Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

What reading I have done this month has principally been on buses, trains and trams. Bus journeys – to and from Doncaster or Sheffield – in particular are ideal for reading poetry collections. Derek Mahon’s final collection, Washing Up (Gallery Press, 2020), available here, was some way to bow out.

Understandably, aging and awareness of mortality, which the punning title implies, are much to the fore, not just in self-portraits, but in portraits and remembrances of others too:

Not even holidaymakers really bother
Joseph the beachcomber, who spends his days
sitting among the rocks and the rock pools
absorbed in his own thoughts, his own schedules,
like a bōdhisāttva or a Desert Father
for whom this life is only a glum phase.

(‘Among the Rocks’)

Candlelight in Portstewart,
forty-odd years ago now,
and your tin whistle starts
the tots jigging as though
instinctively they know
just what to dance and how.

(‘A True Note’, i.m. Ciaran Carson)

Mahon’s mastery of forms – including Lowellesque sonnets – and rhyme, the quality of his translations, and his poetic gifts in toto were undiminished to the end. ‘Another Cold Spring’, nodding to Elizabeth Bishop, contains a lovely, gracefully controlled discursiveness:

Another cold spring —
the same as last year,
the previous year also,
a late storm papering
the daffodils with snow
and leaving the sky clear.

We can’t depend upon
the meteorology from one
month to the next, the seasonal
graph of established weather
having been since revised
or scrapped altogether;

but when could we ever?

I read another book by Ruth Fainlight who, at 93, is surely Britain’s oldest excellent poet: Burning Wire (Bloodaxe, 2002) and enjoyed it so much that I’m reading it again. Why I like her poems, I think, is because she notices things so acutely and lets the spotlight on her observations do most of her work. Take the simmering swelter of ‘Sunday Afternoon’ for example:

A Sunday afternoon in late July:
the leaves look tired, the sky is clouding up,
pressure falling. The couple
in the next apartment are arguing
about how much he does or doesn’t help.
Eavesdropping from my terrace.
I am jealous of how it’s bound to end:
the stuffy bedroom. Moans and love-cries muffled
so the baby won’t wake.
I remember every detail of
the misery there is in marriage –
and then making up.

Elsewhere Fainlight considers her (and her parents’) place within English society with a surprising degree of otherness, but not, surely, without a note of humour:

A Jewish poet in an English village:
incongruous and inappropriate
as a Hindu in an igloo, a Dayak in
Chicago, a giraffe at the South Pole.

(’The English Country Cottage’)

Otherness is one theme in Peter Daniels’s latest, superb collection, Old Men (Salt, 2023), available here.

Many of the poems concern being a gay man of a certain age in Britain, such as the wittily allusive ‘Old Keys’:

Old keys open strange doors where the dark
dwells in the lock. Entering the front brings you
through to the back where the furniture is
older and stranger. There’s a thick brown varnish
chipped, you might imagine, by spurs of cavalrymen
waiting to be undone, away from truth or whatever
they fought for. Their own bodies asked to be
betrayed, but they faced any soul unburdened
behind those doors, overcome by the frantic power
with its affront to virtue passing unchallenged.

As exemplified here, Daniels’s syntax is old-school (i.e. without irritating contrivances), elegant and satisfying. The book also contains several memorable and moving poems about objects and stuff which transcend the immediate matter at hand e.g. ‘Royal Worcester’ (‘Its chime resounds / in time and space and is real.) and ‘Empty Boxes:

I have many lovely boxes, too lovely to fill,
like these nifty cigar boxes, some plain wood,
some fancy ones. The man who gave me them
forty years ago, he’s been dead for thirty-five:
they screwed his box down tight, afraid
of what they had to put away inside it.

The title poem is a microcosm, a masterpiece representing a whole collection of masterpieces, with a nod towards Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirablis’:

It all began too late for us, but what we hold
offers this lifetime more than making do:
we make each other real enough to touch,
with time to spend where we complete each other.

And talking of Larkin . . . in February 1952, he offered some words of advice in one of his very regular letters to his mother, Eva, who was suffering from depression, almost four years after the death of her husband, Sydney:

Do not worry about the past: it is, after all, past, and fades daily in our memory & in the memories of everyone else. Further, it can’t touch the future unless we let it. Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start. Finally, do remember that we are not very important. Hundreds of living people have never heard of us: those who died in previous years & those who will be born in the next century have no chance to, and in consequence we are silly if we do not amble easily in the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.

Excellent advice, I’d say, and exquisitely written. It comes from Letters Home, 1936–1977, edited by James Booth, Faber 2018, p.201.

I’m off to amble in what’s left of today’s thin sun, if I can find it in the fog which has hung about for two days now. Thank you for reading any of my posts this year, dear reader, and happy new year when it comes.