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

     It’s not just a children’s game. Dorothy Nimmo presents a society on the model of game-playing. In the title poem the children play a game of pass the parcel with babies: “In the end the baby is naked and/ everyone falls down.” There is a sudden shift to the cagebirds miners took underground: “as long as it went on singing/ they would know they were alive.” Successively that cage becomes a pushchair (“wheeled cages with plastic covers”) then a zimmer-frame. It locks the aged and the young into a game like the one played by the children at the beginning of the poem when, “The boys pretend to be men. They go out,/ The girls sing love-love-love and rock the babies.” The difference is perhaps that later the adults are not so much playing the game as being played by it.

     In ‘The Wedding Party’ the “Party Girl” is treated to a bizarre mixture of games: they squeeze into the cupboard with “our ankles tied together so we can’t run/ our eggs wobbly in our spoons”. The mix of games continues, but gets sinister:

If you take everything away
how much will she remember?
We tie a scarf over her eyes
and spin her round three times.

Or take ‘Left Right’:

if you had your time again what
would you choose? If you were playing
Oranges and Lemons would you pick
oranges? Lemons? Would you pick me?

Game theory presents the individual’s interaction with the group as being based on a set of permitted strategies, and a set of preferences as to outcome. The main premise of game theory is the rationality of the individual players. Not only that, but each player knows that the other players are also rational, and acts accordingly. So we have a functional model of society, allowing for both competition and co-operation. You have to be playing the same game and you have to be rational. But there are also rational constructs with irrational outcomes. These are the games Nimmo writes about. And at her best, these are the poems she writes.

     This volume shifts constantly from the childlike perspective to the elderly, grandmotherly one. But they are perspectives, points for seeing from, not for sentimentalising. They are the points at which the game can be seen as such, either while it is still “play”, or when it can become the subject of post-match analysis. When she ventures into the gap, as in poems like ‘Expatriate’, the ground becomes dangerous. Too dangerous for sweeping moralisms – in this poem the logic of the progression from violation to incarceration to transcendence is Plath-like, but by assimilation, not imitation.

     Having said that, there are about half a dozen poems in the latter part of the book that fall straight into the moralistic trap. ‘Promenade Performance, Mosedale’ is perhaps the most indicative. A sheepdog trial is presented as a quite obviously manufactured article. The sheep are “imported for the occasion”, “Performances are covered by insurance but/ there is a supplement for the helicopter”. In conclusion,

Soon we will be able to plot our expeditions
to suit our own individual tastes. We will sit
blindfolded, masked and helmeted
having turned down our thermostats
for an authentic chill.

Only in the sterile world of game theory would this happen. Look at extreme sports, where people versed in virtual reality go all out for real danger. The truth will be less logical, and Nimmo has already shown this. The other poems in this part of the volume are all hidebound by the need for this kind of complicated closure. In ‘Being Grandma 2’ the ending

And for him I would walk into the water
and lie down as I did before

almost works. But it is portentous in a way the body of the poem isn’t. The rules of the irrational game: say something heroic in a situation that calls for no heroism in order to prove how much you care. In fact the caring has already been proved. He gives her stones:

I name them: Stripey, Blackie,
Holey, Tiger John.

That’s creativity. That’s play.

     At the end of the volume is a selection from the sequence A Testimony to the Grace of God as Shown in the Life of James Nayler. The entire sequence was published by William Sessions in 1993, and I wish that it could have been reprinted here in its entirety. It presents the life of the “Quaker Jesus”, English, born in 1618, and subjected to savage punishment after being tried for blasphemy by parliament in the mid-seventeenth century, dying shortly afterwards. I confess to not having had the chance to read the whole sequence, and I feel cheated by this selection. It emphasises certain events, in order to remain comprehensible, but because of this the quaker dimension seems downplayed, even missing. Nayler becomes a pure victim, rather than somebody who did something which caused him to be victimised. The effect is that we feel the compassion of the poet for Nayler, while being unable to contextualise it. Yet I suspect the complete sequence may be a fine thing and should be more widely available.