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

This is an astonishing document to come out in England: Dostoyevskian in dolour, masochism, sadism, damnation and redemption, and yet totally English in its matrix and even its morbidity.

     Anyone who thinks they had burdensome parents should compare notes with this double prize-winning story. I say ‘story’ advisedly, for it’s a narrative in all its eleven parts, with a beginning, middle and end, a problem and a dénouement. It’s the story of a seriously ill parent - psychotic, fanatical for control. He hung over his children’s beds like an axe to ensure, with smacks, they slept in the right position. He turned the narrator s sister, crazed with eczema, onto her sore side and when she cried slapped her face. She died at six months under his hand. The children were supposed to lie sideways on the pillow, hands folded in prayer under one cheek. ‘To ease an itch was sin’ - an eye open, thinking him gone, even nictation, and the hand came out of the darkness: ‘I always to aim to miss the eye itself.’

I’d be eating my cornflakes -
STOP!
What?
Don’t say ‘what.’ Breathe through your nose.
But I am.
Don’t answer me back. You’re breathing through your
cornflakes; now breathe correctly, through your nose.
But you knew. You knew I couldn’t,
bunged up with adenoids, catarrh, what else.
Breathe properly!
Only my mother’s fury in-
hibited your hand, itching to thump the mastoid.

     Yet the child loved his father, found him handsome, identified him with the Trevor Howard of Brief Encounter. The terrible rows the children heard downstairs once led to near-murder by the mother, and soon after that the parents broke up - ‘we became happy and you got rich’: apparently, ‘Europe’s top man in steel’, -

                              you rise
to air-conditioned luxury in Mayfair.
Key-money on your flat would buy our house outright.

     Ogled by choir-girls, at fifty-five Dad still sings the Messiah and The Lost Chord, with only half an intestine from his bleeding duodenal ulcer. Then he dies on the narrator’s birthday, and they hear about it from the CID. Dad’s transvestism - presumably this is what he had been trying all his life to control - has led to his death, strapped to a fantastic pain-machine gone wrong in a high-class brothel.

     Yet it’s the child who asks forgiveness of the father in this paradoxical story. The Christian relationships are turned upside down. The sinning father is the crucified Christ, and his child is the would-be redeemer. By an heroic act of masochism or imagination or both, the son has understood his afflicting and afflicted Dad not as evil but in need of love and touch, which the son now feels able to give: ‘Touch me…as I touch and am touched’:

And now,
drawn by complicity of sex and pain,
through the soft female stigmata impressed or
embossed on the equine body of the male -
the nipples, the empty nail-holes, the navel
with its little hill, the open slit – here
in the Brera, Milan, before Bellini,
I reach out hands to you dead Father. Dad.

     The narrator’s experience seems to have led him to a new conception of Christ - his suffering seen as in no sense respectable: Christ and the father, Christ in the father ‘like some ghostly escapement’, wounded in his sex as well as his soul, is bisexual in his suffering, transcendent through his suffering.

     It is astounding, and also a triumph, that such material has found publication in this squeamish country - ready enough for violent entertainment but not enquiry into violence, and prone to covert censorship through petty office-holders and ad-hoc publishing house appointments. But how far is this a poem, rather than a therapeutic anamnesis? I think it’s both. It does look like prose cut up: the line-divisions are measured by thought or syntax. But the concrete detail, the articulation, the control and organisation of refractory material, and the victory of consciousness over the personal censor that this implies, the general impassioned exaltation, coming perhaps from a sense of being elect in suffering, take this confession, though imperfectly, into the dimension of art.