This blog seeks, among other things, to celebrate the work of those poets and other writers who have had the greatest impact on my own poetry, and in this first post I have chosen a poem I wrote in 2004, inspired by my reading of Marianne Moore. Beneath the apparent simplicity of her poetry there is great sophistication: her delivery via the rhythm is smooth and controlled like the action of a great baseball player standing at the plate, and the final flourishes of her poems are often akin to those of a glorious home-run. Just as cricket was important to Beckett and Pinter, baseball was Marianne Moore’s chosen sport, and its influence is everywhere you look in her lines. William Carlos Williams, in his Selected Essays, describes Marianne Moore’s talent thus: “It is a talent which diminishes the tom-toming on the hollow men of a wasteland to an irrelevant pitter-patter. Nothing is hollow or waste to the imagination of Marianne Moore.”

Marianne Moore

The face
         that has come down to us
                   through the photographs
         is of an elderly lady–white hair
                   beneath a broad-brimmed black

boater.
         A face that bears the soft creases but not
                   the deep lines of age; the eyes incisive
         and captivating as any disenfranchised tiger’s;
                   a wry, generous smile tightly-

pursed
          in the knowledge that silence
                   is a most auspicious friend
         to the judicious poet.
                   Her poetry: a

space
         in which we would-be
                   steeplejacks
         might immerse ourselves
                   and grow ever so youthfully older,

in
         contempt only of all that is
                   small-minded, artificial,
         artless and
                   conspicuously untrue.

For the repose of John Berryman

A clone met in a clearing sprouts a salt and pepper
beard and speaks from below a gentle frown, furrowed
by the unbridled years of empty, dyspeptic houses
in which only old things ever re-offended and even
the tears appeared to break laws. Picture him
seated thus with high forehead, so inclined as to
nestle his profound intelligence on the palm
of his aging hand, all future movements of stone within,
and yet gracefully beyond his grasp, all the niceties
of distance and dream Book of Job despair
writ in words of wrought iron. “Brush away
them words that to you do no favours, Mr Bones,”
quoth quietly the alter ego. Quite. We pray: wipe
away those words pure and simple as one would, say,
the cigarette smoke that heavenlywards winds its way
from betwixt insubordinate and pain-stained fingers.
“My God, my God, why have you so utterly abandoned
me so,” mutters finally the altared ego. Tetelestai.

Note: Tetelestai, supposedly Christ’s final words before he died on the cross, signifying “it is finished”.