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SENSE OF SOUND: REVIEW
BY JANE ROUTH MAGPIE WORDS by Richard Caddel, 182pp, £12.50, West House Books, 40 Crescent Road,
Nether Edge, QUIET MUSIC OF WORDS
Conversations with Richard Caddel by Anthony Flowers,
40pp, £4.50, West House Books ‘Difficulties’. The word jumps at you from the first page
of the preface to Magpie Words.
It’s there again several times in Quiet
Music of Words. Daunting, if like me you’ve not come across much
of Caddel’s work – most of my time being spent with what he calls
High Street Poetry. But there’s also encouragement: ‘if there are…
– heaven help us – difficulties in what follows… they are there because
I wanted them that way’ and ‘Reading the poems out loud will get round
most of the tricky bits, I’ve always found’. (p11, Preface, MW)
Magpie Words is typeset at Five Seasons Press
and printed on Five Seasons recycled… a book to take seriously. The
poem titles strike you. I expect I shall like: ‘Milkwort’, ‘Parsley’,
‘Ramsons’ and ‘Sweet Cicely’. Oh, and several ‘Rigmaroles’. I’m reading
these titles for quite a while (a poem in themselves?) then it strikes
me: they’re in alphabetical order. Nothing arbitrary about this: ‘For
the Fallen’ a poem about the death of sons is followed by ‘For Tom’,
the poem about his own son’s death. This is a selected, for the period
1970 -2000… a bold thing to say: my work belongs together, over any
time period, in its own order. There are fewer of the famous difficulties in the second
half of the alphabet: this is the whole of ‘Parsley’: Evening: smell of parsley thinned in late May after rain But these words recur in the ‘Fantasia in the English Choral
Tradition (redesdale section)’ in a passage about recollection, the trick being to love anything within in a poem in which a present moment intersects with
a line of memory. And geological time. And cultural shifts. This is
a (long) poem I’m re-reading with increasing pleasure. As I am the
‘Rigmaroles’, poems which ’in a sense take their forms from walks’
(p37 QMW) ‘Each uses anchor quotes, uses repetition and sound patterning,
but in different ways…’ (p25 QMW) The first of them, ‘Rigmarole: And Each Several Chamber Bless’
Caddel describes as ‘driven by sound…rather than its syntactic cohesion’.
(p 25 QMW) Its haunting
opening ‘Long time coming’ is one of the phrases that hold the piece
together and bring it back to itself. Far off, another chorus: Pete
Seeger’s ‘long time passing’. The fourth time the phrase appears is
as a place for the genuine long time coming, a song of the high hills… echoes of the ‘high song’ in ‘Larksong Signal’. Not only
is this alphabetical ordering of the poems not arbitrary, it also
gives you the ability to find your way around and between poems (have
I heard a variant of this phrase somewhere else?) with ease, get to
know the book as a whole, rather than individual pieces. ‘Ground’ is a good place to see the repetitions and echoes
at work across a group of very different pieces. The five stanzas
of ‘Theme’ that begin Throstles feeding on the ground recur in various arrangements in the eight sections of ‘Ground’,
the simplest re-vision coming in ‘Homage’ (to W.C.W.) thrushes feeding on the ground No, no notes needed, not ‘difficult’ (though there is a note
which answers why the word ‘throstle’). I’ve been referring to Anthony Flowers
pamphlet Quiet Music of Words
as I go along. These are transcripts of conversations from 2000 and
2001, a form which I usually loathe, especially when every cough and
sneeze is faithfully recorded as a sort of stage direction. But this
isn’t at all bad in that respect: just the odd ‘Hmm’ and pause for
thought. There’s stuff I’m not (at the moment) that interested in,
about Caddel’s early working life, but much that directly addresses
the ideas and the work and the methods of Magpie Words. This, the ‘Preface’ to Magpie Words and the notes in that book
have been invaluable. Particularly the notes: I appreciate having
a way into the long ‘reading’ of ‘Y Gododdin’, telling me that there
are three approaches to the idea of translation in this poem: •selective literal translation •loose phonic translation •free palimpsest rendering all of which are unlikely to ‘satisfy a scholar of old Welsh’,
because Caddel’s more interested in making a new text than a literal
transcription in a different language. Quiet
Music of Words expands on this: it is the elegiac core, the grief
for lost sons, with which Caddel empathises in the original, and it
is this he’s pulling through into new work, powerfully – this from
section 83 (free palimpsest rendering): fear for him all puffed out crying for whats lost close loved under stars Here is a (whole) short section, number 24, rendered in ‘selective
literal translation’, pointing up those words and feelings which resonate
with the ideas within the poem as a whole, as well as with Caddel’s
other writings: borderland gold bright protected nature only son do not tell harsher So back to that question of ‘difficulties’. Caddel does not
duck out of this in asking you to listen to the sound of the poems.
He acknowledges that the poems would be difficult if you were expecting
to be able to understand a poem in the same way as prose, and to be
able to paraphrase it’s meaning. But he has faith in an ‘empowered
reader’, someone who will engage with a difficulty, so that like a
piece of music it ‘grows on you’ (p28,QMW). And that is how it’s worked for me:
the more I’ve moved around Magpie
Words, the more I’ve heard the poems, the more they’ve grown on
me. Not necessarily (as he anticipates in ‘Larksong Signals’, with
‘no ideas but in tunes) just because I’ve
begun to catch the sense of the sound, but also because of the look
of the poems on the page, the meticulous placing of words so that
you see what else they can conjure beside the first-heard statement.
From ‘Fantasia…(redesdale section)’: the shape of these words gives
you not just children-letting-go, but letting-children-go: or striding over turf the children learning to catch things and
let them go and I struggle for breath for plant names Although I’m a reader bored with what appears in so many
poetry magazines, I haven’t found much ‘what else’. The reason, says
Caddel, is that ‘you haven’t been looking in the right place, because
there’s been little or nothing to show you where to look’. For a writer,
he adds, the downside of such independent work away from ‘commercial
pseudo-critical faffing-around’ is that ‘no-one knows you’re there’.
(p33, QMW) Well, now you
know he’s there: sound sense to listen. © Jane Routh
2002 |