Growing A Pearl: Jacob Polley's 'Little Gods' (Picador 2006)

Mother of tides, father of skies:
give me the grit to grow a pearl.
Fill me with fear,
that brain-food, or that dark matter, desire.

As the eminently quotable Don Paterson has told us*, ‘Poetry is the art of saying things once’, and Jacob Polley’s second collection, Little Gods, published last year, seems to provide that perfect balance between under and over-statement to which Paterson, his editor at Picador, was referring.

His poetry is clear-spoken, or rather - since this is poetry - clear-sung across the white space of the page, without straining for emphasis or becoming distracted by those odd peripheral activities that poems indulge in as they are written, as evidenced by the perfect poise and lyrical invocation of the four lines above (from Polley’s ‘Sand’).

It is possible to read Paterson’s little aphorism as an assertion that poetry is about saying things on one occasion and never needing to go down that route again. But then none of us would bother with all these versions or translations of poems that have influenced us, or poems inspired by other poets, ad infinitum.

But of course we do bother, because part of being a poet is positioning oneself within a certain poetic tradition - or, if you are daring and competent enough, outside that tradition - by choosing poets, past and present, with whom you can align yourself.

Jacob Polley understands this venerated practice and leaves us a number of these signposts in Little Gods: two poems directly ‘after Baudelaire’ (‘Spleen’ and ‘The Sun’), and many individual words, lines or tropes which speak to me clearly of the pastoral lyric tradition.

On top of that, there’s the blistering contemporary varnish of ‘burnt-out’ urban decay, reminding me in places of shorter poems by T.S. Eliot such as ‘The Love-Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ or ‘Preludes’:

October, November: leaves and smoke.
The coalman pulls up in his flatbed truck.
Who would believe I stand where I am,

so long at the window, lost in a coat,
or under a streetlamp, my shadow unstuck?
Only she with her clock and her almanac can.

This is from Polley's 'Skin and Bone'. Here I’m waiting for Eliot's lonely cab-horse that steams and stamps ('Preludes'), ‘And then the lighting of the lamps.’ The last line too, its old-fashioned deferral of the verb giving us an unusual stress on the final word, feels almost ironic, self-mocking. Then, as though to confirm my pinpointing of his influences, we have the closing lines of Polley’s ‘Twilight’:

On the river, lanterns float. The city
lies with its throat cut and wrists open,
feeding streetlight into the water.

Ah, but the rain you prayed for. Do you hear?

Now I’m waiting for rain in the dry mountains, followed perhaps by a quick chorus of ‘Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.’** And who doesn’t remember ‘ When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table’ from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?

Here we have a highly urban Eliotesque poetry, dark, intelligent and sophisticated, alongside versions of Baudelaire, a poet praised by Eliot for his ‘great genius’ and technical mastery. Some ambitious choices of mentor from Polley here.

But what does Charles Baudelaire represent to us now? A reckless and dissolute young man, his political edge tempered by addiction and the relentless pursuit of luxury in its older sense – that of lust or lasciviousness from the creamy Latin luxuria, meaning excess. ‘Spleen’ is his infamous expression of rage against the world, a dark and slimy place he envisages as an inescapable trap, full of horrors and leading only to death.

So how does all that translate to Jacob Polley’s take on Baudelaire? At first glance, it seems a glaring mismatch of styles. Jacob Polley is a ‘nice’ poet. He writes about owls in trees (yew trees though, associated with Plath, graveyards, longevity) and doesn’t write about unpleasant things lurking in the darkness or ladies with long tresses, the fleshpots and seductive lures of the city. Or does he?

Here are the final two stanzas of one of his more urban poems, the gothicky ‘Black Water’:

The knife’s not a fish,
though it’s cold from the drawer;
and the birch leaves aren’t cymbals, though they’re blown
silver-side-up in the wind, which won’t show you
death in a cistern’s slab of black water:
only your own untroubled face.

And there’s no testing the blade of her shoulder,
there’s no catch hidden in her throat,
and your heart’s no more than meat.

The ‘her’ of these last lines is the first mention of a woman in this poem. She is not named, nor designated as lover, wife or muse, but is described almost as a faceless predator, a suggestion of dangerous nudity in ‘the blade of her shoulder’, and a trap being set for the unwary male where ‘your heart’s no more than meat.’

But Polley is cleverer than that. The narrator’s face is ‘untroubled’ in the ‘cistern’s slab of black water’ and he is not involved with the woman, so cannot be trapped or hurt by that seductive shoulder and throat: ‘your heart’s no more than meat’.

Some critics have seen Ted Hughes in this poetry; I don't, except in individual poems where specific echoes occur, and as a general influence which I consider all-pervasive for younger poets, something you can't help imbibing directly or indirectly via other poets as you learn your trade.

For me, poems like ‘The Turn’, the Plath-like ‘Caldecotes’ - 'Roll over, you dead, for the little ones' - and ‘Twilight’, quoted earlier, simply reinforce that other face to Polley’s work, the darker and less socially integrated side: ‘Here comes the evening, the criminal’s friend'.

The powerful emphasis on metaphor and simile in Polley’s work can seem old-fashioned in this age of unsophisticated, confessional writing. Yet perhaps this is precisely what we need to bring that elusive general readership back to poetry. As twenty-first century poets, we work within a paradox where poetry is everywhere, yet everywhere ignored. A poet whose work is quotable, accessible and nostalgic in tone - whilst also being complex enough to provide any number of hot meals for academics - may be the answer to our prayers.

There are problems associated with that sort of writing, though. For instance, we tend to associate the English lyric with over-simplicity, perhaps a certain lightweight feel to theme or subject. Poetry for more innocent times, for the children we used to be. What we need now - it’s generally assumed - is a spare, muscular, uncompromising poetry. Poetry for the modern age, poetry for grown-ups.

But the truth is, we are still looking to poetry to fill the gaps left by the demise of religion and the old-fashioned intergenerational family unit, mothers who used to sing and teach us nursery rhymes, fathers who told us stories at bedtime, grandparents still available to explain the way it used to be when they were children. The television, video game and computer have largely taken the place of those creative sources. Even the novel is barely in evidence anymore: if statistics are to be believed, we are a nation of non-readers.

So, as adults, we may come to poetry looking for truth and spiritual sustenance - ‘I remember hearing a poem about the sea when I was a child, or was it a dark forest, anyway it made me feel sad/frightened/exhilarated’ - only to wander away empty-handed, bemused by the incredible variety and the sheer vacuousness of most contemporary poetry.

Is Jacob Polley’s poetry too lyrical to be truly contemporary, too simple to carry the weight of what we know now? I don’t believe so. I believe it to be one of the best new collections that I’ve seen coming out of Picador for a few years. It lacks the intensity and laser-like accuracy of Robin Robertson, and the sardonic theatrical flair of Don Paterson, and has almost nothing of the nature of Annie Freud's more recent discursive, anecdotal style. Yet it rolls confidently off the tongue, more Anglo-Saxon than Latinate, and is not afraid to speak in simile and metaphor, or to shift verbs about the line where necessary, regardless of the shades of Georgian poets conjured up by such methods.

Sounds like critical hyperbole? Just take a look at this from his poem ‘April’ (the cruellest month, let’s not forget, for old Tom Eliot and, before him, Geoffrey Chaucer):

Whatever the leaves were saying must wait:
rain has filled the trees with its own brisk word.
There’s thunder in the darkened slates.
The pond’s green eye rolls heavenward.

You can’t charge a page with the hiss, with this
cooling of the city like a new horseshoe.
Rain in the hair, at the neck and the wrists:
for rich and poor, there’s rain to hurry through.

The boil and spit of pavements: mirrored brick.
Every patch of grass is fiercely lit.

Here Polley claims ‘you can’t charge a page with the hiss’, whilst making a creditable job of it, nevertheless. And he’s not alone in this very British concern with the weather. ‘April’, and the poem which immediately follows it in the book, ‘Rain’, both remind me of one of the best pieces of required writing produced by Ted Hughes in his capacity as Poet Laureate, the epic ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, where ‘Thunder gripped and picked up the city./ Rain didn’t so much fall as collapse./ The pavements danced, like cinders in a riddle’, and then the magnificent ‘A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head, // Risked it across the square’s lit metals.’ I could also point to Seamus Heaney’s opening poem in Spirit Level, the exuberant ‘Rain Stick’, with its torrential euphony of descriptors. Here at least I find Hughes - and Heaney as a sturdier alternative - but if he is elsewhere in this collection, the influence has been well-integrated enough not to shriek Hughes, even to someone steeped in him, someone for whom Hughes is, quite frankly, a god.

So Polley’s poetry stretches to meet its predecessors, needing to rival them, to leave his footprint in the pastoral tradition. He succeeds in some places, the stronger poems in his second collection overshadowing the weaker ones to such an extent that we barely notice the flaws. Best of all, his poems are articulate; they connect with the reader, want to give back to them. From such auspicious beginnings, a pearl may be grown, the career of a poet forged:

Darling, d’you think you can’t see as you did?
Then find inside this battered tin,
this tin that smells of cold metal and rust,
these steel-rimmed spectacles. Hook them on,
for I want you to see as you did again.
Others have. Those who’ve aged, or lost,
have worn them a while, and regained
lovers or sons, memories or minds,
then returned to their lives, less vague, less blind.

(‘The Prescription’)


* From ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ by Don Paterson (T.S. Eliot Lecture November 2004).
** The closing lines of ‘The Waste Land’. T.S. Eliot’s note on the text reads: “The peace which passeth understanding is our equivalent to this word (shantih)."

Buy Jacob Polley's Little Gods from Amazon.co.uk.

The Best Man That Ever Was, a debut poetry collection from Annie Freud

I recently bought The Best Man That Ever Was, Annie Freud's debut poetry collection from Picador, and have been reading it. Reading poetry collections takes time, and I don't imagine that one - or even two - fairly rapid read-throughs is enough for anyone to comment wisely on a poet or their work. But I'm going to attempt to comment to some extent on what I've read, in particular the title poem, and you'll have to forgive any fuzziness now or subsequent shifts in opinion as I come back to the book in the future.

First off, The Best Man That Ever Was is an intelligent collection, darkly humorous, loaded with grand ideas and impressive metaphors, written by a poet with oodles of raw talent and a sure ear.

But there are flaws here, and most of them are connected, in my opinion, to Annie Freud’s decision to sidestep the sticky issue of gender in poetry by writing so frequently over the shoulder of a man (i.e. ‘He’ does this or that, rather than ‘She’) or actually in the first person voice of a man. Which is problematic in itself, because it raises another sticky issue for poets, which is authenticity.

You could argue that it’s in the nature of things for a poet to be a ventriloquist, speaking in the voice of an object or another person, regardless of gender. But you could also argue that when it becomes noticeable it’s no longer in the nature of things, but is a stylistic nervous tic.

Which brings me to the question of style.

‘One of the most startlingly original poets to have emerged in recent years’ declares the Picador-generated blurb on the back cover of this handsome book.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself struck by these - often very witty - poems’ similarity to work by, say, John Stammers, Roddy Lumsden, and other London-based poets tonally influenced by - among others, agreed - the same Frank O'Hara/New York School tradition. There's also more than a touch of well-known American poet Sharon Olds here, with the long, loose-limbed rhythms of some poems and their peculiarly detailed note of intimacy, the psychological touch [though often veering away into a blokeish humour, as though Freud flirts with but doesn't want to get too close to any kind of female love poem tradition, even one as densely textured and metaphysical as Olds'].

This is a poetry with two distinct moods, neither of them unusual in contemporary poetry. It either undulates, like the I Claudius-style snake on the cover, in syllabic-heavy American-influenced lines dripping with semi-colons and subordinate clauses, or trots in sharp urban stanzas like this:

Fucking great to have done my bird
and get the heat of the sun on my neck,
no longer to hear the hooter’s howl
and live in fear of the cunting screws.

Which is where you may spot the problem I mentioned earlier: Annie Freud’s liking for poems written from a man’s point of view.

I can see that writing poetry in the voice of a man can be liberating for a woman, allowing her to say all sorts of things she might feel uncomfortable with as a woman and to use a few techniques native to male poets, like the snide or brutal closing one-liner, blowing right down the British line from Simon Armitage, which makes a frequent appearance in this collection.

It’s a fabulous trick if you’re trying to achieve humour – and these poems can be very funny – but it’s a trick that’s right there on the surface of the work, not concealed by the magician, as here in the final statement of The Maskmaker of Wanstead, its deliberately empty 'You ain't seen nothing yet.'

Authenticity. It’s not so much that we have to consider biography whenever we read, relating each poem back to the poet’s life. It’s more that the poem must seem authentic in the reading, that it must strike the reader as being ‘true’.

Indications for me that a poem is ‘true’ in this sense may include a raised heart beat, a sharp intake of breath, the urge to re-read those particular lines, and a strong desire to instantly rush off and write something myself, because the spark of authenticity ignites something in me as a writer, a sort of internal wick that’s always there, dry tinder, waiting to catch light.

Ambition is another word on the list of things I tend to look for first in a poem, including my own work. I constantly find myself writing unambitious poems, perhaps having been influenced by others in the same tradition to the extent where I don't always notice how a poem is going, the way it's shaping up, until it's too late to do anything about it.

There can be a randomness about this, but I see no other reason for wanting to write poetry than to leave behind work that will last. Anything less and we might as well give up the attempt and work a supermarket check-out. Or write fiction.

Annie Freud's The Best Man That Ever Was announces its ambition up-front with its title. Or does it?

Two things here: ‘best’ and ‘man’, the first being obvious in its claim, the second striking at first glance, gender-wise. But is Freud the ‘best man that ever was’, you may wonder, picking up the book in Waterstones? Or is this the inverse of female poetic ambition, tugging a forelock to the male tradition in the hope that it treats you kindly?

As though to completely throw out of kilter this initial impression, the title poem turns out to be one of the most complex and interesting pieces in the book. Like the collection itself, it plays with the reader, suggesting one interpretation, then unexpectedly revealing another, and yet another. It's also unusual for its content: 'The Best Man That Ever Was' tells the story of a woman who is beaten - or enjoys being beaten - in a ritualistic and theatrical manner by a man in a hotel room. **

Five stanzas of twelve lines, alternate lines slightly indented as though to create a see-sawing, swaying or dancing motion for the eye, each stanza recognisably different in tone. The first two stanzas left me confused, forced to retrace the earlier lines to find the thread I suspected I’d missed.

Having regained some sort of stability in the middle section, I then found the poem pulling me on compulsively to the end, by which time I felt a prurient interest in the interior world of the poem, its hinterland, its past, its truth or otherwise, not to mention intrigued and a little flustered by the content of the poem.

Here's the middle section, the rhythmic core of the poem, with no hesitations and the narrative voice superbly poised:

And having washed and dried his hands with care
and filled our flutes like any ordinary man,
the night's first task would come into his mind.
He'd bark his hoarse articulate command
and down I'd bend across the ornamented desk,
my mouth level with the inkstand's claws,
my cheek flat against the blotter; I'd lift my skirts,
slip down my panties and sob for him
with every blow.

[I can't do the inset for alternate lines here: anyone with the correct HTML please email me!]

I loved this particular stanza, could feel the authenticity zinging off it. Yet after the poem had finished I still felt confused, questioning the logistics of the poem's voice and set-up, like someone who walks out of the cinema after watching a film and feels unable to stop going over and over the plot and its closing moments in her mind. Re-writing, perhaps, or just trying to come to a better understanding.

In this title poem, Freud’s tone - and this applies to many of the longer poems in the book - is beautifully managed and maintained. Like a formal garden. Indeed, there’s something Edwardian about 'The Best Man That Ever Was', its narrative voice old-fashioned in an ironic and highly self-conscious way. We have the stilted self-importance of the wealthy man who beats his mistress (or wife, or prostitute, I’m not quite sure which) with birch twigs in a grand hotel, referring to the birch twigs as -

A Thing of Nature, so he said, so fine, so pure.
He’d turn away and smooth his thinning hair,
lost as he was in some vision of grandeur

- at that moment complementing the tone of the woman being beaten, in other places contrasting with it.

The narrator's voice sounds slightly deranged at the beginning of the poem, off-balance, with truncated clauses cluttering the first stanza. The narrative develops quite suddenly into eloquence after that, imbued with a sense of calm resignation about the woman’s ritual beating and its effect on both of them, Freud’s sentences lengthier and more urbane as the poem reaches its middle section.

Then her manner changes abruptly at the end, becoming Plath-like in its declamatory rhetoric, short clauses falling over themselves to reach the finishing tape, the tone unexpectedly triumphant as she celebrates rather than decries her oppressor/lover:

It’s over. But it is still good to arrive at a fine hotel
and reward the major-domo’s gruff punctilio
with a smile and a tip and let the bellboys slap my arse
and remember him, the man who thrashed me,
fed me, adored me. He was the best man that ever was.
He was my assassin of the world.

I can hear the true voice of the woman here. The throwaway finality of ‘It’s over’, the bite in these shortened syllables, the hint of barely controlled hysteria behind ‘assassin’.

Submission. Domination. The cruel, complicated, often unfathomable mental and sexual games that men and women play together. The see-sawing motion of the alternately indented lines: first one, then another. The dual face of desire. These are the things which inform the title poem.

And perhaps the deliberate textual confusions sprinkled throughout 'The Best Man That Ever Was' - who’s speaking? who is the best man? who’s doing what to whom, and why? - reflect the playful and duplicitous nature of Annie Freud’s first book. Another word to describe this might be artful. Which is to say - authentic, good. Which is to say there may be hope yet for my inadequate reading of this complex, multi-layered, tongue-in-cheek collection, and plenty more for Annie Freud herself.

But I still wish she hadn’t written quite so many poems from the point of view of a man ...

*
*I had to look up ‘velleity’. It means 1. a low degree of volition not conducive to action, and 2. a slight wish or inclination (Shorter Oxford English). I’m not sure how that fits into its context here.

**I'm grateful to Roddy Lumsden here for letting me know that the man mentioned in this title poem is Hitler. This was not at all clear to me from the title or content, but may be apparent to others. I think, in instances like these where vital contextual material is not immediately obvious in the poem itself, notes should be supplied at the back of the book, or a subtitle given to elucidate the poem. Either that or the poem should be written in such a way that it can stand alone, without notes or subtitles, otherwise alternative readings to the one intended by the poet are inevitable and must be accepted as such.

The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007), Annie Freud