Love and death

Emma Fisher

Goings and other poems Richard Poole (Christopher Davies 90p) One Another: A Sonnet Sequence Peter Dale (Agenda Editions/Carcanet New Press E2 soft, £6 hard) The Cost of Seriousness Peter Porter (Oxford E2.50)

'Poetry isn't dead — it just smells funny' is the motto on the front of the first issue of a new poetry magazine called Straight Lines (6 Cleveland Gardens, London W2), edited by Mark Hutchinson. This declaration is displayed on a repellent background of dead babies, with fleshyold men's grimaces. The inside is the opposite of putrescent, however, with one or more poems each from diverse famous names (Hughes, Patten, Fainlight etc.) and impressive ones from some lesser-known poets, so the whole is short and surprising. It is quite a jolt to go from Heathcote Williams's capitalspattered sex-visions (in which he provokingly includes Auden's 'we must love one another or die', making it mean merely 'let's fuck as often as we can'; I thought the last word on that line had been said by the Composer Rosenbaum in Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, who pointedly rephrased it as 'we must love one another and die') to the spare wormy meditations of Ivor Cutler, which sound even flatter without his pregnantly deadpan reciting voice. A jolt, but the journey is worth making.

Three good books have come out recently of poems by men, about love, death and women. This isn't such an uncommon trio of subjects, but they are alike in other ways — they are all serious, thoughtful, nice, struck by the limitation of their poetic efforts yet driven to go on. The language is often clear, even ordinary. Richard Poole, for instance, breathes life into an image I thought had been banalised forever by the ad agencies — that of the flower for sex: It was beginning to happen: intensely in suspension she experienced a slow opening as of a blossom rapt in the conviction of an impending explosion of sunlight.

This comes in 'Love Match', which doesn't express love (as many of the poems do) so much as the unspoken feelings of enmity, suspicion and apprehension that can lurk behind successful sex: The lust sated, love given immanent in her smile — was it an enemy's?

The poems about death —especially the title poem 'Goings' — describe the people who have died, and the process of their growing old, not with emotion exactly but with careful observation of how they met it: She had long waited, wanted, long prayed for this death, knowing that life lends, that life never gives, that in giving death alone is absolute.

He speculates about what comes after, as one does at funerals, finding no answer. In fact intelligent speculation, combined with a sense of its limits — 'I despise the mind's mocking, seductive planetarium' — characterises most of these poems.

Peter Dale's sonnet sequence explores the progress of love between a man — the poet, 'obsessed with the cyclical nature of most experience', always observing, comparing and describing — and a woman, 'driven by a search for the unique'; he brings to life their intense closeness, yet the utter polarity of their points of view. Although the poems are intended as a dialogue, you don't get to know her well. His intelligence analysing the difference, his concentration on her absorption in some thing or state, come through most. I suppose this is inevitable and proves his point. As encapsulations of his solipsism, the poems work very well. His obsession with the incapacity of language coexists with moments where he almost makes it cross the barrier — usually with a physical image, as here (the woman is touching a rose petal): know the sense my hands have of your skin — your hair, more like, that round their roughness in its flow.

So touch the rose, and in my hands you'll be.

In the end the woman dies, and the final poems of loss and memory are full of the private symbols of the earlier ones — silver birches for her, oaks for him; her saffron skirt. This distances the death for the reader — it is still personal, but bearable and more generalised. Not so with Peter Porter's poems on the death of his wife, where the agonising minutiae — the appointment card from an optician, other mail after she's dead — are presented in all their nakedness. He makes Gertrude Stein say: Nothing can be done in the face of ordinary unhappiness Above all, there is nothing to do in words I have written a dozen books to prove nothing can be done in words.

Porter does a lot in words but cannot do much about ordinary unhappiness, and this inability is a subject of many of the poems. Despair and wit mingle uneasily. His cross — cultural jokes— as when Boccherini says: When I start an allegro it's planned like those washing programmes right through to spin-dry are typical of his rueful sense of himself as a responsive tourist of civilisation, celebrating other people's art and the absurdities of his own. But he keeps coming back from contemplation of some work of art— such as an angel at Blythburgh — to the fact of that death, as if by linking it in he could help heal the pain.

Often the message is 'they believed in God or an afterlife, but I don't and it's very hard', as at the end of '"Talking Shdp" Tanka': I can't go on, I share death not faith with Donne. In 'An Exequy', he compares Bishop King's lines on the death of his wife — 'a baroque architrave', 'a public stance' —with his own: The words and faces proper to My misery are private.

Yet the act of writing the poem makes the misery public. Part of the point presumably is that it is about struggling to accept the event without King's belief that . .

slow howere my marches be, I shall at last sit down by Thee. The thought of this bids me go on, And wait my dissolution With hope and comfort.

There is an irresistible pull in poems about death to come to some sort of resolution or acceptance, even if only a stoical one; but in Porter's poem the grief remains private and unbearable and he can only ask her ghost to come and remove him, presumably into the separation of sleep going on forever mentioned in 'Evensong'. With an echo of King, he quotes at the end Turchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir', but not as if he believes in it.

There is something tight-lipped about all this. Elsewhere, in The Cost of Seriousness, he says

I have come no closer to my goal of doing without words, that pain may be notated some real way.

One suspects that he finds music a real way, although he says in 'The Lying Art' Music gets the better of it, since music is all lies'. It may seem unclear why he goes on writing at all; but in one of the best poems in the book, The Delegate', he has the answer: The artist . . is being used despite himself. The truth is a story forcing me to tell it. It is not my story or my truth. My misery is on a colour chart — even my death is a chord among the garden sounds.

He sees his unhappiness in perspective as only a part of a polychromatic, amoral, but inherently beautiful world, and this is his form of reconciliation.