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.

Abse makes the heart grow fonder

Dannie Abse and Louis Zukovsky are the book-ends of English poetry: its two alphabetical extremities. For that reason alone, I've been aware of Dannie Abse for a long time. Nonetheless, it was only hearing him on the Oxfam CD Life Lines 2 recently which gave me a particular spur to read his work. It was another Oxfam store which duly obliged, with a selection of his poems from 1963 (I'm aware he's had time to move on since, having published his latest collection, Running Late, in 2006).

The poem which stood out to me was one which provided an amusing commentary to society's current focus on environmentalism. Like the John Wain poem I referred to recently (which was published in 1956, just a year before this one), Letter to The Times provides a comic look at how humans differ from nature. Why do we bother to look after roses, it asks, when they make no effort to look after us? Why do we protest the cutting down of trees, when not one tree wrote 'an angry note in its sly green ink' when London was being bombed? Likewise, rivers are dishonest because they reflect swans upside down and stars 'are even too lazy / to shine when we are most awake'. His tongue-in-cheek conclusions are 'away then with trees and roses. / They are inhuman' and that 'we should pity them no more, / but concern ourselves with more natural things'.

It's a charming and pointed satire of people's hostility to nature and on its own made looking out his poetry worth the effort. There's an interesting commentary on his work by Peter Forbes here.

Our dear dumb friends

As previously mentioned, I was struck with Auden's poem Secrets in the Great Poets selection and also noted the influence of his voice on Larkin. In fact, Auden was an influence on other poets from the Movement as well, as the similarities between the last stanza of Secrets and the following poem by John Wain shows.

The joke, which we seldom see, is on us:
For only true hearts know how little it matters
What the secret is they keep:
An old, a new, a blue, a borrowed something,
Anything will do for children
Made in God's image and therefore
Not like the others, not like our dear dumb friends
Who, poor things, have nothing to hide,
Not, thank God, like our Father either
From whom no secrets are hid.


Sonnet

An animal with a heart (in the ordinary sense
of the expression) would find the going tough,
no doubt of it. Birds, to get enough
to eat, would have to peck - with no defence
against the bully Conscience - worms they were
sorry for. Dear me! And cats would shed
very hot tears for little mice, quite dead;
digested, indeed; and hedgehogs would pay dear

for beetles crunched while happily at play,
and so on, ad lib. Yes, if they had hearts (in
the ordinary sense) and yet still had to eat
and copulate, despite their sense of sin,
they'd be human, just like us, wouldn't they?
But our hearts beat and ache. Theirs only beat.