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In the poem
'Memory' addressed to an unnamed friend, whom the poet remembers when 'we
were still scientists together', there is this stanza:
I find you
used to write poetry
Gave up at
sixteen, dissatisfied
At not
immediately being Eliot,
I, always the
slower one,
Gave up
science at twenty-eight.
So what we have in Christopher Southgate is a lapsed scientist who became a
poet; and, also, a man with a plain, undramatic , but not-quite-serene
religious awareness. He dedicates a poem to R.S. Thomas who 'infected us, not
with faith, / But with acceptance of a space in-between'; and in another
distich, 'A mountain-land where faith and doubt / Inhabit each other's
shadow'. Most interestingly, too, for a lapsed scientist, he shows no rancour
against, nor any doubt of, that discipline from which he turned away. And
this sensible detachment has been rewarded with the gift of writing about and
interpreting scientific ideas. Something which makes the poems incorporating
scientific notions more readable than any other poetry I can recall dealing
with such matters. This I think is because he wears his scientific learning
lightly, and because, as he subtitles the entire volume, they are 'poems of
science and love'. Love and rational curiosity are a rare mix, and rarely
successful; but they are here. It is what makes the book so interesting, at
times moving, and wide-ranging.
Christopher Southgate's 1997 volume, A Love and Its Sounding, published by Salzburg University Press,
was a remarkable verse-biography of T.S. Eliot. It struck me as a brave and
imaginative enterprise - as it did Anne Stevenson who wrote the introduction
to it. A book that I enjoyed, it left me feeling that here was a poet with a
sufficient originality to mark out a place of distinction for himself. Easing
the Gravity Field does
just that because we can now see his is a life of varied experience expressed
in poems of great variety. There are poems of humour like 'A Capsule Falls
From Space' that cannot be quoted from but which is satirically risible in
its totality; and there is a poem like 'Christabel The Cat In Springtime':
On the window-sill
concentrating
on birds,
our cat.
She has made
of them
a lifelong
study ...
Cat-teeth
chatter gently,
miming the
grinding of bones.
Among the love poems - the section sensibly termed 'Variations on a Theme' -
there are beautiful lines to be encountered: 'But our eyes stop at Venus, /
glowing, lovely as a throat-warmed pearl', or in the serene study of
Vermeer's 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter':
Vermeer has
so arranged the space, the light,
The stillness,
the shape of the face of the woman,
That our
imagination streams to the paper.
There is, too, a short poem in this section, 'Plath and Hughes' - it is one
of the best I have ever encountered on this disastrous but famous
relationship. Definitely an anthology piece. Among the longer love poems, and
difficult again to quote from, is one called 'Meigle Museum'. Like all of the
love poems it shows a remarkable gift for moving restraint.
Years ago I read a short piece of prose by the Georgian poet and friend of
Ezra Pound, Wilfred Blunt, in which he narrated how, in a Munich beer cellar
in the 1920s, a man came up to him from a neighbouring table and asked him
for a light for his cigarette. The man was Adolf Hitler - not then a
'celebrity' but soon to be. Reading Christopher Southgate's 'Les Petites
Entrees?' about a man who 'As a small child he had a door / held open for him
by Swinburne' and who, through his life, cherished a 'bowl ... of ... milky
pearls ...', namely, his brief encounters with the famous. In later life, a
minor celebrity himself, he is finally 'not wanted now to open ftes / or
read the Christmas lesson.' So the poem ends:
Each day, he
takes out his will,
and has it
read to him,
and drinks
a pint of Dom Perignon.
It is the one
true satisfaction of his life.
Sad perhaps, but showing the insightful strength of this poet who now looks
beyond science to the very human condition itself.
Lastly, a humorous, quietly celebratory, never didactic, tastefully loving,
lucidly thoughtful, poet, his poetry is an honest experience of truth, and
possessed of something of that gift found in Thomas Hardy to place a gentle
finger on human emotions. Do I have any reservations? Well, I thought I had
one. It was this: I wish he would live less in the land of free-verse than he
does. Or if that was where he must dwell, then try for more rhythm in his
poems like his great biographee/mentor T.S. Eliot so often achieved. But
then, suddenly, in the scientific poem about 'Crick, Watson and the Double
Helix' he hits the reader with that most difficult of verse forms, a
villanelle; so I drop my quibble and say: here is a book to be enjoyed in all
ways.
© William
Oxley 2006
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