Reviews
Olivia Cole reviews Making Worlds edited by Myra Schneider, Dilys Wood and Gladys Mary Coles (Headland Publications, £10.95)
101 poems by men is one anthology that you’re unlikely to find nestling amongst the bestsellers. Elizabeth Bishop famously refused to be anthologized in all-women anthologies, disliking the marginal label the concept implies. The editors of Making Worlds note the reluctance of some they wished to include. As Anne Stevenson (who also contributes some of the book’s most striking writing) suggests in her preface, a narrow gender consciousness can be a hindrance, unlikely to lead to the best kind of poetry, that which resists ‘gender politics’ and justifies itself aesthetically.
“I didn’t go round the world. It went round me” writes Katherine Gallagher in Jet Lag; “peering// through a window, settling my watch/by the stars” she resolves to “catch up with this shaky life,//wrap it around me like a quick nap.” So do the paper “worlds” made here stand up to such scrutiny? My answer would be an enthusiastic yes. Making Worlds moves gracefully in time and space, across centuries and continents, and you are unlikely to nod off.
It seems unfair, not to mention difficult, to pick on a few poems amongst so much good writing. Substantial contributions from some of the best writing today, including Ruth Padel, Elaine Feinstein and Mimi Khalvati to name just a few, are here alongside work from less well-known poets. Unusually for an anthology, the editors have chosen to feature sections of longer works. Particularly memorable among these are Jacqueline Brown’s Thinking Egg, Gillian Clarke’s Glass and Carole Satyamurti’s Between the Lines.
Equally are there poems in which great distance is covered in the space of a few lines, as in the terrific Blood Donor by Merryn Williams. In a poem in some ways representative of Making Worlds as a whole, Williams potently injects a shot of the personal into the more broadly cultural:
It all floats back. I’m staring at the ceiling,
as others queue, to give blood for Vietnam;
…The capsule cracks; high windows,
August heat,
Me lying on the white unspotted sheet.
The confession and a remembered chance encounter turn out to be as much historical as personal: “There’s no real sequel. All those students scattered.” The story ends in its beginning; “our blood never mixed” the speaker concludes and yet the poem is just one example of many credible sequels to experiences of both life and of art that are collected here.
Addressed to a bereaved parent, Sylvia Kantaris’s delicate and haunting Some Untidy Spot catches the horrible aptness of art and the chaotic artlessness of life’s accidents in restless counterpoint. In direct opposition to Kingsley Amis’s professed desire to read no more “poems about poems or poems about paintings” Kantaris produces an elegiac ‘sequel’ to both a painting and a poem. “Methought”, declares Othello in the face of loss, “it should be now a huge eclipse/Of sun and moon” - but of course there is not. Like Auden in Musée des Beaux Arts, Kantaris is attuned to the ‘anyhow’ aspect of tragedy. We find her “thinking of Brueghel’s Icarus/who fell into the water in the space between/two glances”, and then into the painting, then the poem:
But this poem is about your son
who was too young to fly like Icarus
and simply walked behind you on
an ordinary path
along an ordinary river’s edge
then wasn’t on the path when you looked back.
So all the lives he might have lived slipped
out of him
in ripples and were gone, to all appearances,
yet grow in circles which are not contained
by any accidental river bank
Nobody, it seems to me, wants any more bad poems about poems or paintings, or about anything else for that matter, but Making Worlds repeatedly reveals the inadequacy of Amis’s mantra. Poets here unabashedly take their cue from masters old and new, from Aristophanes, from Bonnard and Monet, from Rembrandt, Rodin and Ruskin, Beardsley and Wilde, from Lucien Freud, from Saatchi artist Mark Quinn and last but not least, from David Bowie. This list is an eclectic mix typical of this vibrant anthology.
Other more obviously personal poems choose to go it entirely alone. In the painfully pared down mayday mayday by Michèle Roberts, the only thing we which we are allowed to see “cracking up” is the pavement. In Felicity Napier’s almost unbearably poised Jasmine, the “crisis” of loss “dwindles” in the eyes of the world but persists for the bereaved with the clinging “sickly sweetness” of the flower. In a reversal of Hardy, the voice “calling” is a lost husband’s, leaving only an “absence” and a woman’s heart that must be trained “not to leap”. The allusion, if here, is left oblique; as ever the editors proscribe no one way for writing about extremes of emotion.
What unites many very different poems is the fact that although suffering might inform art, there is not a single contribution in which the subject justifies the existence of the writing. Any reader who goes to this anthology is bound to find much to enjoy and remember, not least a variety that bears eloquent witness to the impossibility of describing a specifically feminine poetics.
Perhaps in this instance, Bishop is too scrupulous a model – after all, not even Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts could entirely please her. “It’s just plain inaccurate,” she wrote to Lowell, intuiting darkly that “the ploughman & the people of the boat will rush to see the falling boy any minute, they always do, though maybe not to help.” The diverse and surprising contents of this book make it a treasure for anyone who writes or reads poetry for its own sake. My sneaking suspicion is that should Bishop, or for that matter a whole number of others, be controlling their literary afterlife now, she might be more concerned at being packaged as a help for “unreal times”, as in Neil Astley’s Staying Alive, or for depression, than as a female poet. Making Worlds makes no excuses for being a book of poems – it makes no promises to ‘help’ or to make you feel more human or real. And that, to my mind at least, really is something to be cheerful about.
Page(s) 53-55
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