Anthony Caleshu’s extraordinary book, set in polar regions, appears at first glance to riff on two other poets, T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham: T.S. Eliot for those lines from ‘What the Thunder said’ in which the two walking ‘up the white road’ appear to have a ghostly third walking with them. In Eliot’s notes for this section, he suggests that the lines were stimulated by one of the Antarctic expeditions, ‘(I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s)’. And Caleshu appears to not towards W.S. Graham’s ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’ in which ‘the printed snow’ is a metaphor for the struggle with language on the white page; elsewhere Graham talks about the ‘white threshold’. Both Eliot and Graham populate this white landscape. And this is what Caleshu does in his ‘Victor Poems’.
Set in a polar landscape, a narrator seeks to speak for the protagonists in the action as they explore, inhabit, work through that landscape. All they time they refer to/ defer to the mysterious ‘Victor’ who appears to be the presiding genius of the place.
In section 18 of the poems, sub-titled ‘Fata Morgana’, Victor appears to be just that, ‘One can circle the globe looking for a friend, but here you’ve been all along, donning a hat of come-hither hints and half-formed suggestions – a beacon for polar birds of supernatural agencies’
At another point, the narrator comments:
We’d try you Victor for treason if there weren’t an attractive young woman at your side.
Your friend, she says, is an allegory for a star, a life
Choice for those of us who’ve lost our voice.
Thus Victor appears to be a catchall for aspiration and the need for worship. Victor is a kind of contemporary deus absconditus who may or may not provide a panacea for all their problems. But toward whom the narrators seem inescapably drawn. Victor is both friend and enemy; both fata morgana and trickster who’s leading these people across the void towards what they both do and do not want.
These lines give some flavour of the loping, jokey prose in which the ‘epic’ is couched. On the one hand there is a very precise evocation of the polar landscape and the techniques for existence there: ‘We sled the ice-foot, the belt of shore-fast, until the air is as crass as the water below.’ And detail from the natural world: ‘On a platter of ice: the murre eggs of sea birds, low flying auklets, boiled and stored in seal oil, the dovekies fermented like very ripe brie’(24. We come on the back of snowmobiles) On the other, Caleshu is never afraid to stitch his tapestry with anachronisms of both place and time: ‘If we had a boom box, we’d blast some heavy rap from the safety of a widow’s walk, while you rise up from the powder to appear in front of us with a pea-shooter’ (29. Panegyric).
This is a lamentably late review for a text which reaches out in epic fashion, in a thoroughly unique way. The Victor Poems is a splashy, capacious poem which bubbles along in a completely engaging and involving way. If I’ve invoked Eliot and Graham, it is only that Caleshu’s poem reaches out to them in both scope and ambition. And are its 42 sections a nod towards Douglas Adams’ answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?
Ian Pople