It would be difficult not to like Pam Thompson’s poetry, because it has immediacy, depth and variety. Her Sub/urban Legends won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet prize in 2023 and has recently been (rather belatedly) published. At only £5 (plus p&p) it’s a genuine bargain and is available to buy here. It’s Pam’s first publication since her excellent second collection, Strange Fashion, published by Pindrop Press in 2017.
In his adjudication of the Paper Swans prize, John McCullough wrote:
Sub/urban Legends gripped me because of the way it marries poignancy with a really bold imagination and stylistic flair. Its poems exploring both experiences of parenthood and mourning the loss of a maternal presence find a great balance of a lively eye and, where it’s most needed, a heartfelt clarity and directness.
Pam is influenced, inter alia, by the New York school of poetry, a loose amalgam of poets associated in the 1950s and ’60s, chief among them Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Pam has discussed her particular liking for, and the influence of, Schuyler in an intriguing 2023 podcast with Chris Jones, here. The deceptively offhand diction of the New York poets, their acute but apparently nonchalant awareness of what’s going on around them, their precision, urban sensibility and painterliness can all, I think, be discerned in Pam’s poems. And as she says in the podcast about the New York poets’ poems, hers are almost always ‘peopled’.
Sub/urban Legends doesn’t feel like a themed pamphlet, because it isn’t one. Its 24 poems are varied in tone, subject-matter and form, and each of them is worth spending time with.
Pam has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.
*
Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest
Easter Saturday, his type of weather—
squally, grey. He wanders up the High Street,
buys a cagoule and a flask from the Army and Navy,
considers a Magilux torch but puts it back.
WHSmith are giving away Cadburys mini-eggs
with the Daily Mail. He queues for ages.
The man behind the till insists he must take
this newspaper and not the one he prefers.
Three young women with piercings in their faces
are leaning against the railing outside Tesco—
one has sea-green hair. When he paints her
he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them.
He buys tomatoes and crusty bread.
As she fills the flask, the woman in Greggs
seems to understand what he says to her in Norwegian.
On St Mary’s Bridge he has some sort of turn
that history will repeat— on pub signs, posters,
as though all the portraits of his homeland,
of his sister on her sickbed, never happened,
but it passes and the world stays still again.
This morning, it’s all the time it takes to feed ducks
on the river and pour coffee from a blue enamel flask.
*
Munch, 1863–1944, brought an explicitly psychological edge to his paintings; not just, but most famously, in the several versions of The Scream which Pam’s poem alludes to in the eighth and ninth couplets. (I remember seeing all extant versions Munch made of it in an exhibition at the Barbican in 1985 and being surprised by how small they were.) He lived through times of immense change in Norway and beyond, and died 15 months before his country was liberated from the Nazis. Alas, his funeral and legacy were hijacked by Quisling and other Norwegian collaborators and by the occupying Nazis themselves.
Whether or not Munch ever went to Haverfordwest is irrelevant; the poem takes fundamental liberties in placing him there, and doing so in our time – liberties which the reader can happily go along with as Munch perambulates along the town’s streets. Why Haverfordwest? Well, why not? My maternal grandfather’s New Standard Encyclopædia and World Atlas from 1933 says of Haverfordwest that, ‘In the days when ships were small it was a prosperous port.’
It’s a poem rich in specificity from the outset: I guess technically Easter Saturday falls six days after Easter itself, though I suspect most of us think of it as the day between Good Friday and Easter. Either way, it places the poem firmly in springtime, on a fair-to-poor day, as the shorthand of ‘squally, grey’ tells us. That colloquial ‘his type of weather’ is a lovely and confidently omniscient narrative assertion. The verb choice is interesting too: that Munch ‘wanders’ rather than ‘hurries’ or one of its synonyms, implying that, being a Norwegian and therefore somewhat hardy vis-à-vis inclement weather, squalls are water off a duck’s back to him. Nonetheless, in the next couplet we see Munch buy ‘a cagoule and a flask’, as if the weather is actually more of a nuisance than it first appeared, to the point of needing proper outdoor clobber. That he does so in ‘the Army and Navy’ is wryly amusing. I don’t know if any Army and Navy stores are still open in Britain, but, again, that’s irrelevant, because it sounds just right. It’s amusing too, how Munch ‘considers a Magilux torch but puts it back’, presumably, the reader senses, because of the price, his implied thriftiness just another small detail which we accept as true thanks to the poem’s this-is-how-it-is descriptive tone.
The third and fourth couplets are also funny, in a droll manner, but what’s also admirable is how the third couplet’s opening is constructed: instead of saying something comparatively pedestrian (pun intended) like, ‘He enters WHSmith where they are giving away / Cadburys mini-eggs with the Daily Mail, and he queues for ages’, the clauses are cleverly compressed. We sense Munch’s boredom and impatience in that ‘for ages’, and then his frustration at not being able to transfer the deal from that right-wing rag to the Guardian or whatever. But of course, we are allowed to infer those feelings, due to the poet trusting her readers. Now that WH Smith has been bought over and its stores are disappearing from our high streets, its inclusion here was prophetically poignant. Pam is too good a poet not to choose the particular details in her poems with the utmost care and consideration as to their resonances.
The fifth and sixth couplets allude to, and crucially reinvent, Munch’s famous Girls on a Bridge, which he painted 12 versions of between 1886 and 1927. (Derek Mahon used the 1901 version for his marvellous six-strangely-shaped-stanzas poem of the same name, in which he described ‘Grave daughters / Of time’.) Here, again, there is further fine accretion of detail: the ‘piercings in their faces’, ‘the railing outside Tesco’ (compare Mahon’s ‘The girls content to gaze / At the unplumbed, reflective lake’) and that truly excellent ‘sea-green hair’, somehow perfectly appropriate, not just because Haverfordwest is/was an inland port but also because Munch, strongly influenced by van Gogh and Gauguin, was fond of using bold colours and because it shows another assertive streak of independence to these ‘young women’. This is, of course, a poem which time-travels – both physically and attitudinally. (Munch, it should be said, has been posthumously accused of both misogyny and feminism in how he depicted girls and women.)
At this point in the poem, just the right moment after the layering-on of precise visual details, the narrative commentator re-enters the poem with that beautifully synaesthetic sentence, with its hint of Magical Realism, ‘When he paints her / he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them.’ Note that it’s ‘colours’, not ‘colour’: we are reminded that this is a painter whose palette dazzles.
For me, the thought comes that the first six couplets might work better, in terms of their discrete content, as quatrains:
Easter Saturday, his type of weather—
squally, grey. He wanders up the High Street,
buys a cagoule and a flask from the Army and Navy,
considers a Magilux torch but puts it back.
WHSmith are giving away Cadburys mini-eggs
with the Daily Mail. He queues for ages.
The man behind the till insists he must take
this newspaper and not the one he prefers.
Three young women with piercings in their faces
are leaning against the railing outside Tesco—
one has sea-green hair. When he paints her
he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them.
However, one can intuit that the poet ruled that idea out for four reasons: that what immediately follows those 12 lines has, until the end of the penultimate couplet, an almost continuous syntax (despite the full stop midway through the eighth couplet) which better suits the couplets form; that, in any case, there are 11 couplets, rather than 10 or 12, and therefore they couldn’t all be arranged as quatrains; that the unfolding of the couplets also ideally suits the leisureliness of Munch’s morning walk (or ‘Morgenspaziergang’, per the title of a Kraftwerk track, on Autobahn); and one other reason which I’ll come to later.
But back to the content. After we readers momentarily dwell upon hearing the colours, the poem rolls on gently, cinematically following Munch as he makes more purchases, for what we presume may be a simple brunch. The Greggs sentence works especially well because it spans a stanza break, giving the reader a pause before delivering another almost Magical Realist moment. Does that ‘seems to’ dilute its power? I don’t think it does; it bestows the feeling that not everything is knowable and so, paradoxically, makes the possibility more plausible. I recall the strange incident in the folk-horror film Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster, 2019) where the American protagonist Dani appears to be able to understand and speak Swedish as she dances with young women from the Hälsingland village where most of the film is set.
Then we get the ‘Scream’ incident, relayed with commendable economy – ‘some sort of turn’ – and, once again, a mid-sentence pause across couplets. Perhaps there should be an em-dash rather than a comma after ‘happened’, though the meaning is still clear, and this, the longest sentence in the poem, ends with the comfort and reassurance of that delightful ‘the world stays still again’. A case could be made for saying that the poem should end there, but I’m glad it doesn’t: the final couplet augments the sense of stillness and peace provided in the penultimate couplet. We implicitly picture Munch tossing into the river some of the bread he bought earlier, and using the flask he bought then filled at Greggs. This pulling together of threads is sonically completed by the half-rhyme of ‘ducks’ and ‘flask’ – and which wouldn’t work half so successfully if the poem were in quatrains.
As a whole, the poem seems to be incidentally telling us how the creative process, and the flashes of brilliance involved therein, can derive from the most mundane of activities; above all, from taking a nice constitutional – which is what I’m off to do now.
I must reiterate that this splendid poem sits among 23 other immensely readable and enjoyable poems in Sub/urban Legends. Pam will be launching it with the equally terrific poets John McCullough and Robert Hamberger, on the evening of 5 June in what promises to be a very memorable event. Free tickets can be obtained here.
Tag: edvard-munch
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On Pam Thompson’s ‘Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest’
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 