Peter Robinson : There
are Avenues
(Brodie Press, Bristol, 2006; pb, 39pp, £5.99; isbn
0-9542649-5-9)
Will Daunt : Running
out of England
(Oversteps Books, Salcombe, 2004; pb, 79pp, £7.50; isbn 0-9541376-6-3)
Ross Cogan : Stalin's
Desk
(Oversteps Books, Salcombe, 2004; pb, 79pp, £7.50; isbn 0-9541376-7-1)
Obe Postma : What
the Poet Must Know: An Anthology
(Tresoar, Leeuwarden, 2004; pb, 141pp, £8.99; isbn 1-904440-40-1. Distributed
in the UK by Librario Publishing.)
Peter Robinson's references in There are Avenues to the 'The literal avenues
of' the poem as well as 'this area of urban landscape and feeling' (my
emphasis) hint at the complexities of this small volume: in this sequence,
written 1984-2004, he uses the specific Liverpool streets of his childhood
and the resulting memories they trigger, as a means of meditating on
the self ('I'm talked back to myself as was') as well
as exorcising demons from his past—in particular, as he himself
tells us in an interview with Tom Phillips, the impact of a domestic
quarrel between his mother and one of his father's parishioners
(the poem suggests that this family helper was later ostracized because
his mother felt she was trying to steal her children's affections).
In the process he explores a whole range of emotions: casualness, ambivalence,
anger, guilt, regret, and finally resignation or even quiet affirmation—all
couched in deceptively simple language. You have to look closely at Robinson's
work to appreciate the skill and versatility with which he achieves this.
The opening line immediately establishes a subtle ambiguity as to who
is doing the traveling: memory, time, or other significant characters: 'Most
days now you float with the hours/letting them go where they will';
yet at the same time it is clearly the poet attempting to understand
the self he has become as a result of his past: 'with almost no
memory at all once more/I'm out exploring territories'. And
as he makes this journey there seems little distinctive about his chosen
setting: 'We keep coming back and the same old home/is picked out
by nothing in particular','. If we are looking for some kind
of plan God-driven or otherwise we are not going to find it. These
initial reflections are striking for the absence of nostalgia—there
is more mystification at the apparent randomness of human encounters: 'where
the school friends' lives/ intersected for a few years with my
own'.
Yet as we feel our way into the poem's layers, the poet's
questioning suggests—with his careful placing of simple diction—a
more metaphysical intent:
Late-night conversation
over card games in the small hours—
did they so much touch how these lives are'.
The unexpected concluding 'are' (rather than the expected 'were')
transforms what might otherwise have been an unspectacular teenage memory
into something far more open-ended Like Lear's repeated 'never' or
Hamlet meditations on what it means 'to be'. We are lead
to consider notions of a self that stands outside time, an amalgamation
of all our past selves, at the same time as we reflect on notions of
teenage naivety, absurdity and the like. Repeatedly in the poem we see
this kind of unexpectedness in the language: take, for example, the way
the poem's soporific tone is suddenly given a jolt with the reference
to 'a fresh sense of what is gone', or the reference
in section 12 to how 'someone / walks solid with bereavement'.
This sequence also gives ample examples of Robinson's unobtrusive
use of both imagery and rhyme. His metaphors and similes are often
so closely connected to the literal context of the poem that they slip
in unnoticed, yet at the same time they are often spot on in what they
are attempting to convey. Thus we see him here using the imagery of urban
landscape in a setting that is actually an urban landscape: 'forgettings
fall from me one by one like a derelict warehouse'. Similarly unobtrusive
are the childhood associations: 'like so many childhood scabs,
/ those meanings just evaporate' and 'suck the rewards/of
small sweets given for our journey'. When it comes to rhyme there
are all manner of whole and half-rhymes going on, and then really clever
stuff like 'still undivided', 'Wirral side' or 'his
stipend, 'summer's end'.
Above all, though, this poem is a painful lament for life's hurts.
And his masterly use of plain language can be movingly direct—below
we see how he uses repetition to emphasize his desire for empathy with
others:
Like a case of mistaken identity
tell me about it, tell me
about how it feels being on your way home
underneath a cherry-tree row
only yards form the house round the corner
as you look up to find yourself lost
in unrecognised places, one more time—
The addressee might be someone suffering from amnesia, but the lines
also double as a metaphor for his own experience of going back to a familiar
location and failing to make sense of it all.
Yet the poem concludes with a quietly uplifting sense that one must
and can move on for the poem's denouement is strangely comforting
and, given the adult questioning that has gone on throughout the poem,
even gently humorous:
But as traffic lights turn amber
in timely warmth, why not relax
now dusk suffuses empty sky
and kids at play on a churchyard wall
have no earthly reason to recall
anybody else going by.
It's as if the Robinson who should have
foreseen the range of emotions he has overlooked, or only now is feeling,
expects nothing of the child but the pleasure of being able to exist
free of the need for such adult reflection.
The nuances of There are
Avenues allow the
reader to share Robinson's experience of self-definition, creating
poetry of substance that it is difficult to exhaust—poetry
that endures.
Will Daunt's Running out of England does contain things
to admire: he has a strong feel for language with poems rich in monosyllables
and harsh gutturals giving them an Anglo-Saxon feel. Take the following
lines from 'Lock Holland':
—snuff the polder winds,
full pelts of wheat
and mill some slumped extent of sky.
But overall this collection suffers from being overlong and obscure
in places. Often the reader is left to do too much of the work as if
Daunt is afraid to give us clues as to the subject matter of the poem.
This is a shame as it means this good feel for language often goes to
waste in spite of the fact that his is a voice very much suited to his
concerns over urban destruction of the environment. His work does get
clearer when he works within the more disciplined sonnet form. Two strong
poems are 'Upside Town and 'Dawn Carnage'. Likewise,
when he aims for something concise and straightforward we start to get
good poetry such as 'Bedroom Picture':
Under Klimt
there has to be
a new, or personal
tapestry
of words and
clasping certainties
you will not need
to light, or free,
and Love, much more
than artistry
lies here, for you
in the dark, from me
Elsewhere, though, powerful emotion can get a bit swallowed up in his
words. Take the sequence 'Lost One': the third poem of the
sequence 'Disconnecting' provides a harrowing account of
the death of a premature baby:
The hospital had
naught to show
but scaffolding,
nothing beyond
the empty branch.
Winter zigzags
brought him outdoors,
no cold, no warmth
from end to end.
Elsewhere in the sequence, however, wordiness
means the reader failed to remain engaged. The whole collection would
be stronger if there were less poems overall and individual poems were
cut back to allow the stronger lines to stand out. One of his most
successful poems in the collection, which deals movingly with bereavement
and shows the kind of poetry Daunt is capable of producing, is 'A Veranda'.
It succeeds largely because it relies on the actions and setting of the
bereaved person shortly after the death of the loved one:
1
Her cask will soon be empty
and September grey. Tonight
he took the cane chairs back
to the outhouse counting
three cicadas in the scrubland.
Etienne's goats murmured past
almost blurred under the grove,
where every dusk she'd watched
them dwindle. They called it
'Trekking through the Midi wound'.
2
A kind of lovely scar expands
over the western pen and herds.
Tomorrow the villa survives
unshuttered. Mosquitoes
die and he stalks the sunsets
from cellar to attic, believing
that someone's frozen summer.
The china is dusted, dressing up
winter, and a lizard sweeps
towards the mistral.
Out of a crevice, pincers clip.
Two scorpions, at the death.
Ross Cogan's Stalin's Desk provides
sharply conceived poems which concentrate largely on famous
individuals Cogan has encountered from his diverse reading, with
an emphasis on religious figures. He also has much to say about
the tyrant's role in history. In his strongest poems
he is good at pinning his characters down in specific concrete
settings at the same time as he meditates on their universal impact.
Take 'The Voyage of the Beagle' where he shows both
Darwin's fear at his own revelations and the long-term impact
of his discoveries, opening with the precise, 'A man's
hand hesitates over a book' and then goes on:
His paper litters with
bits of feathers,
disembodied legs, beaks, pieces of claw.
In London and Vienna tea cups rattle.
Throughout the book he provides us with numerous strong images
and herein lies the strength and weakness of some of the poems,
for one can have too much of a good thing. In places one feels
a little too bombarded with similes. The collection would also
have benefited from footnoting. Cogan, so well read himself, expects
a lot of his readers. Anyone read up on Browning's dramatic
monologues is likely to know Fra Lippo Lippi but is it reasonable
for us to know: Haff von Wedel, Albertus Magnus, Poggio, Lanfranc,
Naseby, Kathleen B, Ramon Lull, William Longspee? Indeed, the poems
that work best and provide the strongest emotion are those where
the reader is made to feel less inadequate and the situation is
more universalised. The following poem has all the qualities that
will make the poem stick in the mind, worthy of anthologising —clarity
and clear purpose without labouring the point:
Someone Like Someone in a Book
He will be standing in the fringe of dark
that hangs around a stairwell as men
are led away and swung onto the black
back seats like sacks of flour. And he will nod
as the dark glasses chokes the view and lights spring on
and the car noses its way into the road.
He will be wearing gloves and he will pull
absently at his cuffs. Then he will leave
and, later on, won't have been there at all.
It's always the same: the hangman longs to pen
his memoirs; the silent, hired assassin loves
children and cats; the strains of Beethoven
lull the death commandant to sleep.
The hand that delicately grips the bone
china may earlier have held the whip
or fitted the electrodes. And when you look
into his eyes you see the eyes of someone
real and someone like someone in a book.
The poem is finely crafted with
subtle rhyme and half-rhyme, various patterns and repetitions to
provide cohesion, and lines largely carried by monosyllabic words
to gives the whole poem weight. Other poems that provide similar
clarity are, 'He Passed Quickly', 'A Brief History of the Twentieth
Century' and 'House' and 'the Martyrdom of Ramon Lull'. Cogan
clearly has talent. Later books might benefit from a little less
erudition, or at least a bit more variety in the subject matter,
and a concentration on keeping some of the poems a bit more succinct.
To conclude, by way of example, here is one of Cogan's tight, witty
poems that sticks in the mind long after you've closed the book:
Love Sonnet of the Compulsive Gambler
for D.T.
If I don't put my shirt
on you, my love
don't be upset, it's not that I don't care,
trust you, or rate your company above
anyone else's, but it's just where
the heart's concerned I've learned it pays to spread
your bets, and study form, and if you can
develop the kind of eye that spots the dead-
cert from the dead donkey and also ran.
True, all your form suggests you're a safe bet,
but favourites in the long run rarely pay.
I could stake everything I have and get
little or no return so, if I may,
I'll keep going in the fond hope that some
great day my rank outside will romp home.
Obe Postma (1868-1963) is a poet hailing from the little known
Dutch province of Friesland. His poetry is part of the attempt
to make the Frisian vernacular part of a literary tradition—one
gaining strength since the nineteenth century. All lovers of language
are likely to find this commendable. This said, I found little
to engage with in this collection. Postma is a rural poet and he
cites Wordsworth as a key influence. Like Wordsworth he attempts
to use the natural world for his own inner meditation. The result
for Wordsworth is poetry. The result for Postma is rather twee
verses that would go well with cards celebrating harvest festival,
if such a thing exists. The book's blurb states: 'Postma
knew that his ditch-bank, his cow-shed and his fisherman's
houses were just as interesting as the Empire State building.' This
one would not doubt, but the difficulty is showing it. An
extract from 'Childhood' will give a flavour of the
absolute awfulness of this 'poetry':
I remember sunny Saturdays at school
(those days that were not so much work as play)
When we traded our old books in for new;
How the new book's glamour then filled the day.
Or if love poetry is more up your street:
The woman, what is in her mind?
Oh miracle! Can it still be
That blossom opens so spring-white?
Oh evening! Oh light reverie!
There is stuff like this on every page. I'm not sure how
much to blame Postma and how much to blame the translator but enough
said I think.
