Review
Michael Hamburger: Variations
Michael Hamburger: Variations; Carcanet, £2.95.
David Jacobs: Marlowe Court; The Kit-Cat Press, £1.25.
Arnold Rattenbury: Dull Weather Dance; Harry Chambers/Peterloo Poets, £3.00.
D.J.M. Saunders: Bad Friends; Long Spider Press, 95p.
Variations is a collection I shall return to often, not least because it happens to contain in definitive form the early sequence 'Travelling'. Hamburger's work has the symmetry of Eliot's 'Four Quartets', though does without the least hint of the didactic. It is as though we remain content with the sensitive acknowledgement of stillness within flux, with 'East Coker' rather than 'Little Gidding':
Estranged. By those global routes,
All curved now, all leading back
Not to the starting-point
But through it, beyond it, out again,
Back again, out. As the globe rotates
So does the traveller, giddy with turning, turning
And no return but for more departure,
No departure that's not a return.
Indeed we read Variations in the way we listen to music - learning the central theme, noting its reiteration and the changes imposed upon it by more sounds than we can instantly register, some easily absorbed, others more digressive and wayward. Hamburger's phrases have a way of lingering almost diffusely, as though awaiting clarity of perspective, and matching exactly the poet's tentative but winning grapple with language:
But enough now. More than enough
Of pressing into words
What sense, cluttered or stripped,
And mind leave behind them:
Mountains, lakes, rivers,
Too many, and you,
One, but moved on,
Nameless to me because named
You'd evade the name.
The sequence also finds its own resting places through an unobtrusively thoughtful use of the page itself. Often the break from one page to the next runs counter to expectation: we are held in mid-sentence and mid-idea and consequently invited to retrace and consolidate. 'In Suffolk', the second part of the volume, applies a similar method to a more specified setting, but here too Hamburger stresses that there is only 'flux / To be learnt again and again'. Nevertheless a stronger sense of place, named and familiar, leads him to introduce one or two passages that could almost be independent of the sequence as a whole, like this portrait of an old woman:
Shortest nights. Too long by far
For her who lies between sleep and waking,
Racked, pulled this way and that
Not by pain alone and the drugs' half-promise
But the motions of sun and moon...
In Marlowe Court David Jacobs reminds one of the so-called 'Martian' school following Craig Raine. He has its obsession with the image as entertainment and way of seeing completely afresh, but also shows some of its weaknesses: the danger, for example, of offering the reader no more than the sum of many memorable parts. The seventh poem illustrates what I mean, possibly, by its series of metaphorical puzzles followed by an out-of-place, Prufrockian self-mockery:
Customers sit around with their coats on
in chairs precisely shaped for bottoms.
The leavers post debris into boxes
and make cold air with the door.
I nibble thin chips, consider my life. ('Terminus')
Jacobs also tends to make his subjects plural, which, however true to the anonymity of the setting ('The block is vast enough to hide / away a life'), invites too much stereotyping. His method is basically cinematic; he moves his camera swiftly from one thing to another, sometimes achieving colourful panoramas, but on occasion leaving individual figures, women especially, caged in an assumed sameness:
The young women acquire shapes and legs again.
They stride briskly along the pathways, looking serious.
The young men look up from polishing their motor bikes.
The bolder ones call out, then polish again.
('High pressure over Marlowe Court')
However, Jacobs is not always as detached as this. There are a few tighter and more concentrated poems in the sequence which do not make such general statements. Perhaps 'Thomas’ about the man whose job it is to 'unlock trapped air' from radiators, sums up the stronger aspects of Jacobs' work, in particular his ability to exploit the ordinary and apparently arid:
This quiet, punctual man, who knows
the routes the pipes take when they enter walls,
out of all the staff, is most liked,
preferred to those who carry bags or clean.
Seeing him from my window should help to relax,
Yet he makes me dissatisfied with my own life.
Inside the well-shaped atmospheres of easy rooms
I cry out for the ways of pipes, the unseen worlds.
Arnold Rattenbury's Dull Weather Dance is a variable collection. Sometimes the poet writes almost too tersely for the thought process to be made clear, overloading some pieces with parallels that fail to develop. The more successful poems are those in which the focus is sharper from the outset or the context more vivid. In 'Cuckoo', for instance, wit and seriousness are cleverly interplayed, the conventional subject being both satirical butt and source of philosophical curiosity. The poem typifies also Rattenbury's blend of intensity and eraticism:
Utopian, we are charmed,
Forget, or never knew enough.
Clutches are laid. It is all song
Or seems so. Then the cuckoo lays.
And still it seems all song, this odd
Egg out as beautiful in its way.
But bugle-silent, cuckoos cough
And choke with excitement as the Godly
Do who lead schoolboys astray.
Rattenbury is a very conscious technician within the bounds of traditional forms. Though his imagery is often derivative, it is treated delicately in such poems as 'Long After Marlowe' and' Above Lake Bala'. In 'Notes after a Midlands Flood' one can see too the poet's sensitivity to the tonal influence of single, carefully chosen words:
Sheep in the fields hump
Scattered as boulder-or, like enough
Ourselves-while the air twitters of downpour.
The poems with a Welsh 'interest' are embroidered with too many 'old mythologies' to be very individual. It seems to me that the limited aims of 'Railwaymen's Terraces, Oswestry' are more interesting than the staged allusions to Taliesin or Pryderi in other poems:
O, little gradations in brickwork and caste,
Unite. You have nothing to lose but your place-names,
Bosses, patches. The streets are wide
For riot. There's a gossip shop on the corner.
From the start, the poems in Bad Friends by D.J.M. Saunders assume a kind of cryptic authority, making statements which clearly ought to resound further than they do. For me, the first coherent poem is 'Developing Country', where the method is more discursive:
Right now - would you believe? -
I'm a pin-stripe urban guerilla,
standing well back from the doors,
curara on the tip of my umbrella,
and my emergent third-worldliness
on the brink of colonizing British Rail.
Too many of the poems in this collection, however, seem to have evolved out of cliche or literary echoes. In one or two Saunders comes near to being an independent voice, yet one is never quite sure that he can do so completely. 'Unidentified' is, I think, the exception to the rule in finding a more fruitful avenue for the poet's mock-serious approach:
Two unidentified flies in their meeting
make an unofficial wedding-car of my drive home.
There, on the outside of the passenger's window,
the amazing tenacity of their mating
holds them together
against winds of thirty or more,
for more than a mile.
Finally, I would say that the illustrations in Bad Friends, all of them exploiting the female form, do little to improve the volume. They seem to have very marginal relevance to the poems also.
Page(s) 96-101
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