Correspondence
Min Menai
Ffordd Siliwen
Bangor
Gwynedd
To the editor of Poetry Wales
Dear Cary Archard,
In his review of Donald Ward's recent collection of poems, Border Country, in the Autumn issue of Poetry Wales, Philip Owens has a good many hard things to say about the poet. Whether these are justified as a whole I cannot say, since I have not yet read the book. The language of the bits he quotes seems alive at least, and I suspect that the sort of response that he notates with condemnations like 'self-conscious' and 'odd' is far too negative to allow a (presumably) young poet the space to grow. Of course poetry is self-conscious what art is not? and of course in the modern world poetry is odd. What we have to decide is the value of the oddity.
Mr Owens may be right, as I say, as far as the book as a whole is concerned; but he quotes one entire poem, and there I am quite sure that his comments are misleading and actually wrong. If you will allow me to requote the poem it is fortunately quite short:
WALKING TOWARDS HOME
A rook is flying high
over a line of trees
almost asleep -
it is the distance that I seeand the elegance of a bird
that is also shadow
as it wheels in slow precision
for the bough.
Mr Owens uses this as an example of Mr Ward's alleged determination to throw the reader off the scent all the time (all the time?) and leave him with a 'So what?' feeling at the end of each poem. Mr Owens alleges that the only thing the poet really says in this poem is contained in the fourth and fifth lines; the rest is mere decoration. And why Towards Home, in the title?
Now, with respect, 'It is the distance that I see / and the elegance of a bird' is not at all the same thing as the whole poem. First of all, it is a rook – and rooks are generally anything but elegant. There's a surprising quality about this rook. It is 'almost asleep', it is moving with the slow precision of the very tired, it is wheeling round its roosting place not quite able to grip the bough, not yet quite precise enough to sleep. I'm not quite sure whether it is the bird or its elegance that the poet says 'is also shadow'. I think its elegance. At all events it is a very rich line, full of hints of meaning. The blackness of the bird, of course, is suggested; but also its sleep-walking quality, the elegance of a great dancer tired to death but still moving with innate grace -the more grace the more tired she is. The sixth line is the climax of the poem, and is in fact what the rest of it serves to illuminate the elegance that is also shadow.
And why Towards Home in the title? Because the poet is thus shown as identifying with the rook. We feel that he too is weary, moving with the almost subconscious 'elegance', the almost automatic 'shadow' behaviour of the very tired. He too is 'wheeling' for his roost, walking towards home. As a title 'Walking Home' would be inadequate: it would not give this essential clue, and therefore the poem would be only half-complete.
And, if I am not mistaken, the poet is also talking about the way an image will operate as an objective correlative of a man's emotional state. The poet walks home in the evening, looks up at the distance and sees the rook. That's the way poems happen. And, in a way, the poem itself is like the rook, as it is being written, wheeling in slow precision out of the distance towards its resting place. At all events (and I allow that I may be being over-subtle at this point) it answered to something so definite in my own creative experience that I would be surprised if the poet totally disavowed my suggestion. The combination of 'distance' – the vistas of the subconscious; 'tiredness' – the inertia that the artist must face before he can create; and 'slowly wheeling round a resting place' – the actual fashioning of the poem: is all too familiar to me as a mode of making poems.
Be that as it may, the poem is a good example of late imagist writing. I would have thought that a reviewer of poetry in the nineteen eighties ought to be able to see its virtues, even if he disapproves of the kind of poem it is.
Yours sincerely,
ANTHONY CONRAN
Page(s) 79-80
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