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

David Grubb, FROM THE WHITE ROOM Rondo Publications, 155-7 The Albany, Old Hall Street, Liverpool, 40pp, £1.50 hardback. SOMEWHERE THERE ARE TRAINS Headland Publications, 56 Blakes Lane, New Malden, Surrey KT3 6NX, l6pp, 30p.

Judging by the enthusiasm of the establishment culture pundits for the bloodless doggerel of Larkin and the vapid reminiscenses of Betjeman, 1974 would appear to have been a bad year for British poetry. It is only when one considers the output of the independent presses that one realises how much of value was produced in that same year. The publication of David Grubb’s first major hardback collection by Rondo and a new booklet of his poems by Headland were both cheering events.

     David Grubb is a poet gifted with skill and insight, and when these gifts fuse successfully, as they most often do, the result is that moment of pure balance which is the making of all good poetry. He is not concerned with demonstrations of verbal ingenuity but rather with the achievement of perfect balance.

     ‘From The White Room’ starts off with a sequence about a psychiatric hospital, a potentially dangerous theme handled with absolute assurance, as in the last section of the title poem:

In the white room you forget the future; present and past
come together like tired old professors: they sit down in the
white room and wonder how they cannot see the deaths of others.
Unanswered questions turn to snow.

     There is the same capacity for close observation coupled with empathy in one of the other poems on the same theme, ‘Inside the Institution’

Two of the things I saw inside
the institution, apart from the
man waiting for Mary, apart from
the woman who stroked the chairs,
was the African male nurse who
danced on the table at his first
view of snow, was the old mad man
one evening of the following spring
bending over a potted bulb.

     Further on is one of my favourites among Grubb’s poems, ‘Hearing the Music: Three Songs for my Grandfather’, a perfect example of the poet’s skill as magician:

My grandfather
walks on the lawn.
It is autumn and
sermons lie In his mind
like stone leaves....

     I am less happy with some of the intropesctive poems, those for which the trigger seems to be purely cerebral rather than experienced; ‘In the Old England’ and ‘The Queen is Dying’ seen, to lapse at times into empty dissertation, cataloguing of loosely strung images. Similarly, ‘Imitations’, about the poet’s young daughter, starts off strongly but falls off half-way through with some less assured lines: ‘I think she imitates my broken faith and dances night dance/ and learns the less than accurate despair of clowns and tramps.’

     However, these poems are a small minority and Grubb’s talent is confirmed by such pieces as ‘The Tramps’ and ‘Henry County Farm Scene, January’ with its bleakopening lines which bring to mind the desolation of a Wyeth landscape:

The old woman works
wihh hands forced deep into the rippled bladders
of ruined gloves
helping her husband keep up the sky:
they take advantage of tight earth, squat’ horizons,
winter’s fixed geology.

     The ‘Sequences for Wallace Stevens’ are ambitious but fragmented, an interestingly flawed experiment; some of the 3-line verses stick in the mind like burrs (‘There are no other ways of doing this;/ each man gets out, gets up, dances/ and breaks his legs beneath the sun.’), but the aphorisms do not always come off. Towards the end of the book ‘The Priests of Wessex’ is Grubb at his very best, a tightly-knit poem of great clarity and depth:

The priests of Wessex love the wide days of summer
when the wind is a white horse with a happy rider
and the mystery is calmed by green fields and high
flying laughter. There is space then to forget the
scars, the deep animal blood, the movements that cannot
let this land alone . . . . . . . . .
                                            . . . . . . And the priests
keep their conversations short, carry those dry official
smiles, wishing they were poets. They have become improbable
messengers or staggering servants in a land of fabulous code.

     ‘Somewhere There Are Trains’ reprints the Stevens sequence and includes ‘Formal Elegy on the Death of my American Father-in-Law….’, a poem which I was not much moved by at first but which tends to grow on one. There is also an example of Grubb’s most recent style, a sequence called ‘The Park Animals Learn to Love the Concert Hall and Music which is the Middle of their Zoo. Oh yes.’ I look forward to a future collection of the new, slightly fantastic Grubb, but since this is the only example in both the collections considered here I shall put off a detailed discussion, merely quoting the last part of the sequence:

The elephants pining for Beethoven
their ears like gargantuan rhubard leaves
gone grey with waiting:

nothing can ever be the same now.

     Finally, the Headland pamphlet contains ‘Priest on a Bicycle’, another of those unpretentious poems by Grubb the conjuror, which are completely irresistible:

The priest whizzes down hill
on his red bicycle.
He does not mind the trees; they
offer no confusion.
He is late for Mass and
early blue houses hold nothing
but grey spiders.
Telephone wires dice the sun.
His eyes slim in damp fists of
sudden wind. When he gets to the river
he rides in the water that has all the
night been flowing under the old church
door. He loves the breath of liquid bells.