Don Coles, A Dropped Glove in Regent Street (Signal)
Don Coles Where We Might Have Been (Signal)
Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations to make beguiling poems which combine artifice and spontaneity with unusual conviction. Published in the UK mainly through the pages of the LRB, Coles books are available through Signal (How we all swiftly: the first six books; and his new book, Where we might have been) and Porcupine’s Quill, who publish a useful Selected, edited by Robyn Sarah. Coles’ effects are appreciated by reading him in bulk: once a reader tunes into his habitual subtleties the poems qualify and reflect on one another in appealing and intriguing ways. Although a contemporary of Sylvia Plath’s at Cambridge, and a member of a generation often called Confessional, Coles’ late start as a poet marks his work as post-Confessional, original and fresh even as it responds to the questions about autobiography and history which were first asked by Plath, Lowell and others. In earlier books, he seemed to use his long sojourn in Stockholm as a way of writing a kind of disguised confessional lyric poem: biography, art and photography seemed to allow an alternate account of provincial life in poems like ‘Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13 1910’ and ‘Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm’, a life which refracted his own experience of growing up in Canada.
The two new books published by Signal offer a new dimension to his reflectiveness. A Dropped Glove in Regent Street is a strange but illuminating book of prose which mixes together his reading life with actual memoirs, pointedly refusing to grant precedence to the latter. Coles seems to inhabit as fully his experience of reading Camus and reading about Camus as he does his one glimpse of Camus in the flesh (in Stockholm). In A Dropped Glove his enthusiasm for Camus, Celine, Flaubert, Musil, Rilke, Transtromer and others is rendered as freshly as is his reminiscence of finding his feet in Stockholm and Florence and his studying (and playing tennis) at Cambridge on the fringes of a life in poetry at the same time as his contemporaries Ted Hughes and Plath. In the essay on Camus and the essay on translation the reading and the life cohere in interesting and convincing ways, the latter because of the way it recounts his friendship with Tomas Transtromer whose work he has translated. And while A Dropped Glove is an enjoyable book, the conceit of mixing together his reading and his well-travelled life does not gel in Coles’ prose as it does, say, in David Markson’s later novels or in Coles’ own poems whose remarkable use of memory and artifice are well caught by lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Poem’: ‘art copying from life and life itself, / life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other’.
The new poems in Where we might have been sometimes revisit the essays, but always re-turning them, shaping and compressing them with characteristic meditations on idiomatic phrases. The opening, title poem retells a couple of the anecdotes from his Swedish essays but that is only a pretext for introducing the book’s preoccupations with time and memory, and how one ends where the other begins: so we hear, differently in the poems, how a voice ‘above the partition asked / ‘could you tell me the time please?’, just as Coles experienced the question differently as he writes the poem to when he first heard it in a Swedish cafe, ‘fifty plus / years ago when I was less untidy than I am now and was / wearing a watch which I no longer seem to need.’ The poem then zeroes in on other transitional scenes, ‘the bottom step of a long staircase’, ‘my flight to Canada’, the death of an admired writer, before ending ‘ Nobody’s exactly where they might have been,’ a speculative statement typically as conscious of fact as it is of flux. The poems continue to remember times and places beautifully, always situating them against what he calls ‘the pending years of my life’ and, beyond that, a future belonging to others as when, in ‘All our yesterdays…’ he imagines the next owner of his house: ‘next door will have a settled look / by then, and standing in their driveway / they will explain to him / the street’s idiosyncracies.’
Longer poems use other possessions – houses, books, plays – as ways of fixing time and its passage, a theme which defines these poems. The final long poem, ‘Too-tall Jones’, has something of Yeats’s ‘High Talk’ in its relation of ‘high’ themes to actual physical height, though instead of Yeats’ simple declaration, ‘Malachi Stilt-jack am I’, Coles feels his way more carefully into his subject describing, with engaging comedy, the isolation of its too-tall speaker in his pre-NBA youth, before he finds lines from The Waste Land graffiti’d on a Primrose hill pavement and the poem’s more metaphysical admission comes surprisingly into view, as is so often the case in Coles’ work, with its ‘apparent and continuing / concern with higher-up, taller-type things.’
John McAuliffe