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Qwerty by Paul Groves
(Seren, 2008)

Qwerty is Paul Groves’ fifth poetry collection to be published in the past three decades. The TLS prize winner sees images in the mundane, in the unexpected, and has fun with them. In ‘Talking to the Wallpaper’, the character does exactly that:

                Kneeling, I face
the horizon of the dado

The poet conjures the William Morris paper with a few sinuous words:

among the curlices, the tendril forest

which fit both the paper and the religious crisis going on in the poem, which ends with a horrendous, but hilarious, pun:

Jesus had his flock:
I have mine.

But images of fury, of discontentment, of insignificance abound. Dylan Thomas reading sounds “like raging owls/full of primal guilt”, two people who commit suicide are “tunes on a penny whistle”. People aging are “victims/of an uncommitted crime”.

Few of Groves’ characters are sympathetic; if they are someone in the poem isn’t: mysteriously appearing undertakers, smug Greenlandic literati, the sadist in ‘The Sadist’s Children’.

Some of them are capable of abandonment, even relish it. One leaves his wife in the Outback after she demands “some space”. Others deposit their mother at ‘Grans ‘R’ Us’ in the Scottish islands, with the callousness of people who are deluding themselves:

As we chugged towards the mainland we remembered
those happy suburban years nothing could touch.

Groves constantly plays on the dichotomy between inner thought and outer action, never more clearly than in ‘Dead of Night’, about a man who consummated his relationship with his dead fiancée:

She still can laugh and cry and bleed,

circling on time’s carousel
to claim him as the delving blade
hits hardwood

ending with the prosaic yet horrifying ‘Strong fingers grapple with the lid’.

Black humour runs throughout, whether the irony is internal, as in ‘Greenland Literati’ “ ‘How’s the modern saga progressing – or shouldn’t I ask?’ ” or forced on the poem by exterior circumstance, in ‘The Wasp Trap’:

I stopped the practice when my father broke
the silence of three decades to declare
that his old man…
… had died when a torpedo’d hit the hull.

Death is ever present, even in the poem with the lightest tone, ‘Augury’. Its rhyming couplets swiftly ask famous people to avoid their methods of death:

Isadora Duncan, send every scarf you own
to some deserving person or let it out on loan.

But another comic irony is on its way:

Marie Curie radiates health
and the soothsayer’s warning is ignored.

Often, the more formal a poem, the lighter its tone. The more formal a poem, the more likely a sting in the tale:

Darkness, doom and drink combined
to bring Dylan to his knees.
Shame he sounded so refined
                  in lines such as these

Groves alternates between these verses and longer-lined poems showing the thought processes of his characters, most clearly in the Victorian stuffiness of Lord Palmerston in ‘Lord Palmerston’s Demise’, the denseness of the words illuminating how bound up in themselves these people are:

When my heart stopped
moments ago the paroxysm of consummation
became unearthly

‘Suspended Animation’ has shorter lines, but its character is just as trapped as Groves’ others. The tight, interlocking rhymes and constant striking on “I” and “you” giving it the obsessive feel of a man who can’t move on from a relationship. At the beginning and the end, he is doing the same thing: “I watch the hours come round.”

Even when the character is a river, it is trapped. Of course, the form of ‘Last Throes’ mirrors the journey of the Wye as it flows towards obliteration in the Severn.The rhyme is regular, the rhythm naturally matching the river’s pace as it attains

a settled middle age among
the fields of Herefordshire

The rhyme breaks down as it nears the Severn from if/life in the second stanza to say/agony and between/Severn in the third, but resolving with the maturity/purity observers other than the poet see as it rages into the bigger river.

The 2007 TLS winning poem ‘The Mauve Tam-o’-shanter’ also uses rhyme to pull the poem to its inevitable, unwanted conclusion:

and so a journey once begun
so flippantly reduced to one
man gazing at a polished floor

Groves builds a picture of a relationship, beginning with the hat, with never a spare word until the final gut-punch:

And yet I sense it wasn’t meant
                  to end like this.