|
Matthew Mead is not as well known as he
should be. I can recall the name from magazines and at least one anthology -
Edward Lucie-Smith's British Poetry Since 1945 published by Penguin in
1970. There Mead is included in a section entitled 'Influences from Abroad'
with poets like Michael Hamburger and Chrisopher Middleton, in which
Middleton is quoted as saying Mead combines 'the tradition of experimental
form and European political themes'. Then there was Penguin Modern Poets,
shared with Harry Guest and Jack Beeching, also in 1970. As well as being a
poet in his own right, Mead, with his wife Ruth, has, like Hamburger and
Middleton, played an important role in translating modern German poetry.
This, along with Modernist American poets like Wallace Stevens, has obviously
influenced his own writing - though he claims to have avoided what one
reviewer has called 'programmes of allegiances'. Like Eliot and Pound, he is
a cosmopolitan: his perspectives are European, his concerns being the
political events (what he himself calls 'psycho-politics') of the twentieth
century. He has lived in Germany since 1962 and is now in his mid-eighties.
Mead has been publishing highly original poetry since the sixties, has five
collections to his credit and was, for some years, editor of the magazine Satis. Now we have this
substantial Selected Poems, the more you read of which the more you recognise
a hard-to-place poet, thoroughly independent-minded, completely his own man,
but, once encountered, someone you can't ignore. In this he reminds me of
other fine originals like W.S. Graham and Gael Turnbull.
Heaney has talked of 'the subversive and necessary function of writing as
truth-telling'. It fits Mead's poetry. The truths are often uncomfortable,
those of man's inhumanity to man. Eliot's question is pertinent: 'After such
knowledge, what forgiveness? It is sometimes said that postwar British poetry
failed or refused to deal with such matters...though it could be said to
lie at the heart of Plath's
poetry: the question being how can a poet respond to the enormities of
twentieth-century evil, to such huge-scale suffering and devastation.
Here is Mead:
After Passchendale
After Katyn
After Auschwitz
After Kronstadt
We stand here
After Asquith
After Beria
After Noske
We stand here
What footfall?
What valley what field
what forest
What morning sun
After the streets of Nagasaki?
Mask, persona,
Alias, pseudonym;
We stand here.
[from
'Identities']
This extract is bare-bones poetry working with material which is extremely
difficult to articulate, as its cryptic and staccato style implies. It is has
the look of being 'experimental'. But Mead's range is wider than this
suggests. He can bring off technical feats: triolets and villanelles look
easy in his hands; he can write lyrically, epigrammatically, and with biting
wit. I think I admire him most when I feel he's in Wallace Stevens' mode.
Take this, the first of four sections of a poem called Echo:
Except as I speak she is
silent. When I speak
She answere in no accent
but my own,
Makes her eply true to
the last word
Repeating nothing which I
have not said.
I speak and she replies.
Yet her reply
Lingers upon the word as
if the word
Awoke a memory of speech,
of how to speak,
Not as I spoke but as she
might have spoken.
I speak and she replies.
My word is changed.
In a useful essay printed at the end of The Autumn-Born in Autumn Dick Davis says 'His tone
is unmistakable, and once encountered is never forgottn; certainly the reader
feels that Mead's finest poems could have been written by no other
poet.' Davis is right.
© Matt Simpson 2009
|