Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Today. I doubt Hamburger would’ve wanted much fanfare, but I can’t let it pass.

His 2000 collection Intersections (‘Shorter Poems 1994–2000’) included, on facing pages, two of his loveliest poems, ‘Spindleberry Song’ and ‘Swans in Winter’. The final two quatrains of the first provide another example of Hamburger’s earth-rooted melancholy:

Fallen leaves, let them stay
Where they stopped, weighed down with rain.
From the season for lying low,
Get up if you can.

But time’s the mere measurement
Of motion, mutation in space.
Unbleeding though bare from this plant
Hangs the heart-shaped seed-carapace.

‘Swans in Winter’, though, is a beautiful affirmation:

Has their long marriage ended? On pastures separated
Less by our culvert than their chosen distance,
Composure that seems indifference to our eyes
While each unhuddled picks at low herbage, grasses,
Their slow necks rippling as though no fang, no weather
Could ever so much as ruffle the silk it wears.

I especially like that ‘unhuddled’, and how he presents it without commas either side, the effect of which is to change the word into a noun. Making nouns into adjectives (or verbs) is common poetic practice, but to do the reverse, other than by sticking a definite article in front, is, to my mind, very rare.

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2004’s Wild and Wounded (‘Shorter Poems 2000–2003’) continues seamlessly from Intersections. Its finest poem, perhaps, is ‘A Cat’s Last Summer’. As the title suggests, it’s a study of old age, by a poet deeply aware of his own mortality and, with that mention of Belsen, of how his life could so easily have been ended before it had barely begun. Most of all, though, it’s a wonderfully tender series of observations, all the more affecting because of the outward absence of emotion:

Day after day she sits
On the same patch of grass,
Her senses waning, the well-deep eyes enlarged
But not for seeing,
Her needle-sharp hearing blunted;
And Belsen-thin, ribs showing through,
So fearless now that when a cock pheasant
Struts at her, clucking, claims the terrain,
She neither deigns to flee
Nor make to spring, as she could,
Agile enough, did a will impel her.

How he conjures as ‘fearlessness’ the cat’s reluctance to see off, or catch, the pheasant is remarkably astute.

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Each of the poems extracted here need to be read in full and I much recommend tracking down copies of the Anvil collections, or at least the Carcanet reader, edited by another tremendous Anvil poet, good old Dennis O’Driscoll, and which is available here. The engaging, exceptional existential clarity of his poetry richly merits celebration.