It's a jungle indoors: review
The Elephant in the Room by David H. W. Grubb
The Elephant in the Room by David H. W. Grubb, 76pp, £9.00, Driftwood Publications, 5 Timms Lane, Formby, Merseyside, L37 9DW. 2004.
The Elephant in the Room seeks to inhabit the spaces between things, the precarious edges of life. It loves the words ‘light’ and ‘silence’, those weightless ones, somewhere between tactility and thought. The dreamscape of ‘Piano at Midnight’ for example, is no simple dreamscape, but one in which refuge from the present is rendered in the detail of an ‘orchard of owls’, a ‘blouse smelling of gooseberry’, descriptions which condense the delicacy of the words themselves, whilst evoking a specific scene.
The precariousness of the routines which govern a life are dramatised in the title poem. In some ways, I dislike its existential angst: ‘It goes on and on like this because nobody/is allowed to say it will not, cannot, must not’, but only when it becomes too general. Its power is recouped in the small, surreal reaches of the language. I love how it unsettles the
…sometimes a joke
begins to slip sideways and we all rush to
deliver a punch line in case
something is exposed.
‘A Map of my Father’s Mind’ sketches scenes from different countries, like clippings, composing the father’s ‘map’ of something both larger and smaller than himself. It is in the details of these locations that we get a real evocation of them, at once familiar and lucidly new. This occurs in the ‘dawns’ that ‘smell of rhubarb’ and in the juxtapositions between overwhelming human emotions and events and the concrete happenings of life:
In the summer his mother floats between hymns
and griefs and the pig called Sally squelches the apples
between maisepulp feasts.
This is where Grubb is at his best, when details have equal status with his more philosophical preoccupations. It has the curious and pleasing effect of making everything both meaningful and contingent. In privileging the seemingly insignificant, the colours and deepens the larger questions.
There is plenty of humour too. ‘A Poem about Peter who took his Eye out’ is a deceptively simple portrait of a child who uses his false eye to gain attention. Asking childish questions about Peter’s motivations, it heightens the sense that his audience consists of children, allowing us to feel child-like and ending on a haunting note that can be thought through with an adult or a child’s mind:
…he kept
it in at night so that
he could see with it in
his dreams
This line resonates after the poem is over, evoking the sense that there is far more to this half-glimpsed child than (excuse the pun…) meets the eye.
While, in the main, I like Grubb’s form of questioning, on occasion I’d prefer to be prompted more into asking my own questions. In ‘Jeune Fille à la Fenêtre’, he evokes the scene of a girl at a window, wondering at the speaker’s implication in the very scene he describes. He leaves us with the question: ‘In what way are we part of her story/her fiction, the event, this occasion?’ If there is a criticism to be made, it would be against these more obviously philosophical treatments, those that tell me their ideas, rather than manifesting them in flesh and blood, earth and water materiality. This he does elsewhere to excellent effect, as in ‘John Clare, Coughing’:
So, cough against your elbow, do all you can to disguise
this fact of dying.
Existential musings are also dealt with brilliantly in the eccentric character poems, such as ‘Other’, in which the protagonist has disappeared after hurling ‘himself at the mirror/in an attempt to discover other’. A witty, surreal micro-narrative packed with earthy, resonant images; ‘singing stones’ books which ‘stank of berries and old orchards’, ‘his letter to the zoo’. It is an involving, ingenious piece, an enjoyable combination of a frown and a smile, and not without writerly magic, something difficult to come by.
Grubb is preoccupied with silence, as in the cleverly titled ‘Remaining on Air’, in which an imaginary DJ has no music. He does not ‘do silence’ and will
…never give in
to them, even in between motets and vespers
and the chantings of monks and other creatures.
I do not see the silence of fish, of grass, of
string, of empty mansions, of lost scores.
As beautiful a list as you’ll see in any poem, slyly asserting itself through the DJ’s denials.
In a benedictive poem ‘I Wish You’, Grubb also privileges silence, and creates another stunning catalogue of images:
Between one word and another
I wish you silence.
Between the going and the entering
I wish you laughing.
Between the hill and the cottage
I wish you sea.
Between thunder and snow
I wish you visits.
Quiet, simple and striking, but above all, human – this is where you’ll find, if not the answers, the right questions.
The Elephant in the Room seeks to inhabit the spaces between things, the precarious edges of life. It loves the words ‘light’ and ‘silence’, those weightless ones, somewhere between tactility and thought. The dreamscape of ‘Piano at Midnight’ for example, is no simple dreamscape, but one in which refuge from the present is rendered in the detail of an ‘orchard of owls’, a ‘blouse smelling of gooseberry’, descriptions which condense the delicacy of the words themselves, whilst evoking a specific scene.
The precariousness of the routines which govern a life are dramatised in the title poem. In some ways, I dislike its existential angst: ‘It goes on and on like this because nobody/is allowed to say it will not, cannot, must not’, but only when it becomes too general. Its power is recouped in the small, surreal reaches of the language. I love how it unsettles the
…sometimes a joke
begins to slip sideways and we all rush to
deliver a punch line in case
something is exposed.
‘A Map of my Father’s Mind’ sketches scenes from different countries, like clippings, composing the father’s ‘map’ of something both larger and smaller than himself. It is in the details of these locations that we get a real evocation of them, at once familiar and lucidly new. This occurs in the ‘dawns’ that ‘smell of rhubarb’ and in the juxtapositions between overwhelming human emotions and events and the concrete happenings of life:
In the summer his mother floats between hymns
and griefs and the pig called Sally squelches the apples
between maisepulp feasts.
This is where Grubb is at his best, when details have equal status with his more philosophical preoccupations. It has the curious and pleasing effect of making everything both meaningful and contingent. In privileging the seemingly insignificant, the colours and deepens the larger questions.
There is plenty of humour too. ‘A Poem about Peter who took his Eye out’ is a deceptively simple portrait of a child who uses his false eye to gain attention. Asking childish questions about Peter’s motivations, it heightens the sense that his audience consists of children, allowing us to feel child-like and ending on a haunting note that can be thought through with an adult or a child’s mind:
…he kept
it in at night so that
he could see with it in
his dreams
This line resonates after the poem is over, evoking the sense that there is far more to this half-glimpsed child than (excuse the pun…) meets the eye.
While, in the main, I like Grubb’s form of questioning, on occasion I’d prefer to be prompted more into asking my own questions. In ‘Jeune Fille à la Fenêtre’, he evokes the scene of a girl at a window, wondering at the speaker’s implication in the very scene he describes. He leaves us with the question: ‘In what way are we part of her story/her fiction, the event, this occasion?’ If there is a criticism to be made, it would be against these more obviously philosophical treatments, those that tell me their ideas, rather than manifesting them in flesh and blood, earth and water materiality. This he does elsewhere to excellent effect, as in ‘John Clare, Coughing’:
So, cough against your elbow, do all you can to disguise
this fact of dying.
Existential musings are also dealt with brilliantly in the eccentric character poems, such as ‘Other’, in which the protagonist has disappeared after hurling ‘himself at the mirror/in an attempt to discover other’. A witty, surreal micro-narrative packed with earthy, resonant images; ‘singing stones’ books which ‘stank of berries and old orchards’, ‘his letter to the zoo’. It is an involving, ingenious piece, an enjoyable combination of a frown and a smile, and not without writerly magic, something difficult to come by.
Grubb is preoccupied with silence, as in the cleverly titled ‘Remaining on Air’, in which an imaginary DJ has no music. He does not ‘do silence’ and will
…never give in
to them, even in between motets and vespers
and the chantings of monks and other creatures.
I do not see the silence of fish, of grass, of
string, of empty mansions, of lost scores.
As beautiful a list as you’ll see in any poem, slyly asserting itself through the DJ’s denials.
In a benedictive poem ‘I Wish You’, Grubb also privileges silence, and creates another stunning catalogue of images:
Between one word and another
I wish you silence.
Between the going and the entering
I wish you laughing.
Between the hill and the cottage
I wish you sea.
Between thunder and snow
I wish you visits.
Quiet, simple and striking, but above all, human – this is where you’ll find, if not the answers, the right questions.
Page(s) 51-53
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