C. B. McCULLY

'Laboratories of the spirit': recent poetry

R . s. THOMAS, Selected Poems 1946-1968. Bloodaxe, 24.95 (paperback). FLEUR ADCOCK, Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, 24.95 (paperback), u. A. FANTHORPE, Selected Poems. King Penguin, 22.95 (paperback).

It's not often one gets the chance to review three fine selections of verse and in doing so become aware of one central mode of current English writing. This mode has seldom, I think, received the critical attention it warrants; although it has been scanned and monographed, it remains resistant to enquiry. In any case, critics writing retrospectives or introducing anthologies tend to concen- trate on more or less discrete assemblies like Movements or Martians; but the mode I have in mind doesn't draw attention to itself by artistic or political rhetoric. There are however certain grounds on which it can be identified as a mode: poets working within it are often non-aligned, and with that artistic estrangement there is often a deeper exile, of temperament or nationhood or disconsolation; they are intersted in 'the world', and their poetry is peopled by a handful of human types through which is refracted a multi-valued experience of pain; the formal hallmark of their work is an interpretative lyricism which rests on careful craft; and this interpretative lyricism both enacts and studies the isolation it describes. The three poets distinguished here all work in 'laboratories of the spirit'; each is in some sense an outsider; and each has the rare and costly ability to sing verse into the head, to make memorable lines. If there is a model that underlies their work, it derives, I think, from poets such as Blake and Yeats (in the case of U. A. Fanthorpe, Yeats and Auden) - although none of them exhibits any of that limp twilit mysticism. They are too tough, one might even say 'too modern', for that.

A. E. Dyson' sees R. S. Thomas as important in his own way as Yeats or Eliot, and claims that he and they 'would count among prophets of modern consciousness itself'. I wonder if this is not an over-valuation - or perhaps, a valuation in the wrong terms? Thomas has attracted no critical industry, no battery of grants and theses; moreover, neither his style (with the exception of the verse-play 'The minister') nor his theology can really be said to be innovative: innovation attracts imitation, and I've read very little that could be said to be sub-Thomas, compared with pages of sub-Eliot and whole collections of sub-Yeats. Perhaps this will come in time. But I think Thomas's value to this century lies precisely in the fact that he is in the best sense in-

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imitable; no poet I know can work so skilfully with simple verse forms and a simple imagery of earth, stars, and always the tenanted/untenanted Cross, and achieve complex effects that, as Quakers say, speak to our condition. Take the much-praised opening to ‘Here’:

I am a man now. Pass your hand over my brow, You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree, From my top boughs I can see The footprints that led up to me . . .

Stan Smith’ sees this as a poem of the self, but surely this is too simple. Although the poem seems to invite such a straightforward interpretation, it is more than a hymn to the derelict ego (but yes, i t is also this). As Dyson notes, i t is also about the evolution of man, and equally about the evolution of one man made flesh: ‘We have, in fact, a poem about Christ, at the moment when his death is upon him, and God appears to be absent from God.‘4 I’m not here concerned with evaluating these different interpretations - all three are plausible - but I would like to note the resonance set up by such a seemingly-simple phrase as ‘I am a man now‘. It is almost a tautology, it is certainly ambiguous, and it’s in the nature of Thomas‘s craft to use similar means to similar ends in poem after poem. His brainwork, revealed in the poems, is the inverse of metaphysical flashiness; his statements seem almost laconic. But in ’Here’, this tight-lipped affirmation is aligned with an imagery made complex by what isn’t said: I don’t think it’s fanciful to see ‘The dream of the rood, and behind that, the Ravennate vision of Cross as cosmic symbol, as underlying that careful simile ’I am like a tree’. The power of Thomas‘s work derives as much from the unsaid as the said. Think of the people that populate his wasted, decaying landscape of villages (’This last outpost of time past‘) and lost farms, above all the figure of Iago Prytherch:

. . . I am alone, exposed In my own fields with no place to run From your sharp eyes. I, who a moment back Paddled in the bright grass, the old farm Warm as a sack about me, feel the cold Winds of the world blowing . . .

(from ‘Invasion on the farm‘)

It’s curious that the Prytherch poems - the one by that title, from Thomas’s 1958 collection Poetry for Supper, and ‘Affinity’, from the earlier volume Sung at the Year’s Turning (1955) - are left out of the Selected Poems. One would have liked to see them reprinted, if only since Prytherch and his kin seem central to Thomas’s vision of ‘hills too lonely’. His kin are here, certainly: Walter

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Uywarch (’Sure prey of the slow virus / Bred in quarries of grey rain‘) and Job Davies (’. . . still alive / After the slow poison / And treachery of the seasons’), and even Prytherch‘s later self, to whom

There is no forward and no back In the fields, only the year’s two Solstices, and patience between.

(from ‘Aside‘) But it would have been good to have the earlier poems in which Thomas’s guilt towards his creation, and the paradox implicit in that guilt, are so effectively explored. That quibble aside, one can only welcome this new edition of Thomas’s Selected. Reading the volume through, with its selections from six volumes, the impression is of a mind of great if troubled integrity; and always there will be lines to haunt or affirm:

. . . Don’t think even the dirt And the brute ugliness reigned Unchallenged. Among the fields Sometimes the spirit, enchained

So long by the gross flesh, raised Suddenly there its wild note of praise.

(from ‘The cry‘)

Earlier I wrote that this poetry ’is peopled by a handful of human types through which is refracted a multi-valued experience of pain’. This is true of Thomas, moving through his bleak farmsteads and studying the human condition ’between better and worse’ (’Aside‘); it’s also true, although the strategy is different, of Fleur Adcock: examine the park-walker, Mr Morrison, a prey to the sudden imminence of pain:

With stiff little wooden ste s

and lowers his body with its secret fiery tenant down, inch by inch . . .

he edges his way to a benc f,

That pain passes. But the poem ends with what Patricia Craig5 has called Adcock’s ‘salutary ruthlessness’:

Doors open inside his head; once again he begins to hum: he’s been granted one small occasion for worry and the promise of more to come.

Examine, too, the inmates of ‘The Soh0 Hospital for Women’, and note that strange gentleman riding his hobby-horses (‘The man who X-rayed an orange’). Dannie Abse, writing in 1973, makes a pertinent comment that’s equally applicable to Adcock’s later work: ’The oddness of people’, he writes, ‘their

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feelings of disconnection - the separateness between people, between man and woman, or between adult and child comprise some of her main themes.’6 He might also have added a line about the laconic intensity that underlies the surface of poems such as ’Hauntings’, ‘The ex-queen among the astronomers‘, and ‘Advice to a discarded lover’, which last I think exemplifies well this poet’s candour as well as her canniness (see the phonological rightness of her slant- and off-rhymes):

Think, now: if you have found a dead bird, Not only dead, not only fallen, But full of maggots: what do you feel - More pity or more revulsion?

The poem concludes:

If I were to touch you I should feel Against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin Do not ask me for charity now: Go away until your bones are clean.

There’s a lovely symmetry in this poem, partly carried by internal sound- patterning (‘found/fallen/full/feel . . . feel/fingers/fat’) and partly by the conceit that’s carried in ‘What do you feel?’ (in the first stanza) and ’I should feel’ (in the last). The technique is rather like that in Donne’s ‘Flea’ (Adcock has called Donne one of her ‘early masters”), but here the lovers don‘t meet grotesquely in blood but separate over a small pulp of death. It’s clever, formal and detached.

Having identified separateness as a major theme, I should amplify this to include Adcocks work on foreignness and ex-patriotism; the interesting thing here is that her backward look is always disabused. As she states in ’Going back, ‘nostalgia-time ran out as I grew older’. One of the more effective poems here celebrates a moment of pause and adjustment:

November ’63: eight months in London. I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans: they float swanlike, cooling their white necks over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings, burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.

I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer’s jacket and secretly test my accent once again: St James‘s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.

(‘Immigrant’)

This seems slight on an initial reading, but more is going on than just Received Pronunciation. There’s a syntactic and thematic cohesiveness (’I pause . . . they float’), and as those beaks are awkwardly buried so the accent is secretly tested; the choice of the pelican as central symbol is also structurally apt - it’s not

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indigenous. Adcock, here as in 'Advice . . .', is adept at finding an image that doesn't simply carry a local clarity but is valid for a whole text. Finally, for those readers who consider entering poetry competitions, let me direct them to one of Adcock's splendid one-off pieces, 'The prize-winning Poem'; this is the conclusion: 'What is required is simply the masterpiece we'd all write if we could. / There is only one prescription for it: it's got to be good.' Her work is not all irony, awareness and exile; there's not a little wry humour here. Adcock's Selected Poems contain work from six previous collections or pamphlets, spanning The Eye of the Hurricane (1964) to Below Loughrigg (19791, and also include several new poems which indicate a new and disturbing depth to her exploration of separateness - see especially 'Piano Concerto in E Flat Major' and 'Across the moor'. One hopes that this volume will bring her work to the attention of a still larger audience.

Back to the handful of human types, and the work of U. A. Fanthorpe, whose three Peterloo collections established her as a considerable presence whose subject-matter is unusual and often uncomfortable:

The gift remains Masonic, dark. But age affords A vocation even for wallflowers. Called to be connoisseur, I collect, Admire, the effortless bravura Of other people's lives . . .

(from 'Growing up')

Fanthorpe left her job at Cheltenham to become, in her own words, 'a middle- aged drop-out'. It's from her subsequent experience as a hospital clerk that some of the subject-matter from Side Effects (1978) is drawn. In 'Case history: Julie (encephalitis)' she counterpoints narrative and direct speech with truncated phrases from Ophelia's madness; in 'Case history: Alison (head injury)' the damaged girl looks at her own photograph, becomes her own haunting and future, and in this poem Fanthorpe sustains a reiterative technique with great skill:

I, who need reminding Every morning, shall never get over what I do not remember. Consistency matters. I should like to keep faith with her lack of faith, But forget her reasons . . .

The technique's reiterative because of Fanthorpe's ear (and eye) for the effective line-break (a prime requirement of those not working in strictly formal verse schemes); this allows apparently disconnected phrases - 'I do not remember / / But forget her reasons / / Her job with a future / / I am her future' - to stand

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as foregrounded and insistent. Both ’case histories‘ are unusual and expressive achievements, and technically most interesting.

Standing To, her second collection (1982), shows her preoccupation with the classics, and their classic themes. There are some marvellous poems here; I particularly enjoyed ‘Sisyphus’. This is the conclusion - notice how the poet doesn’t strain for the grand effect, but closes on a laconic (that word again) phrase that is part-assertion and part-triumph:

It falls, and I pursue it, To heave it up again. Time not spent On doing this is squandered time.

The gods must have had a reason For setting me this task. I have forgotten it, And I do not care.

I also enjoyed ‘Inside’ and, again from the same volume, ‘Portraits of Tudor statesmen’. But the work isn‘t always grim; Fanthorpe handles the four poems that comprise ’Only here for the bier’, which looks at ’the masculine world of Shakespeare’s tragedies . . . from the woman’s angle’,* with a wry and rare acuity. It‘s small wonder that this collection was highly praised.

I have written about Voices Off (1984) elsewhere. On this rereading, I keep my reservations about ’Purton Lower Bridge’, with its kite-string of adjectives, but I like ‘Knowing about sonnets’ more each time. The poem bears an epigraph from Eagleton (’The task is to show the text as it cannot know itself‘); the poet comments:

. . , The next step is telling the sonnet

If I should die What it is trying to say. This is called Interpretation.

What you musn’t do is collude with it. This is bad for the sonnet, and will only encourage it To be eloquent. You must question it closely: What has it left out? What made it decide To be a sonnet? The author’s testimony (If any) is not evidence. He is the last person to know . . .

The poem ends with a clever play on Brooke‘s ’think only this’, and it must be required reading for those sceptical about the tyranny of a certain kind of critique.

Fanthorpe’s Selected Poems contain a generous number of poems from each of the earlier collections; the work confirms her status as one of the best poets now working in that mode I mentioned earlier.

Peter Levi has recently suggested that ’To define a tradition is only to define one’s own ambitions’; lo let me emphasise that I’ve had no such pretentions here: a mode is not a tradition. A tradition depends on time, continuity and reaction;

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a mode depends on (I'm sorry to have to use the term) intertextuality, and a correspondence of tone. Tone involves diction; it also involves a way of addressing one's subject matter. O n these grounds, the three selections I've discussed have more in common than might be expected.

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Notes

A. E. Dyson, Yeats, Eliot and R. S. Thomas (Macmillan: London, 1981). Ibid., p. 305. Stan Smith, Contemporary Poets (St James: London and Chicago, 1985), p. 860. Dyson, op. cit., p. 304. Patricia Craig, Contemporary Poets (1985), p. 10. Dannie Abse, Corgi Modern Poets in Focus 5 (Corgi: London, 19711, p. 104. Adcock, Corgi Modern Poets, p. 108. Fanthorpe, Poet's note, Selected Poems, p. 50. C. B. McCully, 'Voices off', in PN Review 51 (vol. 13 no. 1, 1986), pp. 75-6. Peter Levi, PN Review 51, p. 77.

Book review

M I C H A E L LONGLEY, Poems 1963-1983. Salamandar Press, Edinburgh, and Gallery Press, Dublin, 29.95.

Some six years after the publication of Derek Mahon's Poems 1962-1978, and five since Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems 1965-1975, the appearance of Michael Longley's Poems 1963-7983 is especially welcome. Like Mahon, Heaney, Simmons and others, Longley was one of the Belfast 'Group' poets in the 1960s. He has lived and written in Belfast since then but has, perhaps, been less prolific than some of those contemporaries, his four previous books at present being out of print. All the better, then, that this beautifully-produced new volume includes most of his work from No Continuing City onwards, and a final section of fifteen previously uncollected poems as well.

In two recent interviews for The Poetry Review and The Sunday Tribune Longley talked about his childhood in Belfast, and about his relationship with his father. Two moments in particular emerge as stations from which to take a bearing on his poetry. One was his father's death when Longley himself was twenty and, as he now sees it, before he had got to know him properly. To contradict that absence, Longley says, he has tended to 'mythologise' his father 'to try and grasp his reality'. The second moment to which Longley returns lies