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One of the first things that struck me on reading John
Daniel's most recent poetry collection was the number of fish I encountered:
Fish
I love you
when you watch fish,
giggling at
the huge snouty one
that never
ventures out of its hole,
other uglies
you think could be me,
wrestling
with an octopus, oohing and aahing
at silver shoals
flying over the reef,
the white and
orange fish-clowns
that live
among poisonous tentacles,
the
sardine-balls chased by the sailfish,
cheering on
gudgeon-like creatures
that crawl up
the cliff to reach paradise,
laughing uproariously
as schools of green tiddlers
surround the
grey hippopotamus, hoovering his hide,
nibbling the
armoured plates of his arse.
He's obviously been watching a natural history programme and jointly
revelling in biodiversity and in the strange behaviours of the undersea
world, something I often do as well, so I'm immediately in tune with the
piece and on his side. This poem could be said to be typical of a 'John
Daniel' poem - insofar as you can ever say such a thing - in that it combines
curiosity with playfulness and an unexpected and arresting final line,
humorous in this case though not always so. 'Aquarium at Barcelona' is a
little different, hinting towards the slightly experimental, still observing
fish in a slightly less 'virtual' geography where the 'protagonist' feels
more connected to the environment he is describing in a somewhat cool but
curious 'Ballardian' manner:
These cinema
screens,
moving
staircases, the shark overhead
growing its
teeth like unwrapping steel,
the sea bass
turning and turning
while far
below
a moray eel
stalks a tabby cat,
(the Romans
used their poison against people).
God's doing
this, no doubt about it.
Darwin and
God, the two of them,
dancing in
darkness and out of the sea,
up the beach,
the brain a squashed matchbox,
the aeroplane
shark flying over my head
turning me
upside down
to the depths
where I'm born.
(extracts
from 'Aquarium at Barcelona')
As I'm gisting this piece I can't help seeing and hearing John read it aloud,
to an audience, building in intensity and delivering key lines with a
suitable sense of humorous discard, bathos or in the role of
'information-giver', wherever appropriate.It's a neat poem, with an introductory
stanza, a somewhat more strange and dislocated centrepiece and a conclusion
which is slightly baffling yet very
satisfying.
Formal poems - a sonnet or two, likewise a sestina - collide with more
free-form verses and there is a neat play on the prose-poem, funnily enough
entitled 'Prose-poem: a definition'. Despite being a scholarly chap, John is
always on the lookout for pretentiousness in art and this piece steers a good
line between entertainment, critique and bedevilled bafflement.
The
poem is one-sided and gives itself capital airs,
prose is an
impossible document covering a million pages. A
prose-poem
knows its limitations. Poetry is milk, prose is
cheese. A
prose-poem is on the way to becoming a yoghurt. A
prose-poem
has a story to tell but not a long one. It knows
when to shut
up.
(from
'Prose-poem: a definition')
Daniel covers a vast range of subject matter in this collection, from
varieties of art (the hilarious 'Surreal' for example), to aspects of war, to
gardening, the natural world in all its glories (including plenty of fish in
all sorts of strange situations) through childhood reminiscence and an
extremely offbeat poem based around 17th century voyeurism in
Totnes, entitled 'Documentary evidence'. I was particularly taken with his
short 'pirate poem':
The seven
seas
The seaweed
lies slumped
on the beach:
cat o' nine
tails dumped
from the
ships that have sailed away
with their
captains, capstans and cannon,
canvas,
compasses, cockroaches,
over the
seven seas.
which neatly encapsulates a whole history of storytelling, imagination and
nostalgia in seven lines.
There's also a strong visual sense evident in these poems and it's no
surprise to discover that John Daniel is a painter. The cover pastel, which
refers to the title poem, is reminiscent of Soutine.
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Jane Spiro's poems are deeper than they appear on a first
reading and there's a gradual progression in her first collection towards a
darker sense of history which is nevertheless expressed through a reading of
individual lives. Her experience as a language teacher also infiltrates these
poems and there's a constant sense of
movement, between the here and now and the then and there, where
echoes of different times and places are foregrounded in the present moment:
I am not of
this place
where I hear
from the dockland workers
language
stolen from nursery rhymes,
from
half-remembered stories, prayers
that found
new tongues, started again.
(from
'Return to the first language')
While there's an increasing sense of dislocation and fragmentation in these
poems the mood is often one of an ambiguous relation to childhood memories
where recollection and 'remembering' can be a source of both intense joy and
a more shadowy, unrecoverable aspect.
The sestina 'Grandfather cut glass' tends towards the more positive
end of this spectrum and has an almost cubist overview in its descriptive
onrush:
light
refracted through glass, blue-red-yellow
partly-seen
children, corridors through whirlpool reds
in
kaleidoscope whorls, number sixes with ash,
silver putty
edges, spaniel faces in blue-glow through glass
all made by
you, your large hands
that held
ice-creams. ÉÉ.
Because of
all this, the first poem I ever wrote was
for you - the
killing ash, the first yellow - childhood
your hands
made red-glow, magic glimpsed through glass.
(from
'Grandfather cut glass')
'Forbidden city - Warsaw 1938; Warsaw 1998' hints more strongly at family history and the cataclysmic events of
WW2 yet remains firmly in the present, while earlier, more pastoral-based
poems such as 'Wild flowers elegy' (almost a song) and 'Company of cows'
(capturing the moment - evocative and endearing) are descriptive and precise,
beautifully put-together pieces which are succinct and stand alone.
The subject matter of 'The new machine - Kilmainham jail, Dublin
1868', is
that of the introduction of the camera in
relation to identifying and 'capturing' criminals and it's a poem which as
well as pointing towards increasing surveillance in contemporary times, hints
at the darker subject of physiognomy, or telling the nature of a person by
his or her countenance, a contentious enough subject even in the nineteenth
century.
The title poem - 'Playing for time' - remains the darkest and most powerful
piece in this impressive collection and relates to a father's love of music
and the piano, amid a backdrop of human violence and totalitarianism:
Its
voluptuous curves, shining smile,
banged
against walls, outswept arms
clawed the
bony bars of banisters,
punched at
closed windows
and then, its
hungry ivory gnashing at air,
was demoted
to the street, shuffled out,
a failure to
fit.
We learn not
to long for
things, to
forget them
since they
forget us -
not to long
for
places we
once sang,
spread under
our hands,
felled with
hammers.
(from 'Playing for
time')
The cover painting by Michael Harvey is a neat 1930's style pastiche, which
on this occasion entirely suits the italicised title.
© Steve Spence
2015
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