Review
Vicki Raymond Selected Poems
VICKI RAYMOND
Selected Poems
Carcanet, £6.95
“Webster was much possessed by death": a first reading of this selection (including poems with titles like 'The Cemetery Gates' and 'Corpses'), may tempt one to extend Eliot's observation about the Jacobean playwright to this writer.
But that would do a grave injustice (if I may pun) to the wit and energy of writing which characterises these poems. It is not a dwelling on the morbid -"the big D himself" as one of her versions of Horace has it -but a thirst to acknowledge reality which inspires in Vicki Raymond such a keen taste for life's extraordinary drama, which inevitably includes the sheer vulnerability of our human being.
No, to die will not be Peter Pan's
"awfully big adventure":Look at it this way, Peter:
you are about to start
A whole new career as a corpse.
('The Mermaid's Lagoon')
Ending on a brisk note of dismissal ("you'll have grown up at last"), this witty little poem shares with several others a dialogue with key figures, real or mythic, in our cultural life -heroes or villains, like Captain Gates, Bligh of 'The Bounty', Cinderella, Helen.
The opening poem, 'Film Archive', is a condensation of a theme running through the volume: what we can know, even with media records, is limited, subject to mistaken interpretation. All we have are clues ("merely to sort them occupies my life"). Hence many of the poems are dramatisations, using poetic imagination to real-ise versions of various scenarios. Vicki Raymond has a pictorial imagination, creating vivid scenes and often invoking artists -William Morris, Burne-Jones, Michelangelo, Lowry.
But she imposes the order of narrative, too. Her credo for poets is not the usual poet-as-maker, but as s/he whose vocation it is to seek order.
Miss nothing that happens,
remember the auditor.
(‘The Professions of Poets')
Poets are accountable for 'naming' how things are -- a cognitive role. 'Small Arm Practice', however, dedicated to her parents, recognises wryly that usually we learn, too late, by experience. "Children can't understand / Age's long-sightedness" -- not, that is, until it is their turn for bi-focals. This emphasizes the need for self-responsibility. Nostalgia for the child-one-used-to-be is misplaced self-pity:
Don't talk about childhood:
Say what you are now.
('Don't Talk About Your Childhood')
This dominantly anti-sentimental approach uses humour as a way of accommodating the contradictions inherent in life. The poet takes a certain Gothic glee in frightening the reader.
Come: that is only a branch
scraping the window. Nothing
can harm you. I'm here. Relax.
That sounds fine -- except that it is spoken by 'The Witch Sycorax Addressing Her Lover'!
This poet shares with Auden an interest in variety of form, and a use of slang and contemporary vocabulary; she revels in a love of word-play. "Hail, pale snail!" she cries in 'Snail Poem', a poem appealing to the witty intelligence; and a few love-poems have ever needed words like "squat", "squirm", "lidlessly", or the metaphor of a threatening preying insect ('Love Poem').
Vicki Raymond shares also Auden's gift for menace, as in 'The Hidden' where an ornamental English lawn is disturbed and "what was hidden from the start / shuffles into view". The poem makes effective use of comfortable nursery-rhyme rhythm which makes the eventual disturbance all the greater:
English summer, rolling down,
ornamental lake,
and the manor, richly brown,
basking like a snake.
As an Australian living now in London, she is aware of a wider, tougher mode of existence than soft, summery idylls in England. Nonetheless, she has a feeling for the small and intimate -for informal Ladys Chapels, where prayer could be that "of untidy flowers / stuffed anyhow / in a milk-bottle" -- rather like a Winifred Nicholson flower-painting. A quietly tender poem, like 'The Prophet's Cat', becomes earned by her realism. The air-plane crash which kills the two 'Holiday Girls' is deliberately remote from traditional religious icons, but celebrates "what the heart of the poor has always known", the everyday Holy Family of the beach-party: Mum, Dad and kids.
Are these poems recognisably Anglo-Australian? The Southern hemisphere certainly provides some poetic locations and subject-matter; but it is the world's vanishing forests, and the pathos of cows maddened through fodder ("cattle shall feed upon fowl" - 'The Mad Cow's Song') which define a universal commitment.
Well-travelled and learned, Vicki Raymond presents us here with a fine selection of poems to give pleasure and to illuminate. She always retains, though, that sense of limitation. Our ability to imagine -- or sum up -- other people's lives and situations may be fertile or merely glib, and she warns against too powerful an X-ray gaze in our travels, real and imaginary:
Easy this dishonest imagination.
Secret is the world's heart, our glimpses
touch-downs.
Sun breaks through. The men have withdrawn.
Our plane is
Starting to taxi.
('Touch-down at Frankfurt')
Page(s) 55-56
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