by John Hartley Williams

The Harper, Peter Redgrove
Redgrove's Wife, Penelope Shuttle
Slower, Andrew McNeillie
The Blood Choir, Tim Liardet

Poetry Wales, April 2007

Poems are communications, that's clear, though readers not friendly to poetry usually maintain the opposite. A friend remarked recently that it was precisely the uncommunicative nature of poetry that repelled him. If the poet didn't know exactly what he wanted to say, how should the reader guess? His complaint also seemed to have much to do with poetry's lack of information content: how does the writer live, is he broke, widowed, in good health? What does he, or she, think of Tony Blair? My friend didn't read poems because they didn't provide the chapter with the verse.

There is a contest between language and subject matter in modern poetry that has not been resolved, and very likely won't be soon. A reader can tell you what Chaucer, or Skelton, or Marvell, or Wordsworth, or Matthew Arnold, or Browning is writing about. But what is 'The Wasteland' about? Eliot described it as 'rhythmical grumbling', but if that's all it is, it erects a fiercesomely elaborate super­structure around its complaint. In classic mode, the narrative and the reflective merge imperceptibly with 'the lyric' (that emotional overtone which supercharges everyday language use). The twentieth century has changed all that, fore grounding the lyric at the expense of other ingredients poetry needs if it is to survive.

Peter Redgrove's book The Harper is chiefly in lyric mode, with occasional gestures towards narrative, and very occasionally reflection. Its motive power is imagery, the concentric unwinding of analogy, which supplies by itself the communicative intent. In the title poem, waterbeetles write on water, their inscriptions make harps which collide. A woman swimming in the same pool is at the centre of her harp, 'entering the music like Ophelia', and the woman becomes an orchestra: a 'woman harpist clothed in the forest brook'. These jumps of analogy (the ripples of water-writing analogous to the strings of that wide-curving instrument the harp) are carefully controlled, teetering on the edge of logic but never entirely letting go. A poem called 'Vision of the Duessa' - taking its cue from a research project that has discovered a 'grannie perfume' pheromone that gives elderly people a caring glow - invents a female figure, the Duessa, who is both sexual and ancient:

she wished a kiss, the crone did,
and like a hot poker plunged
in a spicy drink
Clouds of agreeable influence rose about her,

and the poem concludes:

'She was a perfect nudity
almost lost
among the swinging vanities
I entered for my kiss.'

Of that ending, I guess my friend would ask: 'What are the swinging vanities?' And 'how do you enter vanities'? Or 'how do you get a kiss by entering vanities'? The poet answers with a shrug; if pressed, an interpretation can be provided. You can always provide an interpretation. But this is not exactly communicative, at least not in the sense that my friend intends, though experienced readers of poetry would have no problem with it. Redgrove is at his most communicative when the natural world is in question:

I saw wasps pinching
fine ginger crumbs
from a reeking dogturd.
By the sweet hum of the small power station
I was caught in our mother the rain
and still the wasps came weaving...

and tracing the line of symbiosis that joins the man-made to the natural:

in the great wasp
Nesting hum of the transformers.

Here he deftly articulates unities in our experience of the world, though when he attempts a Chernobyl poem, despite startlingly effective images, what you might call the political dimension is missing. My poem­agnostic friend might complain that the vividness of much of Redgrove's imagery is merely silk-spinning from the poet's brain, the artist­anarchist obeying no laws but the compulsions of his own inner urgings without reference to a world plagued by war, pollution and religious conflict. Not communicative therefore in the realm of reference that embraces those temporal and political forces that lie beyond the compulsions of the inner self. And of course in that sense he would be right. Nevertheless a poem such as 'Trial by Mallet', which describes a weird battle in a storm drain between mysteriously unidentified protagonists wielding mallets, dramatises some fratricidal strife from the realms of the unconscious, the umpire a father perhaps, 'the mallets heavy / as our children's heads', in a way that cannot be gainsaid.

Perhaps the communicativeness of any given poem depends on the reader's ability to open its shell - and readers have to acquire an art of reading that is unfazed by a loss of normal signalling. Because a poet cannot, should not, know his intentions too precisely (otherwise poems become didactic and over-determined), poetical communications make their discoveries in the negotiations between the discursive mind and the rudely teeming discognitive. It's surprising, though, to find that Redgrove worked, as Yeats did, from prose drafts evolved from journal entries. The process by which journal entry became prose became a poem, he called 'incubation'. This involved putting away the drafts and forgetting about them to see later whether they had 'succumbed and say nothing' or whether they 'crowd forward to the next stage'. As the prose 'takes voice' (his phrase) 'a tighter rhythm, more dramatic and declaratory than the prose' emerges and 'the poem begins to sing, to require phrasing and lineation which I give it to the best of my capacity.' The poems, therefore, which often give an impression of startling spontaneity, are nothing of the sort. This may give comfort to those suspicious of the poetical work-ethic, but alarm to those poets who find the fragmentary nature of their self­appointed work load (proceeding as it does by fits and starts with long periods of blankness in between) rather trying. By his own account, Redgrove had a system. And most of the time it rather brilliantly worked.

Redgrove's Wife (this is the title of Penelope Shuttle's new volume from Bloodaxe) is stylistically at least somewhat less methodical. From a communicative point of view (and in contrast to her husband), we find out a lot about the poet herself. She is learning (or has learned) to drive, and finds it difficult to park in Falmouth, where she lives. She has acquired Cornish and uses that language in poems. The reader might guess that she has a son and a daughter, both of whom are widely travelled, and that Shuttle grew up in London, drinking its 'just-about-palatable' water. She can recount a dream (Apres Un Reve) and make it charming and implausible as dreams are. She can leave a peach 'to the piety of his ripening / the joy of his squandrance'. The reader learns about Shuttle's life, and her joy of life. My friend, and other readers, will appreciate this kind of gossipy communicativeness. But there is more to the book than the merely anecdotal. Her poems tend to surrealism, often constructed as many surrealist poems are, round the framework of a list:

To imitate horses, but in a pure way
To acquire hooves, pure mane, sweat. To gallop, purely
To imitate the cloud-perdu of a garden
by sparing the lily
and by pursuing charities
with the eagerness of a golden thistle.

True surrealism, where tenor and vehicle abolish the ground on which metaphor rests for its analogical persuasiveness, needs to convince us it is happening beyond contrivance. So despite the happy invention of 'cloud­perdu of a garden', I'm not sure that 'pursuing charities / with the eagerness of a golden thistle' doesn't drift in the direction of deliberateness. This isn't quite imagination freeing itself from worldly dictates, rejoicing without reserve in the accident of the moment. I think Shuttle's English reserve holds her back at times. She writes a long elegy for her husband, a Tennysonian 'In Memoriam' of a poem, with humour and grace, but I did think as I read it that it was about time that creative writing shibboleth of not telling but showing should be exploded. Someone who can write as engaging a comparison as 'kissing as a type of mouth cricket' shouldn't be burying their remembrance of conjugal sex in the decent obscurity of French as Shuttle does here. Communicative certainly, but not communicative enough. Redgrove's poems are shot through with eroticism; I'd have liked Shuttle to tell us more. Remember Tennyson?

Fantastic beauty; such as lurks
In some wild Poet, when he works
Without a conscience or an aim.

But perhaps poetry is fundamentally an evasive art form. Could that be the case? My communications expert friend would certainly object, I think, to Andrew McNeillie's postulation that:

The art is to leave your calling card and
melt away. To keep them wondering what
it is you're up to, haunting the page at
the edge of sense, as if you understand
their dreams.

In fact McNeillie's book Slower is communicative in the manner my friend would appreciate and, far from melting away, the poems stand cleanly etched. Here we have subject matter, clearly defined, a series of autobiographical sonnets, elegies for the poet's father, poems dedicated to (and memorialising) writers and artists, poems reflecting on Welsh identity through meditations on historical figures (Glyn Dwr Sonnets) and on the Welsh emigration to Patagonia. There's something slightly old-fashioned about this approach; the poems are discursive and with a slight tendency to moralising the paysage with extracts from the cupboard of wise saws, for example:

the best ones are the ones / that get away;

What is another language? Not just words
and rules you don't know, but contents too
for feelings and ideas you never knew.'

A little bit platitudinous? So is:

in the grain of all success rusts the seed of ruin.
Generations are as dust. Languages no less.

And even though the poem is called 'Dog Days', it's a little too pat, I think, to end it: 'Not every dog has his day.' The poem 'Arkwork' memorialises the sinking of a ship, The Princess Victoria, 'not knowing how near she stood to haven / at the mouth of Belfast Lough', but I did wonder what had prompted the choice of this subject. McNeillie's poem doesn't have the passion of Hopkins' Wreck of the Deutschland, and the very literary construction of the whole subtracts from the total effect. Empathy and feeling for the victims are undermined by instructions like this:

Cut your losses and swim for it. Think of it
in metres and work to improve your style.

It turns out that literature is the raison d'etre of the whole piece:

In my heart's wake, a catalogue of wrecks

and:

I'd go down again with the good ship Elegy
on a dog-toothed covenant wing-and-prayer
to see all the world as it flashed before me.

There is however much that is likeable about this book, and its communicativeness is not the least of that. The autobiographical sonnet series 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog' strikes me as particularly successful. These poems show balance, a reflective intelligence and refined technique. The book ends world-wearily with thoughts on the intractability of resolving the Irish question, whose solution may come:

maybe in their lifetime? Or
slower yet their children's? Or their children's?

In Tim Liardet's book The Blood Choir, we find subject matter alright; in this case the subject matter chose the poet, I think, rather than the other way round. Thematically speaking, this is the most focussed of the books under discussion here, not to say fixated, on the experience of going into prison as a teacher of creative writing and working with the inmates.

Two quotations, slightly backwards, to give you the flavour:

Do you have anything to say in your own defence?

No is the blank, the zero, the lumpy zilch
the bijou fuck-all the question solicits ...

and:

I felt like a man sent to fix, say
a ten-by-three mile rupture in the side of the Zambesi dam
with a tube of calk, dental floss, a hammer and nails

We're into Ken Smith territory here, though Smith worked with lifers, very extreme cases in Wormwood Scrubs; young offenders constituted Liardet's clientele. He has, however, acknowledged his debt to the older poet: 'Smith becomes somewhat like a mirror image of them (the prisoners), enabled to speak on behalf of those who have not yet found a voice ... ' and refers to Smith's 'tragic imagination'. He remarks further that by failing to confront the world it is witnessing and retaining an essentially personal tone, most 'prison poetry' (a genre, now, perhaps?) 'lacks Ken Smith's intense focus.' Liardet himself quickly realised that his own job, teaching poetry to young men who would rather be stealing Subaru Imprezas, was not going to be easy, and he unreproachfully catalogues the attempts to sabotage his efforts, describing 'the opera of yawns' which greets the teacher, the 'echolalia' which mimics his words - 'high­pitched and ironic' - the futile boredom of prison lifewhich has the class lifting up the heavy desks on their knees to crash them down. One poem, entitled 'Martianism' details the unlikely business of using a 'Martian' image to start the prisoners writing, and illustrates the fatality of that procedural formalism which compromises pedagogical endeavour anywhere. The prisoners don't actually articulate the thought but so-called Martian images don't work because they are actually conceived in human terms. That spectacles might be 'windows that flash and ride upon a man's nose, like heliographs' is not something any Martian, having no concept either of nose, window or heliograph, would consider for a millisecond. However, when the prisoners tell Liardet: 'Your boots squeak so loud ... it sounds ... like there's water in every squeak' they have the situation bang to rights. Occasionally, perhaps, Liardet over-dramatises the situations he so unerringly homes in on. "You squelch on," they imply, "we'll cling together on dry land'" catches exactly the unpersuadability of the school-proof, but to end the poem with the sentence: 'We look at each other amazed' doesn't feel quite right to me. I don't believe the prisoners are amazed, merely 100% sceptical.

Liardet's great strength, in this very interesting book, is that he does not patronise his subjects, nor does he indulge in a false empathy. The situation is not moralised over, not deplored, there is no programme for Howard League reform, and I think he does achieve the focus he admires in Ken Smith's work. When he writes, in the poem 'Water­Walking', of a judge who 'believes himself to be priest-like', who has long since put six hundred men inside a prison fence, and who is therefore able

to talk
of wrongdoing, because he feels like he talks on behalf

of the crowds crossing the city square in rain
and the shoe-soles which, every time they come down, fmd
those of the six hundred rising to meet them

he finds an image for the collective guilt of those who talk of 'wickedness'. That also reminds us of the suffocating insufficiency of prison, and reminds me in turn of Ken Smith's simplicity of utterance invoking the prisoner's intense desire to be free:

So we've a rich inner life have we?
What I want is Gloucester Rd Anyplace.
Single. What I want is trains,
and my face angled in wind, my hat
blown away behind ...
I want rain, the lamefoot doves
crowding city monuments, the traffic
and the grainy flush of air in the tubes.

That's communicative.

About the Author
John Hartley Williams's most recent collection is Blues (Cape, 2004). He lives and teaches in Berlin.

Poetry Wales

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