A Few Thoughts on 'Beyond the Alps' by Robert Lowell

While many poets seem to have got their knickers in an unsavoury twist over royal shindig invitations, I (good republican that I am) have been thinking about Robert Lowell. More specifically about ‘Beyond the Alps’, which kicks off his most famous collection, Life Studies, and also the little Faber Selected Poems, edited by Michael Hofmann. I believe several versions of the poem exist, some with extra stanzas, but I’m going to stick to the one from the Hofmann Selected (two 14-line stanzas, one 12-line stanza and a final couplet). The poem isn’t online and I’m not going to reproduce it here (I can’t afford Faber’s copyright fees), so this post will continue a long line of Surroundings articles which have, at best, a limited audience. Given Lowell’s lack of popularity in the current climate, that audience may be almost nil, but not quite. This “not quite” is exactly what Surroundings is about and, I hope, it's a "not quite" that is set to grow.

Now, ‘Beyond the Alps’ is a fantastic poem. I love it! It concerns a train journey from Rome to Paris through the Alps, with various diversions – the failure of a Swiss group to climb Everest, the train stewards (from the restaurant carriage?) who, amazingly, go “forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs”, a “skirt-mad Mussolini”, and the Pope’s purring electric razor and pet canary. The poem is about Catholic faith, perhaps the loss of it or at least a distancing from its orthodoxy. The train moves off from Rome and heads into the mountains and, as it leaves the Alps and comes back to ground-level, each stark peak begins to resemble a “fire-branded socket of the Cyclop’s eye.” The landscape, where we might expect woolly snow, feels more like a barren burned-out desert: clearly also a psychological state. One of the main arguments concerns the ambiguous closing couplet:

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

I stared at this for a little while, as it seemed a curious way to end. It contains the virtue of surprise, but also evades any sense of closure. Or, even if “closure” isn’t desirable, the couplet asks more questions than it answers and not all the questions stem from what’s happened previously in the poem. There is debate on this online in the New York Review of Books – Jonathan Raban and Edwin Franks debating with James Fenton. The debate sheds some light on the poem, I think. The reference to the Etruscans must have to do with a great civilisation, vastly influential in its cultural milieu, which nevertheless disappeared and left behind no literature and whose geographical power collapsed completely. The killer kings have themselves been killed by events, time, shifts of culture and power. Paris feels the same to Lowell. His world-view is disintegrating as he nears the city and he seems himself in it or, perhaps sees himself as it.

Paris would be black, as Raban and Frank suggest, because it would have seemed grimy at the time compared to Rome. However, why “our black classic” is the real question, as Fenton says. If something is “classic”, it is untouchable. It has status, accorded by the influential. A ‘Penguin Classic’ (Morrissey aside) or a “classic album” is such because it has been ‘canonized’ by those who have the power to make such decisions. Paris has that canonical quality. It is a great, iconic city. It is a “classic”, but a sooty, tarnished classic here. It mirrors Lowell’s internal crisis of faith, dramatized within the poem by the Pope (expressly exercising papal infallibility) making the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a dogma in 1950, the idea that Mary was bodily taken up into heaven at the end of her life:

The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
to Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?

Lowell’s loss of faith in strict Catholic dogma has led him to a city breaking up before his eyes, a city beyond the Alps where gods once held sway. It is a poem that still resonates in the shattered cities, physical and psychological, of 2013.

New Reviews of 'Fleck and the Bank'

A few reviews have appeared on my pamphlet, Fleck and the Bank, to add to Harry Giles’s review at Ink, Sweat and Tears. Harry’s review was as close to a dream review as I’ve ever received, not just because it was mainly positive but because he seemed to 'get' more or less everything I was trying to do. For example:

‘The poems are a series of signs pointing not to Fleck but to other signs, because Fleck himself is not there, is someone of whom even an imagined newscaster’s imagined dress is “more solid than himself”.’

and:

‘... the themes themselves are unusual, or at least have unusual clarity: to write more about a specific absence than any real moment or presence seems new to me, especially when achieved with such grace. And there will, as I’ve suggested, be many more ways to read this book than mine, it is far bigger than its size suggests... Fleck couldn’t hope for a better offering, wherever he is.’

Three new reviews have gone up now at Sphinx and these reflect the huge variety of thought and opinion that constitutes Contemporary Poetry PLC these days. Jake Campbell doesn’t care much for the pamphlet, describing it as having ‘crystalline moments of greatness, but also elements of drudgery’. He goes on to say:

‘I want to be angered; I want to feel Fleck is angry, or at least alive. Instead, he feels like a wet lettuce.’ :-)

Rosie Miles, on the other hand, finds the poems and themes interesting. Rather self-effacingly, she says:

‘I am not this collection’s ideal reader. I don’t entirely “get” it. But I assent to the world it creates and Mackenzie’s use of language is inventive and full of a kind of demotic energy.’

Actually, her readings of the poems seem perfectly fair to me.

Matt Bryden finds it “satisfying” and “generously dense and experimental.” And he makes the interesting point that

‘While some of the fun in reading is to make out Fleck a little more clearly, in one sense he is the MacGuffin that keeps you reading to figure out his world.’

And, finally – on Andrew Shields’s blog – you'll find not a review as such, but more a reflection on how juxtaposition and disorientation are used in some of the poems to create new meanings.

Thanks to all the reviewers for taking the time to set down their thoughts, whether positive or negative. It’s all much appreciated and I certainly hope Salt and I sell a few pamphlets as a result...

Review: 'More Shadow than Bird' by Nuar Alsadir

The bio note on More Shadow than Bird tells us that Nuar Alsadir is training to become a psychoanalyst and this I can well believe after reading her poems. Her subject is the unknown self, fleeting glimpses into the hidden depths of motivation and personality. Her characters often have difficulty in understanding who they are and where they’re going. They are at the mercy of events, misunderstanding others and themselves, and yet a hazy kind of clarity emerges: “more shadow than bird”, it’s true, but the habitually invisible can hardly be held in easy focus.

The attempt to focus results in remarkably clear and striking images; the connections between them aren’t always immediately obvious but they aren’t arbitrary either. Some poets juxtapose outlandish images for reasons of humour or even stylish obfuscation, but Alsadir is trying to express things that aren’t ordinarily expressible. ‘The Ride Home from Mourning’ begins with the phrase, “My underwear is my backpack/ and I feel true” and later, with a desire for accuracy, “grey, with thin strings”. The mood evoked from such imagery is not self-pity, but a desire to express the impact of loss. The narrator asks the questions people ask at such times: “Where do we go when we go/ no more? The unmooredness puzzles”. There are no answers to such questions, but the narrator reflects on how we mourn:

the unintelligible inside us
and the accurate on our backs.

This final couplet clothing unintelligible unmooredness (which is nevertheless somehow moored deep within us) with the weight of accurate expression sends you back to read the poem again, and it’s true that these poems, like all good poems, need to be read more than once. Her images are perfectly clear but produce complexity in combination. The most similar UK poet I can think of would be Claire Crowther and, perhaps behind both, we might detect American poet, Lorine Niedecker.

‘Disquiet’ is a fairly riveting sequence of short independent prose paragraphs. They read like aphorisms but seem less certain of themselves than traditional aphorisms. It is about disquiet, but some lines could be read as describing Nuar Alsadir’s poetics:

What blooms does so in the space that breaks from knowing.

and:

Reason is like light, it comes in quanta. There are no lines connecting thoughts, only packets and leaps.

Making the leaps and connecting without drawing hard-and-fast lines certainly brings rewards here. Most of these poems can’t be explained or summarised but I was always convinced that something interesting was going on. ‘Breakfast’ would be one example. Phrases repeat and echo throughout the poem – images of eggs, roads, and three characters (one man, one woman, and the first person narrator) having an argument are all jumbled up. Some change has occurred. Anyone who can write lines like

.............He thinks she’s a trail
of cigarette butts to something human

and:

Morning. We crack eggs in the pan,
wait to see what creature will rise

has my full attention. The characters appear disorientated and curiously estranged both from their own selves and from those around them. The man’s perception of the woman as a trail is countered in the final line. He doesn’t notice, but “she’s not the path, but where it begins.” What exactly is being said here isn’t clear to me, but I find the poem intriguingly mysterious and strikingly well written, worth continuing to ponder on.

Other poems are more immediate, such as ‘Walking with Suzan’ and ‘Bats’, both of which you can read in full at Michelle McGrane’s Peony Moon site (along with several others). ‘Bats’ again may tell us something about Nuar Alsadir’s approach to poetry. The bats, “not like you/ or the other rodents” are unashamed and “share their darkness like a piece/ of delight”. The crawlers have to “rise for breath, belief”. In contrast:

The bats do not need applause.
If you clap, they will change direction.

Echoes of W.S. Graham there, of course, from the end of his famous poem, Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons:

...keep your finger-stops as light
As feathers but definite. What can I say more?
Do not be sentimental or in your Art.
I will miss you. Do not expect applause.

The evasion of applause or indifference to it. An immediate change in direction at the first hint of populism. Art, not Commerce. So let’s not clap, at least not loudly enough to be heard. More Shadow than Bird is an extraordinary collection: beautiful, reflective and provocative in equal measure. It deserves readers and perhaps the turn of a page, that near-silent form of applause, is all that matters.

More Shadow than Bird by Nuar Alsadir is published by Salt, 2012, in paperback, currently £7.99.

Supervielle and the Smoke

I enjoyed this review of Homesick for the Earth, a selection of poems by Jules Supervielle, 'versioned' in English by Moniza Alvi. I know of Supervielle but have read more or less nothing of his work, and this review has made me want to read more. Doing that will have to wait for a couple of months as I’m snowed under at the moment, but I’ve enjoyed reading even the short passages that Sean O’Brien quotes and the two poems quoted afterwards in the comments box. ‘Rain and the Tyrants’ (translated by David Gascoyne, and not included in this new book) is terrific, and the title poem, ‘Homesick for the Earth’ (an Alvi 'translation') closes with the astonishing lines O’Brien quotes:

We'd pick daffodils, collect pebbles, shells,
but we couldn't catch the smoke.
Now smoke is all we hold in our hands.

Just great. There’s a very solid memory combined with regret and then the terrible loss in the final line, which makes the previous regret all the more tragic. In addition, there’s a sense of recognition because in today’s cynical world, smoke is all we hold in our hands, all we are allowed to hold. Maybe good poems keep our eyes open and attentive in spite of the smoke.

I was intrigued by Sean O’Brien’s comment that “the world of objects, places and ordinary events, to which poetry in English is habitually so attentive, is rarely a secure presence in the poems Alvi presents; reading them feels at times like trying to drop anchor in fog.” That lack of a secure presence also speaks to a contemporary sensibility, I think, so these translations may be timely. ‘Homesick for the Earth’, for all its imagery, is indeed hardly an “ordinary” everyday event, even if it does speak into the world of everyday. I do like the idea of dropping anchor in fog. Perhaps that’s what reading a good poem ought to feel like. If you are already clear on where you’re dropping anchor, a poem may not feel so necessary.

(Homesick for the Earth by Jules Supervielle is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £9.95)

All the Rooms of Uncle's Head: Fact and Fiction

My review of All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head by Tony Williams (Nine Arches press, 2011, £6) is up at Sphinx issue 19, together with reviews of the same pamphlet by Jon Stone and Nikolai Duffy. Oddly, the same Nikolai Duffy review, slightly extended, also appears at Stride magazine.

One issue that emerges from the reviews is whether the background to the poems is fact or fiction. The description on the pamphlet’s back cover says:

The maker of these strange pieces was an inmate of an asylum somewhere in Central Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. His fevered versions of the sonnet form were painted on to ceramic tiles, since smashed, and now pieced together.

Sounds like historical fact – if that’s as far as you read. But I was convinced from the outset that this was a fiction – even if a fiction interweaved with certain historical facts. My reasons are as follows:

1. The pamphlet’s cover clearly asserts Tony Williams as sole author.

2. Nowhere does the pamphlet ever suggest itself to be a work of translation. The poems are © Tony Williams and no one else.

3. The pamphlet’s introduction says that in 1986, the building occupied by German psychiatrist, Hans Prinzhorn, was stripped for renovation, and it was during this that the ceramic poem-tiles were discovered. Prinzhorn, his landmark book on ‘outsider art’, and his accommodation in Munich, are all historically verifiable, but a Google search for ‘Prinzhorn ceramic tiles 1986’ or any other similar search directs the searcher only to Tony Williams’s pamphlet.

4. There is no reference to those tiles anywhere, or to their previous publication in their original language. That means Tony must have worked with the original tiles, which no one else had ever thought to publish either within a book or online. Surely that’s impossible, given their obvious literary quality.

5. The back cover description above continues with, “Inspired by the great artists celebrated by Hans Prinzhorn in his famous work The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Tony Williams has explored what it might mean to create literature under such conditions of stress.” This seals it for me: those phrases, “Tony Williams has explored...” and “inspired by...”. In other words, these are original poems by Williams, inspired by his research into ‘outsider art’.

I am a fan of literary hoaxes. Ern Malley springs to mind, and I know of a few other brilliantly conceived hoaxes. But I don’t think Tony Williams is hoaxing anyone here. All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head is a fiction, not a hoax. The poems are obviously by Tony Williams but are written in a convincing persona and, like any strong work of fiction, it draws the reader into a spell so that he/she enters a world that feels absolutely real. One thing that makes this pamphlet so convincing is how well Williams evokes the style of central European poetry of the early 20th century and yet still manages to make it sound something like Tony Williams. I’d definitely recommend you get yourself a copy, particularly if you like poems that offer new discoveries with every read.

Poets, Reviewers and the Broadsheets

Two short reviews appeared in The Guardian a day or two ago, both written by Ben Wilkinson. The first is a positive review of Simon Barraclough’s Neptune Blue. The second is quite a negative review of Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea. I’d make the following observations:

1. Neptune Blue is a very interesting book. There are similarities to Simon Barraclough’s first collection, but he’s definitely not just treading the same ground. I’m not altogether convinced by the Armitage comparison, even if I recognise the similarities Ben points out. I think Neptune Blue does resist the pigeonholing and contains some decidedly odd, mysterious poems. Anyway, it’s just the book you need for a cold, clear winter evening.

2. Some people may not have liked Ben’s criticism of The Itchy Sea, and I can understand why. I don’t know Mark Waldron and have no idea what Mark himself thinks of this review (and silence is usually the best reaction in such circumstances). If it had been my book, I wouldn’t be applauding. When a poet spends years writing and revising poems and publishing them in a book, it’s perfectly natural if they feel aggrieved when dismissed inside a short paragraph in the Guardian. I know some people say we should all consider negative reviews carefully etc, but poets are human and get cross and upset as much as anyone else.

3. On the other hand, the sting doesn’t last. The next review might be highly favourable. Someone (a reader you don’t know, not a critic or reviewer) will email you to say how much they’ve enjoyed the book. Your book will be selected by the Poetry School staff as one of their top ten books of the year – such as, this year, Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea! A future reviewer will ‘get’ what you’ve been trying to do, which is a good feeling. Such experiences are fun but adulation doesn't tend to come the way of poets often. Those who crave it ought to stop writing poetry and instead take up the guitar or enter the Big Brother house or try to be photographed often with a celebrity.

4. The Guardian is often criticized for publishing anodyne, positive reviews without any hint of real criticism. We can’t express a wish for a more rigorous reviewing style and then get annoyed when Ben says what he genuinely thinks. It’s not his fault that the word count he is offered doesn’t allow him to make his points more fully. It’s also clear that there’s no personal motive here. After all, he does recommend Mark Waldron’s first book, and feels that some poems in the second book are “very good”. He had reviewed Mark’s first collection very positively in the Times Literary Supplement.

5. But on the other hand again, the bland, anodyne style usually comes into play when the book under review is that of an ‘established’ poet (hard to find the right word here but ‘established’ will have to do). It’s tricky to work out why that is. It could be because the established poet is being reviewed by another established poet who would cause major controversy by writing a negative review (and consequently may elect not to review books by fellow established poets whose work they don’t like much). I’m not sure whether established poets feel that way or not, but would be interested to know. I could certainly understand why they might feel that way. It could also be that poet and reviewer are friends and review one another with regular positivity. Or it could be that the reviewer isn’t an established poet but would like to be and feels intimidated to write a negative review of someone they imagine (usually erroneously) holds massive influence in the poetry world and will nurse their grudge for decades. Or it could be that the newspaper broadsheets don’t want negative reviews of established poets and won’t publish them when they’re written.

6. Perhaps, broadsheets need to search harder for reviewers who are fair but who aren’t concerned with what anyone thinks – independent critics, poets who have stopped writing poetry, poets who couldn’t care less about their own ‘careers’ (but who aren’t, without good reason, simply out to diss those who have had mainstream success).

7. It seems wrong that critical engagement seems only to be allowed in the broadsheets when a book is written by a poet published by an independent publisher. There are occasional exceptions, almost all of them written by critics rather than poets e.g. Kate Kellaway’s review of Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees.

8. I had read some of Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea. He’s a good writer. One concern I had with it was that it seemed similar to his first collection, although I’m basing that impression on a random read through a fairly small number of poems – so it’s not something to pay any attention to. Interestingly (to me) Ben clearly implies in his review that The Itchy Sea isn’t like the first collection. That actually makes me want to get hold of The Itchy Sea and read it properly – so a negative review may not have the negative consequences people might expect.

9. Ben writes one thing that struck me as of particular interest. Whether it correctly applies to The Itchy Sea is another matter, but it does sound like a feature of many contemporary poems, those which are:

“... latching on to outlandish similes in the hope that they might lead somewhere new. You have to admire the intention...”

I’m quite fond of outlandish similes when they do lead somewhere new. Or when, as in John Ashbery et al, their outlandishness fits perfectly within the little engine of the poem. But when they are merely fashionable attention-seeking beacons or empty vessels designed to sound meaningful (Ashbery's aren't), that’s not so good.

10. I’m definitely going to read The Itchy Sea over the next few weeks and see what I think.

Poetry and Emotional Impact

Just spotted this curious review of Lavinia Greenlaw’s new collection, The Casual Perfect, in The Independent. Its curiosity isn’t altogether the reviewer’s fault. She’s obviously been given a maximum word count and 281 words is hardly sufficient to review a poetry collection with any real insight. It may even have been edited down by someone else to emphasise an attitude that might not have been prevalent in its original draft. Maybe. It’s impossible to tell. The attitude is represented by:

"There is some emotion to be gleaned from these cool, opaque poems."

So the reviewer is analysing the poems to glean emotion from them and largely isn’t succeeding. When she does glean some emotion from a poem, she writes:

"Nicely earthy, it contrasts with the cerebral tone of much of this collection."

Now, a poem’s emotional impact is one measure of a poem’s success. But it is hardly the only measure. We can enjoy poems because they turn our brains inside out, because they transform the way we’ve always looked at something, because their words sing in a way which isn’t merely clever but somehow invigorating, because they coolly hit the nail on the head, because they connect ideas and themes in ways we’d never before imagined, and so on and so on.

I have read some of The Casual Perfect and I think “cool” and “opaque” are both fair words to describe the poems I’ve read, but their payback doesn’t depend so much on a gleaning of emotion as a surrender to and engagement with mystery. Why demand emotional impact when a poem is offering something else entirely?

On Katharine Kilalea's 'Hennecker's Ditch'

One poem I didn’t write about in my review of The Best British Poetry 2011 was Hennecker’s Ditch by Katharine Kilalea, and perhaps that’s just as well, as Don Share has just posted a fascinating reading of it at the Carcanet New Poetries blog, a better way of reading it than I would have managed. The text of the poem is also at the link and, although it’s long, it’s well worth taking time to read it.

I read it a couple of times when going through the anthology and felt taken aback. I had read (indeed, had reviewed) her first collection, One Eye’d Leigh and had liked it a lot, but I didn’t remember it containing anything quite in this mould. It felt like a step forward rather than a repeat of what she’d already done. There was so much going on, so much that wasn’t obvious, that I mentally filed it under Go Back to Read Again Later. I now have done and am intrigued, as I often am, to reflect on why I can enjoy a poem when I don’t understand much of what’s actually happening in it. Each phrase is in itself entirely clear – nothing muggy or vague about them – and the syntax is relatively standard. But the poem doesn’t occupy a linear time-scheme and it took a few reads before details of the world it creates began to map themselves in my head. So what makes the poem so effective?

Partly it must be memorable lines and images (“the trees walk backwards into the dark”, “the washing machine shook so badly/ that a man asleep four floors down reached out to hold it”), partly the sound, rhythm and the music Don Share mentions. The language, with its shifting tones, is is never predictable – the first section alone contains the lyrical “pages of a book/whose words suddenly start to swim”, the informal “Wow. The rain”, the strange “Ickira trecketre stedenthal, said the train”, and the consciously poetic, “Dear Circus...the painèd months are coming for us”. Perhaps, also, it feels like I am being taken to a half-lit world and shown something beautiful, haunting, and intimate, and then I’m left there to build my associations at first hand – the dark, the many different kinds of light that emerge, the trees and coastline, the human relationship(s), the bath and water, the dog, the moon, the different winds, the bakery, the house and the surrounding houses and gardens, the curious addresses to the Circus. Some obscure poems send me to sleep. Nothing about them draws me in, but the world of Kilalea’s poem feels like a place I am happy to spend time in.

You can hear her read part of the poem here on YouTube (where it's called 'Dear Circus'). You can read the full poem online at the link above or on paper in New Poetries V or in The Best British Poetry 2011.

Review: The Best British Poetry 2011

I wasn’t sure whether I would like The Best British Poetry 2011. I know some of the poets in it and was fairly sure I would like their poems but I was more interested in what I’d think of the rest. I tended to avoid reading the British mainstream (until, of necessity, I had to engage with it through becoming Magma’s reviews editor) and much preferred to spend time with American and European poetry collections, along with a few Scottish favourites, and I had the fear that an anthology of British poems selected from magazines would contain too much bland and boring work.

I have to say that my eyes have been opened. I really enjoyed some poems in this anthology from writers I knew by name but had somehow bypassed. It’s certainly a positive introduction to contemporary writing in Britain – a far wider range of styles and schools (and both the famous and lesser known, both the established magazines and the new) than is customary in British publications. I will pay more attention in future. Poems that struck me (not counting those by my friends) included those by Emily Berry, Judy Brown, Fred D’Aguiar, Sasha Dugdale, Ian Duhig, Giles Goodland, Patrick McGuinness and Deryn Rees-Jones, and there were several others I much enjoyed. OK, there were also poems that struck me as pretty ordinary, but nowhere near as many as I had expected, and no one is ever going to like everything in such an anthology.

Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘The Rose of Toulouse’ got my attention with its opening section in which the streets are “not a scene for former slaves”:

Or their feisty descendants, wearing their life
Savings, nursing wounds from history, no track
Record in an ocean with bones for a library.

The poem is an evocation of French city life, into which is woven a subtext centring on the poet’s children and another one focusing on justice and domination in history. At the back of the anthology are 40 pages of short author biographies and a few paragraphs on the poets’ impetus for writing their poem. I noted from Fred D’Aguiar’s reflections that the poem seemed to me to be about more or less what he also thought it was about.

That wasn’t always the case. Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Shepherds’, according to its author, “is an elegy for the last dwellers on the [South] Downs, and a hymn of praise to the hills themselves.” Now that she mentions it, I do see how that makes sense. But I felt the poem centred on questions of religious faith. There’s an ambiguity at its heart – the Bible-carrying shepherds also read the earth’s Bible – the one written “in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady’s smock” which now has “no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds/ Who are gone.” The pastoral world of the Bible (both the literal one and the metaphorical Bible of the earth) is rendered unreadable in an urban age. That may be a statement of how the poet views the world, but the elegiac tone also suggests to me that something seems lost by this shift.

I found the variance between my own interpretations of poems and those proffered by the poets to be a source of considerable fascination. Both the writer’s and the reader’s ideas are admissible, of course, and a difference between them isn’t evidence of failure on either side. It may even point to a welcome complexity that the poem can’t be summed up in explanatory prose. Several poets expressed a discomfort about offering comment on their poem and I felt an initial scepticism at first glance, but I have been won over. It is simply interesting and doesn’t negate other readings. Now and again, I did realise that I hadn’t read the poem carefully enough and saw it with new eyes after reading the author’s thoughts. Sometimes, the comments were just a little pretentious..., but not as often as you might expect in an anthology of poets.

I am always happy when poets come across as unusual people and when Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch confessed (in her prose comment) that “lining objects up on tables has always fascinated me” and that she attended a “table etiquette course in Somerset three years ago,” I found new reason to trust her advice in her poem, ‘Table Manners’:

..........................Do not remove your shoes or
show any flesh. Tilt your soup’s light towards
her, like an invitation to swim. Sip
as though you’re working on it.

Perhaps not all of that will impress on a first date, but I hope someone puts it to the test. But remember the sting in the tail, that "cutlery is a code" and "ten to five means it's over." Don't say you haven't been warned. So, yes, there are more good things happening in British poetry than I had expected and The Best British Poetry 2011 will offer, to most readers, a number of welcome surprises and send them rounding up the back catalogue of at least a few of the featured poets.

The Best British Poetry 2011, ed Roddy Lumsden, is published by Salt, £7.99

Courtesy of Shiraz: Geoffrey Hill's Clavics - 1

It’s 10pm, my wife is out being an actress, my daughter is asleep. I have settled down with my laptop, a glass of Shiraz – an inordinately large glass – and a review copy of Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics, posted to me by Enitharmon Press. The collection is described in the dust jacket as “an elegiac sequence for William Lawes, the Royalist musician, killed at the Battle of Chester.” So we’re in the 17th century during the ill-fated reign of Charles I. It isn’t the first time I’ve picked up Clavics, which consists of 32 page-long poems, each in two fetchingly-shaped sections. I’ve read poems at random off and on for some time now. I recognise that certain names, phrases, and ideas slip from one poem to another and several long, coherent, note-taking reads are no doubt necessary to review it properly, but I am not going to review it properly. I am simply going to record a few impressions and I’m going to begin with the first poem. In future posts, I plan to say more. I am intrigued, for instance, by the relationship between the two sections of each poem which sometimes seems tenuous, and this is a question which (strangely?) no previous reviewers have addressed. How can they possibly not address that?! One good thing – in the course of writing this paragraph, the Shiraz, pretty rough at first, now tastes much smoother. This has ridiculous metaphorical possibilities when it comes to discussing a Hill collection, but I will refrain.

All this talk of Shiraz etc will no doubt have got rid of the Hill acolytes who swoon theatrically at every syllable he writes. Not serious enough, y’see. There are people who just can’t fathom why readers find Hill “difficult”. They know it all, are vastly more intelligent than ...well... anyone who suggests that there might be a few complexities to overcome when reading Hill. It is reassuring when they use Hill to assert their intellectual superiority without (of course) offering us the slightest proof of their unique understanding. I always enjoy that. Hill knows very well that he is difficult and thrives on the fact. Anyway, the Shiraz is going down nicely and I feel like raising a toast to Astraea, goddess of justice for whom this world was unendurable. Perhaps that owl with the mouse in its mouth, which adorns the cover of Clavics, was one reason why Zeus placed her within a constellation in the night sky. Cheers, Astraea, wherever in Virgo you are (according to that reliable source, Wikipedia, there is also a ‘La Vida es Sueno’ reference, as one of the characters in that play takes on the name ‘Astraea’ when in court. ‘La Vida Es Sueno’ features heavily in Hill’s ‘The Orchard of Syon’). We really need you down here, by the way, Astraea. And Hill also knows it:

Bring torch for Cabbalah brand new treatise
Numerology also makes much sense,
O Astraea!

Indeed. This is how poem 1 begins, so we’re in the realm of metaphysical digging. The Cabbalah is a way of understanding everything, more or less, although it has no agreed canon and can incorporate internal contradictions with aplomb, which is extremely handy for everyone. Hill adds to the mishmash and invokes the goddess who is watching from her starry haven. I read the invocation as angry, sarcastic. As such, I’m taking a rather different view of this poem to Lachlan Mackinnon in his now infamous “sheerest twaddle” review, where Astraea represents Elizabeth I. Hill is trying his best to get to the truth, to the centre of things, but he is locked into his tradition (as we all are, whether we recognise it or not), and moving things on from it is no easy task. He is unhappy with Astraea’s chilled distance and calls her a “bitch” in his typical politically-correct way. She may have been physically exalted but, in Hill’s eyes, she has returned “rich/ To the low threshold of contemplation”, which at least has given Hill the opportunity to prove himself, as ever, the undisputed master of spitting irony (even rhyming ‘bitch’, ‘ditch’ and ‘rich’ is supremely ironic). I should mention at this point that the poems all rhyme and are technically demanding, to put it mildly – plenty of lines with two (or sometimes one) accented beats. Try the form and see how far you get! Anyway, seeing as Astraea isn’t playing her full part, we’re left with the poet/artist/composer (I presume) as:

Her servile master subsisting on scraps
Keeping station
As one pursuing ethics perhaps.

Astraea seems to function as a pitiless form of Muse here, an object of devotion who nevertheless feeds the artist only on scraps. It is a particularly religious feeling, a severe Kierkegaardian sense of the utterly transcendent God who can barely be approached, yet must be obeyed humbly by e.g. the pursuit of ethics. Time to fill up my glass, although I note there is not enough left in the bottle to fill it up more than half.

The second section of the poem riffs on the writing process, partly through the metaphor of musical notation. It can be done with “care” (like prayer) or with “flair” (which I suspect is not so good). He makes reference to musical stress marks, also surely a mischievous allusion to the curious stress marks which adorn some of his poems in other books. If these are simply flair, mere affect:

Dump my clavic books in the mire
And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff.

No, don’t do that! I quite like Poem 1 and it’s obviously been written with a great deal of care (and flair too, I think, and just as well). Some readers will be saying, “But that’s quite an ‘easy’ poem, relatively speaking.” And I agree. It is highly compressed writing, a more radical compression than most poets would employ and this, combined with the tight rhyme and accentual scheme, necessitate a degree of odd phrasing and strange syntax, which make certain sections of the poem hard to make sense of – but not impossible. Later poems do present more formidable challenges.

Lachlan Mackinnon on Geoffrey Hill's Clavics

There’s been a fair bit of talk concerning Lachlan Mackinnon’s review of Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics in The Independent. Obviously, people disagree over whether his dismissal of the work is justified or not but discussions have focused more on the nature of reviewing itself.

It is true that most broadsheet critical reviews over the past year or two have seemed, well, rather uncritical. Uncritical to the extent that I have wondered what has been going on. This review is the complete opposite of that anodyne tendency, but I disagree with those who suggest it represents a much-needed kick against one of the big establishment names. Hill is absolutely not establishment. He belongs to no school except his own and has pretty much nothing in common with most of the big names in British poetry at the moment.

Nor do I really accept the idea that, just because someone is a big name, they deserve to be taken down a peg or two and given a good trashing every so often. That’s only true if they write a bad book but, sometimes, I get the impression that disgruntled reviewers make a decision to write a negative review before they’ve read a word of the book at hand – either due to peer rivalry/enmity or because they want to draw attention to themselves.

I’m not suggesting that’s true in the case of Mackinnon on Clavics, incidentally. I think it’s a fair review in that he makes his points and backs them up with evidence from the text, and I doubt there’s any underlying personal agenda. There is of course an agenda in the battle for Hill’s reputation. Hill has a massive Collected Poems coming out in the next year or two. It’s what he will be judged on – the early stuff nearly everyone (however grudgingly) agrees is significant and perhaps great, and the later stuff which has so divided critics and readers. Many believe Hill to be the greatest living poet. Others, even those who loved his earlier work, have been driven to distraction by the obscurity (note, I don’t use the words ‘difficulty’ or ‘density’ which could also apply to his earlier work) of the later material. There’s little middle ground in this debate. Hill’s later work is either “the sheerest twaddle” (Mackinnon) or further evidence that he is the “greatest living English poet” (Michael Dirda). In this connection, I’m intrigued by Liam Guilar’s question:

...Can a poet reach a point of eminence where what they write is no longer important because there are enough people ready to find value in whatever they write?

I think the second half of that sentence rings true in many cases, but I haven’t yet read Clavics to know whether the whole question ought to be asked of Hill’s admirers.

I doubt the review marks any real change in the way the broadsheets deal with poetry. They tend to review well known names from the major trade presses and use other well known names from the same major trade presses (often good friends of the writers under review, which is ridiculous!) to write the reviews. The way reviews are conducted in those venues certainly helps with the marketing of books more than the advance of genuine and rigorous critical discourse in this country, and it disappoints me (at times, it enrages me) that reviews have become an arm of the big publishing houses' publicity machines rather than independent evaluations.

Review of Claire Askew's 'The Mermaid & the Sailors'

I’ve read through Claire Askew’s first pamphlet, ‘The Mermaid & the Sailors’ and enjoyed it. I know Claire and (disclaimer time) wouldn't have written anything had I not liked the pamphlet. But, seeing as I did, I will try to bring some kind of critical discpline to the table. Claire has a good ear for sound and rhythm and her writing is noticeably tighter than when I first came across her poems a few years ago. There are certain points where it really soars, such as in ‘Moloch’, a poem in which a father has taught his offspring how to make a fire:

...It was what this town worked for –
the men up at dawn, crawling
into the lit-up earth like colourful bugs.

It’s a mining town and the depiction of the men as insects, however colourful, is painfully apt given what was to befall British mining communities later on. Good writing, but it’s in the second and final stanza that the poem lifts full off the ground. The son/daughter remembers the father’s instructions and begins making the fire with newspaper, kindling etc, and then:

Finally, the few ancient apples of coal –
its cold choke the thing
that would cripple this town, given time.
And the first thought of heat would occur
to the grate, as the first flame
ghosted up out of the pile.

The title poem is very strong, with its drunken men (‘sailors’, metaphorically) spinning their tales to the narrator at the bar, “hooked by my red hair,/ swarming like fish/ to a bright fly”, which put me in mind (in a good way) of Sylvia Plath’s “Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air” (from ‘Lady Lazarus’).

There are also intriguing connections between poems – images of fire and fish keep surfacing. In fact, steam, smoke and fire all rise both literally and metaphorically in several poems and men who’ve “dived right in” eventually “come up sparkling,/ wheezing, waiting to be saved.” (‘The Mermaid and the Sailors’).

Negatives? A villanelle-type-thing tries hard to take on a big subject and doesn’t get anywhere with it. ‘Visiting Nannie Gray’ is strong (and indeed won a prize), but starts off with the dull, “We go on Sundays to make her tea”, when it could have begun with what immediately follows, “I’ve known her years, but every week...”, a far more interesting lead-in! A few poems are well written but don’t get under the skin in the manner of ‘Moloch’ and others (but at least there are others, which isn’t always the case with poetry collections). These blips are more than made up for by a highly imaginative three-part poem on ‘UFOlogists’, a list of place names which, for whatever reason, I liked a lot (‘Fell’), and an unexpectedly fine sestina, ‘Dream Lover’:

He’d know how to hot-wire a Ferrari in the dark,
eyes closed. He’d smell like kerosene and a quiet road at night,
and touch my face as if I’d made him blind.

Well, OK, I’m not certain that the eyes need to be closed in the dark, but I love the way he can smell both like kerosene and like a quiet road at night, and the third line is a great image, combining tenderness and wild passion in one vivid, economic sweep.

(The Mermaid & the Sailors is available from Red Squirrel Press for £4)

Poetry, Criticism, and Moral Values

On my Facebook wall (for those of you who can see it) at the moment, there’s a very interesting discussion on a set of reviews and, by extension, on the nature of reviewing generally and, extending further from that, on the state of UK poetry today.

One of the most interesting points is how reviewers tend not to question a poem’s moral values and, instead, examine its technique, narrative and subject matter. But the moral outlook on the world (or lack of it) exhibited by a poetry collection is obviously an important part of what it does. One commenter suggests that critics maybe lack the confidence –or ability – to look at such issues. Or perhaps it’s because the current values of our society say that all moral truths are relative, and there is heavy pressure on critics to reflect only on how poems say what they say, but not on what they are saying, the values they espouse behind their narrative and subject matter.

Critics and reviewers aren’t moral censors. Poets have to be free to express the unpalatable, the difficult and offensive, without being censored. But if they do, they ought to expect critical reaction, some of it hostile, rather than silence and a quiet sidestep into technical considerations. Reaction is surely welcome or they wouldn’t have published the poems in the first place.

Magma, Issue 49, and the E-Newsletter, Issue 12

The new Magma, issue 49, is all ready and you can read a few poems and articles from it online, including my review of Katherine Gallagher's Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc £11.99), Alan Wall’s Doctor Placebo (Shearsman £8.95) and TEN: New Poets Spread the Word ed. Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (Bloodaxe/Spread the Word £8.95).

In addition, if you sign up to receive the free bi-monthly e-newsletter (halfway down the page at the link to sign up), you’ll find me doing the ‘subscribers workshop’ in which I comment on a poem someone has asked for help with (perhaps 'set loose to run riot over someone else's poem' might be just as good a way to put it, but I hope it's a constructive riot), along with articles on ‘poetry and catharsis’ by Jacqueline Saphra (which includes a nice mention of Andrew Philip's collection, The Ambulance Box) and a review of Matthew Sweeney’s The Night Post (Salt 2010) by Laurie Smith. Definitely worth signing up for.

Three Snippets

I have two reviews in the latest issue of Sphinx online, issue 16, both of pamphlets from the ‘innovative’ or ‘radical’ or ‘experimental’ (or whatever word is being used these days to pin down what can’t be pinned down) end of the poetic spectrum: here’s my review of Ralph Hawkins’s ‘The Size of a Human Dawn’ and also this one on Nathan Thompson’s ‘A Haunting’. Both are published by Gratton Street Irregulars.

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I’m spinning out the theological implications of a very different WS Merwin poem to ‘Home for Thanksgiving’, which I wrote about on this blog on Saturday. In the same book, he has a one-liner called ‘Savonarola’, which goes, “Unable to endure my world and calling the failure God, I will destroy yours.”

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Yesterday, it appears my daughter left a message, in a very posh voice, on her friend's parents’ answerphone:

"Hello. I'm the prime minister, David Cameron. Can I help you? If I can, press 9. If you don’t want my help, press 0.”

If only it were that simple.

On WS Merwin's 'Home for Thanksgiving'

I’ve badly misjudged WS Merwin. I’d read only a few poems by him, mainly written in the last decade or so, and these hadn’t done anything for me, so I paid him no attention, not until a week ago when I wandered into a charity shop in Edinburgh’s Gorgie Road and found Merwin’s 1963 collection, The Moving Target, a 1966 hardback reprint to be exact, from Atheneum Books, New York. What route it took from New York in the 1960s to Edinburgh in 2011 is anyone’s guess, but I’m glad to be its latest recipient.

It contains plenty of good poems, but I was immediately struck by the opener, Home for Thanksgiving (full text at this link), which is well worth printing out and reading carefully. My first thought was that it would have been a more conventional poem, the kind of poem commonly written by many, many decent poets, if he had begun at the third stanza, the memories of women and the regrets at how things had panned out. I wonder if that’s how the poem began life, if the dramatic opening stanzas arrived later and then went on to affect those following. Impossible to know, of course.

In any case, the first two stanzas employ astonishing imagery – the streets opening like “long/ silent laughs”, the “knowing wires and the aimed windows”, the “crusty/ unbarbered vessel”, and this brilliant combination on the limitations of freedom:

...the months of plying
Between can and can, vacant as a pint in the morning,
While my sex grew into the only tree, a joyless evergreen,
And the winds played hell with it at night, coming as they did
Over at least one thousand miles of emptiness.

He’s come back from all that, from all that promised happiness, which never really was open to him. Or, at least, the promise might have been real enough, but the reality was that possibilities proved vacant, the evergreen proved joyless, and (from the third stanza) Vera had a “small fat dog named Joy” and Gladys had “watery arms”. The refrain, “well this is nice,” suggests ironically that coming back from it all isn’t nice either, even if the billboard informs him that things have “now improved”. The regions of pure hope had proved an illusion and nothing can alter the natural imperfect human state. The best he can do is half-hearted dishonesty, to say things are “nice”. Happiness couldn’t have come from these particular women – he knows they would have drunk his bottle (the same one that launched his hopeful boat in the first stanza) dry or smashed it to pieces. Instead he’s left with misery (repeated three times!), which fits him perfectly, and he even makes it painfully plain that he’s thankful (it is thanksgiving after all) for this discovery, that he’s done “the right thing after all.”

The structure of the poem elevates it above the typical memories and regrets poem and instead sets it within an existential struggle – one human being (who is all of us) against all the forces which conspire to snuff out hope, a man resigning to the perfect fit of misery. But the resignation is also the site of discovery. “I bring myself back...” he keeps saying – back home, back to his senses, the one place where he can begin from truth, reality as it actually is. This is, of course, his own perception of himself, reality through the narrator's lenses.

Another way to read it might be that he saw only the bad points of imperfection and ended up wrapped in his misery like a comfort blanket as a result, whereas he could have done better to settle for an imperfect happiness. The final "I did the right thing after all" then reads as unconscious irony. It's his own attitude that keeps him locked up in misery rather than reality itself, the fear of letting go of his comfort blanket. I guess we all know people whose misery gets them attention, and they prefer the devil they've become over-familiar with. To his credit, Merwin doesn't judge the issue and I think either reading could at least be partly correct.

The vocabulary is straightforward, nothing you’d need a dictionary for, but there’s no way you could confuse this poem with prose. The syntax plays a part in that. Merwin spins out sentences like little webs – the word “from” in the first line keeps finding new nouns to govern throughout the stanza. The same goes for the same word, “from”, in the second stanza where it makes its first appearance in line five. It means the reader needs to stay awake but rewards are well and truly there for doing so. He also keeps sentences going by using commas when full stops would have been technically ‘correct’, as if to keep things flowing with the required intensity. The rhythms also aim to capture the reader with their intensity, right from the first line and a half:

I bring myself back from the streets that open like long
Silent laughs

The strong stresses are woven between weak stresses, almost anapaestic, until “long/ Silent laughs”, the line-break adding emphasis to the heavy enjambed spondee, and suggesting immediately that these laughs aren’t the kind to chuckle merrily along with, silently or otherwise. And so it proves, although black humour survives the misery; some of the descriptions are priceless, although my favourite is probably the aforementioned billboard, “Which says NOW IMPROVED and I know what they mean.”

A terrific poem, I think, and not the only really good one in the collection, which I am currently halfway through.

David Orr on Reviewing and Criticism

An interesting interview at Lemon Hound's blog, from which here are a couple of short extracts:

"If you’re a poetry critic writing for a general audience, it’s essential to realize that the overwhelming majority of your potential readers think of your art form the way most people think of Renaissance faires. That perception is wrong, of course, but it’s one you ignore at the risk of having your audience read your opening sentence and promptly assign you to a pigeonhole adjacent to the jousting fanatics..."

"I’ve always thought that criticism is its own art form. It’s true that only by reading poetry can we have the experience “reading poetry,” but it isn’t clear to me that that experience is richer or better than the experience of reading criticism, if the criticism is good enough. So I guess by “writing about writing” I hope to achieve something at least as interesting to the reader as a decent poem or pop song."

The 'Real Critic' and the 'Good Ordinary Critic'

I posted this quote to a Facebook thread yesterday. It’s from an essay in which Randall Jarrell argues that critics had become too central to literary discourse. He satirises the tendency, citing academics who had read thousands of articles about a poem, but had not actually read a contemporary poem in years. He talks of a PhD student who had read everything there was to read about Tennyson’s Ulysses, but had never actually bothered to read Homer’s Odyssey. Jarrell sees the role of the critic to help readers, to open up poems for them; not to maintain discourse with critics and academics, but to create interest among general readers of literary works.

He goes on to differentiate between the ‘real critic’ (who may not actually exist in a pure form) and the ‘good, ordinary critic’:

“...the real critic must speak ill of friends and well of enemies, ill of agreeable bad works and well of less agreeable good ones; must admire writers whom his readers will snicker at him for admiring, and dislike writers whom it will place him among barbarians to dislike. For it is the opinion he offers with trepidation, thinking, ‘Nobody will believe it, and I hardly see how it can be so; but it seems so to me’ – it is this opinion that may be all the next age will value him for; though in all probability it will value him for nothing...

“But I am talking about a ‘real critic’ who would have a very short half-life, one who may never have been on sea or land; let me talk instead about good ordinary ones...What is a critic anyway? So far as I can see, he is an extremely good reader...He is always many other things too, but these belong to his accident, not his essence.” (Randall Jarrell, 1955, ‘The Age of Criticism’ from Poetry and the Age).

I’m with Jarrell all the way here. I think we are very short of the kind of criticism and reviewing he’s looking for in our own age. Many reviews in newspapers speak well of “agreeable bad works” and pretty much ignore “less agreeable good ones.” There is a degree of dishonesty too: that need to watch one’s back, not to speak ill of the influential, to talk up those who've talked nicely about us and bat down those with whom we’ve previously disagreed. It’s all wrong.

Jarrell’s age was different from ours in other ways too. There was plenty of space for reviews and criticism. In fact, many of the top journals had little space for poetry and short stories and were dominated by criticism, and some critics obviously felt their art superior to the poets they criticised. Jarrell counters this and feels criticism is there only to serve the art of poetry.

I wonder if we have reacted too strongly to that generation and now devalue good reviewing and criticism too much. “It’s someone’s opinion, no more important than mine or anyone else’s,” people claim. And of course, that’s true. It is just someone’s opinion. But surely some opinions have to carry more weight than others. If not, then we may as well unpack our brains from our skulls and throw them to the pigs. We don’t have to agree with everything our favourite critics say (nor did we ever have to), but we can at least allow them to make us think, to challenge our received ideas. It’s a basic act of humility, to acknowledge that we have something to learn and that specialists in an art might have something to teach. To deny that strikes me as a form of arrogance peculiar to late-20th century and early 21st century western humanity, an attitude I doubt we will be commended for by posterity.

The First Poetry Collection

Here’s a really brilliant reflection on first collections, part of a review written by W. N. Herbert, originally published in the autumn 2010 issue of Poetry London.

“There are two ways for a poet to be professional which first collections tend to throw into relief. The first is the orthodox career, in which, having acquired the necessary awards (and, increasingly, degree), then having wooed the correct mentor, residency and publisher, a debut volume appears — its voice already assured, its technique established, its unique subject matter clearly delineated. None of these are easily come by, especially at an appropriate level to make it worth acquiring them in the first place.

But the second involves a still-harder apprenticeship, following the obstinate, labyrinthine path that learning craft takes through such markers of esteem and our individual experience. Along this route concepts like ‘voice’ or ‘muse’ fall under perpetual critique and suffer challenging reform. Here the poem itself often has to be sufficient reward, one glimpse of theme must function as sustenance for years, and publication may be no more than an interim report, rather than a career-defining goal.

Our society encourages new writers towards the first challenge, while their instincts tend them toward the second. On the one hand the triumphant first steps of Eliot or Auden; on the other the initial sketches of Pound or Morgan. Publishers, in the business of second-guessing posterity, prefer the former; the media, too, is always drawn to the simpler narratives. “ (W.N. Herbert)

That sentence, “Our society encourages new writers towards the first challenge, while their instincts tend them toward the second,” is spot on, isn’t it? Or is ‘encourages’ too mild a word?

Helena Nelson: The Teller

Like Rachel Fox, I’m won’t review Helena Nelson’s new collection, Plot and Counter-Plot. I know Helena and she published my first chapbook with HappenStance Press. However, this is my blog and I can do things here which I couldn’t do anywhere else: I am going to look at three poems – one today, the others will come later in the week.

When I first started to read Plot and Counter-Plot, I rattled through it at an alarming speed. The poems seem to invite this approach, as they employ plain language, ordinary syntax, and punctuation in all the right places. I thought the poems were ‘OK’ but there was a voice in my head shouting, “Slow down! That’s no way to read poetry!” And when I slowed down and started again, I realised how much I had missed first time through.

Take ‘Teller’, as example, an eight-line poem in couplets, set in a tight iambic tetrameter and full rhyme scheme – AB CD AD CB. On my initial quick read-through, I wasn’t much impressed by this poem. The narrator tells her story to the rain, the rain tells it to the trees, the trees recount it, and the narrator is left with an empty breeze and has to begin all over again. “Hmmmm, so what?” I thought.

So, quite a lot... Reading it again, I wondered how it was possible for me to have missed so much, but that’s what happens when you blast through a poem without giving it due consideration. The first line should have alerted me that something odd was happening – “Umbrella-ed here in Autumn light”. I am thinking Mary Poppins, an uncanny entrance – not literally Poppins, but certainly magic-realism of some kind. It could be the narrator simply is carrying an ordinary umbrella, but the oddity of “umbrella” being used as a verb and acting on the narrator, who appears to have no choice in the matter, speaks against that.

So we’re whisked out of normality into an eerie half-lit world (“Autumn light” isn’t accidental), and the narrator tells her life-story to the rain – as you do... The rain passes it on to the leaves and moss on a tree-bark. The third couplet lifts the poem way beyond standard poetic fare:

The bark recounts, but not quite right,
the plot and counter-plot of loss.

It’s like Chinese Whispers. The bark isn’t accurate and the story comes out slightly wrong. The poem might be about communication, about what gets lost in telling, and the life story is itself both a ‘plot and counter-plot of loss’. Who thinks of their own life like that? The poem invites us to do so. A life has a story and also an anti-story: what gets missed out, forgotten, misinterpreted, told all wrong. It strikes me that the bark’s mistake mirrors our own attempts to tell stories, as getting it ‘quite right’ is virtually impossible.

The result is an ‘empty breeze’. The story is nowhere. The narrator’s attempts to tell it and have it soak perfectly into the world seem to have failed. Perhaps we could read this as a parable on writing (not the only way to read it, of course) – every poem is born to fall short. It tells us something and then someone like me comes along and recounts it, but not quite right, as the poem itself – the minute it is retold in someone’s head – ceases to be exactly itself.

Does the poet then give up? The narrator here starts “to tell my tale again.” That’s why we write poems, because the billions written before by ourselves and others weren’t enough to tell what needs to be told. There is value in doing so, necessity even, whatever is lost in the telling. The rain is waiting patiently.