Clotted Cream
Aidan Mathews: According to the Small Hours. London: Cape, £8.
Being an Irish writer in a century dominated by your compatriots – all those giants (Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney) casting long shadows over the corner of land you’re trying to cultivate – must have been especially tough. So I wanted to enjoy According to the Small Hours, Aidan Mathews’s first book of poems since 1983, a fat collection that refreshingly bears no trace of Paul Muldoon, the pre-eminent influence now that Craig Raine has gone out of fashion. Borrowing the odd cup of sugar from Muldoon has been de rigueur for at least a decade, a practice that has had distinct advantages, not least a ready-made audience – no need to create the taste by which you’re enjoyed when your mentor will have done the spade-work for you. This is perhaps putting it a little cynically. All those pale imitations of Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin didn’t set out to be second-rate – their decisions were no doubt based on an intoxicated enthusiasm rather than a shrewd calculating of the literary stock-exchange – and anyway, the long-term disadvantage of this route is probable oblivion. After all, why read the imitation when you can have the real thing? Does anyone now savour the hand-me-down Martianisms of David Sweetman’s Looking into the Deep End? Must we make room on the shelf for Anthony Thwaite’s ‘Mr Cooper’ when Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ is already there?
A fifteen-year sabbatical might also account for the fact that According to the Small Hours betrays no evidence of the stupid gene, introduced to the poetry of these islands in a vain attempt to expand the readership. It might have begun with a few poets reciting to indifferent commuters on Waterloo station as part of 1987’s Poetry Live but probably goes back even further, to the 1960s and the Albert Hall, where poetry first chirruped that it was the new rock ‘n’ roll. So, Aidan Mathews’s poems have an unfashionable gravitas, and though their gentle timbre suggests Michael Longley (whose imprimatur adorns the collection’s back cover) and their loping lines might superficially resemble the work of Ciaran Carson via C.K. Williams, he really doesn’t seem to be working in any single contemporary writer’s shadow.
A big thumbs up, then, for the adventurousness of According to the Small Hours, which everywhere refuses to strike a crowd-pleasing, glib note. Anything but throwaway, these proliferous poems are as baffling as they are impressive, seeding images that spread across the page (Mathews tends towards an unrhymed free-verse line of five or more stresses). His is a numinous poetry dazzlingly littered with objects. A twenty-two line poem like ‘Biddings’, for example, includes photocopied bidding-prayers, a presbytery sideboard, paperbacks, a black and white picture of a woman in lemon, a peace-prayer, charge-cards, an organ donor ID, an ambulance and images that range from a mushroom-cloud to “the carbon of a kimono”. Though the collection is divided into three sections – moving backwards from ‘Compline’ to ‘Vigil’ and finally ‘Lauds’ – organisation is a distant second place to a climate of profusion. Ideas are transformed as they are handed on, like the wedding dress in ‘Wearings’ converted to a child’s Communion dress then a christening shawl then a mantilla, after which it is compared to
the fishing-net the Virginia creeper crept through
In the bistro that was a fort at the top of the mountain
Where, if you lifted your head and looked out the arrow-slit,
You could see the valley whitening with April
The guiding principle of According to the Small Hours, this shifting, metamorphic quality is more frustrating than it is rewarding. If only Mathews would pause for a moment, settle on a single image and let it take root in the reader’s imagination rather than burgeon on the page; so many of these poems would benefit from an increased attention-span to cope with the incorrigibly plural world he describes. A thought only has to occur for it to lead to another, then another: “The thousand nuclear breast-pocket/ Ballpoints aimed at the curving globe in our galaxy/ Were the mythical here-be-monsters of Krishna’s milkmaids// The day I warmed my blue hands on a hot-water bottle/ While a girl took off her bra like it was Duccio’s studio.” That’s from ‘Surgeon at Seventy-Five’, though, by the time these lines arrive, the surgeon has – much like the father at the seaside, up to his neck in sand in ‘The Burial Party’ – disappeared beneath a weight of imagery.
There are hints of autobiography buried in the book, apparent references to Mathews’s career as a prose writer – “My true-life fictions are out in Czech and Slovak”, a drawer is full of “my remaindered fiction” – and also poems about illness and hospitalisation. It is tempting to regard the collection’s most elliptical moments as the private workings of a mind in turmoil, though this is not the diaristic turmoil of Lowell, and there is little opportunity for the reader to construct a coherent narrative from the material. Never merely confessional, these poems are troublingly self-sufficient, airless in a manner that is sometimes too close to the crossword-clue for their own good:
Spotlit melanomas on goose-pimpled ghost-bikini tops.
or
Cider-freaks like glassblowers float condoms among obelisks.
It is interesting to imagine what formal constraints might have done to this book, though such curbs on the imagination would undoubtedly have left it a less original work. Perhaps According to the Small Hours heralds an important new voice and I am just too obtuse to hear it. Take a look at T.S. Eliot’s early reviews to see how wide of the mark his first critics turned out to be. Aidan Mathews is certainly a serious poet, and it would be pleasing if my estimation of his work were confounded.
Page(s) 74-76
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