David Constantine: Collected Poems
(Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2004; h/c, 374pp, £12.00; isbn 1-85224-667-7)

On opening this volume the first thing that strikes you is what a prolific writer David Constantine is. Along with working full time as an academic (until 2000) he has produced numerous books of: translation, biography, literary criticism, prose, and poetry, many earning him prestigious awards. All this suggests the time is right for the appearance of this Collected Poems. It includes one new collection along with all previous work he wished to keep in print. Fans of David Constantine should also note that Bloodaxe have published his A Living Language: Bloodaxe/Newcastle Poetry Lectures at the same time. 

A Brightness to Cast Shadows is a fitting title for his first book, which is riddled with deliciously bleak lines. One thinks of Keats' in his 'temple of delight' where 'melancholy has her sovereign shrine' or a child afraid of having their toy stolen.  Moments of love or sexual union are hindered by some undefined deeper anxiety: 'the clock picks everything to the bone', 'sleep do not let go my hand', 'Most are asleep, some/have waited hopelessly for mercy'. In 'Daffodils in Vases' even the simple pleasures are not to be trusted as we 'watch them daily/for the first touch or dying'. Nothing is free of the inevitability of either death or loss: 'You are distant, you are already leaving' and connected with that life seems to be happening elsewhere. Pessimism about human relationships is taken to greater extremes when he speculates on how people would coexist in hell in 'The Damned'—one thinks of Julia and Winston's pointless contact at the end of 1984:

Like two dead trees' branches
they sound the skull with a long finger,
their speech is a sort of trepanning, lidless
the eyes watch barrenly for ever.

Similarly: 'All the Wraiths in Hell are single, though they keep/company together and go in troupes like sheep'. The nature poems provide some reprieve but even here he draws attention to the bare rather than the blossoming. One notes in places his precise observation and careful, plain language, such as in 'the Journey':

. . . only a hawk was shone
Steadily upon me in the grip of noon
I trod my shadow down.

He also has the wonderful knack of extending a metaphor with accurate description of both the metaphor and the literal reality. Take this oh so familiar description of an ex-weeping child—'Suddenly she is radiant again':

She has to suffer the interruption
Of sobs still, that have the bad manners
To arrive after the thunder has already gone
Over the hill, insisting they are hers.

Indeed some of the best poems are those that provide that shock of recognition for the reader. 'Waiting', for example, again with plain diction, captures the eternal newness of the arrival of a child:

              Our hands are ready.
Even not yet knowing you
We love you; grateful
For how you have increased us; glad
We have it in us to put out new love.

There is a similar absolute truth in how we 'think' we feel about the approaching death of those we love in 'For Years Now':

Finally the gap is absolute. Living
At all you were never nearly dead
And dead there is nothing

Vital of you in the abandoned face.
But the lack, the difference, has such nearness
We could almost embrace.

This selection also prepares us for Constantine's stylistic variety with its satisfying mix of free verse and more formal stanzas, with frequent use of iambic pentameter and for narrative poems stanzas of twelve end-stopped lines. The only poems I was less keen on were the rather Auden-like poems on social exclusion towards the end of the volume.

In Watching the Dolphins draws more on biblical and classical references. Unfortunately, we have Carol Ann Duffy to thank that so much recent poetry now seems to be inundated with those cursed, blood-stained mummies — i.e. dramatic monologues, but we shouldn't take this out on David Constantine any more than we would Browning. It does make it difficult, though, to look at this form with a fresh eye. This said, his approach to bible stories is enjoyably unorthodox.  Christ is shown as an all too human figure not able to compete with the sun in the eyes of Magdalene: '"Look," he moaned, "at this and this that they did"' and we see Lazarus complaining to Christ about being dragged back to life. As Constantine gets heavily into classical civilisation he gets a bit carried away with obscure vocabulary ('priapic' is definitely worth looking up!). He continues to mix traditional and free verse forms increasing line length even more. Some of his social comment poems seem a little dated now but 'Swan' is a fine tribute to the sad life of the streets with its beautifully calm and desolate tone:

                    After birdsong

That is the kindest light.
Through silver grey, through rose
Across our malignant city
The heavy birds strain
In this season, about this hour

'Watching for Dolphins' is a gem of a poem, brilliant in the way it is about not managing to see dolphins. Eliot's line 'I heard the mermaids singing each to each' hovers in one's mind while reading this poem where the people look 'to the children for they/would see dolphins if anyone would'.

The rest of the book consists of collections containing a similar mix to his first to books; his two extended poems: Casper Hauser a poem in Nine Cantos and Sleeper; and the thematically linked poems of A Poetry Primer.  Madder continues with a number of dramatic monologues and in places the poetry would benefit from footnotes. It includes a wonderful set of sonnets based on 'Don Giovanni' and a fine group of poems based on Pompeii. His best poems are the more condensed lyrics that often have a lovely transparency to the language such as say 'wet lilac, drifts of hail':

My empty-handed love, someone will come
Soon bringing me armfuls of stolen lilac,
Sparkles of rain in his hair, and the black earth
Tonight when I run barefoot will quake with sobs.

In Selected Poems we see increasingly the pleasure Constantine gets from telling stories based on the classical or biblical, or just quirky things that go on: the man who goes to the seaside to sculpture nude women in the sand.  'Miranda on the tube' whose 'brave new world' innocence contrasts with the jaded, streetwise commuters. prepares us for the more extended treatment of innocence versus corruption  provided by Constantine's tour de force: Casper Hauser a poem in Nine Cantos.  Here he provides his own individual take on the true story of a young man incarcerated throughout his young life, only to be abused and finally murdered when he comes out into the world. The most moving parts of the poem are the descriptions of Casper's trusting nature and the efforts made by the philanthropists to help him. The most shocking are where his corpse is brutally dissected. Sleeper is a heartbreaking poem for all times. Although it provides a personal story of (one assumes Second World War refugees) transported by train, it is the universalised story of all forced exile or mass human transportation by rail, as the speaker states in the poem:

They are the cattle trucks of our continent
This century. They last forever. Imagine
How many feeders each collection point

Had fastened to it. Over me then
As though my body were the body of Europe
I felt the links of a sort of logic laid down

And riveted.  All was connected up,     
This to that, a small thing, but that slotted
Into a larger and let a next develop

Larger with spurs each side that split
Into others and the worst was
The certainty that a set mind meant it

To be so eternally and all resource
And all ingenious devising would go to that
One total articulation.

Once one has worked through this Collected Poems the overriding impression is the almost total lack of cynicism. Constantine's poetry reflects tremendous respect for life's small pleasures. Human love in all its forms is seen as a privilege. His last few collections are filled with beautiful life-affirming lyrics.  His subject matter throughout has made all too plain the horrors that are outside our control, but his poetry has come full circle: earlier insecurities having been displaced by absolute faith in the human — thus these lines from 'The Wasps' seem a fitting conclusion:

That morning last year when the light had been left on
The strange room terrified the heart in me,
I could not place myself, didn't know my own

Insect scribble: then saw the whole soft
Pelt of wasps, its underbelly, the long black pane
Yellow with vistants, it seethed, the glass sounded.

I bless my life: that so much wants in.

 

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