I’ve continued my merry way through the novels of Rupert Thomson by reading his debut novel, from way back in 1987: Dreams of Leaving. There’s a good summary of its plot and themes here. Its London-set scenes capture well the glorious seediness of pubs, drugs and relationships in the Thatcher years, and its characters, as always with Thomson, are completely believable. Thomson’s written much better novels since then, but he set the bar high right at the outset: as remains the case, he could tell memorable, complex stories that didn’t give easy answers to the reader. The book’s also discussed in this essay, here, which surveys the first seven of his 14 novels.
I’ve also read another Barbara Pym novel, her fifth, A Glass of Blessings, published in 1958. Its unusual among her novels in being written in the first person, and it’s a pity that she didn’t try that more often, as it allowed her narrator, Wilmet Forsyth, to make more deliciously barbed comments about the other characters than Pym’s all-seeing third-person narrators did in her other novels. As ever, the plot, even with its perfectly pitched set-pieces and comic misunderstandings, is secondary to Pym’s superb ear for dialogue and delicate descriptions. I can’t think of more pleasant reading experience than savouring Pym’s novels. I’m fully aware, of course, that they largely exclude the grim reality of life as it was lived by many of her contemporaries in Britain, yet her deep understanding of the fact that everyone has flaws makes her books as relevant today as they were when she wrote them.
On the poetry front, I read and re-read (several times) an Eliot-shortlisted book prior to reviewing it and that’s taken up a lot of my poetry head space. However, last week I did take off my shelf, to accompany me on a flying visit down south, something more to my taste: Voice-Over (1988), the last collection by Norman MacCaig to be published in his lifetime.
Many of the poems in it are short, reflective lyrics of a man coming to the end of his days. I especially liked this one:
Slow Evening
Night is long in coming. Its soft feet
pause at the horizon. Stars wait
for the lights to go out, to perform
their brilliant rituals on their dark stage.
My mind that was sleepy with waiting
begins to waken, to feel small movements
like the tiny waves fudged in a glass of water
carried by a child.
Light drains away. – But there,
sudden windows appear on dark buildings,
small universes wheeling nonchalantly
with Saturn and the tilted Plough.
I like the simplicity and naturalness of his metaphors – such a contrast to the outlandish metaphors fired off these days – and of that simile in the second stanza, with that tremendous ‘fudged’.
I enjoyed Jeanette Burton’s beautifully produced pamphlet, Ostriches, subtitled ‘Ten Poems about My Dad’, published by Candlestick Press and available here. Burton carefully, and wittily, writes affectionate portraits of her father without tipping into dull sentimentality. At their best, her poems – ‘such as the flamboyantly titled ‘Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun’ and ‘Poem in which I recount the finding of my dad’s love letter to my mum in the style of a Ronnie Corbett monologue’ – speed along with a giddy mixture of whimsical silliness, acute observation and pride. It might be tempting to suggest that some of her more stream-of-consciousness poems could do with some vigorous pruning, but I reckon that would deaden the sheer exuberant flow of her poetry. (I’m glad to see that she also writes about her mum, as in this recent poem, here.)
For this month’s poetry book club, we’ve been reading The Europeans (2019) by David Clarke, published by Nine Arches Press and available here, as different a set of poems to Burton’s as could be imagined in how he uses form and restraint to carve poems which not only protest implicitly against the bigotry of the Brexit referendum result in 2016, but also travel back in time to his younger days to paint a picture of small-town England in its various guises. ‘To a Public House’ could be one of very many hostelries the length and breadth of the land:
I knew your ash-tray haze of ale, that pitiful booth
for the under-aged, the spinning punctuation of
your fruit machines that trilled, mesmeric in the gloom
between a first necked pint and each man’s lonesome trudge
for home. Late it was, then later still. Bleary years
were counted out in wet white rings. Some bloke
who kept a pewter mug behind your bar pegged out
at last. Your jukebox dirged him to his grave,
There’s so much to admire here: the description of the fruit machines; how the almost always unfortunate hanging ‘of’ works well in this instance because it provides a helpful pause; the pewter mug of the man who drinks himself to death; the clever rendering of ‘dirge’ into a verb. In my memory, pubs weren’t exclusively male, but we get the picture.
In ‘To a Photo Booth’, Clarke writes, in another rather beautiful direct address to the subject of the poem, that, ‘My drawers grew full of all / your rejects, curled ghosts / who wept in envelopes unseen.’ There’s a brilliant poem – both formally and per se – about the last (presumably) of Auden’s summers in Austria from 1958 to his death in 1973, ‘Auden at Kirchstetten’, one gay poet’s response to an illustrious predecessor. It begins as follows:
All morning, his difficult love kept itself to the kitchen,
sweating, as always, to make its comfort terrible.
If a family habit of property had survived
his makeshift years, he refused to become responsible –
somehow he contrived to never fully arrive,
if only for the sake of that necessary tension.
The rhymes are fine and seem to lift Clarke’s register to a higher place than in his other poems, and the line with the split infinitive would serve perfectly as an epitaph for Auden’s exile. I shall have to read Clarke’s other two collections.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 