Something else, then something else again

I've just reread Miriam Gamble's collection This Man's Town, with pleasure. It's published by Tall Lighthouse, who set out to publish talented young writers and they've definitely succeeded here. I've said before that she's a fine critic, but clearly, she's also a fine poet.

One of the poems, Interface, concludes with the lines:

Momentarily, you snuffle, and rise for tea,
then I lose you to the depths again. Your breath gutters

like a stuck pig's, your eyelids leak an underwater tear.
There is havoc at the gallery, you say, taking
my wrist. And Plato's on the river bed. Then you roll over without
so much as a 'Help me'.

This is striking writing - and also reminds me of a poem from John Wain's 1961 collection Weep Before God:

Anecdote of 2a.m.

'Why was she lost?' my darling said aloud
with never a movement in her sleep. I lay
awake and watched her breathe, remote and proud.

Her words reached out where I could never be.
She dreamed a world remote from all I was.
'Why was she lost?' She was not asking me.

I knew that there was nothing I could say.
She breathed and dreamed beyond our kisses' sphere.
My watchful night was her unconscious day.

I could not tell what dreams disturbed her heart.
She spoke, and never knew my tongue was tied.
I longed to bless her but she lay apart.

That was our last night, if I could have known.
But I remember still how in the dark
She dreamed her question and we lay alone.

Awkward Movements

Back to those Collected Poems. I’ll write a fuller review another time, but one thing that’s struck me is this: for a movement called ‘The Movement’, its writers had at best a curious sense of movement in their verse. This occurred to me when getting entangled in the following couple of lines by Amis about ivy damaging a wall: ‘Then it would all become a legal quibble: / Whose what has wrecked what how and by whose what’.

This style is archetypally ‘Movement’, like Thom Gunn’s ‘I know you know I know you know I know’ in Carnal Knowledge. Their role model, William Empson is perhaps the only other poet (at least since the most extreme contortions of John Donne) to write such self-consciously wooden lines. Which isn’t to say they’re bad, exactly, just that they’re so heavy on their feet, even while they’re going through an elaborate pattern of steps. It’s as if they lack all sense of movement...

Obsession

I’ve been reading Kingsley Amis’ Collected Poems recently – part of an over-comprehensive spurt of reading seven books by or about him in a row (with more ordered, too). This is, to put it mildly, an odd way to spend time. I’m not even a particular fan of Amis, but there’s something that’s prompted me to read his work in large draughts. Something about my interest in The Movement and a frustrated academic interest in them, perhaps. Some sort of challenge that his plain and populist writing poses (particularly having dosed myself up on Modernists for a long time).

Something about Kingsley Amis being an interesting individual, as well as an interesting writer.But there’s also something refreshing about having these odd pockets of over-thoroughness in your reading, even if the work you’re reading isn’t of itself that striking. It’s a different way of reading that encourages a more comprehensive and generous understanding. It can also give something to quarrel with. And perhaps the quarrels you get drawn to against your better judgement can be revealing in themselves...