When I was growing up in Middlesbrough, I visited a small funfair with some friends one evening. (This is all fairly liquid, laval and grey in my memory, but I think it happened – in about 1972 or 1973…) In one of the caravans, which was hung with a dingy, pre-dawn light (the light was stale, as if it had been there for a long, long time), there were a number of specimen jars containing physiological 'freaks' - Siamese twins, pigs with two heads, six-fingered foetuses – exhibited on shelves. In my memory, these creatures are suspended in a fluid, which is brown; they are like pickled eggs, except the eggs have hatched.

The whole event is in a jittery sepia. I don’t recall my emotional response to seeing the exhibits – but something about the episode still occasionally draws my memory back to it.

This freakshow seems now very crepuscular to me – there is something taboo about it (I can't imagine a similar thing being allowed in the EU today). There is something poignantly weird about the sheer dreariness of the caravan, a tawdriness, the way these suspended creatures, preserved for exhibit, were being hauled about the country in a peculiar afterlife: it seems strange to me. I imagine the pallid, low-wattage light going out after the fair closes, and the occupants of the jars still there, in the darkness, passive, with a kind of tranquility, the phenomenal patience of the dead.

It strikes me as poignant too that even in so degraded and misted a form (my memory of them), the foetuses persist, alive in some sense.

I returned to an electronic version of 'Nosferatu' after a long absence – I imagine I last read the poem six or seven years ago. It was an interesting experience for me, perhaps an almost forensic one.

I had largely forgotten the piece: it was one of a group of five poems on which I'd embarked after my first book (Poems 1987–1992), and which I'd hazily intended to gather into a collection to be called (with great Modernist economy) Five New Poems. These were all longish poems, and formed a reasonably coherent block of work.

The other poems are: 'Marshal' (published in Angel Exhaust no. 10), 'Sad Idyl' (published in Angel Exhaust no. 16), 'Failed Captain' and 'Pool'.

Very broadly speaking, I see my work developing dialectically; and the Five New Poems were an attempt to write in a different and (stylistically at least) oppositional way to the Poems 1987–1992. As I understand them, the purest poems of the first book were undemonstrative, neutral, affectless: the language was fairly egoless and unadorned.

'Nosferatu' is a typical example of the Five New Poems. The first thing which struck me on re-reading was just how ineffectually the poem had integrated some of its influences. It was like a kind of constrictor, a python or an anaconda, one of those snakes which is capable of dislocating its own jaws in order to swallow prey much larger than itself, which it then digests, the lumpy outline of the victim still visible within the body of the reptile. For me, Nosferatu has that quality – a rather sleepy creature, dozing as it breaks down a meal.

The influence of the work of James Fenton, and Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed…', seem obvious to me, as also is the presence of a poet who, I imagine, was strongly influential upon Fenton and Mahon – Auden. There is also a heavy strain of early Pablo Neruda, from the Residence on Earth phase of his work – 'a glacier of crushed and screaming snails and gas…'

On reflection, I now see all of the Five New Poems as being poems of trauma. The narrators of the poems tend to be passive, stripped of volition, witnesses of events to which the narrators’ only response is description – although the act of describing leads, not to relief or escape, but to the deepening and rigidifying of the traumatised state.

I suppose in one way 'Nosferatu' could be seen as a very distant relation of Romantic and post-Romantic poems like Browning’s 'Childe Roland', Tennyson's 'Marianna' and 'The Lady of Shalott', and Keats’ 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' — 'Nosferatu' has some of the stupefied, dreamstruck atmosphere which hangs over those poems.

I think 'Nosferatu' is an early example where I use a floating point of view, something which is now almost characteristic of a certain strand of my poetry. I mean, by a floating point of view, the way in which the notional narrators of poems phase over into different narrators – or, equally, how the person addressed in a poem may vary from stanza to stanza, or even from line to line. This use of 'fused' narrators makes explication of poems difficult – but it is, in a way, poetically true, I feel.

In 'Nosferatu', for example, the vampiric conglomerate who haunts and threatens the poem is described externally for much of the poem – but then, towards the end, seems to speak in the first-person. Part of the interest in the poem may thus be generated by trying to understand the relations between these fused narrators – to separate them into comprehensible roles and identities.

The poem is very theatrical. It is luridly lit. There is perhaps something of a pantomime Mephistopheles to the person who invites the reader to 'Come closer'. Although the panning and dissolving momentum of the poem is cinematic, that very progress is staged theatrically. Among my favourite film-makers are Powell and Pressburger, and Nosferatu – in its heavy, nocturnal way – reminds me of the 'theatrical cinema' of The Red Shoes.

So, I think, the poem is gaslit. As 'Nosferatu' is in some ways a poem to do with the unnatural survival of memories, and of a life which is 'undead', which has persisted beyond its healthy limit, it seems fitting that the poem is haunted by images of hell, of suffering creatures who are condemned to a tormented existence, and who are not permitted to die.

I tried to incorporate some of the scratchy elements of European horror films into the writing. Clearly, however, Nosferatu is also a poem of European horror in a different sense. The central metaphor of Nosferatu himself, this creature which feeds off living blood but cannot endure the light of day, possesses great folkloric, cultural and historical resonance. Both parasite and predator, a suppressed and suspenseful presence, possessing hypnotic and fatal glamour – yet having no integral reality, somehow, casting no shadow, inhabiting the littoral between life and death, sleep and wakefulness… The famous image by Goya, with the motto The sleep of reason produces monsters, seems to me deeply linked with the figure of Nosferatu…

Obviously, there are images of severe dislocation – hands whirring past on bat-wings, wounded mouths fluttering like grouse, and so on. There are some echoes of the anatomical cruelty of Surrealism in Nosferatu – but perhaps the images slide further back, along the lines of influence, towards Dante and Bosch.

Technically, 'Nosferatu' uses defamiliarisation to reinforce the atmosphere of trauma and unease – the grotesque personifications of Time and Change at the beginning of the poem, or the bizarre, Huysmans-like image of kisses with 'tiny diamond parachutes' towards the end.

Personally, my overall feeling about 'Nosferatu' is that it is a failure – albeit, hopefully, a fertile one. (Perhaps it’s not very useful, really, in the end, to speak of success or failure.) If I were to rewrite now, though, I would certainly revise the conclusion of the poem, I think…

'Nosferatu' is interesting to me, too, because of the way it adumbrates some of my later themes and preoccupations. The subject of craving and of addiction; a fascination with, and fear of, vegetable Nature, and a concern with evolution and decay; the hints of fairytale sprinkled through the stanzas – there are several other examples.

In a sense, then, 'Nosferatu' continues to survive, eerily prolonging its life, concealed in the cellars of later poems, and casting his shadow over the figure of the earnest poet who, like the amateur entomologist in one stanza, is busy cataloguing the universe into a more reasonable form.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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