Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Thanks to the Poetry Archive, Michael Hamburger’s bewitchingly lugubrious voice can be heard, here, reading three poems not long after his 79^th birthday. It’s a meagre number for a poet of such a prodigious output, but never mind.

The first poem is an extract from his collection From a Diary of Non-events (Anvil, 2002), consisting of a year’s worth of monthly ruminations written, as he says in the recording, between December 2000 and November 2001. (‘Muted Song’ and ‘Ave Atque Vale’ were published in his 2004 collection, Wild and Wounded.) While much of From a Diary of Non-events consists of poeticised nature-notes, there are also some irruptions of memory, as in the opening stanza of part 1 of ‘April’:

Fools’ Day has tricked the diagnostic view:
A visible sun has risen
At the pasture’s far end from a scud
Not smoke but vapour released at last
From ground long sodden, puddled.
Out of that wispy whiteness contours emerge,
The whiter white and black
Of the Frisians grazing as ever,
Prodigious now as a Gipsy encampment surprised
In a German glade in April 1945,
A congregation of Jews untagged
In the centre of ruined Dresden.
Here too eugenics, the money-drive,
Doomed the defenceless breeds
To be slaughtered for purity by butchers mortal, impure.

For Hamburger, a German Jewish refugee, serving in the British Army at, and after, the end of the war and the Holocaust, must have involved such complex emotions. In his memoirs, A Mug’s Game, he says that he wasn’t posted abroad until June 1945, to Italy first and then Austria, but he also says that he destroyed his diaries from that time, so one can forgive him for getting his dates wrong – unless the details he related in this poem were not his own experiences. Either way, their inclusion more than hints, of course, at the most terrible of events and their desperate aftermath.

As ever, I admire how accurate Hamburger’s descriptions are, and how they steer clear of being oppressively so. I like, too, that eye-rhyme between ‘wispy’ and ‘Gipsy’.