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

This is a curious book, moving in its way but unevenly structured in terms of rhythm and language. As the title says, it’s a monologue of sorts and further information tells us it was written in response to the death of the poet’s wife, an event it clearly took time to come to terms with. Aldiss starts by showing how the world just goes on despite personal tragedies:

Sometimes I walk along the street where the
                                                            living
Earn their bread - or else are old, morose, and
Shop in supermarkets instead. And some I
                                                             meet
(I know it by their stares) have also suffered
                                                              loss.
Others are young and go in pairs, happy and
                                                              close.

He then slowly builds up the picture as he recalls moments when his wife was still alive and he refers to a video showing her doing ordinary things in an ordinary way. At one time we would have had to rely on memory, and perhaps a few old photographs and letters, to recreate the past, but the advent of videos has given us the opportunity almost to see the dead in action:

The occasion was my birthday treat;
Into our circular courtyard came
The sun, empowered like an ocean.
          Watching this video, I hoped
To look once more upon her face.
The family gathered round while she
Played gracious hostess, had a smile
For everyone, and brought us tea.

     Aldiss provides a narrative of the affair, the marriage, the family, and his own grief. He also tells us how, tidying up after his wife’s death, he unlocked her bureau and found a list “of my misdeeds and faults (‘His thick complacency! A bore’)” and had to question his assumptions about the relationship. But he eventually realised that he had much to be thankful for in the years they spent together.

     As I said, the poem can be quite moving but the technique used to present it to the reader is odd. The lines range across the page, sometimes rhyming conventionally, sometimes internally, sometimes not at all. There are places where prose takes over, or appears to do, and I began to wonder if the whole thing might not have worked better as a kind of prose poem. And the language varies from the direct (“When she became so weak, she would spend the day on the chaise longue in my study”) to the would-be poetic (“For with such grace and beauty gone, what worth this world to wander on?”), with the result that the effect is uneasy. It’s as if the writer can’t quite make up his mind about how best to deal with the subject and needs to use a form of supposed-poetic expression to dignify it.

     I didn’t have any difficulty in reading A Plutonian Monologue, and its sincerity is obvious, but judged from a purely literary point of view its flaws affect the overall impression it creates.