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PLAYING
WITH FIRE
by Grevel Lindop
[93pp, £9.95, Carcanet]
Some years ago Grevel Lindop told me that the long poem/epic as a form
preceded historically the short poem. So that when the first poem in his
latest volume contained the line 'The epic buried inside us never rests', I
imagined the reader was in for one or more long poems. But, in fact, Playing
With Fire
is a book
of short poems, that is, poems of varying length but none of which could be
described as long. However, they are none the worse for whatever length they
happen to be. As the quoted blurb from The North magazine puts it, 'All the
tricks in the poet's bag work for him...'; all perhaps bar the capturing of
that elusive music which guarantees true lyric memorability. But, in any
case, that is something which visits any poet rarely.
There is a much-commented-upon general weakness in poetry these days from
which few poets - myself included - can claim exemption, and this is a too
great obsession with personal experience and the making of poems out of
autobiography. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that per se if the poet
can transcend the autobiographical by stripping away the personal and leaving
only the epiphanic moment or moments. Put another way, the notion of poetry
as 'the supreme fiction' or, in Coleridge's words 'ventriloquizing for the
truth' has somewhat 'gone out of the widow' today. There are various reasons
for this such as the precept, dating from the 1930's, that you should 'only write about
what you have experienced'; or the more recent idea that the language of
poetry should be brought as close as possible to the vernacular. But, like I
say, this doesn't matter if - and it's a big if -- the poet transforms the
personal moment or moments of experience into something of universal
relevance and of durable verbal structure like, for example, Arnold did with
his poem 'Dover Beach' or Keats did with his nightingale ode. But, now, back
to Lindop's book.
Playing With Fire is
full of this struggle between the personal and the impersonal, the 'I' and
the 'Non-I', and it makes fascinating reading. Not only because it - as all
autobiographical effusion must do - makes appeal (successfully or otherwise)
to the reader's natural curiosity about the author; but to a fellow poet
curious to watch the aforesaid artistic struggle unfold and, even more
important for the general reader, to discover hopefully some truly memorable
poetry.
An early poem in the book 'Five Lemons' combines for me a number of these
'concerns' I have raised. I find it a beautifully-, even musically-, shaped
poem by virtue of the prefatory refrain which begins each of its five stanzas
thus, 'Here are five lemons from the poet's garden,' reducing at the last
stanza to 'Here is a lemon from the poet's garden'. Though the stanza is a
septain and promises rhyming rigour, in fact it limits itself to an
occasional and irregular slant rhyme like 'out' and 'shut' or 'foliage' and
'turquoise', with the result it is a very undistracting structure whose main
emotional capital, artistically-speaking, resides in the welcome and welcoming refrain at
the start of each stanza. At the same time, for me, the 'autobiographical
element' both pleased and distracted me. Because I recognized or guessed that
the 'poet's garden' mentioned in the refrain was one I, too, had walked in
with Robert Graves when he was alive and was my earliest obsession among
living poets. Then, reading the acknowledgements, which mentioned the poem
had been read at celebrations in 2000 for the poet's birthday, confirmed the
fact. I also happened to have known that Lindop had edited an edition of
Graves' The White Goddess, which was not only the volume that drew me, like
many poets, into contact with Graves, but was also written in the Galmpton-Brixham
area where I have lived for many years.
Lindop, for me, is at his very best when he coins really beautiful lines
like, 'every breath you take is the gift of green', which is a kind of
mini-paean to the predominant colour of nature; or 'the subtle starry sweat
of the shivering mind'; or where he manages to sustain the concrete reality
of good poetry over a greater length:
'The
knitwork tapestry of furballed goosegrass,
pink
spikes of willowherb have run her through
but
still the unstaunched spring whispers and sings
and
will not let her rest and turn to earth
but
long past hope still sets the empty heart
echoing to the perpetual music of water.'
But back to the autobiographical. I first encountered Grevel Lindop's name
through Kathleen Raine ,who founded the Temenos Academy 'devoted to the arts
of the imagination', and who told me that 'When I am gone, Grevel Lindop will take over after me.', or
words to that effect. Kathleen had a Blakean obsession with 'the Imagination'
but struggled hard to transcend the personal in her work. It seems that, for
a while after her death, Lindop did
become closely associated with the Temenos Academy; and when I finally
encountered his work I was expecting either the sort of spiritual poetry one
associates with, say, Rumi; or a poetry of struggle between the mundane and
the transcendental that one notes in Yeats or R.S. Thomas...or Kathleen Raine.
I discovered the latter sort of poetry in Lindop's work.
Well, now, all that said - how am I to read a seemingly brothel poem like
'Afterwards', with its pertinent question 'What do we talk about? Sex,
mostly.'; or the extraordinary twenty three sonnets 'set in an East London
strip club'? Sonnets as
well-fashioned as ever 'Five Lemons' was which I praised earlier. The
sonnets, especially, are so authentic that it is hard to believe they are
simply the fantasizing of an aging academic, who has lost sight of
Coleridge's distinction between the fancy and the imagination. Earlier in the
volume there is confessional evidence of Lindop being a well-married man with
a beautiful wife, though a man who, when younger, was not short on sexual
adventures. So if I take this sequence of pornosonnets as autobiographical I
end up with one mystery: that of an unhappily married man; and if I take them
as fiction then, like I say, I run into the problem of: are they trying to
lead me to a greater and more spiritual truth (which is the true and proper
exercise of the imagination: whether in Shakespeare's Lear, the parables of Christ or The Dhammapada.) or are they simple fantasy?
In the end I must confess myself nonplussed.
But, puzzled or not by my failure to get a more satisfactory purchase on the
poetry of Grevel Lindop, I found this volume a fascinating read.
© William Oxley 2006
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