{"id":10440,"date":"2019-04-19T16:53:34","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T15:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10440"},"modified":"2019-04-19T17:04:26","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T16:04:26","slug":"ken-smith-collected-poems-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10440","title":{"rendered":"Ken Smith | Collected Poems<\/em> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ken Smith | Collected Poems<\/em> | Bloodaxe Books \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The slight sense of a jostling masculinity in Ken Smith\u2019s poetry might be part of the reason that it is often described as \u2018muscular\u2019. In part, this jostling feels as though it rises from the abundant contradictions of his life and manifested in the poetry; that Smith, the son of an agricultural labourer is a university graduate; that he is capable of writing deeply empathetic poems about both the prison life of Wormwood Scrubs whilst also writing a series of persona poems in the voice of Sir John Hawkwood, a fourteenth century mercenary who ended up a freeman of Florence; that this poem is itself followed immediately, in this volume, by the poem \u2018Colden Valley\u2019 whose \u2018children [are] gone through millyards \/ into stone they chiselled Billy, Emma, Jack<\/em>\u2019. Thus, there is in Smith\u2019s writing a sense of working the tainted, deracinated working class masculinity that manifests itself in the poetry of Tony Harrison, and the early writing of Douglas Dunn. <\/p>\n

The other name that rises around Smith\u2019s work is that of Ted Hughes. This comparison is not only to do with Smith\u2019s own context of being brought up in the north of England; but there is also in Smith\u2019s work an early interest in the matter of \u2018England\u2019. An example of this is, \u2018A description of the Lichway or corpse-road across Dartmoor\u2019, which begins, \u2018From Babeny and Powell \/ west to Lydford 11\u00bd miles \/ as the crow flies who needs \/ carry his own death.\u2019 It needs to be made clear that this poem of Smith\u2019s was written before Hughes published Crow<\/em> in 1970. But the poem sits with a concern, like Hughes\u2019, for \u2018legendary depth \u2026 as deep as England.\u2019 This concern in Smith\u2019s writing can show itself in such lines as \u2018I ran with the Swale, \/ clear mountain river, \/ around me, learned \/ in its stones. I was \/\/ its listener, that country \/ of turf and hill \/ falling into the cut \/ but oh slowly.\u2019 Here, the narrator sees the landscape in stark terms, the nouns unadorned by adjectives, \u2018stones\u2019, \u2018turf\u2019, \u2018hill\u2019. These objects are items which are listened to and teach. <\/p>\n

Central to Smith\u2019s oeuvre is the magnificent \u2018Fox Running\u2019, from 1980. This is a poem of rare sustained drive and brilliance, possibly unique in the range of post-war \u2018British\u2019 poetry. As the title suggests, the poem begins by describing Fox running through the suburbs of London. That Fox could be the persona of Smith himself, a country man then living in London, is perhaps contained in the early lines, \u2018Fox wanting to be alongwind \/ amongst bracken his own shade \/ the breeze at his back\u2019. \u2018Alongwind\u2019 has a technical definition meaning the mean wind force when the wind speed and other factors are taken into consideration. However, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary<\/em> offers no definition of the word at all. If we surmise that this word is part of Smith\u2019s childhood lexicon, perhaps we might guess that it means running \u2018with the wind\u2019 in the bracken. If \u2018alongwind\u2019 does mean this, then Smith\u2019s vocabulary is metonymic of the presence of the country in the town, of the northern dialect in the language of the city dweller. Fox also \u2018runs\u2019 in the city\u2019s underbelly as part of its process of marginalisation, \u2018In Brady\u2019s Tavern with a cashflow problem \/ exchanging alcohol for coin of the realm.\u2019 Or, \u2018Holed up with Baudelaire and Lorca. \/ On Sundays picking up exotic fruit \/ along the market side, selling half a dozen ties he\u2019s nicked.\u2019 Smith\u2019s bare, colloquial vocabulary driving home the economic marginalization which the city breeds; the rapid colloquialisms being part of a language which Smith wields with real skill and energy. <\/p>\n

If Fox has cashflow problems some of which he knows that he causes himself, he is also suborned within the bureaucracy of the city within the state, \u2018investing in the breweries \/ his last Isaac Newton portraits \/ and never coming up all day \/ cashing in his cash card \/ ripping up his cheque stubs \/\/ waiting for his giro \/ arguing his earnings related \/\/ always with the wrong form \/ in the wrong office \/ on the wrong floor.\u2019 In the age of the performance poet, you can hear the audience whooping and hollering at all this. And Smith maintains the political element, \u2018This the bullnosed politicians \/ cadge votes for\u2019, the poem modulating at that point into a vivid description of the effects of a nuclear bomb falling on London; a destruction in which \u2018Goodbye love. Woman I loved.\u2019 But also a destruction in which we say \u2018Goodbye Areopagitica, Aeneid<\/em>, \/ Assyrian Winged Genius, alphabets \/\/ running from aleph to zero.\u2019 This destruction also is wrought upon the identity of Fox who comments, \u2018once upon a long time \/ I was a good dog. \/\/ I ran around town \/ with the other good dogs.\u2019 But as part of his self-exculpation also Smith writes, \u2018I come from a broken home \/ and I broke it.\u2019 And off he runs again.<\/p>\n

This running and destruction eventually seeps into the language itself. And, in a slightly Eliotic way, snatches of conversation crowd into the poem, and into the disintegrating mind of the narrator, \u2018\u201dhas he for whom you \/ left yours now gone?\u201d \/\/ he\u2019ll never be a buttercup \/ in God\u2019s shining garden\u2019 and there is more to come. These voices which suggest not just the disintegration of the narrator, are part and parcel of the disintegration and alienation of the city itself; an alienation which moves from speech and conversation into the very language itself. \u2018I want the word \/ for the many lives he might have lived \/ if he\u2019d gotten off anywhere, Moorgate \/ for instance or Tooting \/ in a single room\u2019. When Smith asks for \u2018the word\u2019 as opposed to \u2018a word\u2019, and a \u2018single\u2019 word to describe the \u2018many lives\u2019, the poet places his limits on the surface of his work. Smith carves out a place for these people which sets their existences in front of the reader and admits his own defeat; as Smith comments below this, \u2018With his word that was word \/ of the unmasked betrayer \/ a beaten man knowing better\u2019.<\/p>\n

Sean O\u2019Brien commenting on \u2018Fox Running\u2019 writes; \u2018What lends the poem its alarming coherence is the energy and unsparing accuracy Smith brings to presenting the descent into the most harrowing of derelictions\u2019 and comparing the poem to The Waste Land<\/em>, O\u2019Brien writes, \u2018Smith\u2019s poem, on the other hand, is written from below, at a point when cultural referents have lost even residual authority and the \u201cessential horror\u201d of things is not subject to the liberty of irony.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Bloodaxe have issued the only extant recording of Ken Smith reading \u2018Fox Running<\/a>\u2019; although it should be noted that Smith\u2019s reading has both additions and deletions from the version printed in this Collected<\/em>. <\/p>\n

A major thread that runs through this large compendious Collected Poems<\/em> is Smith\u2019s sense of empathy. That empathy starts, in the early poems, with Ken Smith\u2019s clear need to understand his difficult, thwarted father, and runs through to the final poems, in particular his long, final sequence \u2018Almost\u2019 which touches on the war in the old Yugoslavia and much else beside. Smith\u2019s empathy is always driven by a huge, sparking poetic intelligence, whereby almost every poem contains some moment of piercing imagery or juxtaposition that pulls the reader into the precisely realised text. Often this precisely realised empathy consists in dramatic monologue. Smith\u2019s narrators come from many continents and many walks of life. Sometimes those narrators might be extreme, for example the poem \u2018Figures in three landscapes\u2019 contains \u2018One: Brady at Saddleworth Moor<\/em>\u2019. As someone who lives on the edge of Saddleworth Moor, I can attest to the power of Smith\u2019s description of the landscape and weather, and there is some power in Smith\u2019s attempt to penetrate Brady\u2019s mind. There are, however, limitations to the depth of engagement in a short, lyric poem. In these poems, Smith is good on the detail, but such a figure might need the expanse of a novel, as in Gordon Burn\u2019s brilliant novel about Myra Hindley, Alma Cogan<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These, though, are quibbles. What we now have here is the collected poetry of a singular and driven voice. A poet who travelled widely both literally and imaginatively into some of the most difficult corners of the late twentieth century world; from Wormwood Scrubs prison, to the moors of his northern England, from Amish Pennsylvania to \u2018a Sarajevo bread queue\u2019. Part of Smith\u2019s drive is to inhabit these places as nakedly and fully as he possibly could, and to write as clearly and unsparingly as he could about that inhabiting. Sometimes, therefore, he can remind the reader of an entirely different poet, someone like Keith Douglas, a poet whose voice and writing seems of another kind to that of his contemporaries. This book shows how hugely successful Smith was as a poet, and what a resource he provides for those writing in his wake. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ken Smith | Collected Poems | Bloodaxe Books \u00a314.99 The slight sense of a jostling masculinity in Ken Smith\u2019s poetry might be part of the reason that it is often described as \u2018muscular\u2019. 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