|
|
Stephen Romer made a big impact with the short,
disciplined stanzas of his second poetry collection, Plato's Ladder in 1992, and this fourth collection continues many
of his keynote themes. Many are set in France or concern teaching - Romer has
been involved in American academia as Visiting Professor of French - and
several poems speak of the writer or painter's need for a sacred space in
which to work. Specifically, two poems ('Dismantling the Library',
'Dismantlings 2') explore what it means to prise apart such familiar spaces:
it is 'removed layer by layer' like a honeycomb, and 'squattable tomorrow /
by strangers'. 'Yellow Studio', the title poem, finds parallels in exploring Vuillard's
studio: 'I stare with nostalgiaÉand I know the place / absolutely', but other
poems here explore the anxiety of age and the melancholic tone of a sense of
exile.
The poems here are carefully arranged into five sections and the fourth,
loosely about the experiences of teaching in America, seems to me, with the
honourable exception of 'Yellow Studio', the weakest. A sequence of short
sketches, 'Waindell Shorts', strains to attain a loose-jacketed late Lowell
casualness of tone and seems less sure-footed than Romer can be.
Happily, the book concludes with a fifth section of very strong poems devoted
to the character of the poet's father, as he approaches death. Whereas the
earlier pieces were quite inward and hermetic in their artistic explorations,
these work in a different manner. The father-son dynamic often results in
precise, heartfelt definitions of the self and thus it is here: Hugo
Williams, whose poems often winningly explore his own father's complexities,
is right to laud them as a real achievement. Romer begins some time after his
father's death, noticing 'this clearance / this sunny space to be busy
in'('Pottering About') , then retrospectively describes for the reader his
father's school days, his National Service, his love of music, sibling
rivalry and passions for ornithology and Wimbledon. When he is finally
confined to a hospital bed, Romer is made to recognise his father's essential
privacy, his silence and 'adherence to routine' ('No Interruptions'), but
still the gulf between father and son remains, mired in silence:
Something of
the grey heron
the ashen
heron
in your
demeanour
when you
stood watching herons...
('Further Encounters')
His father's death does not bring what we now lightly refer to as 'closure';
instead, secrets, quirks of character and intellect, aspects of love and
family life remain forever unfinished and inconclusive, Romer movingly
anatomising 'the intermittent crises / of self-esteem, the struggle / at
times despairing, against failure // and self-exclusion'. The need to enter
into a kind of dialogue against such a resolute, disciplined figure has
brought a new, vivid precision
to Romer's work here.
©
M.C.Caseley 2008
|