poetry

Lesnes Abbey – a poem set in ancient woodland

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lesnesabbey

Located in the London Borough of Bexley, Lesnes Abbey was founded in 1178 by Richard de Luci. De Luci had been involved in the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, and it is assumed that the foundation of the abbey was an act of penance. In any event, de Luci spent the last four month of his life in retirement at the abbey and was buried in the grounds.

I have visited the abbey on so many occasions and in the company of a number of people who were so very dear to me in my emotional life that its history has become a part of my history. The grounds and the shape of many of its trees have become permanently lodged in my affective memory.

In addition to a formal flower garden, the site of the ruins is backed by extensive remnants of the ancient woodland that gave its name to the location.

The poem below was inspired by the extraordinary beauty of that woodland. Sometimes a simple poem may be composed of little more than a list of things or attributes, and this is what I sought to do here: to select some of the characteristics of this delightful stretch of nature and to assemble them into phrases that would be carried forward by the rhythm.

Lesnes Abbey

In the ancient woods
     around the Augustinian abbey of Lesnes where
            Richard de Luci’s crime was laid to rest,
      daffodil, bluebell, violet and wood anemone
            thrive, along with foxglove, heather,
willow herb,
      red campion, figwort, dogs mercury, ramson,
            St Johns wort, yellow archangel and yellow iris.
      Here the shadows of hornbeam and mulberry
            and larch and swamp cypress are also
to be found,
      and in silence or above the raucous cry of the magpie
            or the great spotted woodpecker’s fevered drill,
      the chirrup of the robin, the song thrush, the blackbird,
            the wren or the collared dove may be heard.

Fernando Pessoa – what’s in a name?

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pessoaI began to study Portuguese as an optional special subject, in my second year at Oxford. The Portuguese tutor in literature was Tom Earle, and it was he who first introduced me to the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, the colossus of 20th Century Portuguese poetry. Pessoa spent his early childhood in Durban and grew up completely bilingual. He wrote a number of poems in English, notably a sequence of sonnets in the Shakespearean mode. But he is far better known for his poetry in Portuguese.

Pessoa (his surname means ‘person’ in Portuguese) is famous for having written under the guise of around seventy-five heteronyms. Far more than simple pseudonyms, Pessoa imagined entirely different personae for these fragments of personality within himself and described the experience of being possessed by the different characters at different times and being driven to write in a style markedly peculiar to each individual.

Below, I have chosen to translate poems written by four of these heteronyms: Pessoa himself, Ricardo Reis, who wrote odes in a more classical style, Alberto Caiero and Álvaro de Campos. The selection is insufficient to give anything more than a taste of Pessoa’s craft, but interested readers will find plenty of information online to sate their curiosity.

In the end I was not able to complete my special subject, but the phenomenon of Fernando Pessoa has been with me all my life, and his poetry a constant source of pleasure.

It’s raining. There’s silence

It’s raining. There’s silence, because the rain itself
Makes no noise but falls gently.
It’s raining. The sky sleeps. When the soul’s a widow
Which you can’t know, feelings are blind.
It’s raining. Who I am (my being) I disown. . .

So calm is the rain that drifts in the air
(there seem to be no clouds) so that it seems
Not to be rain but a whisper
That of itself, with a whisper, forgets it exists.
It’s raining. No wish to do a thing. . .

No hovering wind, no sky that I can sense
It’s raining far far away and indistinctly,
Like a certainty that deceives us,
Like some big desire that lies in our face.
It’s raining. I feel nothing inside. . .

Fernando Pessoa

*

Come sit with me, Lydia, by the river’s edge

Come sit with me, Lydia, by the river’s edge.
Quietly watch it flow and understand
That life goes on, and our hands aren’t clasped.
(Let’s clasp hands.)

Then think, as children who have grown up, that life
Flows by, never lasts, leaves nothing, never returns,
But flows on into a far-off sea, at the foot of the Fado,
Beyond the gods.

Let’s unclasp hands because no point in us tiring.
Enjoy it or not, we flow on like the river.
Better to understand how to move silently with the flow
Without major upsets.

Without love, nor hatred, nor passions that cry out,
Nor longings that over-excite the eyes,
Nor cares, for regardless of cares the river flows on,
Will always run down to the sea.

Let us love without fuss, thinking that we could,
If we wanted, exchange a kiss, an embrace, a caress,
But it’s better just to sit side by side
And listen and watch as the river flows by.

Let’s pick flowers, you gather them and keep them
In your lap, and let their scent soften the moment
This moment when at peace we have no beliefs,
Innocently decadent pagans.

At least, if once there were shades, you should remember me
But not let my memory burn or hurt or move you,
Because we never clasped hands, nor ever kissed
Were never more than children.

And should you hand the dark boatman his coin before me,
There’ll be nothing to bring me pain when I remember.
Gently my memory will recall you thus – by the river’s edge,
My own sad pagan with flowers in your lap.

Ricardo Reis

*

That lady has a piano

That lady has a piano
Which is nice but not the flow of rivers
Nor the murmur the trees make. . .
Why must one have a piano?
It’s better to have ears
And to love Nature.

If I could crack the whole earth

If I could crack the whole earth
And feel it had a palate,
I’d be happier for a moment. . .
But I don’t always want to be happy.
You have to be occasionally unhappy
In order to be natural . . .

It’s not all sunny days,
And the rain, after much drought, is required.
So I treat unhappiness and happiness the same
Of course, as one not surprised
That there are mountains and plateaux
And there are rocks and grass. . .

What’s required is to be natural and calm
In happiness or unhappiness,
Feel like someone who notices,
Think like someone who walks,
And when you’re dying, remember that the day dies,
And that the sunset is beautiful, beautiful the night that remains. . .
So it is and so be it. . .

Alberto Caeiro

*

Magnificat

When will this inner night, the universe, pass
And me, my soul, have its day?
When will I wake from being awake?
I don’t know. Impossible to stare
As the sun on high glares.
The stars shimmer coldly
And can’t be counted.
The heart beats so remotely
And can’t be heard.
When will this theatreless drama
Or this dramaless theatre pass
So I can go home?
Where? How? When?
Cat staring at me, eyes agog with life, what do you hold deep inside?
He’s the one! He’s the one!
Like Joshua he’ll order the sun to stop, and I’ll awake;
And then it’ll be day.
Smile, as you sleep, my soul!
Smile, my soul, it’ll be day!

Álvaro de Campos

Brazil – two poems

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toucanI like to think that the ten years I spent living in Brazil enhanced my powers of observation, particularly, of the environment. The colour and diversity of the tropical and sub-tropical flora and fauna fascinated me endlessly. Birdlife in particular always caught my attention and my imagination. It was wonderful to see and hear the buzz of humming-birds or to see textbook toucans flying at a leisurely speed past my study window, or to observe the mating ritual of small birds that would hop up and down incessantly on the garden wall as though they had springs attached to their legs.

Where there is abundant rain and sunshine, nature appears to enter into overdrive and plants and trees grow at a staggering pace. It was a constant reminder of the richness of the earth and the bounty of life: the life that is there to be lived and enjoyed, one day at a time.

At night cattle graze
      upon the hillside,
I see them in the moonlight,
      their white hides glow
incandescently. Night
      shadows are the deepest
although also the quickest
      to be displaced. I raise
my eyes from the book
      I am reading and the cattle
have disappeared. Their
      sluggish shadows trail
behind them, hopelessly
      dragging the light
into the darkness.

*

Earth banana they call plantains
banana da terra
and thus metaphor for all food
all basic foods that derive
from the earth and feed the earth;
from clay the nutrients that will feed
the clay that one day will be laid
to rest in clay. What we call the food chain
which sounds so cold and technical
compared to the lifeline
life chain that in reality it is,
the earth feeding its own
like any mother would,
the papaya and coconut
before my eyes today
in Arraial d’Ajuda, Brazil
this 22 December
the succulence of their flesh
both humid and firm.
Why the consumption of food
is so close to being a sex act
utterly pure and essential.
Not fantasy food
but minerals that confirm our
blood relationship to fields
of rice and barley and wheat,
to the cattle that trample upon
vast plates of pasture.
Bounteous earth, fired by endless sun,
bathed in ocean blue, swept
by the breath of life.
The descent of poetry into science
is inevitable, though Shelley
recognized that all life ascends,
only death dips back to the earth
and to rebirth.
If life is location it is love too
chemical communities,
fire in the blood, iron in the soul:
what binds us to our humanity
is this magnetism and the desire
      to be less than one
so as to be completed, even if
bi-lateral love sounds geometric.

César Vallejo – three poems in translation

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vallejoThese three poems by the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo (pictured), were among the first translations I undertook while I was at Oxford in 1969. A friend of Pablo Neruda, and a defender of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, Vallejo was a very intense individual and as he developed his poetry over the years, that intensity began to manifest itself in a density of language that is both beautiful and challenging. Not all poetry yields its fruit on first reading. Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk, called Vallejo the greatest of all the Latin American poets. The youngest of eleven children, Vallejo lost his brother Miguel when he was quite young and later wrote a poem dedicated to the memory of the games they had often played together. Always was a most sensitive poet, Vallejo remained committed to the cause of ordinary working people throughout his life.

I am dedicating this post to the memory of Paul Kavanagh, a cousin of mine who died recently in Waterford, Ireland. As a young boy I would occasionally stay with his parents during the summer holidays, and Paul and I became very close friends. At that time my uncle owned a small bar on the Quay in Waterford and the family lived in the flat above. In the summer of 1963, the year John Kennedy was assassinated, I stayed with Paul and learnt so much from him. Among other things, I discovered the joys of fly fishing, and he taught me two essential skills for a young lad: how to whistle with my fingers in my mouth and how to cup my hands to make owl calls. I nearly drove my uncle and aunt mad with that. The same year, I bought two Beatles albums from Paul who wasn’t too impressed with their music. I still have the vinyl records.

My cousin also possessed an old steel-string guitar which I would pick up from time to time and strum away, pretending I could accompany any song on the radio. In reality I hadn’t a clue and it was probably totally out of tune and a further instrument of torture for my long-suffering uncle and aunt. Nevertheless, all good grist to me: and when I returned to London at the end of the holiday I acquired a guitar of my own and so began my own erratic journey as a musician.

For my brother Miguel

in memoriam

      Brother, I’m now on the bench at home
where you are so endlessly missed!
I remember we’d play at this time, and that mamá
would gently chide us: “Now, boys . . . ”

     Now I hide,
as before, during all these evening
prayers, and I hope you won’t find me.
In the living room, the hall, the corridors.
Then you hide, and I can’t find you.
I remember we laughed ourselves to death
in that game, brother.

      Miguel, you hid yourself
one night in August, as dawn broke;
but instead of laughing as you hid, you were sad.
And your twin heart from those dead and gone
afternoons tired of not finding you. And now
a shadow falls across the soul.

      Hey, brother, hurry up
and come out. Okay? Mamá will be worried.

*

The Black Heralds

      There are blows in life so hard. . . I don’t know!
Blows like the hatred of God; as though in the face of them
the undertow of all that has been suffered
simply welled up in the soul. . . I don’t know!

      There aren’t many, but some. . . They open dark furrows
in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.
They could be the colts of barbarous Attilas perhaps;
or the Black heralds of Death’s dispatch.

      They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adorable faith that destiny blasphemes.
These bloody blows are the sizzling
of some bread we’ve burnt in the oven mouth.

      And man. . . poor. . . poor man! He turns his eyes back as
when someone greets us with a slap on the shoulder
turns his mad eyes, and all that he’s been through
wells up, like a pool of blame in his gaze.

      There are blows in life, so hard. I don’t know!

*

And if after so many words

      And if after so many words,
the word does not survive!
If after the wings of birds,
the bird at rest does not survive!
It would be better, indeed,
for it to be gobbled up and be done.

      To be born to live out our death!
Rising up from the heavens to earth
through one’s own disasters
and to spy the moment one’s shadow shrouds one’s darkness!
It would be better, frankly,
for it to be gobbled up, and be damned!

      And if after so much history, we succumb,
no longer to eternity,
but from these simple things, such as being
at home or weighing things on our mind!
And if we then find,
suddenly, that we are living,
to judge from the height of the stars,
for the comb and the stains on a hanky!
It would be better, indeed,
for it to be gobbled up, of course!

      It might be said that we have
in one eye much suffering
and in the other, much suffering
and in both, when they focus, much suffering. . .
Well then. . . Of course! . . . Well then. . . not a word!

Emily Dickinson – a breath of fresh air

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dickinsonIt is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the influence of Emily Dickinson’s poetry on subsequent generations of male and female poets writing in English or indeed any other language throughout the world. Although she wrote almost 2000 poems, only a handful were published in her lifetime. Scholars have since written extensively on the themes of her poetry: the beauty of flowers and nature, the inevitability of death, her Christian faith and what she called the undiscovered continent or the landscape of the spirit.

Her preoccupation with the mystery and complexity of human consciousness brings with it a desire to shape her poetry in a truly revolutionary manner. Her verse is renowned for its unconventional syntax, for the use of dashes and irregular capitalisation. It would be easy to dismiss this as an idiosyncratic fad: but that would be to ignore the true character of her genius. The syntax, the form of the poem on the page, represents a deliberate challenge to the status quo; and the freedom Dickinson demands in her verse is the freedom to breathe and to express her breath as she feels it. When contemporary readers of her poetry suggested she might make concessions by adding a few commas and full stops instead of her dashes, she was adamant that such a practice would destroy her poetry.

The poem below was written in homage to a lady who, in all her modesty, tore up the poetry rule book. It was a truly remarkable act of emancipation. As with earlier poems on this blog in homage to Marianne Moore and John Berryman, I sought to convey my admiration for Dickinson’s work by adopting, as far as I could, the vocabulary and the stylistic devices typified in her poetry. An impossible task! But this was done in the spirit of those artists who set up their easel in front of an old master in the National Gallery and seek to reproduce a painting in order to learn new techniques and appreciate the challenges faced by the original painter. A learning curve that can bring knowledge and skill, but alas, not genius.

Emily Dickinson

On the cusp of the Night –
Hands clasped as though
in Prayer – she observes
the last flicker of the Candle

Light’s demise – tinged
with the scent of Beeswax –
signals no Death
of the Imagination

Silence and Darkness:
these could be loved –
eternally – intimately
No human Consolation

between the cold white
Sheets – but Words warmed
on her Breath – mind Forms
of companionable Poetry

The politics of poetry

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katrinaThe poem below was written in response to the Katrina disaster of 2005. Poetry, as Keats famously pointed out, is about beauty and truth, in other words it is about life in all its aspects because there is no area of life where beauty and truth are irrelevant. All that we value in our lives is concerned with beauty and truth. That includes the relationship we have with our loved ones, with our fellow citizens and the world’s wider population. We are all in this together and we have rights and responsibilities as individuals under the charter of the United Nations.

So how should a poet engage with the world, a poet obsessed with love and beauty? The answer, I believe, is so simple, as William Burroughs would say: the poet is no different from anyone else, the poet should be engaged with his immediate circle and his wider world. Beauty and truth are synonyms. Lies are ugly. Poetry celebrates beauty and denounces ugliness and does so by employing the stylistic tricks of its trade, or should I say, of the medium, just as journalists do theirs, film makers theirs, artists theirs, musicians theirs. Politicians also have the tricks of their trade, and we should be wise to them. Always! Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you need to know!

Paradise Lost

Your words,
       Mr President, have grown charcoal-
               brittle, they stain your lips
       as you speak them, and bring no
               comfort to those who hear;

let us
       at the very least, carbon-date
               your thoughts, your notion
       of what is right and wrong,
               your black-and-white

world,
       we who have not drowned
               but who looked on in horror
       as you abandoned a people
               who were surplus to

requirements!
       Where were you when the saints
               came marching in and the waters
       rose and the wind howled and
               the levees which had kept

despair
       at bay were finally breached?
               A serpent appeared in the rose
       garden and said DO NOTHING
               as your daddy did, surrender

dignity,
       surrender truth and, as your
               daddy had done, botox
       the lies until you can smile
               in the face of death,

turn up
       your nose at the stench of decay,
               turn a blind eye on the strangers
       upon whose kindness your office
               once depended. Democracy is in

the eye
       of the beholder, but the dead are
               disenfranchised. Katrina Katrina
       to the tune of an old blues song, on
               a blue piano, until the end of time.

6 September 2005

Clarice Lispector – the soul of sensibility

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claricelispectorOne of the joys of learning to speak Portuguese was to be able to read the wonderful books written by Clarice Lispector, Brazil’s greatest novelist. Her writing displays a hyper-sensibility akin to that of Franz Kafka: she notices every detail, she feels everything, but she does not judge her characters and she never slips into sentimentality. She is her own person and for all the tribulations and trials she writes about, she is affirmative. She would concur with a character in one of the novels by the Colombian, Gabriel García Márquez, “Life is the best thing that’s been invented.”

Born in the Ukraine in 1920, Clarice was taken to live in Brazil at the age of two months and ultimately became a Brazilian citizen. She studied law and worked as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro where she began to write fiction. She was also a very popular newspaper columnist and it is in these columns that many of her observations first appeared. She died in 1977.

♦ In another life I once had, aged fifteen, I entered a bookstore, which seemed the world where I would like to live. Suddenly, one of the books I opened contained sentences that were so different that I just stood there, captivated, reading away. Thrilled, I thought, but this book is me! Only after did I discover that the author was considered to be one of the finest writers of her generation: Katherine Mansfield.

♦ I only write when I want, I’m an amateur and I want to remain amateur. A professional is someone who has an obligation to himself or to another to write. But me, I make a point of not being a professional, to preserve my freedom.

♦ To eradicate your own defects can be dangerous. You never know which is the defect holding up the whole building.

♦ There are times in life when we miss someone so much that what we most want is to drag that person out of our dreams and hug them.

♦ Surrender, as I have surrendered. Dive into what you don’t know just as I have done. Don’t try to understand. Living surpasses all understanding.

♦ But there’s life, which is to be lived intensely, there’s love. Love which should be lived to the very last drop. Fearlessly. It won’t kill you.

The Passion According to G.H., is perhaps Clarice Lispector’s most widely read novel. It is a highly rewarding if not a particularly easy read.

The summary on Amazon reads thus: G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white ‘as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed’. There she sees a cockroach – black, dusty, prehistoric – crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector’s spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel.

Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay – two poems

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ColoniaSacramentoWhile living in Brazil, I spent several vacations in Argentina, and on every occasion I crossed the River Plate by boat from Buenos Aires to the beautiful town of Colonia del Sacramento in southwestern Uruguay.

Founded by the Portuguese in 1680, the settlement’s strategic location meant that it was much prized by the Spanish as well as the Portuguese and so it passed back and forth from crown to crown until finally in 1809 it was included as a permanent municipality within the newly independent Uruguay.

Its architecture is a mixture of Spanish colonial style and rural Portuguese streets which run down to the shore of the River Plate. The remnants of many buildings from the colonial era have survived, but what lends Colonia its particular mystique is the spiritual silence which dominates the historical quarter of the town. The town’s relative isolation and the lack of vehicles circulating in its narrow, cobblestoned streets set it apart from the bustle of modern life, and its proximity to the river means that it enjoys wonderfully fresh air all year round.
colonia 3
Trinities in Colonia del Sacramento

There are long straight streets lined on either sideColonia-Del-Sacramento-Plaza-Trees-1024x682
with majestic lime trees. A raw soul-searching wind
blows up from the south across
the vast empty expanse of the River Plate. It rakes
an empty hand through the withered leaves piled
in the gutters. This is autumn. A single grey squirrel
scavenges for food across the lawns of the town square.
Centuries ago, these trees were planted and pruned
in an inspired act of faith. Three sturdy limbs emerge
from each trunk reaching heavenwards in supplication:
give us this day our daily bread. Some brittle rusty leaves
still cling to the branches; they shiver and scratch hopelessly
in the breeze. So much silence now. Soon the last leaves
will fall. These were the prayers of yesterday, of yesteryear.
So much silence now. The last leaves will soon fall.
No bird song will be heard. So much silence.

*

Still-life in Colonia del Sacramento

There is a stillness and a silence in these streets,
some of which are paved with wedge stones quarried
from the river shore, with a gully running down the middle
–in the Portuguese manner– to gutter away the excess rain.
Here and there separating one backyard from another,
a free-standing dry stone wall, the thin broad slabs
cut and laid so long ago by anonymous hands.
Lawns are trimmed to the point of manicure,
and vibrant clusters of white and lilac hydrangea
soak up the gentle afternoon sun. Under the sycamore
shade we sit and observe small pockets of time
ferried in by visitors who appear to survive on
their own oxygen. The Governor’s house near
the main square has been reduced to its foundations;
the once magnificent Convent of San Francisco
is in ruins; the Viceroy’s residence is just a roofless,
empty shell. Colonia, on the banks of the world’s
widest river, has become a monument to human
mortality, drawing no distinction between the beauty
of life and its own conserved and perpetuated death.

The pity of war

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soldatBoth my grandfathers fought in the First World War and both were wounded. My paternal grandfather from Dublin, who served in the Royal Horse Artillery, received a bullet wound in the leg during a campaign on the Western Front. Apart from piercing the flesh it did no lasting damage. My maternal grandfather from Cork, who served in an Irish regiment, was much more seriously wounded on the beaches of Gallipoli. He had one lung removed in a field hospital by the water’s edge before being evacuated. When he died in 1969, the registrar of births and deaths in Tralee, Co. Kerry, made a point of recording the cause of death as heart disease and pulmonary pneumonia exacerbated by a wound received during World War One. I can remember as a child putting my tiny fist into the hollow of my grandfather’s back where the lung had been cut out.

The recent centenary of the Gallipoli fiasco prompted me to write the poem below, based on the death of a French soldier, Eugène-Emmanuel Lemercier. I first came across the name of Lemercier in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a sequence of poems to the fallen French artist. My poem draws on that sequence and also on the letters that Lemercier wrote to his mother from the Western Front.

La mort d’un soldat

Si tu voyais la sécurité des petits animaux des bois—souris, mulots! L’autre jour, dans notre abri de feuillage, je suivais les évolutions de ces petites bêtes. Elles étaient jolies comme une estampe japonaise, avec l’intérieur de leurs oreilles rose comme un coquillage.
If you could know what security the field-mice enjoy ! The other day, from my leafy shelter, I watched the evolutions of these small animals. They were as pretty as a Japanese print, their ears pink as shells.
Lettres d’un soldat, Eugène-Emmanuel Lemercier (1886-1915)

On a ridge outside
       the village of Les Éparges
            a French combatant
a former art student
                      and an orphan
raised by mother
           and grandmother
                      sits in his dug-out
clutching his rifle
           to his chest
                      The dugout is camouflaged
           with leafy branches torn
                      from the surrounding bushes
This is early March
           1915
                      and many men have died
in this most murderous
           of theatres
                      though many more
are yet to die
           He sits in his dugout
                      and admires the clear
blue sky overhead

The war has been silent
           these past two days
                      : the calm before the storm
           Through the foliage
he notices
                      two field mice at play
how pretty they are
           in their rough and tumble
                      the interior of their ears
the delicate sea shell pink
           of a Japanese watercolour
                      In one of his letters home
he writes
           of the beauty
                      of these mice

The driving rain
           the drip  drip   drip
                      of willows in the rain
The silence of the birds
           that wait out the rain
                      sheltering
in the willow leaves
           The mice that scamper
                      for cover
their small pale ears
           glistening
                      in the rain
At night
           a full moon looms
                      above the enemy lines
A soldier’s death
           is close to nature
                      he notes
A month later
           he is dead

Shortly before he fell
           /during another lull
                      in the fighting/
he reported hearing
           the call of cranes
                      returning home
at sunset
           His body
                      was never found