John Whale, Frieze (Carcanet Press) £9.95
Tara Bergin, This is Yarrow (Carcanet Press) £9.95
I don’t know what to say about poetry any more. Lives and deaths. ‘Fallen warriors, a conquistador, a cat […]’ in John Whale’s superb Frieze. Yes, I’d noticed that cat. I loved it. I don’t know why. “Not my thing”. I don’t know if it had the weight of all poetry behind it or whether I simply felt it to be a good poem.
A cat, of a cat, to a cat,
a cat, O cat! […]
For I will consider you
now that you have gone
in the spirit of complete cat […]
Like many elegiac collections, it is not a book full of death. Not war poems. Not necessarily poems of war. Not ‘Where have they gone?’ but ‘Where are they heading […]?’ in the title poem, ‘Frieze’. Movement or moments, ‘the body breaking between | two worlds’. (Falling Warrior). A body of poetry. ‘Time and time again | he falls back down’. (Footage)
It fights into poetry. I do not mean that it struggles to be, or that it is something less (if there is such a thing) fighting to be more. It is word on paper like a ‘thinning line of men | is scribbled into wire’. (Footage) ‘[S]ome brief discomfort between the sheets’, between the pages, ending the poem ‘Falling Warrior’. And that last line of ‘Trooper’, left, the only line separated, ‘and nothing at all behind it’. Makes ‘my favourite birdsong | heard only in books’.
It is not an easy thing, it is not difficult, this life (‘[…] this life this life’ ).
So this is it.
The moment at which
this all too solid body
melts into death –
or at least a pose
which we must surely
recognise as such – […]
[…] a tight fist
and a flexed forearm […]
(‘Falling Warrior’)
One feels that Frieze might, at times, be a lament for poems gone by, and, in elegising them, brings them back. But here is the final stanza from ‘In Tagore’s The Gardener’:
In that year before you died, you alight again upon this book,
you’d pulled down, second-hand, in Great Russell Street
and read that: You are one half woman and one half dream.
Musing on these poems twenty-fours years on from death,
I hear you moan about the pain, and the lack of wings.
*
One would not think Tara Bergin’s This is Yarrow a debut. It’s mixed very well, the vocals do not falter. Water. She opens with water and it works. The Thames in the opener, ‘Looking at Lucy’s Painting of the Thames at Low Tide Without Lucy Present’; and, in the second poem, ‘Acting School’:
[…]
swallowing air, as the Director says,
might not be the same as swallowing water
but for our purposes at least
there is sufficient amount of physical truth
in what we do.
‘Water is Difficult’:
But I have a thirst /
I have a fear of / I have a sin of –
and Lucy is on her knees before you, water,
admitting that she might not believe.
‘What does it do, what does it do?’
she asks, ‘except leave?’
Tell her before she herself decides to go:
Things break – even water.
Water must break
if we are to enter and live.
Water and light, and birth, and sex, and prayer. From there, we move past the riverbank, and its ‘Himalayan Balsam for a Soldier, inland. Where do poems come from, what do we do with them.
I will go on to plagiarise
several well-known poets and writers
without citing their work
or acknowledging their influence on my thoughts in any way.
See, for example, the epigraph to this abstract,
a quote which was taken from the leader of the opposition in
Cairo (2011)
yet used here out of context in an entirely inappropriate setting.
(‘All Fools’ Day: An Academic Farewell’)
‘[…] Nineteen-Forty- | One: | a year too small for her to write in.’ (‘The Undertaker’s Tale of the Notebook Measuring 1 x 2 cm’). ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Wife as a Younger Woman’. ‘If Painting Isn’t Over’ –
If painting isn’t over
I will admit this:
You have offended your whole life.
You have divided your days.
You have taken your hands
and put them in the drawer.
I think, like the recently reviewed The Simple Men, by David Troupes, a poem sometimes simply must come back to what it is – this! The last few lines of ‘This is Yarrow’, placed as the final poem:
And when I woke and went to the window,
your tender voice told me: this is yarrow,
this is elder, this is the collared dove.
One might think the trumpets of the yellow elder, and the dove, the Holy Spirit. Or in terms of colour. But, ‘when I woke and went to the window, | your tender voice told me: this is yarrow, | this is elder, this is the collared dove.’