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Once
you've lived near the sea it is very hard to live, or want to live, anywhere
else isn't it? Now, if you find yourself in the predicament of having to live
somewhere else, life can be easier. You don't even need that conch shell.
Because Andy Brown has done something pretty special:
Our fathers
watch anchor
buoys in line across the spines
of
wave-crests; an armada of seagulls
resolving
cliffs by soaring.
[Song of
the Lifeboat Men's Daughters]
An old friend who grew up on the Cornish coast is convinced that if the sea
were music it would be in the key of E minor. If so, that makes this very
much an E minor collection. But that's not to say that the storm berm lacks variety.
It doesn't: it ranges from prose poetry to intricate formal schemes all
within twenty pages. Which reminds me: this is a beautifully produced book
too. The paper is of good quality, the layout and font give the poems plenty
of breathing space, and the cover is simple and striking. Well done
tall-lighthouse. It's a nice object to have around as well as, I think, an
exceptional collection of poems.
I've already noted, by quotation admittedly and without exactly telling you, the
lyrical quality of this poetry; the ebb and flow of short and long vowels
elongating towards the ends of lines like waves about to break; the
imaginative use of words - 'resolving cliffs by soaring' is one of those 'of
course!' moments for which poets are paid (or ought to be); the sense of
lineage 'Our fathers watch achor buoys...' - you can't get away from the fact
that if you're writing about the sea you're not the first, so you may as well
admit it; and the sinewy muscularity of flexing internal rhymes - 'anchor
buoys in line across the spines' - conjuring mental images of wave after
wave. And that's three and a half lines from the first poem in the book.
And the rest of the collection lives up to the promise of the opening. The
sea's changeability is captured, no 'captured' is wrong and works against the
spirit of the book - perhaps: witnessed, by skilful formal and thematic
interplay. That the sea as trickster is portrayed in a prose poem is sly;
after all it's the trickster form (the 'do you believe in ghosts' of poetry;
despite its now-long history still subversive and controversial), each verse
of Odysseus
beginning: 'The ocean denied knowing anything...' And I admit to being
impressed by a writer who's not frightened to hark back to classical
mythology, and who does so secure in the knowledge that there's something
fresh to be said.
For me the storm berm is especially interesting because I see in the
work of Andy Brown the co-existence of two kinds of poetry, poetry that stems
from very different (some would argue incompatible) traditions. There is more
than a touch of Ted Hughes about some of the sounds that Andy Brown makes. I
was reminded more than once of that Hughes line from 'Wind': 'A black backed
gull bent like an iron bar slowly.' And that is no bad thing (in fact if I
could only be allowed to remember one line of poetry it might even be that
one). But there's also the influence of writers such as Lee Harwood, which
manifests in a delight in the present-ness of things, in simple listing, in
the lights and shades of not-knowing, and in acknowledging that words can
only go so far before the reader fills in the gaps with his or her own
experience:
The sea is
just the sea until
it changes, a
cross between
a sunrise and
a friend...
...those
beginnings on the borderline
between the
things we know
and think we
know.
That relaxed delivery and acknowledgement that sometimes 'the sea is just the
sea' are a world away from Hughes, and firmly in Harwood territory. And I guess this is where things
could get sticky. I think you
can argue that Hughes and Harwood represent the real extremes of post-war
English poetry (Larkin aside: however good he was, and nobody could argue against
his skill, perhaps he had little influence on the way in which
people write poems - there is little in his work that is novel besides an
attitude). Is it possible to
reconcile such extremes?
On the one hand you have Hughes, the self-described poet as shaman, claiming
for poetry a power rooted in the precise placing of words, believing words to
be capable of summoning the daemon of a poetic scenario in exactly the same
way as a renaissance magician would summon a spirit by the recitation of
precise formulae in the correct ritual context. So for Hughes it is all about the words. As a form of sympathetic magic
(the concept that events on one plane of existence may cause changes on
another - a concept that, in Western traditions at least, has its origins in
the collision of the Platonic theory of Forms and Medieval ideas of Angelic
and Demonic hierarchies) poems are capable of affecting and influencing the
soul. Words are, because of
their potential to instigate a universal magical sympathy, more important, in
a sense more real, than the events they describe. Essentially Hughes' theory represents a hierarchy, from
words to poet to reader: words have their intrinsic power and the poet works
his magic on the reader by means of his mastery of that power.
On the other hand, on the back cover of Landscapes Lee Harwood
writes: 'I care obsessively about caring. I hate or distrust all things that
begin with capital letters...
The poem is always unfinished and open ended and only complete (and
then only in a way) when read by someone else... The important telegram torn
in half and only one half given to the reader to fill in the missing half...
The reader fills in the blanks with his own memories and imaginations so each
reader creates a different poem from the basic foundations the writer gives
him.'
It is interesting that Harwood writes 'imaginations' rather than
'imagination'. It implies plurality and flux, not a fixed thing called 'The
Imagination' which can be used as a kind of mental appliance to channel
spiritual or magical energy from one plane to another. No magical primers
here. 'People of the world, relax.'
Sometimes Harwood's poems leave the reader dangling, they end without
finishing, suggesting that there is only so much of which words are capable.
Words are not 'magical' in this kind of poetry: a democratic act of tentative
communication is;
a poem is an exchange in which the poet suggests, instigates, describes,
baffles, makes connections and confusions, but does not prescribe. The
miracle is in the un-hierarchical overlap between reader and writer: that
sympathy (as distinct from magical 'sympathy') exists at all is a beautiful
accident of shared experience. Words on their own are not enough; they are
ultimately an inadequate tool for communication, their effectiveness reliant
on an innate desire in people to find commonalities, or explore differences,
of experience.
And Andy Brown, it seems to me, sits somewhere between these two traditions,
his poetry embodying the tension between the pull of Hughes' reliance on
magic words in sympathetically evocative combinations of traditional
alliteration, rhythm and (on occasion) rhyme, and Harwood's recognition that
there is always something missing, that words can never go far enough; words
in themselves cannot 'care' or be of abstract magical value without
correlative shared experiences. However much they are capable of creating
sympathy words need the people uttering them, and the reasons those people
have for doing so. In 'Prayer
(Compline: 9 pm) / Another Sea Poem', it seems to me that something of the
tension between the above modes of poetic expression is pithily articulated:
We pick up
a nubbin of rock
and speed it
off the surface -
each leap
halving
the distance
to infinity,
where
our token tumbles on,
like a
mermaid sounding
the depths
of her own paradox.
I don't really know whether it's possible to resolve such tensions, and I
can't be sure that Andy Brown is even attempting to. But I feel that they are implicit in
this short book, and important in attempting to understand it. Certainly Andy Brown does not shy
away from the very different challenges posed by the traditions in which he
works. And this is a
challenging book for a certain kind of reader too, one who perhaps thinks he
knows on which side of the poetic fence he belongs. What is incontrovertible is that this is a clever book and
a beautiful book, that it exhibits mastery of diverse forms and styles, and
that I enjoy the experience of reading poetry like this from 'A Ship in a
Bottle':
Inside each
bottle he hangs the sunlit rim of the
sea,
curving from the distant whine and crash
of
breakers to headlands of quiet anchorage
topped by a sailor's chapel.
Inside each
chapel, a team of sailors praying. Above the
gravestones in the quiet yard, prayer-birds stir
their wing tips in an act of ocean wondering.
Inside the graves of the drowned, the
Prehistoric sea rinses the bones.
© Nathan Thompson 2008
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