Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Polly Clark, "Farewell My Lovely" (Bloodaxe, January 2009, 69pp., £7.95)
David Constantine, "Nine Fathom Deep" (Bloodaxe, January 2009, 88pp, £8.95)

In his fine work on Tennyson and Romanticism, Herbert Tucker defines Tennyson’s characteristic mode as ‘the poetry of aftermath’; time and again, Tennyson’s speakers meditate on a lost world and the loss of poetry from the world as they attempt to carve out their small futures from what’s left. A similar withered optimism works its way through David Constantine’s new collection: "Nine Fathom Deep" is a kind of small-scale salvage operation that takes place in the wreckage of Romantic art. Constantine’s verse is so frequently indebted to the paintings, sculptures, and poems that have preceded it that one of its clearest refrains is to be ‘after’ something else, where going ‘after’ is as much a difficult chase after an elusive source, as in the fine translations of Baudelaire, Brecht, and others in this volume, as a sense of belatedness and regret: ‘after Courbet’, ‘after Caspar David Friedrich’, and, at a double remove in the title poem, ‘after Gustave Doré after Coleridge’.

"Nine Fathom Deep" is not ashamed to trail after its forebears, but it is alert to the limitations of such manoeuvres. Some of the finest poems here, such as ‘Lorenzetti’s Last Supper’ and ‘Cranach’s The Golden Age’, think about whether there is ‘still/ life’ to the nature morte of fresco or canvas, while ‘Quatrains for a Primer of our Times’ warily asks the reader to ‘supply your own images’, as if to forestall the criticism that so much aesthetic navel-gazing may have had its day. It is a small stroke of brilliance for a poet who has dedicated so much of his poetic effort to ekphrastic pursuits to give the title ‘Image Unavailable’ to one of these quatrains: ‘No photos yet of the mothers of Iraq / Thanking us for cluster bombs.’ Poetry and its chummy sister arts may no longer be cut out for this world; in the opening stanza of ‘Pity’, the poet anticipates extinction and reflects on an imaginative realm that has already vanished:

Pity we killed all the monsters. It might have been
A help to ask a sphinx or a centaur,
A siren, a deep-sea triton or some such cross between
Our miserable species and another
What it feels like. Too late now. Goodbye
Creation, we are all going to die.

There’s not much in the way of hope here, but the last two lines do play a wry formal trick that offers some resistance to the world-weariness they profess. ‘Goodbye’ is an obvious word to end a line with, as if verse and voice are taking their leave at the same time. But then ‘Creation’ inverts this effect at the beginning of the next line, as its generative potential flickers even in this valedictory context. Indeed, ‘Goodbye creation’ is not a bad description of Constantine’s favoured mode of writing.

Constantine has always been interested in ‘the monsters’, partly because he has made many versions of the poetry that bequeathed them to us and partly because his own poetry is so concerned with the boundary between what is human and what is not, and how to measure the distance between the living and the dead. This is an old subject for poetry, of course, that so often sounds like a dynamic speaking voice but looks like a lifeless monument, but for Constantine it takes on a new urgency in poems that represent scenes of exhaustion and worry specifically about the exhaustion of the poetic art. They frequently perform it, too, in long sentences that stretch well beyond the capacity of the human breath. These threads come together in ‘Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s Todeskampf ’, ‘Roman Sarcophagus’, and perhaps most powerfully in ‘26 Piazza di Spagna’, in which Keats’s ‘lungs of inspiration’ begin to fail him and he slips between the claustrophobic reality of the deathbed and hallucinations of a troop of mythological creatures that seem to have taken life from a fantasia of Attic shapes.

Given the strong elegiac mood of the collection, it is no coincidence that poems like ‘Nine Fathom Deep’ and ‘Fishing’ listen again to the deep that Tennyson’s Ulysses heard moan round with the many voices of the dead. In ‘Fishing Over Lyonesse’, that conceit is neatly inverted, as the deep listens back to the living:

   Down the trembling line
The fish may be listening in to what holds humans
   Together, what keeps them from disassembling
Over depths well known to be unfathomable. Friend,
   Keep talking of dead mothers and fathers
And the living children and their children while I keep
   An eye on the weather, entertain me
And the curious deep fish

The turn from ‘Keep talking of dead mothers’ to ‘keep/ An eye on the weather’ is beautifully controlled; it holds these ‘humans/ Together’ in a delicate coincidence of language that then develops into that remarkable and ambivalent chime with ‘deep’. Many of the brief, moving lyrics in "Nine Fathom Deep" reach tentatively for such connections with the natural world, though not always with the touching comedy that marks out ‘Fishing Over Lyonesse’. ‘Plum Trees’ begins with the hopeful, perhaps even counter-intuitive, assertion ‘Like us they want to continue’, while the closing poem, ‘Elm Seeds’, evokes an ebbing fertility that is only too human:

So strange the casting of seed over the concrete:
Down it comes twirling
On to a surface that cannot foster it
Or parachutes in as delicate as a snowflake
With no better chance. But of all this bounty
Of fruitless offering and arrival
I will always love best the seed of the vanished elms
Some carried to bed in your sandals and in your hair.

An image that itself seems ‘strange’ and impersonal, with that cruel linguistic irony of ‘casting’ seeds over a material that has been cast so inhospitably against them, germinates into something intensely poignant yet unfathomably private. For all of David Constantine’s heroic grappling with the Romantic tradition, it is for such tender insight that he deserves to be celebrated.

Polly Clark has a tender voice, too, particularly when she addresses her verse to her husband or young daughter, as in ‘Our Baby’, or bends it towards the cadences of song or prayer. But such tenderness is not always straightforward; its attempts to foster sympathy can seem mysterious, as in ‘Soup’:

Blessed are the soup-
makers. Blessed

are their feet
that bring them to my door.
Blessed are their hands,
blessed are their eyes

that brim quietly
with all they know.

Such imaginative economy is typical of the poems in "Farewell My Lovely", which often place enigmatic speakers in half-recognisable settings. Who are the soup-makers and the speaker, and why is she the recipient of their charity? What do ‘they know’ that the poem withholds from us? And are their eyes welling with tears or brimming more metaphorically with knowledge, in the way that we might describe somebody as having a wise face?

The loose, unrhymed couplets of ‘Soup’ are Clark’s favoured form in this volume, though it’s a shame that she doesn’t experiment with a greater variety of forms as a solo villanelle, ‘She’, is one of the most impressive poems here. That said, the formal similarity of many of these poems makes them stranger; it’s often hard to know whether Clark is in character or not. A victim of domestic violence (‘Marriage’) inhabits a form that can be transposed to a vision of a suburban Madonna (‘Magnificat’) or to the seemingly straight voice of ‘Advice to a Daughter’. Innocence and knowledge are mutually involved in many of these poems; in ‘The Book of Truths’, the poet talks to her baby about faith and loyalty before admitting that ‘Some people, my darling,/ some people are just cunts’. ‘Friends’ doesn’t quite let on whether it’s an excruciatingly naïve poem or a poem that revels in the naivety of those that claim to be above it:

and in my experience
people found each other
quite easy to take or leave.

The day after the last episode
they ran them all again,
protecting me, it seems.

I keep just one from
two-hundred-and-thirty-six.
It’s the one where Ross says,

but this can’t be it,
and Rachel says,
then how come it is?

The speaker here declares real life to be more disappointing than the clichéd world of sitcom solutions, but her natural idiom verges on cliché itself (‘to take or leave’) in a way that makes her complicit in the type of emotional dumbing-down that she’s trying to renounce. There’s something odd here, too, in the assumed relationship of ‘they’ to ‘me’, and in how peculiar it looks to tidy the number of episodes of Friends into a single line of verse. How much do these lines want us to query them? They are caught, like Ross’s ‘but this can’t be it’, between a faltering question and a bald statement.

Other poems in this collection make their ventriloquism more distinctly heard. In the title poem, a private eye regrets the end of his marriage in an idiom more familiar to him than the wife who has left him:

I’d gotten used to that roomy grin,
the face like a bag of facts,
the flank round as a pony’s
and the way she had of blending in
so badly. But after all,
I didn’t really know her,
Neither she nor I being the intimate type.

This is neatly done, its images hard-boiled enough to obscure what they claim to describe (what does a ‘bag of facts’ look like, or ‘the sea with a face I’d like to smack’?). For somebody paid to uncover motives, this detective is far too easily swayed by slight excuses; ‘really’ has to do a lot of work for him in the penultimate line of this stanza. Elsewhere, the most sustained voice of this collection features in the seven brisk poems that make up ‘I Thought It Was in Scotland’, in which a paratrooper describes his traumatic experiences of the Falklands War. The cribbings from army argot in this sequence can seem like token gestures (‘Now maybe I’ve been tabbing / for fifteen hours or more’), but these poems maintain a capacity to surprise the reader, most notably in ‘Wild Horses’ where the menacing machinations of warfare give way to a thundering herd of wild horses. ‘Dear Mum’ turns Clark’s trademark couplet against itself, as the censor’s pen disrupts the lines of verse as it strikes out the horrors of war:

A charge today, we beat them back!
It was Bigsy’s 18th he died today

 

     Tell Bigsy’s mum
Your loving son.

This world sometimes has to protest too much, to deny its violence too forcefully, if it is to proclaim its innocence; it is a world that is, in Clark’s vision, by turns accommodating and uncompromisingly harsh. That vision has been finely tuned in "Farewell My Lovely".