It is the early poem The Dyer's Hand, from Poems 1987-1992, that is the most useful introduction to a.m. It is an uncharacteristically short piece, not even the strongest poem in the book, but its opening unwittingly provides a guide to the overall concerns of a.m.: '"Society has no address," he said / "and so we leave our dead letters everywhere"' (5). It would be hard to find a poet since W. S. Graham who is more concerned with the loss of this address than Ayres. This new book is in relentless and passionate pursuit, courting 'you' for its extended family, placating 'all of these things with their gaping beaks / of light and shape and weight, all asking / not to be left out' (25). Ayres would seemingly endorse the sentiments of these lines from worksheets for Dark Dialogues:

I hope I do not write
only for those few
others like myself
Poets maimed for the job.

(Aimed at Nobody, 43)

And yet he wouldn't necessarily countenance Graham's fatalistic sense that poets are 'maimed for the job'. a.m. is often a heroic book in its conception of the mutual needs of a poet for an audience, and an audience for poetry. It can be extraordinarily defiant in its vatic verve:

Tell me, don't you want my voice to walk?
You prefer me to 'speak' like a literal human?
But my voice is a bestiary and a magic

(52)

Despite this, the book is also a self-conscious examination of this heroism. The first section defiantly parades its pocket Rimbaud persona through the streets of Middlesbrough: 'you carry signs in your pocket / that will change the world' (23). 76 Streets marks the height of this intoxicated optimism; the poet willingly shorn of his locks, punk proudly sacrificing the dinosaur seventies:

You float above the murmured talk,
among the icons in silvertone,
you don't belong to them,
or to the thumbs which move your temple
... while your hair falls down in streams
away from a life of the dole and shipbuilding.

(24-25)

The lack of belonging here is felt as a guarantee of authenticity, where later it will become a source of unease. The voice is full of euphoric indictment of the day's coy indifference 'hanging loose like a mouth' (23). This speaker doesn't know what to do with a world not inclined to submit to his charms: 'you want to kiss it, shut it up, stop it yawning – / pretending like that – as if it doesn't want you, / as if it didn't wait on street corners / just to run into you' (23). The speaker is hailed as 'an Isaac Newton lover, /your footsteps are heavy, they carry weight'. This weight of self-belief is so tangible in these 1976 streets, but partly because it is so transient. The seventh section marks a count-down as 'clock seconds drop, at first feathers, then lead.' The implied lead bullet that puts an end to this poetic flight is punningly loaded at the outset of the poem, as the streets are seemingly celebrated for 'how they lead you on' (21). Retrospectively – and the poem reminds us it is written 'On '94 streets' – being led on is less attractive. The poem wants to re-harness the energy of this moment, but not to fall for the comic-book persona, 'the superman of all your moments,' who was the channel for it. This 'Isaac Newton lover' has to learn new laws of gravity: 'And behind the blown thought, and a dark door, / an address no one comes to, / but everyone leaves for' (29).

1976 Streets is followed by Transporter; a poem that seeks, with wilful arrogance, to deliver the poem by hand. It opens by picking up on the images of industrial decline that cool the 'heels' of the messenger-poet as the '76 streets' run into '77: 'Cranes haul a dry air only, there are no ships' (30). Only the heels remain ablaze, and the poet, initially 'Marooned on the garage roof' (30), seeks news from elsewhere – until deciding that he will be this news: 'I'll melt the whole world and every word therein / to a single block of pure silence, of terrific mass / and then, with a sigh, or with a kiss, / melt the silence / back into sense' (40). Transporter is the longest poem in the book, and its length charts a key struggle with the poet is caught in a double bind where indifference towards poetry perpetuates the pocket Rimbaud persona the book will ultimately discard. Only in the second half of the book will the reader start to detect how the above image of messianic intervention is carefully undermined by the emerging need to inhabit the common cold, and to feel it as a barometer of the human.

Writing of Ayres' first collection, Andrew Duncan suggests 'The autonomy of the work of art is located in its length ... the momentum of large-scale symmetrical forms, swept like the side of a liner, carries the reader away'. In this second collection the 'large-scale symmetrical forms' are still here, but the implications of this autonomy are much more cautiously weighed. What the book ultimately learns, is to use its profound sense of distance as a virtue rather than a curse. In this sense, Ayres' poetry intuitively arrives at conclusions not dissimilar to those of Martin Buber. Buber's philosophical anthropology explores what he terms the 'sphere of the interhuman', and involves what Maurice Friedman describes as 'the problem of finding the human in the constant flux of individuals and cultures' (Buber 15). Buber is keen to refute notions of the privacy of utterance in ways that seem to provide a productive context for a.m.'s meditations upon distance. Buber suggests:

A precommunicative state of language is unthinkable. Man did not exist before having a fellow being, before he lived over against him, towards him, and that means before he had dealings with him. Language never existed before address; it could become monologue only after dialogue broke off or broke down.

(Buber 115-116)

For Ayres, this breakdown is symbolized by the recurrent presence of the 'Tower of Babel' myth - a myth which also allows him to cast an affectionately ironic glance over the shoulder at his early poetic self, brimming over with self-importance:

I once said: "Every writer must rebuild Babel",
and was proud of that little apercu
standing in my dark-blue, second-hand suit,
a young Mandelstam, a young Master.
I didn't realise Babel was real.
I didn't realise it was all for real.
How it would take time to fall, and would take you.
Or how I'd stand on the platform,
waiting to come home,

(8)

A noticeable feature here, and elsewhere in a.m., is a registration of the instability of meaning as an experience of privation rather than liberation.

The opening poem in section a is a faux naïve account of the mastery of language, and the second section m opens with a part rebuttal to the first, framed as it is by an epigraph from Mandelstam denouncing Rimbaud's 'idiotic alphabet of colours'. The transformation of distance into vehicle rather than obstacle, is what the long poem Transporter is really concerned with. It strikes me that this poem can be read as being 'double' in the sense that Isobel Armstrong has discussed an overlooked dynamic in Victorian Poetry:

Schopenhauer wrote of the lyric poet as uttering between two poles of feeling, between the pure undivided condition of unified selfhood and the needy, fracturing self-awareness of the interrogating consciousness. The Victorian poet does not swing between these two forms of utterance but dramatises and objectifies their simultaneous existence ... in a feat of recomposition and externalisation the poem turns its expressive utterance around so that it becomes the opposite of itself, not only the subject's utterance but the object of analysis and critique.

(Armstrong 18)

An example of this 'doubleness' whereby the subjective utterance of the speaker is offered for objective scrutiny by the reader, might be Transporter's recurrent use of allusions to Arshile Gorky as 'the Man of Van'. For the subjective speaker, Gorky is, to use Artaud's phrase, the 'man suicided by society'. He is paraded as a talisman of the poet's status as the elect, a marker by which to judge the shortcomings of a public indifference:

For I alone am fit to ride you
the rest can only pet you,
my charred sweetheart.

(49)

but they, my enemies, they'd better not stand in my way ...
I'll show them the colours of the Man of Van
I'll speak to them of the hoarse lilacs
and the pinks that burn deep down in the throat
poignant and carnal
my burnt love, my beautiful love –
and they
will not care ...

(50)

And yet Gorky's veiled presence functions at another level; as a symbol of the increasing importance of distance in Ayres' aesthetic. Gorky's sensuous biomorphic paintings of his beloved Armenia become emblematic of an intimate meditation heightened by geographical distance - working, as he was, in what he regarded as the 'soulless technology' of America. In a letter to his sister Vartoosh, Gorky offers an account of the necessity of a serial approach to his painting:

I paint in series for an important reason. If one painting ... is a window from which I see one infinity, I desire to return to that same window to see other infinities. And to build other windows looking out of known space into limitless regions. Continuously imposing new ideas or changes on one canvas mars the window by fogging it. ... I place air in my works. They are the windows viewing infinity.

(82)

This might serve as a paradigm for the long forms of a.m. The length of these poems provides air, and each poem is a provisional window: longingly looking out, not onto infinity, but to a world whose 'beyond' is social contact. If, for example in Saturn's Rings, the poems' circularity is partly felt as snare or fetter, they also cross their own distances in constant rehearsal of the meeting point they accept can only occur after the writing is over. The distance might, on first reading, appear to constitute an obstacle, but it is eventually accepted as the occasion for mutuality. Many of these poems - Tort, Small Poem for Hannah, Lithography, Pushkin - explicitly address intimates: brother, mother, close friend's daughter. Nevertheless, Ayres's poetic is almost epistolary in its demand for a distance that constitutes impending dialogue. In an early essay, 'On the Addressee', from 1913, Mandelstam ponders what he regards as the all-important question of 'To whom then does the poet speak?'. He claims that 'Without dialogue, lyric poetry cannot exist.' (72). And yet Mandelstam is suspicious of knowing the other communicant too well, as he equates this foreknowledge with lessening the capacity for 'astonishment' in his own emerging words:

The distance of separation erases the features of the loved one. Only from a distance do I feel the desire to tell him something important, something I could not utter directly seeing his face before me as a known quantity.

(72)

m is full of poems occasioned by distance: the geographical distance between Ayres and his brother who lives in Bali (Lithography, Pushkin), that between life and death via poems concerning his dead mother (26 Letters, St Petersburg) and the distance between adult and child that seems to frame the book as a whole in the first and final poems of the collection. Indeed, the last four poems all have specific dedicatees, and the final poem Sleep makes a telephone call to Hannah is noticeable for the fact that the medium is that simulation of presence-across- distance, the telephone. Relinquishing his own hold over the poems seems a necessary struggle for Ayres, as Leningrad punningly suggests 'Once the subject is closed – / right eye, left eye, eyes, head, hand, words – / we'll wake in the open' (154). This realisation comes in the second half of the book, as the first half is almost agonistically concerned with the proximity of poet to poem. One revealingly restless moment comes in Transporter:

I can't stay here with you,
and I spill out distance
into the room
as if from a bottle
kicked on its side.
There's a horizon in my heart,
a horizon and an unstable star –
I have to get there.

(81)

These lines betray a compulsive sense of the need to reach a destination. The distance is something that must be crossed. However, the second half of the collection often glimpses a flaw in this compulsion. The poems in m wrestle with an understanding that distance is not an affront to intimacy, but the prerequisite for it. a views distance as a threat; as an icy indifference the breath of poetic utterance must melt 'with a sigh, or with a kiss, / .../ back into sense' (40). But the second half of the collection is less threatened by this cold silence, eventually less willing to see it as the opposite to sense – it even suggests it might constitute 'the emptiness that forms before love comes'.

The death of a loved one is the event whose centrifugal force is felt throughout the collection, particularly in the second half of the book where such a loss becomes an affront to the pocket Rimbaud persona, and maybe even to writing itself. m enacts the faltering responses to this loss, and, gradually, the reassessment of Ayres's aesthetic it forces. Rage is the initial, understandable, response:

You were so proud, and you hated yourself.
Other people hated you. I hated them: and I still
hate them.

(115)

The mistake is compounded by the outspoken desire to want to lower the temperature of the writing, so it might provide a suitable environment for the dead:

I think of you in the barest prose, but it's still not bare enough.
I need to be with you in poetry, in its coldness,
its utter loss of feeling, in its unearthly sterility

(115)

This matching of cold-for-cold is partly a wounded response. St Petersburg opens with the speaker being gently mocked for the messianic tones his grief emits, and for the damage it inflicts upon his supposed courting of tenderness. The equation of the poem with coldness is partly an act of self-protection. And so the 'unearthly sterility' of such a conception of poetry becomes itself the focus of poems that follow. Ronin takes its title from the wandering Samurai of feudal Japan; persons of gentle blood who have become separated from their lords, but are entitled to bear arms. The causes of separation are varied, but include becoming too deeply in debt, or committing a crime. Needless to say, their displaced position would have been deeply felt in such a status-sensitive society. The displacement that concerns Ayres's poem is a condition of exile through a profound sense of humiliation that gnaws at the very possibility of the poem as a place of interhuman habitation:

no one will ever set foot in this place again
or watch themselves grow younger and play like kids
or think the shadows of the two palm trees could matter to anyone:
it's that cold - ravishing, inhuman and impossible to forget.

(136)

A protective carapace has erected a barrier of cold behind which the poet might
cower, and misdescribe this failure of nerve as linguistic mastery:

I've been opposed to my own words for years
and camped outside them as if I could lay siege to them
and as if, one day, they could give in.

(136)

The search for tenderness in a cold climate calls for a poetry that must short-circuit its own hate, jettison its own (self) contempt - just as Percy Shelley's Prometheus understands that the only way to neutralise the power of Jupiter is to revoke his own curse out of recognition that it continues to justify the tyrant's oppression. The coldness of this poetry must not be vengeful, as such revenge is simply a return blow that perpetuates the cycle of hate.

Thus, coldness takes on a different significance in m. It is no longer an obstacle to be melted, but a climate in which the low temperature forces an awareness of human warmth. Hints of this awareness come early on in the first poem A Great Calm Descends. Buber maintains, in 'Distance and Relation', that human beings as a species are unique in their capacity to give distance to the things that they encounter. This distance is thought of as granting independence to these things, but also as somehow marking them for a future function. Ayres seems to conceive of the function of the poem as providing the distance across which we are given back the sentience of the world around us: 'Only the poem is so calm / everything beside it moves' (111). Such a conception of the poem reaches its apex in Pushkin, in which the imagery of wintry cold that pervades much of the book is faced not as a hostile climate, but as the substance against which a human life is measured: 'feel the cold against your face, / it's how you know you're warm, blushing, alive' (262).

If the first section of the book bristles with interrogative self-belief in 'the echo of your nomad voice', the last half often runs into humble surprise; as when the birth of a friend's daughter forces a change in outlook: 'and now, after belonging to myself for years, / I find my life belonging softly to the world again' (249). This might be the intervention the book has been preparing itself to receive, but at no point does it force or stage it. That is not to say that it doesn't at times actually beg for it:

Break it for me – I can't do it myself.
Break my word with your presence ...
and with your glance

(244)

Such moments of potential embarrassment are frequent, and even courted. Embarrassment, a commonplace and spontaneous feature of human interaction, is something this writing uses to attempt to puncture the potential vacuum of a voice painfully aware of its monologic fastidiousness. Erving Goffman, one of Christopher Ricks' sources in Keats and Embarrassment, suggests that such issues are bound up with the status of imagining: of feeling both 'the real or imagined presence of others' (Ricks 185). Ayres book is often finely poised between composure and discomposure. There are moments where the shedding of poetic skin reveals very bare bones:

I remembered what I came to say.
We don't want to lead small lives.
We don't want to be mean-hearted.
We're not consumers, and we won't be consumed ...
We didn't want to live so watchfully,
or to stare through bitter, subservient eyes

(239)

The awkward starkness of the above is what remains of the earlier heroic poise. It is not the simplicity of the protest that is significant here, but the degree to which it rebukes bitterness and the wary guard we keep over our own conduct. a.m. develops a form of lyrical perplexity: 'I get a gold star for English, here's one, and there, / but I don't know how to say the word 'tear'' (107). Such questions of pronunciation recur. Cuba reveals 'sometimes, / you don't know how to pronounce the word 'close' (167). The latter conundrum is particularly poignant for the difficulty it presents in negotiating the difference between the ongoing prospect of intimacy, and finality. For Goffman, the display of embarrassment charts a subtle process of self-postponement as a prerequisite for a reconfigured human agency:

By showing embarrassment when he can be neither of two people, the individual leaves open the possibility that in the future he may effectively be either. His role in the current interaction may be sacrificed, and even the encounter itself, but he demonstrates that, while he cannot present a sustainable and coherent self on this occasion, he is at least disturbed by the fact and may prove worthy at another time.

(Ricks 2)

a.m. is written in this climate of disturbance that opens out onto the prospect of self-renewal. 'don't be Michael Ayres' urges Transporter, recognising the voice of the poem to be a force for aspiration rather than authentication.

The early poem The Dyer's Hand suggests 'what we think / we touch', thereby erasing the distance between conception and realisation. In the context of this early poem such erasure seems threatening. The notion that thought might be figured as a realm of pure speculation without consequence is destroyed out of recognition that we are 'unable even to withdraw our hands from clear water / without implicating ripples' (5). In the context of a.m. 'what we think / we touch' starts to feel more like Blake's paean to possibility : 'what is now prov'd was once only imagin'd'.

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Bibliography

Armstrong, Isobel: Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.

Auping, Michael, ed.: Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years. Texas: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1995.

Ayres, Michael: a.m. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003.

Ayres, Michael: Poems 1987-1992. Nether Stowey: Odyssey Poets, 1994.

Martin Buber (ed. Maurice Friedman): The Knowledge of Man. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965.

Graham, W. S.: Aimed at Nobody. London: Faber, 1993.

Mandelstam, Osip: On the Addressee, in The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Grey Harris, trans. Jane Grey Harris & Constance Link. London: Collins Harvill, 1991. p. 67-73.

Ricks, Christopher: Keats and Embarrassment. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

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Copyright © Simon Perril, 2003.