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Mark McGuinness reviews E A Markham’s John Lewis & Co. (Anvil £5) and Ian Duhig’s The Lammas Hireling (Picador £7.99)

The title of E A Markham’s eighth book of poetry, John Lewis & Co., contains the first of many calculated let-downs; the company in question is not the well-known chain of department stores, but a small cab firm in Stoke Newington owned by “a man who answers Yes to John Lewis” but who “is not recognised by his own High Street / Managers”. The cab driver shares the stage of Markham’s “little play” with “the Professor”, the play’s Argument setting the
scene:

    They are the same age and arrived in this country within three   
    years of each other, in the 1950s, and lived, for a time, in the
    same street in Kilburn. They are both on the point of departing
    England—  the Professor, on his way to Waterloo for Paris, his
    prospective new home; Mr Lewis, planning for retirement in
    Jamaica.

The dramatic structure enables Markham to telescope two lifetimes’ worth of personal and cultural history into just over 30 pages of verse. The play starts with an ‘Epilogue’ and ends with an ‘Interlude’, creating a sense of temporal disorientation as well as gently deflating the characters’ pretensions. Death enters with the
opening lines:

    Here we are after all those funerals
    dressed in these clothes not meant for funerals
    as we head to the house or pub relieved
    that food and drink will comfort and divert us
    for some time longer.

The words “relieved” and “divert us”, highlighted by the line breaks, are undercut by the implications of “for some time longer”; the comforts and diversions are running out for the two elderly characters, and “both are anxious about what awaits them in what they refuse to call retirement”. Though Markham never resorts to heavy-handed symbolism, death provides a sombre backdrop to the wry comedy of his observations and the characters’ small talk, creating a sense of urgency for both author and characters:

                                          Some strange
    business keeps me here. I have an hour
    to disprove that one or other of us
    is auditioning for the unlived life.

Faced with this predicament, as if they were performers in an audition studio or anteroom to reality, the characters’ response is telling:

    Each knows he has much in common with the other, but can’t   
    resist stressing difference.

The tension between sameness and difference can be heard in the subtle modulations Markham plays on the word “brother”, as the story unfolds through a taxi-ride to a missed train, impromptu hospitality at Lewis’ home, a funeral and the final trip to Waterloo and beyond. Sometimes “brother” is used between the black characters to indicate membership of what Lewis calls “the community” (“You listening to the Brother?”); at others there is a suggestion of the intimacy and rivalry of blood brothers (“So tell me my brother…”). At each moment the characters are feeling each other out, testing, looking for an opportunity to “pull rank” or “upstage” the other:

    I stop him pulling rank
    with wife and children; I will not envy
    this relic; my partner, whether ex-
    or current, will not be summoned to tip
    the scale of privilege.

For the Professor, calibrating “the scale of privilege” is tricky, involving considerations of race, class, education and his “usual themes of who’s up, / Who’s down in the small literary world / Outsiders have limited interest in”. These kind of calculations bring a constant anxiety about the possibility of being taken down a peg or two when you least expect it:

    Yes, we agree on the things that matter,
    awkward to talk about when you’re grown up:
    being waved at by a stranger, in the street;
    waving back to find someone behind you,
    the likelier partner, like living a life
    in an old Chaplin film. But here again
    he upstages me:

Embarrassment, humiliation, dismay and the struggle for credibility preoccupy the Professor throughout John Lewis & Co., and they are handled with Markham’s characteristically sharp, self-deprecating wit. The sense of awkwardness is heightened subtly by the syllabic form; most of the book is written in verse paragraphs usually of ten-syllable lines, setting up and resisting expectations of iambic pentameter. Instead of strolling along comfortably in blank verse, the reader is forced to check and retrace her steps, with a sense of wearing shoes that don’t quite fit.

Markham’s treatment of rank and status, as well as the dramatic form, put me in mind of Keith Johnstone’s remarks on status in Impro, his classic book on dramatic improvisation: “every inflection and movement implies a status … no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless”’. As Lewis and the Professor fence politely with small talk, they are engaged in a “battle to convince” (Markham), to gain the high ground—moral or otherwise. Johnstone goes on to say that “acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together … If I take a friend a cup of tea then I might say ‘Get up, you old cow’, or ‘Your Highness’ tea’, pretending to raise or lower the status”. So the status game is still played, but played for fun. Part of the pathos of John Lewis & Co. comes from the fact that Lewis and the Professor never reach this stage, never quite trust each other enough to let their guard down and play, and so remain brothers in name only.

Markham has stated “I write, quite simply—and it’s not simple—to make myself more human” (A Rough Climate). John Lewis & Co. contains more human frailty than human warmth and it is certainly not simple. It is an intriguing, funny, disturbing little book in which the vision of people “auditioning for the unlived life” is finely counterbalanced by the pleasure of reading accomplished verse.

If Markham’s Professor is preoccupied with a “small literary world”, Ian Duhig is evidently conscious of inhabiting a wide literary and linguistic universe, in which the words and phrases he uses in his poetry have a busy life elsewhere—whether as brand names, saws, folk riddles and charms, lines from pop songs, the name of an internet search engine, or technical terms for a ship’s rigging. Coming from a writer who once used poetry to treat recovering heroin addicts, The Lammas Hireling conveys a vivid sense of poetry as language with a job to do, whether to heal, curse, bless, absolve or work transforming magic—a stance that seems at odds with Auden’s much quoted line “poetry makes nothing happen”, but not his often overlooked rider, a few lines later, that poetry is “a way of happening”.

An obvious example of poetry as an active agent is the humorous curse Traditional Irish Charm which must have delighted the schoolchildren for whom it was written:

     I curse you to suffer with
     Projectile diarrhoea
     Runny as buttermilk
     For one whole year

Other poems involving curses include Vilbia, where Duhig imagines the effects of a Roman curse tablet found in Bath, and American Graffiti I: Women’s Room, where the Goddess Tlaelquani, Eater of Excrement, invites women to pray for revenge on men who have harmed them: “Open your mouth. Ask.” I tracked down Tlaelquani on the internet by ‘Googling’ (a favoured Duhig word) and discovered she was a goddess of confession as well as excrement and sexuality; in American Graffiti the toilet stall becomes a confessional, a place for “all the skeletons in your closets”. Although this is not ‘confessional poetry’ in the modern sense, it is closer to the original sense of ‘confession’ where words enacted a healing ritual of disclosure and absolution.

The title poem of The Lammas Hireling contains another macabre confession. The poem starts like a Hardy short story, with the hiring of a labourer at a country fair, but the farmer gets more than he bargained for from his hireling:

    Disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife,
    I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form.
    Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,
    Stark-naked except for the fox-trap biting his ankle,
    I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.
    To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,

    The wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled
    And blew the small hour through his heart.
    The moon came out. By its yellow witness
    I saw him fur over like a stone mossing.
    His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered.
    His eyes rose like bread.

This scene from a semi-pagan rural past is rendered vividly by the poet’s skilful use of chiaroscuro (“the light from the dark lantern”, the “yellow witness” of the moon) and snatches of folk verse—the “leather horns” come from a traditional riddle:

    A hopper o’ ditches
    a cropper o’ corn
    a wee brown cow
    and a paira leather horns!

and Duhig gives the answer to the riddle by quoting an old witches’ shape-changing charm:

    I shall go into a hare
    with sorrow and sighs and muckle care
    and I shall go in the Devil’s name
    ay, till I come home again

The sinister mystery at the heart of The Lammas Hireling is emphasised by the central stanza break falling between “sorrow” and “care”. The farmer’s emotional turmoil is conveyed by the surprisingly delicate, semi-erotic “lovely head” and “gathered’ lip”, before Duhig intensifies the horror with the fairytale grimness of “His eyes rose like bread”. At the end of the poem the speaker compulsively invokes the power of the Catholic Church, using the traditional prayer-formula (in vain?) to try to counteract the pagan spell: “Bless me Father, I have sinned. / It has been an hour since my last confession.”

The witches’ hare charm has also been used by Ted Hughes, as the epigraph to his short story The Harvesting, and the two poets share an aura of archaic, elemental mystery, but it would be wrong to categorise Duhig too narrowly as a specialist in this vein. Indeed, The Lammas Hireling covers an impressive range of subject matter, emotion, verseforms and cultural references. The collection is by turns comic, mysterious, disturbing and heartbreaking. The characters we meet include Pope Gregory at a slave market, Catherine Cookson, a Fast Show-esque tailor, the barman from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a Soho nightclub doorman, a Nazi scientist from Dachau and a gallery of the great and not-so-good from the Duhig family tree. In Blood Duhig observes a modern teenager outside a tattoo shop:

    White Orlon ankle socks beneath petrol-blue
       Levi Sta-Prest,
    Their baked creases rising to the occasion of
       red braces,
    Clip-ons, a half-inch in width, over brick red
       and duck egg
    Brunswick triple-stripe button-down collared
      Ben Sherman…

This poem is written in a preposterously long single sentence, top-heavy with adjectives and brand names, perfectly embodying the teenager’s awkwardness and acute image-consciousness. The poem is typical of the exuberance of Duhig’s writing and provides a characteristic twist at the end. The Lammas Hireling is full of surprises that leave us perplexed and delighted, as if the words have stepped off the page just as we were about to grasp their meaning. Like this cheeky fragment titled The Vision of the Virgin:

    For his climactic Divine Comic strip
    Illustrating Dante’s Paradiso
    Botticelli wrote this title, then stopped
    And left the vellum blank. It was as though

And that’s the whole poem! Daring, funny and thought-provoking, it is typical of a richly rewarding collection that succeeds admirably in blending ‘high’ literary accomplishment with ‘low’ popular culture—so that the Divine Comedy can become a Divine Comic without negating the vision or spoiling the joke.