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Then and Now by W. D. Jackson.
Menard Press / MPT Books, 8 The Oaks, Woodside Avenue, London, N12 8AR. 140pp.; £7.99

This, the author tells us, is the first instalment of an extended work in progress, “an endless poem, of no known category” (as Pound described the cantos in a letter to Joyce). It is this kind of modernism that is the poem’s background. Jackson quotes, alludes, translates and paraphrases in order to explore what is happening in the world both politically and culturally. He attempts, in that Borgesian sense, to create a poem “that is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader …”. This works – provided that the reader is as well read as Jackson. All will smile at the imitation of Eliot in the first section, but many may find the adaptations from Ernst Jandl less familiar. Note how Jackson fits snugly into Eliot’s clothes:

Father father (not among these necks
All correctly attired)
I a tired head
Amongst these heads
Who said out loud crumpets.

It has the right tone with the pedantic “correctly attired”; but, just in case a reader misses the allusion, Eliot makes several appearances in the notes:

In the London offices of Faber & Gwyer, publishers
At approximately the time that Mr Eliot joined the company.

The poem, or at least this first part, consists of a prologue followed by four sections, each of which is subdivided. The prologue sets out the author’s intention in a simple rhymed verse; but its quotations and allusions prepare us for something more important. The first part, titled ‘Self Portrait of a White Collar Worker’, consists of translations from Heine’s Deutschland, adaptations from Jandl, plus original poems that allow Jackson (or at least a version of Jackson), the “white collar worker”, to appear:

I have been suffering all this week
From a tongue gone brittle earning its bread
By chopping words. Your curious lick
Raises me from the clattering dead,
But your back’s still tense. Our silent sex
                    Fits my concave to your convex.

The section ends with an outstanding poem ostensibly about a German secretary, but covering many aspects of Germany’s past by asking those questions about what one can, or should, do when faced with the unbearable, and in Germany’s case, the often disturbing:

Our German secretary. Her Nazi father,
She informed my embarrassed wife and me
One evening after wurst and kraut,
Had relished public beatings. Rather
Than watch the prisoners shuffle out
To the crowd’s indifferent shout
She’d help to make the official tea.

Part Two is a celebration of Heine; the third part returns to Jackson, particularly in the last poems, covering a visit to his birth place of Toxteth during the civil unrest. Jackson has lived and worked in Germany for nearly three decades. He is confused by the sparkling new shopping precincts, theatres and superficial wealth of Thatcher’s Britain, which is contrasted with the reality of Toxteth:

Drones in her phoney accent, “Whoever ’dve thought
Such things could happen in England?” Where she bought
Her get-up, she thinks is England. High rise flats
And derelict back-to-backs are England too –

It is also the place “where more than half the shops / Are boarded up”, where the “dole’s still the dole – humiliation / Aggro, envy, bored frustration”. The polemic against the “evil” of self-serving capitalism is, with a nod to George Orwell and Keats, weighed against the illusion of a more honest civilisation that is evoked through the Beatrice-like figure of his daughter:

Yet every child sees its Paradise before
It’s kicked in the head by the mad donkey. Later
‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’ is a saw
Meaningless to most of us. But its creator
Knew it might change the world.

The section ends with a general grumble that takes in capitalism, the monarchy and religion. It is also a plea that humankind is more than an unthinking animal bound in with iron laws. There is a Blake-like quality to the simple rhymed verse.

   Jackson may be stating the obvious, but every so often it is necessary for artists, whether writers, musicians or painters, to catalogue the situation, to ask those questions that we are too busy to think about. Jackson has done that in a lively way; but he offers no answers, there is no resolution at the poem’s end. I found this disappointing and frustrating but, as the author says, this is only the first part of a long poem.

   In these days when so much poetry is solipsism, it is refreshing to read a poem that attempts something larger, to examine cultural history and the individual’s place within the system. As in any long poem, there are dull sections and for many the versions from Heine may prove off-putting. Whether all the fragments come together to make a coherent whole is for each reader to decide; for some it may remain a collection of separate poems and translations, though there is nothing wrong with that. Naturally there are areas for lively disagreement; this is, as he suggests, a dialogue. Jackson has a tendency to rant at times and some may find his conventional metrics uncomfortable, though the rhyming is seldom clumsy. After finishing the poem, I wanted to read it again, That does not happen very often these days.