|
|
I first
came across Harry Guest's poetry around thirty years ago when his 1968 Anvil
book Arrangements
finally (and undeservedly) reached my local remainder bookshop. Since then,
I've continued to read him and have regularly used his work to illustrate
various poetic techniques wherever I've taught. In 1996, I even had the
privilege of publishing his Visit to an Unknown Suburb as a chapbook. Why do I mention
all this? Quite simply to declare an interest that may have a bearing on what
follows.
Given this interest, it's easy to understand the sense of excitement I felt
when I pulled his latest book, Some Times, from the envelope. Could he,
at nearly 80, still pull it off? Could he still demonstrate the same ability
to innovate and experiment? Or had age taken the edge off what he had to say
and the ways in which he said it?
The short answer, I'm delighted to report, is yes he could, yes he could and
no it hasn't. The poems in this collection are unmistakably Guest's - warmly
human, intelligently considered, measuredly joyful, abundantly evocative and,
without pandering in the least
to the current, odious trend for dumbing-down, readily accessible. Yet,
there's also evidence of him not having stopped developing, of having
continued to search for new ways to express the new themes he wants to
express.
At Harry Guest's stage of life it's perhaps permissibly inevitable that he
admits to the overriding theme in Some Times as being memory and the tricks
it plays. Much of what he has
included is retrospective in flavour. But why not? He's got many years' worth
of happy, confusing, sad and celebratory experiences to draw on. However,
that's not to say that it's in any way sentimental. Even the section, 'Beyond
the Rim', containing poems for the dearly departed, refuses to fall into the
grip of slushiness. Instead, Guest fills them with life:
You stay in
memory
as generous and unaffected, your talk
glinting with
merriment, your work
inventive,
knotty, scrupulous.
[from
'Thom Gunn 1929-2004']
Guest has a way of making so much of what he writes read as though it is a
stream of consciousness, fresh and idiosyncratic. He is an observer, a
reporter who allows the reader the space to interpret - nothing is crammed
down the throat - it can simply be read or, for the more adventurous, delved
into to uncover the layers of meaning.
...simpler than
mere witnessing
though easier
as always
to set down
than decipher
[from
'Duloe']
We drive to
our hotel past hoardings advising
a foreigner
whom to vote for, explaining
why banks
love to dish out money, proving
how
hair-spray makes a goddess, offering
sly tips for
the timeliest bargains
and
prophesying when each one of us
will get the
golden fruit that is our due.
[from
'Palindrome: The Loire Valley']
In continuing to innovate, Guest has taken the stream of consciousness
concept to its extreme with 'As Far as Angkor Wat' in which the punctuation
even becomes part of the flow of words...
what's been
derived from yellowed pamphlets helps
only in part
dash even photographs
must cheat
because you have to pace the thing
out for
yourselves and sense uneven steps
comma a
mediaeval play of sun
down far
symmetric cloisters comma see
firsthand the
blackening waste of rain along
those
crumbling arcades full stop
Of course, you might think that, after 74 lines, a feature of this type might
become a little tiresome. But, no. Quite the reverse. It adds to it,
providing timing to the cadences without having to interrupt the current of
diction. You might think it would appear forced or manufactured. But, no.
Quite the reverse. It adds to it, providing a quirkiness that makes it all
the more interesting. Anyway, that, in essence, is another feature of Guest's
work - nothing is forced. There's none of the forcing of terminology or
name-dropping that others indulge in. With Guest, if it's the right word, it
goes in. And it goes in without jarring:
...still ponds
mirrored
pewter
smudges along
the
threatened sky
while smoke
drifted
from one
unseen
cottage which
could
boast yellow
walls
not to say a
gaudy muster
of hollyhocks
to interrupt
the going
scheme.
[from 'The
Poetry of Ideas']
If there must be a bad apple in this barrel, then it has to be 'Before Reflection'
which, with its strict scansion and rhyming scheme, sticks out like an
excruciatingly sore thumb. It's so un-typically Guest that I fail to
understand why it made the final cut, but for the fact, perhaps, that it is
so un-typically Guest:
If thought is thunder
All ideas are
ice
Glaciers will
sunder
While white
peaks entice
When peril
beckons
Intrepid
desire
A wise wife
reckons
On curbing
the fire
Beyond that though, this collection holds no disappointments, not even to a
seasoned Guest-reader like me, and shows he can still pull it off,
splendidly, right through to the Meldrewesque ire of 'An Open Letter to
Librarians with Closed Minds', a selection of translations of the likes of
Verlaine, Haufs and Serafini, and the pathos of a sequence of love poems
looking back on a relationship that became 'unclasped without a wan pretence
/ of plagency'.
I certainly hope I have more opportunities in the years ahead to pull many
other new collections from Harry Guest from their envelopes. His will be a
hard act for anyone to follow.
|
|
|
One
possible contender may be David Harsent who, according to Michael Hulse in Poetry
Review, has
filled the shoes left vacant by Ted Hughes. His latest collection, Night, is his follow up to the widely
acclaimed and Forward Prize-winning collection Legion. To quote the jacket notes, it
is, 'a book in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark,
unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit
selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never
far apart.'
Out by the
woodpile at three a.m., knock-kneed and shitfaced,
Lost in your
own backyard,
You pour a
libation that comes straight from the dregs and she drinks it.
[from 'The
Garden Goddess']
Dark and unsettling? No, those jacket notes are, at best, misleading. The
language used throughout is colloquial and, at times, vernacular and, in
being so, lends the collection an everyday feel that is far from what it
would have us believe. So much so, it is often light and pleasant to read,
rather than dark and full of foreboding. Yes, there are many mentions of
death, but that, in itself, doesn't make for dark, unsettling writing.
So, if the collection's quality is to be gauged using its own criteria, then
it fails, has not succeeded in attaining what it set out to achieve. But this
would be to do it a great disservice. There is much more to these poems than
the neo-gothic claptrap on the cover.
For a start, as with Guest, Harsent's poems flow as though written from
streams of consciousness, allowing alliterations and repetitions to form the
rhythms that carry them along:
...See where
the doomed and damned
look up to
the sky as it trembles and tears, each lashed
to a spar or
spoke...
[from
'Rota Fortunae']
...with
distances fading fast,
with the road
I travelled by a thinning smudge,
with all that
lay between us bagged and sold,
with voices
in under the door that are nothing more nor less
than voices
of those I loved, or said I did,
with nothing
at all to mark
fear or
fault, nothing to govern loss,
and limitless
memory starting up in the dark.
[from 'The
Hut in Question']
Another technique used to add to this is parenthesis. In poetry? Why not? How
many of us speak in definite, straightforward sentences without adding
information or doubting what we've just said (and looking for affirmation) as
we go? Nobody. We all do it, it's part of our normal speech patterns. In
these pieces, then, the purposes are exactly the same - added information and
self-doubt - and the result equally so - natural flow.
Here are a few, taken out of context and at random:
(is it?)
(I think it
is)
(not mine)
(not
together, of course)
(maybe soon,
maybe not)
(you might
guess)
(face-up till
you tingle, then flip)
(or
grandmother's)
(or so she
said)
All in all, then, although there's nothing particularly high-brow about the
diction, the uses Harsent makes of his language is what makes it work in
producing very readable poems brimming with many wonderfully well-turned
phrases.
This is a
lesson, I think, in how to feel:
the bloom,
the woman, her wound, that the chair is set
slightly to
one side, that my hands now fall
slack to my
lap... and, of course, love in the guise
of a skull
licked clean, the dome chock-full
of
darkness, of errant music, of thoughts of me.
[from
'Vanitas']
But it's not just a collection of well-turned phrases either. There's a
richness of meaning working away on different levels: narrative, metaphoric
etc. The opening lines of 'Scene One: A Beach', for instance:
And this is
where I've got to, pitched up on some shoreline
like any
piece of wreckage, like something
once adrift,
now simply lost, no given purpose,
no way of
knowing where from, where to, no sense of direction...
...form the basis of the narrative of the poem, but can also be taken as a metaphor
for life itself. And, between the lines in 'Spatchcock' and 'Abstracts',
there is even much of interest to the carni-erotic fetishists amongst you.
The centrepiece of the collection, though, must be the long, concluding piece
entitled 'Elsewhere'. Taking up some 26 pages with its dense, unfolding
narrative it has all the hallmarks of a quest-poem in which 'the protagonist
is drawn ever onward through a series of encounters and reflections like an
after-hours Orpheus, hard-bitten and harried by memory'. It's form gives the
impression of cinematic scenes, each populated by variously unhinged
characters going about their unhinged lives, offering up searching questions,
simple advice or unfathomable conundrums to our hero.
The music is
soupy blues, she in her patchy satin
working her
way through the clientele - a dance
for a
double-and-chaser, with (I guess) a pretty fair chance
of better
later - and this booze-blind cretin
confusing me
with someone he once met in
another bar another
time, so I'm just getting set to coast
towards the
door I came in by, as her glance
slaps the
back of my head and when I turn
we're
standing nose-to-nose
and
hip-to-hip, the curve of her lip, the slow burn
as she lifts
her eyes to mine, and dips, and flows
out onto the
floor, myself in tow, her civet-and-myrrh
drawing me
on, 'Fine and Mellow' on the turntable, her mouth
close to my
ear as she whispers, 'There's a dearth
of men like
you and that's the truth...'
So, has he filled Ted Hughes' shoes? Does he have it in him to take up where
Harry Guest will one day leave off? Maybe. More importantly, however, is
whether or not Harsent has his own voice, his own style, his own concerns. I
feel the answer to these must be a resounding yes. Of course, the only way
for you to find out is to fork out the tenner for the book and see for
yourself. And, if you ask me, you really should.
© John
Mingay 2011
|