reviewed by Keith Jafrate

 

I got half-way through the first poem in Magpie Words and it sent me to my own work, to follow a thread that a line of Ric Caddel’s had suggested. If that sounds twee or self-important, it’s not meant to. I tell you about it as a way of beginning to explain how valuable these poems are, that a visit to them should immediately send me back into my life inspired. For that, I think, is what they are for. But they are demanding too. It would be easy to use terms like fragmentary or impressionistic to describe them, but in fact I think they are the opposite: they are deeply intuitive expressions of unity, even when they address (or use) disharmony within this. It’s almost as if large parts of the language have been washed away or become hidden, a device used consciously in ‘For The Fallen’. This is a long series in 3 parts, based on the Welsh poem ‘Y Gododdin’. Here are 3 sections, one from each part:

 

                38

 

                never

                graces

                truly

                struck

                pointed

                through

                horses racing

                in the day of

                green dawn

 

 

                53

 

                no man warned or gloried

                or kin well garnered

                no man thuds mirthwards

                a fresher mime-clue

                chill a bloodier chill

                chiller the bell

                in may dew upon the chill

                in corner angles

                blush – bush of the law

                and a poet in amber

 

 

                100

 

                light on the air he lived

                deftly delightful with

                a personal speech

                                if he was over

                                in gracing going

                                                in falling unselfish

                                a bright tight lad

                                kind to them all

                                ever our loss

                                                a winner in his words

                                all gentle and warm

                                wit was unrealised

                                                when from us he went

 

What does this mean? The first of these sections I read as a comment on human frailty, as much of the whole poem is, saying that the grace of racing horses exceeds that of supposedly more conscious human beings, our graces never truly struck, never absolute or wholly natural like theirs. Or it could mean the opposite, that never was true grace expressed, no emblem of it ‘struck’ better than in the image of horses racing at dawn. So that the poem becomes a kind of Zen parable, a lesson about the nature of true grace. (Actually that would fit either of my readings.)

                In section 53, the sense of ‘never’ is hardened, and maybe made more topical: everything is fixed, all vigorous action either absent or prevented by the cold. So this is an image of weather, but also an image of loss, in that those who could act to break the stasis are either dead or, a slightly different sense, have died out, leaving the world fixed and without motive. Even the poet himself is ‘in amber’, drowned in fixity, or possibly in the past. Perhaps only the ‘bush of the law’ can thrive, the vigorous sense of ‘bush’ suggesting, maybe, a kind of totalitarian strength. Or maybe it means a bush of pubic hair: the law exposing itself coarsely and without ‘blush’. Bear in mind, all these readings are provisional.

                I can get onto surer ground with section 100, the last of the whole series, where it’s easy to read the elegy. How does it relate to the other sections I’ve quoted? I think by describing the dead lad as ‘a winner in his words’, both winning in the sense of charming and engaging, but also capable of winning through his words, a different kind of warrior, a man of true grace.

 

Ric Caddel explains his approach in a note to the poem, thus:

 

                The three sections reflect, roughly, three methods of ‘translation’:

                                1 – 39         selective literal translation

                                40 – 75       loose phonic translation

                                76 – 100     free palimpsest rendering

 

Given the writer’s method, it seems to me there can’t be a definitive gloss or explanation of these pieces, and I think this is part of Ric’s intention: to create complex and interconnecting meanings that resonate from the poem in such a way that the meaning of the whole is compounded, concealed, or perhaps lost, unattained. So I read these poems as attempts both to capture essence and to escape from it, in that they are, as the note also tells us, for the poet’s dead son Tom. Knowing this, it seems to me they can be read as a kind of deliberate failure, an expression of the poet’s bafflement, buried in a ‘translation’ of an ancient text, which also offers a kind of succour by its telling of similar bereavements through the loss of young warriors. So, even in grief, there is a kind of irony at work, the poet mocking himself and mocking language even as he tries to wring the essence of his situation from it. This seems to me a telling description of the nausea of grief, the inadequacy and the necessity of language compounded together. And immediately following ‘For The Fallen’ is this:

 

                For Tom

 

                Dear head, four days ahead of love’s day

                I bring you love. Not that you lack that,

                heart, or music, living far beyond stars

                close in our hearts memory and moving

 

 

                hard as you did then under my hand.

                Never still, your humour and sharp mind

                returned bright now, little carer. So I

                stumble to rest missing you, not twenty.

 

                                                                                     10/2/96

 

As far as I can tell, it is precisely for moments of grace such as this that Ric Caddel asks us to enter the greater complexities of ‘For The Fallen’ and other comparably complex long poems in this selection. You can’t have one without the other: moments of clarity can only be gleaned from an engagement with the whole of language/reality. A book full of poems like ‘For Tom’ would not do justice to Ric Caddel’s breadth of understanding, and his greater grace is his full-on acceptance of and engagement with the massive, contradictory enigma of how language lives through us, and we through it. He was a wonderful, humane and gentle poet, and we need his work.

 

As we do that of Peter Redgrove, also now dead, though I suspect he would reject that term, as his book Sheen is so much about ghosts and presences continuing through all forms of things. A white shirt, in his vision, becomes, in the title of a poem, a ‘Superwhite Extra-Large Perispirit’ that transforms its wearer. A swimming pool sends ‘newly incarnated swimmers’ into Falmouth (‘The Thrones’). The equal intermingling of things conventionally considered mundane with the elemental presences of rock and water creates a powerful interweaving, simultaneous reality process in which all things speak and sense at once. It’s a kind of alchemical poetry, uniting and re-uniting both sides of the brain, or, more accurately, refusing such divisions, by looking into the detail of the world. In the way a cubist painter might unite disparate objects by removing perspective from their relationship, making them part of the same plane, Peter Redgrove can see relationships most of us either miss or dismiss:

 

                                                                                       The flowers on the altar

                Stare back at her, singing also

                                                     but without audible melody:

                                                                                       at some stage I could hear

                The colours joining in;

                                                     they stare back with radiant metals,

                                                                                       their whole self

                In their faces; this

                                                     inspires the coloratura.

                                                                                                                                (from ‘Floral Dentist’)

 

What I love about this is the way the verse, in nearly every poem, passes through surface after surface, revealing a mobile energy which connects all things, both elementally and linguistically, so that language itself is only another version, another aspect, another emblem of this connecting current. It’s a bit like the concepts of particle physics being used as an explanation of perception: the poems assert the intermingling of everything on a level not always recognised by the first five senses, and which is certainly hidden by what the poet, further on in ‘Floral Dentist’ calls ‘routine’, the world of materialism, of belief as a fixed system that prevents connection, whether it be political or religious belief.

                Essentially, these are poems of magic, attempting to give us the tools to transcend a ‘routine’ view of existence. They try to show us not only the dense magnificence of the universe, but to transport us to a different way of perceiving it ourselves: they attempt gently to change us, to shift our relationship with everything. They are spells, actions done to the reader. They are also risks, journeys of discovery for the poet too:

 

                                                                                                I climbed up the laburnum ladder

                For my lessons,

                                                      I sat in a tree                  

                                                                                                eating the black seeds of my siblings

                Using their eyes  

                                                      to see the garden

                                                                                                with everything on the trembling

                Edge of being seen, foetus, foetess,

                                                      colloquy with my garden siblings,

                                                                                                green spiritualism;

                The seasons change as I eat

                                                      the black seeds, seeing.

                                                                                                                                (from ‘Spiritualism Garden’)

 

The effect of Peter Redgrove’s poems is, for me, a definitively shared experience. They are so beautifully written that they can transport the reader into their gentle, risky, astonishing world, while at the same time they are attempting a kind of dialogue with us, addressing us as part of this world and equally miraculous. They are therefore empowering in a particular, Redgrovian way, full of passion and compassion, humour and danger.

 

Unfortunately, Michael Laskey’s Permission to Breathe suffers by comparison with these two fine books. Perhaps it’s just bad luck I picked them up all together, but I think I would feel the same about his work had I not read Caddel and Redgrove so recently, though in fact comparing their work is useful. The issue, for me, is encapsulated by stanzas like this:

 

                At the end of the day it’s a job

                loading the bikes on the carrier,

                adjusting my pedal to slot

                under the bumper, then hoisting

                your heavy frame high enough

                for the straight handlebars not

                to catch on my saddle and twist.

 

                They don’t naturally fit together,

                my light-weight tourer with its new

                dynamo, its panniers – and the sturdy

                lady’s Triumph you’ve been riding

                for thirty-five years, with its rusty

                chain-guard, the Sturmey Archer

                three-speed gears and the basket.

                                                                                                ( from ‘Past Talking’)

 

The third and final stanza of this poem reveals the interlocking bikes to be what you might expect from the title, a symbol of a long relationship. But to me it’s all rather prosaic, both in language and atmosphere, and this gradual unwinding of quite simple images is common in the poems in this book. Where Caddel and Redgrove can explode a mundane detail into lyrical and formal discovery, Laskey seems oppressed and encircled by such details, and can only see them as evidence of the difficult attempt to live everyday life as adequately as possible. This might be seen as a brave and noble confrontation, a recognition of human limitation, but to me it feels more like a limitation in the poet. Many of the poems in this book express a somewhat downbeat recognition of time passed and passing, and many are about ageing and death. So that devices like that used in ‘Past Talking’ do not seem like images encountered or discovered, but more like symptoms, selected and constructed so as to confirm the poet’s attitudes.

                I note from the book cover that Michale Laskey was 60 when these poems were published, so that, given how long it takes publishers to actually publish anything, he would have written a fair few of these poems in his late fifties, or perhaps even before. I assume this is considered to be valid information in an appraisal of his work, or it would not be included in the book, so I end up finding it strange that a poet still relatively young should be writing like a gloomy old man. Nevertheless he does. Given that Redgrove was in his early seventies when he wrote some of the energetic, questing, passionate poems in Sheen, Laskey’s approach seems artificial to me. His poems are clear, well-made, easy to grasp because he intends you to get the message, not through immaturity. But they are limited, and to me they rely too much on a kind of punch-line technique: here’s the carefully constructed observation, and here, to trump it at the close of the poem, is what it really means. Very little seems to escape this repetitive procedure, everything has to mean something within the poet’s ontology, everything is interpreted as a symptom of the poet’s situation, nothing seems simply to exist and be fascinating for itself. The effect is to heighten the sense of artificiality, as if the poems were creating personae, rather than relating personal histories, in fact as if the poet behind them were a kind of persona himself. To me, this effect undercuts any emotional connection I might make with the work, in that it all seems rather self-conscious, rather introverted.

To look at it another way, Michael Laskey seems to see objects as material for his work. The poem ‘Stanislaw’s Iron’, about a much-travelled iron, is a case in point:

 

                it outlived Stanlislaw himself

to stand on the shelf of this poem –

matt black, solid, due for a dust.

 

In contrast, Peter Redgrove sees objects, or perhaps substances would be a better word, as doorways, as opportunities for discovery and communication in their own right.

                A man cycling, carrying daffodils

                                                          in the crook of his arm.

                                                                                              The flowers

Like see-through sails

                                          fan out their scent

                                                                               as he pedals emitting

A full-rigged ghostyacht

                                          in a squall of scent

                                                                               changing the scale of events

                                                                                                                                (from ‘Resin’)

 

Here, it is the daffodils that transform the scene, rather than the man carrying them. Or, to be more accurate, the flowers and the man in partnership change the scale of events. What am I driving at? It’s that, to me, Michael Laskey’s poems want to own and to display all they contain, while Peter Redgrove’s (and Ric Caddel’s for that matter) want to share all they contain. There is a fundamental difference in approach that is not, I would say, merely technical, but is in the end philosophical and ethical: what are their poems for?

                I started all this by describing how Ric Caddel’s work could send me back into my own life inspired, and it would be reasonable to assume that all poets want this for their readers. Certainly this seems to be true of the lyrical magic of Peter Redgrove, and I think both he and Caddell saw poetry, whatever else it was, as an experience for, an act done to, the reader, a way of passaging the reader through the powerful ambivalent substance which is language, which would inevitably colour that reader’s subsequent experience. This does not mean that they shirked the job of writing as well, as magically as they could, but it does testify to a belief in language as an effective process even poets cannot simply control. Because of this understanding that the language is always a shared territory, a ground on which reader and poet are equal, equally empowered and equally at risk, to read Caddel’s and Redgrove’s work is, to me, to assent to a kind of collaboration, an opening of myself to a process from which the poet and I are attempting to create sense together. It would be difficult, reading Michael Laskey’s consistently gloomy book, to believe he credits language, or his readers, with anything like this kind of potential.