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David Caddy is an unusual poet and one whose work really
ought to be better known. Although his poetry deals with the experience of
living in a rural environment, he avoids the common cliches of contemporary
'pastoral poetry' - often little more than a pale re-working of the tropes of
the Romantics - and while his work has a critical (you could say, political)
edge, there's also an avoidance of the more knee-jerk, ultra-leftist critique
of rural matters. I'm thinking in particular here of Raymond Williams' riposte to Marx's notion of 'rural
idiocy' and of Andrew Marvell's famous country house poems where the
complexity of labour relations can be teased out from the glorious and inventive
linguistic wit of the poetry itself. So it is possible to combine critique
with pleasure and still have the best of both worlds, while demonstrating
that a contemporary rural poetry can be engaged and democratic yet also
delighting in language, complexity and contradiction. At least I like to
think this is the case and Caddy's poetry, particularly the work in this
book, is about the best example I can find to support such an argument. Oh
that all literary sociologists were such accomplished poets.
There's an underlying theme of resistance here, to poverty, to the nature of
class-relations, to the power of language as a tool for administration and
for self-expression. Caddy finds himself
in that classic situation of the working-class, educated thinker who remains
true to his roots while needing to find a way of writing about these issues
that rings true. He is writing on behalf of the disaffected and in
defiance of the way society is organised and managed but he does it from the
perspective of one who still lives close to a rural community and with the
experience of having grown up in one. This is not a case of according special
privilege but of combining an analytic approach with a more imaginative one
in response to actual circumstances and to a long history of 'literary
privilege'. His best weapons are his own experience, his education and a sort
of anarchic, libidinal joyfulness, which bursts out in great bouts of
expression in defiance of a muted anger based on arbitrary limited options.
In 'from A History of Walking',
for example, we get this:
Bunny's modelled
legs are more Chaplinesque
than Wordsworthian
knowing that bipedalism
is linked to early
laughter and freed
hands lead to
intricate manipulation.
This dexterity,
anthropologically, knots
with sexual
workers, innuendo, hypotheses,
female ancestral
hominid predators
and plausible male
insecurities. Fantastic!
These final stanzas are preceded by a more rationalist approach, documenting
the joys of naming and the relation between language and place, also
suggesting the appropriation - by both Left and Right - of the nature of
landscape and its place in our Literary/Political heritage. Yet there is
complexity here, a mix of almost reverence, perhaps, with an undermining,
anarchic mood, which induces the sort-of mixed feeling and sense of ambiguity
I still experience when reading Marvell:
How full the trees,
gates, barbed wire
with books and
mnemonics,
how cool to store
an entire library,
remember the Divine
Comedy's maps.
(from 'A History of Walking')
I'm also reminded here of Ian Duhig, a poet who takes a similar approach to
Caddy, when undermining received opinion and challenging prevailing
orthodoxy, though I think Caddy's poetry is more complex and nuanced.
Caddy's ability to embrace and transcend traditional formal strictures by
including a degree of experiment is effective and invigorating and he manages
to do this without losing sight of what he has to say. Thus in 'Botanologia (after
Gavin Salerie)', we have a listing which
works as a sound poem and reminds me slightly of a similar piece Andy Brown
wrote a few years back:
Adder's Tongue,
Alehoof, Love Apples, Mad Apples, Thorny
Apples, Red
Archangel, Mild or Spotted Arsmart, Hot or
Biting Arsmart,
Bears Breach, Cammock, Lady-Traces,
Clown's Allheal,
Creeping Dog's Bane, Earth-Nut, Woody Eye-Bright, ...
(from 'Botanologia')
There's a submerged sense of the scatological in these names, an assertive
earthiness which works almost as a curse, a 'fuck-you' response which implies
the use of a 'hermetic' language which can be used as a weapon and as a way
of proud self-definition. It's also highly entertaining, of course.
These poems also speak of silence, of men dispossessed of work and of family,
on the brink of disaster yet resigned and disappearing into a world of the
woods and trees; of a knowledge both deep and unacknowledged, yet there is
little violent resistance ('No Burning Cottages') or political activity.
Caddy in fact evokes a degree of displacement, which is painfully shocking in
its location of poverty and lack of connection:
Eight became six,
six became four,
some men could not
hack it anymore,
left early, took to
dog racing, pigeons,
making bird tables,
rearing pheasants,
cropped up in
garages under apprentices,
in cheese
factories, garden centres.
A gradual absence,
with their world
of signs and
recognition dispersed
like husks. No
great noise. No burning
cottages. Consent on the brink of sense.
Each year less rows
of runner beans,
washing.
Wildflowers altering the balance
of things, shifting
feet, stones.
some turning
authority, duration
on its head,
placing this against that,
and staying put, not listening
to the spaces
between worlds.
Susceptibility
taking them like magic.
('No Burning Cottages')
There's a big chunk of social history encapsulated in those few lines, a
succinct and exacting description which remains impressive in its
understatement. Yet there is also an angry undertone.
Although David Caddy clearly feels a strong connection to his environment and
perhaps also a degree of disconnection due to his level of formal education,
he doesn't allow this to diminish his own sense of joy in the use of language
itself, even though he is living in good faith and being truthful to his own
experience. Thus he can describe the isolation and the muted anger, which
this generates, while also allowing for a more unrepressed sense of
linguistic exuberance, meshing the two in a fashion which is startlingly
unusual. I'm reminded here of reading Raymond Williams (interviewed in New
Left Review, I think), talking about his
experience of reading James Joyce as a student and being slightly worried
about how much he was enjoying the process, as well as the pleasures of
Practical Criticism where you could also get 'carried away'. Caddy seems able
to marry both the cavalier and the puritan in his writing, including passages
which are quietly descriptive and hauntingly evocative, yet which remain
unsentimental and closely focussed:
As a boy he strode
down the hill
to sing in the
church with the village.
These people have
been and gone.
He lifts his shoulders,
accepting
the weight of
absences, and clings
to the next moment
of stillness.
(from 'From the Farm')
By way of contrast let's take two stanzas from a poem on the preceding page:
Alfie spits
tobacco, his first and index fingers
tightly holding a
roll-up, his right arm arcing
outwards and down.
His stare fixed, seemingly
intent upon some
distant object. Quiet bull.
Now owl, lady's
bedding, dace out of school,
ace in the hole in
an underworld of muteness,
nod and nudge,
flutterer of bets, plough of silence,
confederacy of
dunces, apocrypha and apocryphal.
(from 'Alfie Does Not Speak Much Now')
The whole poem in fact veers between what could be satirised as a dour
description of rural displacement and poverty and a more vigorous,
irrepressible use of language which has something of Barry MacSweeney's excessive invective and
hilariously dark 'loopiness'. Where Caddy wins out over MacSweeney, perhaps,
(not that it's a competition) is in his combining of an analytical approach
with a more joyful 'letting-go'.
There's an interest in the blues, which I take to be the subject of 'Young Paul Hart', a poem which
scatters imagery and suggests a depth and indeed a dark glamour (much needed
in oppositional art) in popular culture, which also aids a feel-good mood and
seems entirely devoid of any cynicism. This is a meshing, rather than a
clashing, of cultures and it's a coming together which seems effective and
affirmative, rather than diminishing and prone to rehearsing those same,
tired old arguments:
At the Fiddleford,
cold on the table waiting, two pints of 6x.
A ritual, man to
man, glass by glass, until chucking out.
LA Woman in the
air. Paul's declarative. Art portfolio.
MG parked askew.
He's got two women, the fuzz on his trail.
He's a friend of
the Devil. He's my friend. He's maybe your
friend too. He
knows Matisse, chords, runs thirty miles daily,
will help you if
you ask. His smile does not lie. ...
(from 'Young Paul Hart')
Caddy is able to take what's positive in American culture without being taken
in by the hype and the spin - no doubt a generational factor here - and
achieves in this poem one of the few genuine utopian moments in this collection,
a momentary endorsement of possibility and expanded horizons. If there's any
intended satirical thrust in this piece then I'm not seeing it!
If the reputation of Thomas Hardy lies heavily within this poetry - due
partly to Caddy's living in Dorset - and Hardy's essay on the Dorsetshire
Labourer remains a key reference point
both sociologically and culturally, there's also something of Thoreau's Walden in Caddy's writing, where local traditions and
natural knowledge are seen as not simply a retreat or escape from the world
of the city but as an alternative information base from which an
'inarticulate critique' may yet be voiced. Hermetic traditions and the use of
'magic', homeopathy and alchemical suggestion can be used to empower the
powerless:
As prickly as cow's
tongue, borage,
Apollinaire, a
pollinating bee bread,
hairy barrach, to
allocate courage.
The language of the
bristling Ox-tongue
that knows no
bounds by the roadside
or in your
grandmother's garden.
(from 'Signalled as Ox-tongue')
There's an ongoing relish in the language itself, combined with a ritualised
'melting' into the landscape (particularly evident in 'Wild Swans at Stur
Mill'), which is impressively rich in its lyrical sweep and in its physically
immersive, entrancing effect:
Great
soap bubbles and froth swirl. Lover after lover,
firm
upon stamen and root, tight at nerve ends, edge
stubble
and eroded mud to where the river softens
around
islands and begins to ripple towards a charge.
(from 'Wild Swans at Stur
Mill')
This is both a nature diary, implying that sense of recording and producing
sense impressions/data, while also being an almost 'metaphysical' or
psychological delving into the strangeness and powerful perplexity of an
alien but not entirely unfriendly world. This isn't Hughes' nature red in
tooth and claw, though there is no hiding from the hard, raw facts either,
but there is great strength in Caddy's alternative vision, stark and often
estranged and alienated yet critical in its attempt to articulate that which
is hard to define. Elsewhere, there is a sense of loss or a celebration of
the here and now, the 'magic moment' yet also at times a sharp focus where
Caddy clearly has the enemy in his sights:
The owner would
sometimes appear
with fat cigar,
smile and shrug.
I recalled my old
economics teachers
saying that
monetarists were a mad
fringe group that
would never come to power.
(from 'Serena')
This fascinating, rich, multi-layered, multi-traditioned, and, at times,
bewildering collection, can't for sure be reduced to an economic argument,
but Caddy's mix of documentation and imagination includes a perception of
real lives effected adversely by the last thirty years or so of ideological
intent. This is at once a testament and an exploration of that damage and is
David Caddy's most important collection to date.
© Steve
Spence 2011
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