{"id":1081,"date":"2011-03-18T15:54:30","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T14:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1081"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:17:47","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:17:47","slug":"don-coles-where-we-might-have-been","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1081","title":{"rendered":"Two Collections from Don Coles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Don Coles, <em>A Dropped Glove in Regent Street <\/em>(Signal)<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Don Coles <em>Where We Might Have Been <\/em>(Signal)<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">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.<span> <\/span>Published in the UK mainly through the pages of the LRB, Coles books are available through Signal (<em>How we all swiftly: the first six books<\/em>; and his new book, <em>Where we might have been<\/em>) and Porcupine\u2019s Quill, who publish a useful <em>Selected<\/em>, edited by Robyn Sarah.<em> <\/em>Coles\u2019 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.<span> <\/span>Although a contemporary of Sylvia Plath\u2019s at Cambridge, and a member of a generation often called Confessional, Coles\u2019 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.<span> <\/span>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 <span> <\/span>\u2018Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13 1910\u2019 and \u2018Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm\u2019, a life which refracted his own experience of growing up in Canada.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The two new books published by Signal offer a new dimension to his reflectiveness.<span> <\/span><em>A Dropped Glove in Regent Street <\/em>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.<span> <\/span>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).<span> <\/span>In <em><span> <\/span>A Dropped Glove<\/em> 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<span> <\/span>and his studying (and playing tennis) at Cambridge on the fringes of a life in poetry <span> <\/span>at the same time as his contemporaries Ted Hughes and Plath.<span> <\/span>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.<span> <\/span>And while <em>A Dropped Glove<\/em> is an enjoyable book, the conceit of mixing together his reading and his well-travelled life does not gel in Coles\u2019 prose as it does, say, in David Markson\u2019s later novels or in Coles\u2019 own poems whose remarkable use of memory and artifice are well caught by lines from Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s \u2018Poem\u2019: \u2018art copying from life and life itself, \/ life and the memory of it so compressed \/ they\u2019ve turned into each other\u2019.<span> <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The new poems in <em>Where we might have been<\/em> 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\u2019s preoccupations with time and memory, and how one ends where the other begins: so we hear, differently in the poems, how a voice \u2018above the partition asked \/ \u2018could you tell me the time please?\u2019, just as Coles experienced the question differently as he writes the poem to when he first heard it in a Swedish cafe, \u2018fifty plus \/ years ago when I was less untidy than I am now and was \/ wearing a watch which I no longer seem to need.\u2019 The poem then zeroes in on other transitional scenes, \u2018the bottom step of a long staircase\u2019, \u2018my flight to Canada\u2019, the death of an admired writer, before ending \u2018 Nobody\u2019s exactly where they might have been,\u2019 a speculative statement typically as conscious of fact as it is of flux.<span> <\/span>The poems continue to remember times and places beautifully, always situating them against what he calls \u2018the pending years of my life\u2019 and, beyond that, a future belonging to others as when, in \u2018All our yesterdays&#8230;\u2019 he imagines the next owner of his house: \u2018next door will have a settled look \/ by then, and standing in their driveway \/ they will explain to him \/ the street\u2019s idiosyncracies.\u2019<span> <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Longer poems use other possessions \u2013 houses, books, plays &#8211; as ways of fixing time and its passage, a theme which defines these poems. <span> <\/span>The final long poem, \u2018Too-tall Jones\u2019, has something of Yeats\u2019s \u2018High Talk\u2019 in its relation of \u2018high\u2019 themes to actual physical height, though instead of Yeats\u2019 simple declaration, \u2018Malachi Stilt-jack am I\u2019, 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 <em>The Waste Land <\/em>graffiti\u2019d on a Primrose hill pavement and the poem\u2019s more metaphysical admission comes surprisingly <span> <\/span>into view, as is so often the case in Coles\u2019 work, with its \u2018apparent and continuing \/ concern with higher-up, taller-type things.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\nJohn McAuliffe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[63,95,11],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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