Noises off
Emma Fisher
The Noise Made by Poems Peter Levi (Anvil Press £3.25) Selected Poems 1940-1972 Barbara Norman (Tuba Press £2.80) On the Rocks Sebastian Barker (Martin Brian & O'Keeffe £2.00) Flower & Song: Aztec Poems Translated by Edward Klssam and Michael Schmidt (Anvil Press £4.95)
At the exhibition of presents given to the Queen during her Silver Jubilee year, noW sadly closed, a large number of poems was displayed. Most were well-meaning subPam Ayres doggerel on the level of 'There were various entertainments and many caused you to smile,/ Like some of the Dundee street games which were certainly done with style.' If any were good, it was by accident, as with some small children's paintings — for instance the English version of their Urdu poem presented by the Waltham Forest Muslim Welfare Society, which began 'Once again the spring arose pompously/ The heavens embraced the beauteous garden enviably. . .Tulips and roses are exhibiting their devotion / Even the particles of dust are dancing with emotion.'
Poetry seems to be wanted for occasions like this, and for greetings cards and epitaphs and funny TV programmes, but good poets do not want to write it (except Perhaps Sir John Betjeman). It is not seen to be serious enough, and most poets wore Stuff the Jubilee' badges. Peter Levi, in his book of four untitled essays (loosely, about Poets and truth; kinds of poetry; what Poetry is for; and the sounds of poetry) Meditates sadly on the small audience for Modern poetry, its separation from — and attempts to get back to — popular poetry, and the nostalgia of poets for 'an atmosphere in which poetry would be as natural as breathing'. He speaks as a poet and a Poetry-lover rather than literary historian. His tone is self-depreciating: 'I have done my best to suppress in this book any clear analysis of English and European social history. . .the long drawn out self-contradictions of my position would be boring.' Amid these supPressions and apologies, and other obstacles such as reliance on attractive metaphors when argument is needed, some enlightening ideas and perceptions get through, as well as necessary remarks not often made — 'the trouble is that most modern poets are not good enough' — and much enthusiasm for old and modern Poets in many languages. Fr Levi regards his religion as inessential to the subject; but it is Often there, as when he defines the three 'apparently permanent' functions of poetry: one is 'to instil or insinuate goodness', one is 'to be articulate about death', and the third is 'a mysterious use of poetry which shadowPlays the return of human beings to their first Justice, the vindication of mankind, the renaissance of antiquity, the resurrection of the dead'. And the life of the world to come, Amen, one is tempted to add, except that it is not a very good subject for poetry, unlike death, which is one of the best.
Meanwhile the poets, good and bad, go on writing. Barbara Norman died in 1972 and the Selected Poems contains sixty poems, about half her total output. Technically she is ften inept. She loves overdoing alliteration — ,Yours is a loveless doom, lonely Leviathan', bearing in his own bone-bouldering bewilderment. ..love', and awful chimes — 'flails and assails a travail'. You need to be good to echo other poets in the way she does — to rhyme 'leaf' with 'grief', put 'edge' and `doom' in consecutive lines, or claim that `Half heaven lies about us from our birth'. She takes apocalyptic subjects (Golgotha, Armageddon, Hiroshima, Nemesis, workers) and also writes with much emotion about love, death, terror, loneliness etc, but often strains too agitatedly for these heights, with an Ultimate effect of flatness. It does not help that the book is full if misprints and spelling mistakes, In one of the least successful poems, 'Golgotha', a long bludgeoning shower of alliteration ('and there bats flit/while old moles gurgle/and male slugs dig for grit') dying out in grunts, one can't be sure she really means 'Hi Bud! Thud/Call UDLULID! UGHWD! UGH!' when one has decided that 'fa dwar in rage, a twisted rose, he fell' must be a misPrint. (Another ineffectual echo, of Milton; the poem is called 'Lucifer'.) Several poems, however, do manage controlled intensity Without hot air; some where her train of
thought is contemplative enough to cool down her language, notably the very first — inevit ably called 'Love' — and `Swimmer'; and some of the most painful ones such as 'Lest we forget (for Hiroshima)' and 'Concentration camp'.
She is obviously much nicer and more serious than Sebastian Barker — son of George Barker and Elizabeth Smart — but his book of fifty-seven sonnets about his love for a woman and her crude unfaith fulness has what she never attained, despite his even bolder echoing of a previous poet: you must read on, once you've read the first.
This is rare enough in any book of poems.
His speciality is to align the spittingly colloquial or flatly everyday with unwilling but tender lyricism. 'Music could arise, the fire
get lit, and the 'phone/ Quietly ring as though in service. The afternoon/ Could memorise the past, the flesh inherit the future./ Instead, what do I do? Write a bloody poem!' He comes across as selfobsessed, angry, morose and alcoholic; writes lines like 'Have a drink. Have a drink. Have a drink. Have a drink.' or 'There we all were in the kitchen trying to put up the shelves'; but can also write 'Apples are noisy, the squirming chords of music knotty/In the ear, architecture grossly symbolic next to your sober kiss'. There's a very good sonnet on the dreadfulness of sex — 'Selfgratifying sweat, disgusting (0! beautiful!) perversions/ Hanging around like policemen' — which incidentally taught me that boredom was an anagram of bedroom. And much, much more. In other words, while not exactly important — though this could be argued — he is extremely enjoyable.
Translations, especially of unknown works, give the poet a ready-made educational purpose. Michael Schmidt and Edward Kissam argue that the best way to understand a primitive culture is through its poetry, the only form in which we are prepared to think, like the Aztec poets, symbolically rather than logically. They 'look back regretfully at the 'sophisticated audience. . .fully involved in the ceremony of song'. The poems were first translated into Spanish, then into English, so we lose almost everything: rhythm, sound, music and often the complex interlocking meanings of the images, though the introduction and glossary help. The repetitive vocabulary of colours, jewels, birds, clouds, flowers and animals is at first impenetrable. But it is worth pressing on, to find poems like this in which the flowers are warriors: 'Sunflower, flower of shields/ spins around, rich, sweet-smelling/ flower. It's in our hands/ here, by the shimmering water,/ in a plain flowing like water with men,/ the god will pick them, flowers.' It's so easy when you're an Aztec.
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