire of peaches" (my bold)
• "The Blueberries" combines past and present, beginning and ending with "I'm talking to you old man./ Listen to me as you step inside the garden/ to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries/ ripened on the bushes I'm planting now ... This was your labour, these are the fruits thereof./ Fill up your bowl old man and bring them in."
• "The men question Tiresias" is fun, and rather funny. Microprose really.
• "Stones" returns to the "I like the drudgery" idea, this time with allusions to writing and whether it was all worthwhile - "trying to set these paths in stone", "the best stones in the best possible order", "making nothing happen"

Other reviews

• Adam Newey (That shift from outer landscape to inner is a familiar Lasdun manoeuvre, and the physical landscapes here – mostly New England, where he's lived for 25 years – are as sharply observed as ever. Observation, it seems, leads inevitably to introspection. ... the finest poem here, "Blueberries", which collapses time by having the speaker, planting fruit bushes in his garden, address himself 20 years on)
• Ben Wilkinson (The suggestion recurring throughout Water Sessions is that intelligent reflection, for all its merits and necessity, can result in paralysis. ... Not all of these poems are rivers winding and flowing; some are content to tread water, while a few vignettes peter out before they get started. Yet the book's opening poem, "The Skaters", a sweeping tale of punctured naivety in the face of life's vicissitudes and painful inevitabilities, is alone worth the price of entry. "It Isn't Me" will doubtless elicit a pang of recognition from many readers; "Blues for Samson", a candid but measured take on the capricious male libido, also deserves mention. In their reflective patter, formal dexterity, serio-comic tones and depth of feeling, these are the stand-out poems in an excellent book.)

"The Silver Age" by James Lasdun (Penguin, 1986)

Stories from Cosmopolitan, Encounter, Fiction Magazine, Literary Review, etc.

• Property - a grandson's staying with a rich grandmother (The blotches on her skin were big and far apart, like the first raindrops on a pavement). She gets a parcel - a silver candle-snuffer returned after decades by a maid who'd stolen it. Next day £2500 appears. Then flowers. The 2 of them watch TV in the afternoon, and bet. On the flower day they win at high odds. The grandmother dies (I think), holding her winnings.
• The Bugle - A son returns after 3 years to his aging parents. Their carer is the woman who looked after him when he was little. She keeps feeding things into the garden incinerator, including his old bugle. He keeps getting job rejections. His parents project an old home movie. He recalls those days when a girl he had a crush on stayed the night and he blew the bugle with joy until the woman has confiscated it.
• Dead Labour - The narrator visits his prof on his deathbed, promising to complete his final work for him. However, he's just started a job reviewing restaurants and social events, plus he's met a girl - "when she came she did so in one silent, extended, blissful, private shimmer. Traffic sounded in the distance. A clock ticked in the bedroom". Drunk, he watched a stage magician doing tricks with scraps of paper. He lets the old man down.
• England's Finest - A working class couple do well for themselves, move to a village and adopt a baby boy. The boy doesn't turn out well at first. The ending was telegraphed, the build up to it too linear.
• Escapes - Steven plans to commit adultery while at a conference in Paris. To him it's like losing your virginity again. A mutual friend, Delmore, sets him up with Lena. "now he must begin steering the conversation from the impersonal towards the intimate. Perhaps he could begin by conveying to her, suitably modified, what Delmore had said about her and how true it was. But no, there was something dangerously coarse and mercantile there, and he absolutely forbade himself to explore that avenue". He walks her home. They have a gun pointed at them. They escape. At her door she says goodbye, which surprises him. He catches the metro, getting out at a deserted station with long passages and locked exits. He begins to panic then finds a way to the surface.
• Heart's Desire - A pretentious 19 year old at a village fete sees 3 more interesting people. He follows them to their enclosed garden and big house. He passes a lake. "The perfect reflection of a fallen silver birch twins its branches into the double hemisphere of a brain, to which the wood with its quiet creatures and watery light might be no more than a figment of imagination". He watches them through the French windows. He sees them in a restaurant and overhears their lewd ancedotes. He later saves (without being seen) one of them being raped. At the end I think he's happy to marry a local.
• Snow - The narrator retrospectively realises that her great aunt had an affair. He comes to understand the significance of footprints in the snow.
• The Spoiling - Ronald, recently divorced, has 2 children. He hosts a party with the aim of talking to Hilary, a friend of his ex. She's a widower with a son, Marty. The children are left together. Marty's aware that he might have to integrate. Marty's world is described to us in an adult way - "But Marty needs to hear no words to know that he has transgressed in some small, but fatal way; that any foothold he had made in the entrance to the private world of these children has been abruptly lost. And with an only child's hypersensitivity to the intricacies of other children's affections, he senses a feeling, long familiar to him, of being gently, but irredeemably, cast out". He sabotages the party. Once he'd swigged the alcohol I guessed how the story would end, right down to the final smile.
• The Siege - Marietta, a young female foreigner, rents the London basement of Mr Kinsky in return for cleaning. They barely see each other let alone talk. He practises the piano hours a day. Things begin to appear in the dumb waiter - a card, an orchid, then a ring. He proposes to her.
  When he asks her what he could do to make her love him, she blurts out "Get my husband out of jail". We and Mr Kinsky were unaware that she has a husband, let alone that he was in a foreign military prison. Over the months items disappear from the house. She sees letters suggesting that Kinsky is in touch with her country. He learns a new piano piece, starting simple then adding complexity, filling the house for hours. It affects her. She sees one the day the piano being removed from the house. She receives a letter from her husband saying he's soon coming to London. She's apprehensive. Kinsky says he can stay in her basement. In the night, on the eve of her husband's arrival she goes to Kinsky's bed. He's plump and greying, the first person he's slept with for 4 years. She has satisfying sex without talking.
  There's a long, rather atypical, explanation of her reaction - "Love desire, fear, revulsion ... Feelings are like a physicist's massless particles; the hypothetical agencies by which the universe coheres and makes itself visible. These miraculous phenomena combine all-pervasiveness with absolute elusiveness, ceasing to exist when not in motion. Devoid of any intrinsic qualities, their secondary effects are none the less momentous and ineluctable. A particle of desire is as improbable as a photon or a graviton; its effects are as undeniable as light, or gravity"
• Delirium Eclipse - Lewis Jackson, charity project manager, meets unemployed Clare at a party just days before he's going to India. He asks her to come as well. At Varanasi he receives a telegram saying that his charity has gone bust. They swim in the Ganges. He gets feverish, imagining that Clare is having sex with the hotelier. One evening he walks through the hectic streets (A skew-horned cow patrolling one of the alleys dragged, like a prisoner's ball, a giant watermelon she had stamped on) to the river to check if she's there - she is, dealing with lepers thoughtfully. He's impressed. But returning to the hotel he has doubts again. He still hasn't told Clare about the telegram.

Often the main character is shaken by news or an event, and wanders/follows in a confused state, leading to an inconclusive ending. I liked the stories which adopted that broad template.

"It's beginning to Hurt" by James Lasdun (Jonathan Cape, 2009)

The stories are about 15 pages long except for the commissioned one which is 2 pages long.

I think I'm going off him. His writing's more telly now, more wordy. In the title story a man comes out of a worrying medical test with a clean bill of health. Suddenly the argument with his sister about their inherited house feels so petty - "He had a life - in every sense! - whereas Ellen had nothing. If it meant so much to her to go on living in the family home, then let her. Let her! The decision further boosted his sense of euphoria." He phones his sister, who's less than impressed that he's not going to evict her, that he doesn't after all have a lymphoma. The penultimate paragraph is "But all the earlier expansiveness had gone from him; in its place a drab, ashen sensation, as if the bitterness of the sister's dismal existence had flowed into him through the phone."

Dilemmas are set up, spelt out and openly debated. Revelations are revealed - "The full extent and depth of the man's wheedling, coercive personality seemed to have suddenly disclosed itself. like some strange creature opening unsuspected wings" (p.79). "The thought of this attractive, intelligent woman whom nature had clearly designed for a life of luxury and ease, living under such circumstances, had awakened a protective instinct in him, while her lack of self-pity filled him with admiration." (p.89)

When he has a good image he milks is - "The number that had been growing so rapidly in the Total Gain column, putting out a third, a fourth, then a fifth figure, like a ship unfurling sails in the great wind of prosperity that had seemed set to blow once again across America, had slowed to a halt, lowered its sails one by one, and then, terrifyingly, had begun to sink" (p.7).

Several of the stories involved encounters across a desk and/or affairs between people whose ages differ a lot. "The Old Man" and "Lime Pickle" end well but take a while to get there. "Annals of the Honorary Secretary" mixes stranger material with believably described social nuances. I liked "Caterpillars" - more "show" I suppose.

Other Reviews

• story

"Landscape with Chainsaw" by James Lasdun (Cape, 2001)

He sometimes uses rhyme and syllabics - "certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English" wrote Hecht. Poems like "Deathmeadow Mountain" begin to live up to such acclaim, but what about the following passage about Citröens - "They were so rare in those days, owners saluted each other on the road. Not us though; our idea of a club was what, having first excluded most of the rest of the world, you then proceeded to snub"? Somewhere in that quote is a stanza-break and some line-breaks (hint - "road" and "though" are part of an end-line rhyme or assonance pattern). Could you have written such vivid and deft verse? Could you have written any of "Returning the Gift"? "A Tie-dye Shirt" goes on for a page about not much. "Between A and B" is a sonnet, though the rhyme-scheme dissolves in the sestet. "Woodstock" is excellent if one reads the rest first - it pulls the book's main themes together, unafraid to mix Greek Myth with F105s, the public and personal, the elevated and the prosaic (but always with a poetical layout).

Lasdun has written one of my favorite stories ("Ate, Memos or the Miracle"), and poems like "Locals" linger with me. He has a range of abilities, from isolated imagery to extended argument. I'm prepared to believe that the poems which don't work for me will work for others.