Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

A characteristically astute review by Helena (Nell) Nelson in The Friday Poem the other week alerted me to the fact that Philip Rush had a collection of his distinctive poems (and photos), entitled Camera Obscura, newishly available from Michael Laskey’s The Garlic Press, here. Nell’s review can be read here.

Enthused by Nell’s review, and knowing Philip a little and (some of) his poems from the last Poetry Business Writing School programme just prior to the pandemic, I bought a copy of Camera Obscura straightaway. Nell quite rightly highlighted the quirkiness, humour and sheer likeability of Philip’s poems. His wit is of the driest, but not irritating know-all, kind. I’m glad, too, that Nell noted the following:

The writing’s mainly rooted in the natural world where everything is as ordinary (and as miraculous) as a leaf, if you look at it carefully. He does look. And the more you read him, the more you trust him to tell you what he sees.

In Philip’s poetry, one can easily discern that sense of wonder, as Van the Man put it, and perhaps of immanence; some kind of indefinable yearning towards a quieter pace of life in which observation is valued purely for its own sake. In these respects, his style is not dissimilar to Laskey’s own, or that of Peter Sansom and Jonathan Davidson.

The book concludes with a true masterpiece, ‘‘Folk Routes, New Routes’ An Ode to Davey Graham & Shirley Collins’, a freewheeling hymn to, maybe elegy for, the outward-facing, optimistic England of the Sixties. Ostensibly written around the hugely influential 1964 album recorded by Graham and Collins, with Gus Dudgeon at the mixing desk, but which also contrives to encompass maps, cars, football, Dr Johnson, wild flowers and the old, pre-1974 counties, including Philip’s own Middlesex. In it, a ‘vintage old-school / road atlas [ . . .] / includes a short / and largely pointless / section of the M1, / a stub of the M5 / leading south from Birmingham / and the entire M50.’ (And also, no M4, on which Dudgeon and his wife Sheila died in 2002.) It’s a poem like no other I know.

I’m featuring a work in a similar vein, in how it harks back, though, I hasten to add, not in any absurd, Reform-UK-supporting manner. Philip has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.

*

Shacklegate

At the heart of all this edgeland
          I’m sure
is Shacklegate Junction —
          its dead-end rails
its island of dry grass
          its sheds
and its flicker of butterflies
          like an old film

like the arcs
          of sharp electricity
which every now and then
          but always
unexpectedly
          played for a fraction
of a second
          beneath the rolling stock.

Once in a blue moon
          or to be fair
more often than that
          our train would pause here,
hesitate forward and stop.
          The engine died
and a kind of queasy silence
          took its place.

Poems have been written
          about such moments.
In those days, no-one spoke
          or watched their phones.

*

The shadow of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ – written in 1915 about a train journey he undertook on 24 June 2014, and published in the New Statesman three weeks after he was killed in action on 9 April 2017 – has slanted across the best poems about railway journeys by English poets since then, from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Patricia Beer’s magnificent ‘The Branch Line’ and ‘Southern Railway’, to Peter Sansom’s ‘Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway, June Evening’. Its quiet depiction of a golden, prelapsarian English summer’s heat haze may well be an influence on Philip’s poem too.

I have to declare a personal attachment here, in that the spot which ‘Shacklegate’ describes is one I know well, because I have so often passed it, and been beside it in a stopped train. The triangular junction lies on the Kingston Loop, the line from Waterloo to Kingston and back to Waterloo, taking in Teddington, Twickenham, Richmond and Barnes among other stations. Having lived and worked in both Kingston and Twickenham, I imagine I’ve passed the junction many hundreds of times. The junction, adjoining Strawberry Hill Golf Club, lies just before Strawberry Hill station on the dead-straight stretch from/to Teddington. It’s a junction because it also contains the start/end of the branch line forking off to/from Shepperton, which quite possibly owes its post-Beeching survival to the presence, a few stops down, of Kempton Park station, servicing the racecourse. Shacklegate isn’t really a place now, if it ever was; there’s a Shacklegate Lane which runs west from the Waldegrave Arms to the Stanley Road crossroads in north Teddington, which imperceptibly becomes another non-place, Fulwell; known, if at all, for being where Manoel II, the exiled last king of Portugal, lived until his murder in 1932.

The poem opens in media res: we are joining an engaging talk which has already started and might well be halfway through. We can intuit the arms of the narrator opening out as he shows us where he and we are. It’s that ‘all this’ which does it, especially ‘this’; rather than using ‘of the edgeland’ or ‘of edgeland’, the fuller phrase shows us more, by rooting us to the very spot. The word ‘edgeland’, or ‘edgelands’ plural, was coined in 2002 by the writer, environmentalist and campaigner Marion Shoard as a label for the out-of-the-way places between urban and rural areas which are, at the same time,  somehow a mixture of both and neither. It was popularised by the publication in 2011 of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’s brilliant book of exploratory essays, Edgelands, with its cheeky subtitle, ‘Journeys into England’s True Wilderness’, cocking a snook at the pretentious neo-colonialism of Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. The suburbs of south-west London, in which Fulwell and Teddington are situated, are chocker with classic edgelands.

The short second line is simultaneously assertive and uncertain, as if the narrator is, in fact, not really certain at all, or might even be being a little bit flippant. The naming of the place is a surprise, in that edgelands are often unnamed. Then a linguistic joke is played on the reader, because this junction is also the railway equivalent of a cul-de-sac, with ‘dead-end rails’, an ‘island of dry grass’ (no doubt interspersed by clumps of ragwort, brambles, buddleia and rosebay willowherb), ‘sheds’ (in which some of the ‘dead-end rails’ terminate) and, quite beautifully, a ‘flicker of butterflies / like an old film’. That each of these nouns is prefixed by an ‘its’ is an interesting poetic choice: technically superfluous, their pleasant repetition could conceivably provide a sonic imitation of either the train’s clicks over the rails as it slows round the bend of the Shepperton branch line or of midsummer insects chirring. But the run-on into the second stanza gives a more likely answer: ‘the arcs / of sharp electricity’.  That ‘arcs’ is contained within the word ‘;sparks’ is surely no coincidence; ‘arcs’ is a less obvious but fine choice, though, because, as well as its implicit sound and its assonance with ‘sharp’, it implies movement in order to extend the lovely similes. Despite the prefiguring of ‘ an old film’, the ‘electricity’ simile wrongfoots us into the past. The unfolding of the linked clauses in the second stanza is delightful on the ear, none more so than the verb. Because ‘played’ is surely not the first word which came to mind. In which sense is it meant here? – ‘acted’, ‘performed’, ‘amused itself’ or all of these? Paradoxically, each of these definitions seems both incorrect and just right. The line-breaks are excellent too, giving a vivid tension to what the reader suddenly understands to be a repeated memory from years ago, probably many years ago. The tumble of quick breaks after ‘always’, ‘unexpectedly’ and ‘fraction’ bestow extra emphases on each of those words and speed the reader along in real time. The stanza, and the poem’s opening sentence, ends with that mellifluous old-fashioned ‘rolling stock’, a catch-all, of course, for engines, carriages, wagons, flat-beds, cranes, etc.

Each of the first three lines of the third stanza consists of a cliché / stock phrase, in a manner reminiscent, to me, of Beckett. (Christopher Ricks’s 1993 book Beckett’s Dying Words, OUP, includes the wondrous sentence, ‘Clichés are an opportunity for a writer exactly in being on the face of it nothing to write home about.’) The effect is mildly comedic, a digressive, meta aside, containing the sort of delicately conversational phrasing which workshopping a poem would sadly remove. Then we come to the line ‘our train would pause here’, notable not just for the pause itself, but also because of that ‘our’ which tells the reader that this is a shared reminiscence, and because the echo of ‘Adlestrop’ (‘[. . .] one afternoon / Of heat the express-train drew up there / Unwontedly’) is at its strongest here. Again, the poet surprises with his verb: ‘hesitate forward’ is a perfect oxymoron, not least because the action described so simply is exactly, still, what trains in England do.

After the abundance of the stanza’s opening sentence, the closing three lines bring a nice contrast of tight precision. It’s tempting to see ‘The engine died’ as an inadvertent mirroring of ‘The steam hissed’ in Thomas’s poem, but whereas in the latter ‘Someone cleared his throat, here ‘a kind of queasy silence / took its place’. That ‘queasy’ is spot-on, because in such circumstances, the passenger cannot help but feel slightly anxious – or even more so if they are in a hurry, particularly if they have a connection to make. The absence of an explanation – if the guard doesn’t provide one – for the unscheduled stop can, the longer it goes on, induce all sorts of unforced terrible reasoning.

The poem’s penultimate sentence shakes the narrator out of his nostalgic reverie, by going full-on meta and undercutting what might have been too earnest a poem without a change of perspective. The poem ends where is started, in the present day (presumably), with a rose-tinted, possibly grumpy-old-man-ish, ‘back-in-my-day’ reflection. On first reading, I was disappointed by this stanza, but it’s grown on me: its detached, ironic tone is in keeping with the earlier undertone of flippancy at naming and recalling something fairly unimportant. Memory, it seems to say, can recall such uncomplicated, apparently trivial moments because there were fewer distractions way back when, and the social code dictated that people didn’t act in trains (and other confined public spaces) like they would in their own homes. It feels right that the stanza is only half the length of the prior three, because it wouldn’t have done to labour the ending’s points. As Nell put it, in regard to the book’s opening poem:

Somehow it demonstrates how not to end a poem on a high point. In fact, Philip Rush may be a master of anti-climax.

What of the poem’s form? In her review, Nell also discussed Philip’s use of short, indented lines and how they ‘pace the reader’s progress, ensuring that the end of the sentence arrives with full impact’. Like the brief narratives in many of William Carlos Williams’s poems, Philip’s own are well-matched to what can be quite a lolloping form.

What, too, of the spare punctuation; above all, the near absence of commas? To me, with a tendency to over-punctuate, it’s something I’ve had to accept by holding my nose – to start with anyway. I can see that the minimalist approach aids the flow of Philip’s first-rate poems.