Poems from Ambit, High Window, Poetry London, Shearsman, etc. 85 big pages.
I think I understand most of the poems at one level, but I feel I miss the point of them. Maybe he's a poet's poet, too delicate and subtle for me. I like phrases such as "Because in every crowd I would search for my parents' faces, I've come where clouds cover the ragged peaks" (p.9) though to my mind he fails to capitalise on that promising start. Several other poems leave me with the same impression.
There's a handful of sequences.
- "At the coast" is in 20 sections spread across 10 pages - factual, impressionistic, nostalgic; Sisley vs photographs; Abstract vs concrete. No revolutionary insights - it's the usual seaside musing and observation; there's even Punch and Judy. Here's the start, the end and some bits in between - "What we can see and name is subject to change. Land and water have become as malleable as sky ... Detail gradually gives way to form alone ... This monochrome photo must be from the 1950s ... To the left, the corner of a striped awning explains the intent gaze of the young crowd facing it ... You can read abstraction in the faces: pity, fascination, fear ... teenagers sip from cans above caves I crawled through as a child. A few feet from the waves, my father puts spin on a tennis ball, playing cricket with my sons. I'm watching from a deckchair inside a memory, knowing how soon this day will end ... we watch evening perform its usual alchemy, shifting each minute ... The boy turns to the sea, hearing the music of everything that has happened before ... a lighthouse painted in bands of red and white like a child's toy, or a barber's pole ... Sixteen hundred tons of sand and gravel were removed each day. The level of the beach fell by about twelve foot. The absence of a single powerful landowner may have meant that opposition to the dredging and claims for compensation were relatively weak. Twenty years of this, high tides and an Easterly gale combined to destroy the village ... As children, we scrambled up rocks hunting the rare advantage of height. Now we walk towards the afternoon sun letting land and sea reveal themselves: a mystery plotted with shade and light."
- I liked section xi best of the Weemoed sequence.
- Part ii seemed especially bland in the "Jutland" sequence.
- "According to John" is a puzzle - I can see that John's a bit of a character, I can see the biblical allusions, but why 5 pages of it?
- "Recent events in Logres" is different in tone, with fable and myth - charming in parts. 12 pages though - 20 sections.
- "12x12" is 12 sections each of 12 short lines - a form that has to be filled whether not there's good enough content.
It's as if sequences are being used as a "safety in numbers" device to give weak passages protection.
"Little poem" is exactly what the title claims. In "It was a circus" someone describes his marriage as a circus. Hearing this, the persona thinks of spangled diamanté and sword-swallowers, then wonders if the other person's thinking more of clowns trying to "make small children cry". The end. "The difficulty of sight" in contrast was none too straightforward. "Twilight at four" has a passage I like - "from how the higher branches slide behind each other trailing down the sullen sky, he tells the fortune of the forest - as if lines on an opened palm.// She rehearses lines she hoped to improvise, sitting under trees, on a park bench against the city sky" - though "palm" is an unfortunate pun. I like "A true story" - gulls and local politics.
Poems like "Taking down the statue" puzzle me. It's a mini-essay/article in short lines making obvious-enough points about a piece of modern art. 2 pages! "Henry Harclay's Ordinary Questions" has even shorter lines. Here's a stanza without the 11(!) line-breaks - "Harclay who had studied with Scotus in Paris noted that Tartars Magyars and Mongols had worked their way through that passage for seven centuries at least." People not used to modern poetry get grumpy about this kind of stuff. I get grumpy too.
There's a page or two of notes near the end. The notes aren't quite in the same order as the poems they refer to.
