All around the snot-nosed parishes of Ireland
small people of both genders, and neither,
are flapping open
copies of The Sunday O’Duffy getting worried
about the continued existence
of the Citizen Army, Fenian Brotherhood,
Official IRA.
We can’t have
parties who perspire to government
secretly controlled by cabals
of men (and ladies) whose faces
we never see; apart from those
faces prescribed by prevailing winds
and the agreed rules
of the European Union,
which we need never see
but rest eternally assured
are there. Or thereabouts.
The only weaponry allowed
those seeking elected office
are five piece suits to help little
men appear substantial,
and no more than six
plastic chairs on which the faithful can
every other month gather
to recite the Our Father,
or discuss the rising
price of sewage. Even
the Social Democrats must come clean
about the continued non-existence
of their army council, and what role precisely
Fintan O’Toole plays in its
military high command.
A mature democracy like ours
needs parties whose manifestos
political correspondents
with excellent haircuts (and none) can safely
spread across their living room floors
and roll around naked on
without fear of being interrupted
by men and women wearing
illegally held
balaclavas.
they come and they go
fleeting wet bullets
my bed has left me
for another bed
the world has lost eternity
clocks are now winding
towards a new paternity
i wait within the ward of maternity
for mother to give birth to me
so that the idea of him
will return
midnight in the soup cans of desire
the taps have stopped dripping
love is cold
i am stuck like ketchup
waiting for her
to give me a slap
and release me from
the gravity of our affair
sometimes it is enough
to sit and cry
and stare
sometimes the night
is stuck like this
and who knows
who is dying
by chance
it is raining in dublin
all we can think about
is love
a soupçon
is enough for now.
Brendan McCormack is a writer from Dublin. He now lives and works in West Cork. He is an environmental activist and was part of the successful ‘Save Our Skibbereen’ campaign and ran as an Independent in the local elections of 2019. His first collection of poetry, ‘Selling Heaven’, was published in 2012 by Burning Apple Press, NJ, USA. A second collection was published in 2014, ‘Phuckle – Irish Auf English’. He has featured in anthologies such as ‘The Gladstone Readings’, 2016, and ‘Songs for Julia’, 2014. He was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2009. He is currently working on a novel, ’88’.
The pages of the city
unfold its secrets
like holding vellum to the light,
a palimpsest of the past.
Who walked here on sacred ground?
What foundations lie under
that coffee shop all birch and glass?
You may see
a piece of broken railing,
the bronze of a sword.
This step led to an open door –
kettle’s on, teacake still warm –
a girl, flaming hair and rough linen.
The open space above you
was a window:
a woman called children to dinner;
there, that corner,
a man waited for a lover
who never arrived.
Take a minute.
In the blank spaces
look into the light:
you can see footprints, a torn letter in the wind,
a field of buttercup and burdock,
willowherb and silverweed
underneath the paving.
Watch your step, consider
what marks the trail you leave behind.
Lynn Caldwell’s work has been published in The Irish Times for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award; Dedalus Press’s anthology WRITING HOME; FLARE; and The Antigonish Review, and has featured on Irish radio’s Sunday Miscellany. She was a runner up in Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award 2017, has a BA in creative writing from the University of Victoria, Canada and blogs at http://kennedystreet.wordpress.com.
I heard Sir Geoffrey refer many times in his Oxford lectures (2010-2015) to our current situation as one of ‘plutocratic anarchy’. I suspect that, like many, he was fascinated and frustrated by the oxymoronic sight of ordinary, ‘common’ people persistently voting for, excusing, and admiring those who would subject and exploit them.
People voting against egalitarianism, that sort of thing. People claiming to hate élites and experts, while lauding fatuous celebrities, mendacious politicians and tax-avoiding oligarchs to the skies. What the hell! It’s a job to keep calm, it is. What’s happened to intrinsic value? After such gnosis, what forgiveness?
Hill is, in this Book, much concerned with our chaotic, self-defeating times, but he’s concerned too with cultural instances of last words, late testaments, final goodbyes and deathbed flourishes. The barbarians may be at the ruined gates, but the professor has brought ashore and stored (in his memory) a whole load of good stuff for us. He’s passing it on.
The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin is a Last Supper, a séance, a cénacle, a ‘Scipionic Circle’ (see poem 128), a consistory. Just look who’s been invited, look who’s turned up!
What are they talking about? They can’t be serious. Stuff about ‘fate’ and ‘genius’ and ‘intrinsic value’, and ‘poetry’ and ‘gnosis’ and ‘hierarchy’. And, what’s this, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) – ‘the Augsburger’ – and his ‘epic theatre’, Brecht who once versified the Communist Manifesto in Lucretian hexameters, and named Brueghel’s Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) a ‘great war painting’ (see 123) – well, ‘it is vital that we | resurrect Brecht’ (124). Christ!
Bertolt Brecht
Final Words?
How to categorise this weird offering, its preposterous form? Is it a biographia literaria (Coleridge)? A tractatus theologico-politicus (Spinoza)? A religio poetae (Coventry Patmore)? A Day-Book of Counsel and Comfort (George Fox)?
Does Hill intend for us to think this is epic theatre? He refers peevishly to W H Auden’s political poem ‘The Orators’ in poem 158: ‘The nearest we get to epic theatre is ‘The Orators’.’
Of this 1932 poem (G.H. was born in 1932), Auden wrote: ‘The central theme of ‘The Orators’ seems to be hero-worship, and we all know what that can lead to politically.’
There’s plenty of hero-worship in The Book of Baruch, plenty of wrestling too with the betrayal of the working class (31), and the embarrassments of the Tory tradition: ‘Tory, to me at this latter day, is both rabble and oligarchy’ (261).
Is Milton’s Paradise Lost epic theatre? I guess so. Milton’s all over the place in The Book of Baruch; amidst the civil war of austerity-and-Brexit, anarchic plutocracy’s generous mess of potage, Hill takes comfort in the compensations of falling towards the grave.
We might more readily expect a Last Will and Testament, I suppose. GH was in his 80s, and whilst he always seems to have written as if he thought he might die tomorrow, well, this is more obviously an apostrophe to those who would survive him. The poem numbered ‘47’ begins, perhaps, with an old man muttering to himself:
If this is going to be your testament best press on with it.
A testament – leaving stuff to someone, testifying to having existed; let’s also remember that GH is masquing himself as one ‘gnostic Justin’, who may understand ‘testament’ more grandly to mean a covenant or new dispensation of some sort, (for those who come after), a scripture, even.
Well, William Blake’s engraving (plate 14) for his America: A Prophecy (1793) is the jacket image, after all. (And Justin appraises that engraving too – see ‘170’: ‘his beard imitates mine in my mock senile portraits’. Sir Geoffrey threatens to get senile on us, but there’s exquisite method in this discombobulation, I suspect).
‘America is an early radiant work if we simply let the illumination bathe us’, a voice declares. I propose that we take time to consider the professor’s last things, and bathe in the illuminations and recriminations that Hill-Justin has to offer?
A Great Gift
So; a generic hybrid. A testament, a covenant, a witness statement, a testimony, a symposium, a reproach, a mockery (Pope’s Dunciad is a lost friend). H’m. I’m only fussing over this because I feel that GH is bequeathing all us ‘poetasters’ – ok, I admit it – a new form to play with.
It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears. You might say he’s just teasing us with being mock prophetic (as well as mock senile), but that’s ok too, isn’t it? Look at the long lines – they don’t even end at the right hand margin, do they?
Folded back into hanging-indent paragraphs, like a manifesto or, (actually), a stanza from Andre Breton’s ‘Ode to Fourier’ (see 179), or, I should say, looking remarkably like Rimbaud’s lineation in Une Saison en Enfer.
Who’d ‘ve thought it? GH makes something of this source in 167, raving about Rimbaud’s (and David Bomberg’s) part in the invention of ‘modernist poetry’, through an instinctive concurrence, apparently, with the philosopher Berkeley’s redemptive notion ‘that particles are units in the mind’s energy’. (This stuff may need some work doing: you could try D J Greene’s 1953 journal article, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Anti-Newtonianism’.) It’s all part of a thrilling defence of poetry for the 21st century; and look out for Kit Smart (‘no hoodlum’, 28) throughout the poem, and the product of his season in hell, Jubilate Agno.
Not obviously poetry then, but beyond prose, certainly. A 21st century Walt Whitman, for sure, inventorying what’s excitingly referred to (47) as ‘the untenable sanctities of abiding things’. Beyond grasping, out of kilter, implausible, but we do know such things, don’t we?
Certainly, [Listen to me – ‘Certainly’!], an old humanities professor might know a thing or two about what’s worth preserving, what might stay us, what abides, what might redeem the time, dare I say. Is this about redemption, after all, HaShem’s ways to man, and is it now delivered by these here genii and their gnomic achievements?
GH reminds us, for example, of the poet Thomas Nashe’s ‘finest poem thrown away on a dull drama’ – remember that invincible line?
Brightness falls from the air
This from a poem in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600), a comedy. Well, if poems can do that…
‘old-fashioned encyclopedic knowledge’
The thing about testament and prophecy, we might remember, is that they’re inevitably political and more or less obviously, satirical, (you can’t get away from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, the other mockers – Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’, for instance). Oh, yes – and also theological. Sorry. Well, just think Søren Kierkegaard, if it helps – his many pseudonymous personae – Johannes Climacus, that sort of thing.
Come to think of it, the title of Johannes Climacus’s 1846 work is perfect for GH’s book: Concluding Unscientific Postscript – ‘scrapings and parings of systematic thought . . . divided into bits’, as its epigraph notes. So much I have known, and know, don’t you know? Unbelievable stuff, ‘untenable’, beyond my grasp, inordinate, but something there, let me tell you. I’ve seen things, as the replicant says before expiring in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner. Peace be upon him.
It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears. I’d like to try it too; who knows, my children might be grateful to their poetasting father, when he’s gone? I’m not as old, nor as learned, nor as wise as GH, nor would he have deemed me a poet, but there’s plenty to encourage me here: ‘Poets with old-fashioned encyclopedic knowledge bring good seed to tillage’. (126) And then, later, he writes:
– With always an encyclopedia on which to rest my left
– arm, I do not have to resort overmuch to erm. (256)
Seems to be down to knowledge, then, and not, erm, inspiration (or genius?) Phew! I can do this. The gnostic Jonathan. A gnostic poetaster. Let’s see.
Geoffrey Hill 1932-2016.
Automatism
What else? How to get started each day, overcome the embarrassment and inferiority of the poetaster? Well, I can tell you, GH recommends the practitioners of automatism.
Robert Desnos is our (hu)man – ‘far and away the best of those Surreal men’ (139). I have to look into this. Peter Stockwell’s book The Language of Surrealism is certainly helpful. He writes: ‘in principle anyone could engage in automatic writing’, and refers to a ‘meeting on 25 September 1922 [the year of ‘The Waste Land’, and of Ulysses], in [André] Breton’s studio on the Rue de Fontaine in Paris, at which [René] Crevel, newly arrived from a spiritualist séance, suggested using the same technique for writing.’
Apparently, Robert Desnos was proficient in writing during a ‘self-induced trance-like sleep’, ‘in which striking images were often expressed with dense echoic sound-effects of alliteration, rhyme and punning.’ He wrote, for instance: ‘Mots, êtes-vous des mythes et pareils aux myrtes des morts? [Words, are you myths and similar to the myrtles of the dead?]’ This was published ‘in Littérature in December 1922 . . . under the name Rrose Sélavy (a pun on eros, c’est la vie)”. And these good mots duly make their appearance in Baruch – check number 139. Is this the discombobulating method?
There has to be something in this for the gnostic Justin, right? I can’t prove this – (Go-ogle doesn’t know, for heaven’s sake – how agnostic is that?) – but I think the line quoted in poem 73 of this Book of Baruch: ‘To run on empty is to achieve a sort of hallucinatory abundance and clarity’ – I think this must be a translation of something in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and that Breton is the ‘Parnassian and … sassy man’ also mentioned there, (not Hopkins, who is above that, as we know).
André Breton in 1924.
The paradox, the oxymoron – they’re pretty surreal, aren’t they? GH always had plenty of time for the paradox, the oxymoron; and the cryptogram too, I’d say; all is surreal in such verbal tourbillions (Robert Graves’ brave word; see ‘On Portents’, and appraised by GH in one of his lectures). And – just in passing – there’s plenty of focus in Baruch on ‘codes’ – ‘the codes from London were always that absurd’ (89) – and the weird poetic lines/codes in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (‘a cultural film of established acclaim’ (139)), and – would you believe it? – Alan Turing’s turned up (227).
There is something in this. Let’s remember, those codes did mean something, (to those in the know, to those in the Résistance (89) or the Widerstand (255), for instance, God bless ‘em). People do solve cryptograms, don’t they? Poetasters are with the resistance too, right? Codes for a consistory. Like Polari, or Yiddish.
But how much cryptic and recondite erudition can the nation – those to whom we bequeath all this – tolerate? (See 163) The poetaster will do well to remember how her work may be received; words of warning: ‘Poem as inaccurate | prism inaccurately decoded; progressively derided; making honest | decent people appear stupid; all the pretence of a séance’ (163).
But take heart; let’s not forget that final mystery about which the mystics advise, and via, apparently, this same automatic writing (see Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism) – look at this in poem 40, our professor musing on ‘intrinsic value’ and John Donne’s final writings: ‘our grandest poetics | perform their mystic dance of savagely disputed provenance.’
Hallelujah. Hill-Justin notes, approvingly, ‘Rouault’s mystical aggressive passivity.’ And has a mystical experience of his own, with ‘[d]ense holly trees’ (221). This is, after all, ‘’Geoff’s Mystery Tour’, perilous self-entertainment that would have | delighted my Aunt Nell, the bright one of our family.’ (178) This delights me: ‘All the mysterium of God is in the measure of time.’ (183) Who knows otherwise?
Form and Process
So much for form and process? Worth pausing here; because I want to say that (what used to be called) the content of this mock-prophecy is absolutely fascinating too, no doubt about it, I’m ashamed to admit. So I’ll come back later, if you don’t mind, to this thing about form and genre and provenance, this ‘All Souls’ Night’ (Yeats) summoning to a final showdown, a last reckoning.
A little bit about the content, even though the Professor insisted this is of no interest if it hasn’t got ‘technic’, (also Yeats, (and Ezra Pound)). But we’ve established the technic is automatism, isn’t it, the subjective-made-objective, the mask which is self-portrait, the sensibility-register. The anti-lyric, too. See 182: ‘The form I choose is monologue though with frequent episodes of multi- | voiced fugue.’
Firstly, if you’re the sort of person who likes to hear, say, Sir Geoffrey Hill choose his favourite bits of music, (he was once on Radio 3’s Private Passions, where the ‘Coventry Carol’ played alongside Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Star-spangled Banner’), well, this will be a revelation, (as prophecies are supposed to be, no?)
Here – this is important to say – you have to simultaneously hear, as counterpoint to various musical miracles, the bells in Wren’s churches crashing to the ground during the Blitz. This prophecy is ‘loud with falling bell-chambers’ (10), ‘bells, a last | cascade of thrashing, mangled squeals’ (36), ‘bells falling and bawling’ (2); and ‘the toppling creel of half- | melted bell-metal’ provides a great metaphor for automatic writing and this whole book: ‘astonishing collocations of syntax and semiotics’ (36). Hill-Justin listens, too, hoping to “cough up the phlegm of a poem”, to
The mingled throps and thrangs of bell-ropes and bell metal, mangled and _ muffled songs, when you stand beneath the bell chamber, hearing the _ ropes grunt and clamber. (72)
We might recall the opening lines of Yeats’ séance poem, ‘All Souls’ Night: Epilogue to ‘A Vision’’:
Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell And many a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Souls’ Night
The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, designed by Christopher Wren.
I think it’s midnight for GH too, and HaShem’s in the tomb, and Tennyson’s ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky’ is a distant memory, (lacking some ‘obduracy of the mind’s address’, apparently (69)). When Hill-Justin tried to compose music himself, he informs us, he failed: ‘My piano compositions failed because I could not compose a convincing | ground bass’ (249). He succeeds here, with Wren’s crashing bells.
We should remember GH didn’t want to be a poet, after all:
I would have prayed to excel in mathematics and music if I had prayed at all; _ envying Wren and the musicians of the Chapel Royal; passacaglias and _ Purcell; for that is where the mind stands to itself, albeit in hell. (25)
Well, look – listen! – the music of Purcell does seem to come out on top here. (When GH was invited by The Economist to read his Clavics and work-in-progress at the Purcell Room on the South Bank in 2011 – ‘What! Six daybooks, already?’ we all declared. (Actually, seven now.) – GH closed proceedings with the most menacing and atoning rendition of Hopkins’ sonnet ‘Henry Purcell’ you could ever dread to hear.) GH seems to agree with what Hopkins says of Purcell:
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.
Wow! (Plenty of derogatory stuff about ‘moods’ as the domain of mere poetasting in Baruch, be warned.)
And Hopkins is a key presence at the table – this cénacle – throughout. In 176 Hopkins and Purcell are linked via Purcell’s ability to create ‘sprung rhythm | two centuries before ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean fire’ which its | rediscoverer – a devout Purcell admirer – felt duty bound to keep | hidden lest he should bring notoriety upon the Society in which you do | as you are bidden.’
Odes and Welcome Songs
Let’s see which bits of Purcell are playing at the Feast, on ‘the wind-up gramophone’ (137). Well, it seems to be his Odes and Welcome Songs (185; 187; 188), and this is what Hill-Justin says of them: ‘these ‘welcome songs’ feature a benign vision for the future of the | kingdom in accordance with divine nature’ (188).
He goes on to express extraordinary gratitude and estimation (189): ‘Tell him his saddest | music well-betides us, elides all but our last, worst fears.’ Plenty of compensations, then, even after a referendum and all history’s idiot repetitions.
So much for content? O, but look out for, nevertheless, Schubert’s Quintet (70; 253), Handel’s Saul (79) – ‘how profound the accessible can be, | given mastery” – Thirties jazz – “accurate music appropriate to heaven” (36) – Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (130), ‘L’hymne de l’Union Européenne’ (140), symphony number 9 by Malcolm Arnold – ‘old Malc’ – “that final untri- | umphing lento of twenty-odd minutes”, “its near subliminal song” (197), and Ralph Vaughan Williams:
I bless the marvellous ‘Five Mystical Songs’: although strong music cannot _ even begin to mend wrongs, it is, in some way I wish I could well relate, _ analogous to the Pentecostal tongues. (85)
Ok. So – poetry – this poetry – aspires to the condition of music, yes? Well, I’m not sure about that with Hill-Justin, after all. Set down this, set down this: ‘Not | music. Hebrew. Poetry aspires | to the condition of Hebrew.’
Of course! Now we’re talking. This naughty apophthegm is ripped from Hill’s 2000 prophecy, Speech! Speech! (poem 20). Such wisdom bears contemplation. (Well, I’m reading Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century as back-up).
And I was always told the three archetypes of the human condition to be Faust, Don Juan and Ahasuerus, don’t you know. [Whilst we’re here, Wikipedia keeps us informed that Kant himself refers to the legendary Ahasuerus, wandering Jew, in his The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. I’m reminded of Hill’s long-time interest in Peirce’s ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’. – Sorry – am I going into séance mode?] And what about Lear as archetype too (God’s spy)? What about Falstaff (God’s clown)? Our prophet is all these.)
Hill-Justin – the poet-prophet – as Ahasuerus. Exiled, unhoused Adam. Well, this did preoccupy John Milton at the end of all his hopes and dreams. Where did it all go wrong? And Milton’s all over The Book of Baruch, as I say. ‘Latterly, led by the hand in his good grey coat, a blind good looker, looking like | a Quaker.’ (18)
Supremely non-conformist, speaking truth to power, aficionado of peace. And a reader – don’t you know – of the Hebrew scriptures. Geoffrey Hill, Hebraist, (there was a quotation in Hebrew for The Triumph of Love (1998), wasn’t there?) He refers mysteriously in 96 to ‘the | inexorable semitic-semantic code.’ Is this that ‘God’s grammar’ thing, again; isn’t that from John Donne? Still, the still, small voice.
John Milton 1608-1674
Love Supreme
The gnostic Justin, we think, was ‘Jewish-Christian’, and, excitingly, considered a heretic by Hippolytus, (third century). And look at this:
But because I am not a Jew I desire to know all that was said when, once a year,
__ the high priest convened in holy fear with the Ark of God.
Hill’s naughtiness and perspicacity, his agile-mindedness and contrariness and impetuosity all remind me, at least, of the Hebrew prophets. It’s a familiarity with HaShem (her omniscience and inordinacy), a longing to hear HaShem’s voice (in the gathered silence of this Quakerly meeting), which makes Hill’s encyclopaedic mind, too, into a psaltery of praise and vexation and vexatiousness. Isn’t this the Hebraic mindset? Forgive me.
Hill repeats this sense, actually, of exclusion from, what, the chosen race? In 216: ‘I am not a Jew though I married one; and I subscribe to their iron scorn.’
Jewish cultural illuminati are prominent and are revered. Besides the anonymous authors of the Gnostic Bible (40) and The Book of Job (86), there’s Simone Weil, of course, Robert Desnos (very much so), Len Rosoman and his commentary on the epicentral Mad Meg painting (is it a pogrom?) by Brueghel; David Bomberg too, Celan, Tzara, Gershom Scholem (think his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)), the Mandelstams, Gillian Rose (quoting from his late friend’s Judaism and Modernity, wouldn’t you know; must read this), Sandy Goehr (his co-eval), even Leopold Bloom; the Jewish century, I’m convinced.
We see ‘Willy Brandt at the | Ghetto memorial’ (77), consider ‘the topic of Jews and usury’ (186), never forgetting strains of antisemitism in ‘my grievous heroes’ (186; 111; 177). And a strange and riddling identification: ‘Ich bin Dreyfus, an old man who walks with a cane, thus – ‘ (189). If poetry aspires to the condition of Hebrew, then I suppose the poet’s task is both to resist and to aspire to scriptural authority for herself. A bit much for a poetaster, truth be told.
Anacoluthon!, as decency demands. Yes, even Love Supreme has to come to an end. Let me finish, please. We’ve got the Hebraic mindset then, the surrealist automatism and discombobulation, the musical passacaglia – and we’ve also got pained awareness of the betrayal of the working class (and the European mindset, bien sûr), the death of intrinsic value (O, no it’s not!), there’s Hill’s gnostic ‘back garden apple’, his parents’ suffering and his childhood, poet-soldiers and – pilots, (Eric Ravilious, d. 1942 (242)), war photography (Mathew Brady (247)), divination (everywhere), and Coke (1552-1634) and Grotius (1583-1645) laying the foundations for international law, as all great poets do, too. Mind you, let’s be clear:
The waters recede: neither covenant nor creed. (236)
This great prose poem, divine table-talk, is endless. You can’t stop loving it. As Ezra Pound wrote of Wyndham Lewis’s work in 1917 on illustrations for Timon of Athens, (and quoted in Baruch, 229), we hear everywhere the prophetic “fury of intelligence baffled and inspired by circumjacent stupidity.” But this fury is never unmixed with “ ‘summer’s sovereign good’” (from, is it, the last poem Hopkins wrote?) and (though not “irrefutable”) “evidence of cosmic cadence” (256). How GH loved this all, all this wisdom, all this folly.
Love you, Professor. Lead the way.
Intrinsic value that I care about is as tenuous and wiry as a bit of great verse. (163)
It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears.
The light that streams across the universe
Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
Where midst the flux of fields and particles
Eternal wisdom older than the stars
Unweaves her web of possibilities
The patterner experiments and plays.
Bright pearls arranged according to the laws of chance
Or unknown logic, now ingathering
Dark threaded galaxies where furious force
Sweeps stirs and scars the dust of earlier worlds
And in continuous creation builds again
Forms that persist beyond the death of stars.
I too shall praise the heaven’s magnificence
Honour with awe its ever abundant power
That once with measured force spread out the sky
To be a bound and roof upon our world
And a protection to the fragile Earth
I dreamed we built a home for everyone
There where I danced beneath the moody sky
We gathered gifts from the untamed wilderness
And put our passions together to prove our skill
I piled turves around the tallest tree
To form a seat and meeting place for friends
And all around
We planted seeds and hope in the dark ground.
A craftsman wrought a jewel long ago
Welded of words and of lines laid true:
From older songs he hammered out his tale
Of courage and of loss, of king and earl
Of men and monsters, a memorial
An elegy of an imagined past.
This that the war geared Danes far in days long gone
Gained fame in story, glory in war
How that the Ethelings harassed their enemies
Tribute and treasure took from tribes all around
So that the gold giver strong in his growing band
Folk wielder, wide ruler, strong in command
It pleased the peoples’ king to plot a towering hall
Gathered the workmen there from every land
To build the glad mead hall wondrous in workmanship
Famed amongst every folk, glorious and grand
Glad in the glee of hall, song mead and feast
Welcome to give to all, stranger and guest
He shared God’s wealth with all, except the common land
Care for the young and old , while shall the hall still stand.
Fast came feud, the dragon crawls along the rock
Brother by brother slain, who from his dark tower gazes on his hoard
The works of man overthrown, and grimly the dragon guards his greed
Nothing of worth remains, while treasure proud he broods of doom
War without end, he who is now the wyrm was once a man
He will devour all, and in his banks and barrows guard his pride.
All of our wealth they bury deep, they who were human once are monsters now.
Until a hero would come who had learned all the language of birds
Who had seen how the hazel nut falls who had found out the strength of a wolf
Who far from the friends of men had drunk of the spring and the well
And boasts he will reforge the shattered past.
Because I knew two fat and greedy slugs
Had crept into my garden to destroy
And everywhere they’d been they’d left their slime
On everything I did and still do love
So I must wander in the wild lands
Of my imagination flying far
Beyond each seen hill. into each dark wood
In endless exploration travelling
And trace each little river to its source
There is no river running round the world to bring us back
To step and step again on our own land
And see it for the first time: river run
River run, river run, always new under the sun
River run to the sea, river run, river run.
And then my mind moves on
To Homer’s heroes weeping by their ships
Who in the pain of war
Or washed by slave girls
Sitting in high seats
Would eat their roast meat and their mixed red wine
Gold jugs and silver basins, gleaming oiled skin
And think themselves like gods
As some blind singer skilled
Sang of their war achievements and their crimes.
The old man now remembering his loss
In his imagination finds his home
Trickster and fighter once, teller of tales,
Sacker of cities,
To meet again the weaver of his dreams.
An old man now imagines his return
That trickster, trader, sacker of cities, king
Teller of tales of whom once tales were told
Will find his way again still with deceit
His youth disguised now only by old age
To meet again the weaver of his dreams.
He will imagine what the swineherd said.
That happy is the lad that had no need
To be a hero.
Odysseus had taken all the boys
To fight in wars for Agamemnon’s glory
He’d let them kill the cattle of the sun
And brought back none.
And now the arrogant young lords
Devour all and never leave a scrap
Till everything is gone.
They taunt and mock the poor.
And drive the needy stranger from their door.
And if the king returns he’ll do such things as will be told in story
He’ll bring a bloody climax to their deeds
Renew himself
In all the joy of action….
Then I awoke in a fair field of folk
And let the leaves of memory fall through my skull,
The bare and distant trees where few birds call
The ferns and dead leaves by the waterfall
And the grey lichen on the granite wall
We go to hear the sermon of John Ball
For Much the Miller will grind small small,
Because I know that winter is delayed
While all the colours of the evening sky
Still gleam and fade.
David Hillman was born in Launceston, Cornwall where the poet Charles Causley was then working as a teacher. One of the children of Ron Hillman, a postman. David read widely and explored the countryside on foot but restricted by his family’s poverty he had never been more than fifteen miles from home until he left at the age of fifteen to get involved in politics and study. He obtained degrees in Physics Maths and in Modern History in Brighton, Oxford, and Liverpool, and has spent many years teaching in Oxford including some quite challenging environments. He considers himself an apprentice poet, now in his early seventies.
To Payney, Tinpan, JJ, Tom P., Tom C., Col, Ry, Peewee
I know the car I would most love to own:
Well red, early seventies TR6,
That beautiful, British-built, roadster mix,
Boldly bearing the boxed badge of renown –
Great jewel in Triumph’s commercial crown –
Two point five litre, manual, straight-six,
Mint restored, flying new like a phoenix,
To be roared, roof down, roared round my home town.
Not for the dropping into overdrive –
Instrumentation alive on the dash –
Nor for near-by-gone auto heritage.
More for the pace and the raw expressive
Chase and catching of oneself off guard – Flash! –
Much unfussed by life’s high, rising mileage.
Paul Curran was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975. He holds a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and a Masters Degree from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. He has worked widely as a professional actor. His Only Sonnet loosely follows the pattern of the seasons, comprised of 100+ ‘alternative’ sonnets; Repeat Fees and its 80 sonnets and longer poems was published in July 2017.
Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat after Alexander Pope
About my person, I at all times carry
a bowl of re-heated cocktail sausages
and a completed application form asking
that I be better funded next year. I only read novels
which interrogate the relationship
between gout and Islamist terrorism,
translated from the obligatory French;
and poets whose words make me sink
more comfortably into
my brown swivel chair.
It’s taken five hundred thousand Euro
strategically invested by a range
of government agencies
over the past three years to give
the literature loving public
me sitting here in this office, knowing
the name of the third most
popular poet in Mongolia;
a country I had to visit
three times last year,
at your expense, to ascertain
the correct pronunciation
of said verse-maker’s name.
My most ardent followers,
a hairy-palmed crew
of professional online smoochers
who append themselves to me
on the off-chance, like maggots
around an untreated wound,
each with an avant-garde masterpiece safely
locked way inside his or her head. My own favourite writers? By far
those who are on nobody’s
side but their own.
In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.
In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.
The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.
And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.
As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower (1928), ‘Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul’; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; ‘And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.’
Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’
New Year
At the beginning of 2020, I’d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.
Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.
A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth ‘because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.’
One senses here a Yeatsian slight disdain for a modern radio audience. Or could he have felt as George Orwell imagined the poet feels ‘On the air’: ‘that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’? Surely, Yeats cannot have hoped that his ideal reader or audience would be listening, that freckled fisherman in grey Connemara cloth whom he imagined in ‘The Fisherman’(1919): ‘A man who does not exist, | A man who is but a dream’.
What struck me most about Yeats’s reading was its incantatory style. Before he started, he was careful to explain: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis on their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it….It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse, the poems that I am going to read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’
I can’t imagine that many poets today would read with quite Yeats’s emphasis on the rhythm, and even a hundred years before Yeats’s reading, William Hazlitt in 1823 could express suspicion of ‘a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.’
That said, I was at first somewhat disappointed when I heard Seamus Heaney read out his poems in such a casual, almost faltering, manner, at a literary festival to which I was once taken in my youth. It didn’t quite match my expectations from the work I had read alone to myself, and it was certainly nothing like the crackly elevated recordings I had heard of Wallace Stevens, or even Tennyson and Browning, which retain something of that still, small voice I seem to hear in the poems I love.
It was also something of a revelation working with Paul Curran a couple of years ago, making a recording of him reading out some poems of mine for a radio documentary. As we sat under duvets in the improvised studio of a back bedroom of the producer’s house, I was taken aback by the care with which Paul was able to draw out nuances of meaning during repeated takes of the same poem. I knew I would have to smarten up my act at future poetry readings.
But, then, Paul Curran is an actor as well as a poet. You should be able to hear him read a couple of his poems on the Cassandra Voices website soon.
To be honest, I am slightly suspicious of the strongly performative element of a lot of contemporary poetry. Poetry is not quite rap or folk song. And why get some actor to read out your poems, when it’s so endlessly fascinating to hear the poet herself read her work?
I would say that my work’s shape on the page is as important as its shape in my ear as I mumble it out during the often-long hours of composition. Its heritage is, after all, a literate and courtly one, when manuscripts might be passed around a small readership, to be read aloud perhaps in coterie groups. Of course the roots of that tradition are ultimately in folk song and ancient incantation.
All poems are complimented by compelling imagery, mostly from the photographic library of Arts Editor Daniele Idini, and I am looking forward to hearing many of these poems, hopefully, read out or recited by their poets so that we can make audio files available for you too.
Edward Clarke is Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. To submit a poem for consideration e-mail Edward@cassandravoices.com
I could go for a quick smoke on the roof,
the steel vent pipe snaking
its lobed edges toward the window,
hear the incidental music of engines snarl up
from Richmond Street, relentless as diesel.
Maybe, just maybe, I see people for what we are
and want no part in it? Spilled lighter fluid,
a puddle of technicolour, swirls like marbled
paper where a lit match was dropped, and where
flames now spasm. A dove, olive branch
gripped in its beak, is shot down by tracer-bullet
in the lull of sundown, and, like me, bouncers
light up down laneways. Beats from a DJ throb
from an emergency exit to remind me that escape
is no longer possible, not now, then or ever,
and that I am moored, permanently, to here.
Rope Jockey
A text from the agency tells me
when and where to be
and what tools to have on-site
(though I know that already):
harness and gloves, high-viz
and hard hat. On the Luas,
I watch Dublin hunker in March rain,
her blue-black skyline tightened like a toolbelt
and head into the site at 7 on the dot,
with an Americano
from Frank and Honest
and a heart attack sandwich
(that’s a breakfast roll to you)
to keep me going.
The site is knotted, impassable as a jungle:
a cluster of skeletal cranes loom
in the sky, statically iron,
set in stone or steel, balanced against all weather,
jibs shredding cloud as the wind’s high grip
rattles through bony lattice
and chain-sling as they slowly swivel
to lift granite slabs to the roof:
pulleys and outriggers and bolts set in a concrete base,
concrete vomited from mixers, giant rust-
scuffed boxes stacked high
with rollers and chains, corrugated ridges.
I wonder how soon it’ll be
before funding gets pulled and it’s left derelict,
not even a quarter of the way finished:
the rich weight of industry, injurious as scorn.
Secretly, I’m grateful for the job,
that I get to work on this building
destined to be a hotel
or some tech firm’s HQ,
I.D. card swinging and bleeping me in,
my serial number memorised like girl’s name.
Rung by rung, I climb
as if towards heaven, past girders and I-beams
slung low in ruled, russet mesh,
my wings soaked in caffeine and blood,
numb to the view
nestling far below me, steel-grey morass
of roofs and webbed pavements, traffic
an arterial drip-feed. I sit in the cab controls
like a pilot becalmed in mid-air,
grip the levers and manoeuvre the crane into life,
harnessing it to come ‘round full circle,
as if in slow motion
with a conclusive thud. Load follows load,
lb follows lb, and I’ll do
as many as thirty, forty lifts a day
if I have to, the back jib
and counterweight locked in their waltz,
’til a voice on the radio confirms:
“Yeh, she’s all clear, boss.”
And time isn’t measured by my watch
but by the rise and sink of the sun,
a solar disk in tiled and black in slow hurtle
across the glass cages,
reddening my face by degrees. It’s mad
how dark it gets in the space of a few hours,
how much the city looks like a crime scene,
how unstoppable it all seems.
Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Sammy Jay, 30, grew up in Oxford and in Ireland by the sea. He works as a rare book dealer with Peter Harrington of London, tending to their literature department with an interest in poetry in particular. He has been writing since he can remember, and is working on his first collection.
