I Am a Cat
For I purr when stroked
For I love to settle in a freshly made bed with cotton sheets
For toes are for biting, sometimes
For I like my meat bloody
For I like company when I like company and do not when I do not
For solitude is a luxury and a virtue and contemplation of the innermost parts of a bush can enliven a whole afternoon
For I have learned not to swat at wasps
For my myth of snootiness conceals my need of hugs
For I struggle against hugs but purr when held tightly
For I love kittens, but not often other cats’ kittens
For I am descended from noble Egyptians
For I am a ginger and all the more beautiful for it, and cherished
For I love to lie in a female lap, or male, faute de mieux
For my French miaows are understood in France and are le mieux
For le mieux is not far from miaow
For I look like a drookit rabbit if bathed
For I once fell off a kitchen counter, asleep
For at night I range far, hunting
Unsuccessfully.
Gally Maxwell
11 March 2024
Poems that Light Up My Life – the first of many
I came to poetry early, thanks to excellent teachers.
They introduced me to Roger McGough who opened my eyes to the possibilities of poems and how hilarious they could be: and beautiful.
For example his meditation on the luscious W.P.C. Marjorie Cox has the lovely conclusion:
Men queue to loiter with intent
for the pleasure of an hour spent
in her sweet custody.
I gathered up his collections, Watchwords, Gig, In the Glassroom, Holiday on Death Row, which I still have and often look into, while, in my poverty-stricken student days I went to the library for Summer with Monika, Waving at Trains, After the Merrymaking and so on.
Gig has many excellent lines. Huddersfield begins perfectly, especially if you know West Yorkshire!
Monster cooling towers stand guard
lest the town take to the hills,
4 p.m. and the sky the colour of frozen lard.
For a student in the north, as I was, Bradford caught the late evening return from the University precisely. The whole poem is excellent, the first two lines are wonderfully evocative, but the part I have never forgotten is:
Up at the University, lectures are over for the day,
and students, ruddy with learning, race back to the digs
to plan revolutions to end revolutions.
So often was I ‘ruddy with learning’ in those wintry early evenings.
I have Mr McGough’s Collected Poems (2004) and many of my favourites are included. Interestingly, a few are not. Some are little masterpieces: Poppoem, My cat and i, Orgasm and the wonderful Bachelor of Love.
Poppoem
Yes, there is a simplicity to the choruses, but the opening lines are only one example of its beauty:
You’re as bored as butterscotch
it’s obvious we’re through
silkstockings lying on the chair
sunshine stick like glue
Remember that morning? I do.
Bachelor of Love
I love this poem. It begins and ends masterfully, but to avoid spoiling your fun when you read it (you must!), I quote just the last few lines of the first stanza. The poem is about a boy, teenager and man’s attempt to graduate as a Bachelor of Love.
He is ten years old, at primary school. I love the rhythm – read it aloud.
When I danced by the light
of a barrage balloon
then hand in handed home
with the love-locked ankle-socked
star of Junior 3
I remember that star. I was knocked over by her prettiness. Despite being weirdly popular in my one year at primary school in England (a novelty – a Glasgow-accented boy plonked in Manchester), she had no time for me. I went to a boy’s secondary school and she disappeared, only to make my stranger’s eye distraught when I saw her on the dance floors of our mid-teens. I had one dance, at the Rugby Club Disco, and, to paraphrase Tony Curtis, it was like kissing a Snow-girl, except there was no kiss for me… But there was for one of my so-called mates!
If you’ve never read Mr McGough, give him a go. Fine poems from his early books are of course in the Collected, such as Soil, Who was the naughty girl, Funny sort of bloke (with the exclamation now in my bones, “Come out Death and fight”), Uncle Harry, Snipers, Sheffield (“Far sweeter than the stink of / death, is the stink of life”) Birmingham, and the little gem Missed. And many others
I’ll leave it there for today and will continue as often as I can to share the poems that have lit up my life.
Gally Maxwell
9 March 2024
Slow Learner
He was young, enthusiastic, handsome
To the lady teachers, we heard them cry,
Gossiping where students did not go. Hah!
Miss Jones heartbroken? Mrs Smith so crude
Her vocabulary was beyond us
And strangely absent from the dictionary.
Sunny with us, we were sullen with him;
Lessons became “fun,” we were serious:
Wanting to learn, not yearn, or guffaw at
Word games, cheeky poems, heretical
Dismissals. Eliot? First class plonker
Dickens? Oscar Wilde and Little Nell’s death.
The lesson buried itself, deep, denied,
For decades. Emerging as the rending
Re-enactment that shamed, yes, Thomas Stearns.
The insubordinate drip of contempt,
Refusal to engage, a rank complaint,
And we had him, broke his idealism.
Evil deeds justified as virtuous?
No such excuse now, or then. We destroyed
For the sake of destruction, created
A cynic, a shouter, a taskmaster,
Recall now his gaze of distaste at us,
Puzzling then, now a lesson learned, too late.
Gally Maxwell
22 March 2024
Tough Times – Show an Affirming Flame
Leonard Cohen summed it up:
Looked through the paper
Makes you want to cry
Nobody cares if the people
Live or dieIn My Secret Life
Many years ago, Alan Price released an exceptional album, Between Today and Yesterday. There are two different versions of the title track, but the worrying times in which we live are captured by his lines:
And the only truthful man he’s seen was standing there in tears
Now the only happy man he’s seen
Was guilty but insane
Too many conflicts are killing, maiming or impoverishing ordinary people going about their daily lives with spouses, children, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Some talk of World War 3. We cannot allow that to happen. The carnage will be overwhelmingly greater than WW1 and WW2.
Wilfred Owen is famous for the agonising specificity of poems like
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Strange Meeting
For of my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold:
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
These are the words of a dead soldier to another dead soldier, the man who killed him. They are both in Hell. In the last quoted line, Owen saw that war could come again.
He also made a chilling general statement in another poem:
1914
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
On 29 March 2024, the newspapers reported the Prime Minister of Poland’s warning that not only are we now in a prewar phase, but that we have been for 2 years:
The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, says Europe is entering a “prewar” era, cautioning that the continent is not ready and urging European countries to step up defence investment. In an interview with a group of European newspapers reported by the BBC, Tusk said: “I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past. It’s real and it started over two years ago.”
We turn to W.H. Auden’s magnificent September 1, 1939. Who can deny that we have lived, as he did, through “a low dishonest decade” and that “We must love one another or die”? He ended the poem with an imprecation of hope that he could, despite being:
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Gally Maxwell
31 March 2024
Poems that Light Up My Life (2)
Wallace Stevens can be difficult to understand but I love many of his poems. This Solitude of Cataracts is one that gave me solace in hard times. Early on, there is a reminder that much of what troubles us will go away or is much less worse than we imagine. It reminds me of sleepless nights worrying about a problem of work followed by its swift correction in the morning – leaving space for another sleep-killer to take its place. The line is:
There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
This is followed by a beautifully written quest for peace and release from oblivion:
He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,
Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest
In a permanent realization… just to know how it would be,
Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction…[1]
Other accessible poems by Stevens include Sunday Morning, Flyer’s Fall, the tricksy Re-Statement of Romance, and the lovely The Man with the Blue Guitar in which, once you know that the guitar is a symbol for poetry, much falls into place. I love the second last section which I have quoted in training sessions trying to generate new ideas. It starts with:
XXXII
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
And there is Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu showing, like many of his poems, Stevens the Unbeliever:[2]
In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder…
Many poems by Billy Collins are a joy. For those getting a bit older, his Forgetfulness at least reminds us of the universality of that problem:
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
…
It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
For the parents and grandparents out there (our grandson is 9), On Turning Ten encapsulates that moment and makes you want to hold the little body close:
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
I will resist naming other poems because I have his Selected Poems Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes[3] and, so many are breathtakingly good, everyone should read them.
Finally, the late, great Clive James announced that he was dying of cancer and proceeded to survive ten (difficult) years. It is over five years since I had major surgery to remove a tumour, but I have been in stage 4 since at least July 2021. This is the beginning of James’s Injury Time, and it makes me give a wry smile:
This is a pretty trick the fates have played
On me, to make me think that I might die
Tomorrow, and then grant me extra time.
But now I feel that I have overstayed
My welcome. …[4]
All of these poets have enhanced my life. I remember Antonia Fraser (I think!) writing once that she had been “learning French all her life”. Poems have seeped into me over decades, nourishing, challenging, and comforting.
Gally Maxwell
2 April 2024
[1] Stevens, Wallace; John N. Serio. Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens (p. 234). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[2] It is said that Stevens was baptised into the Catholic Church and received Holy Communion during his final admission to hospital. Paul Mariani The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens. 401
[3] Billy Collins (2000) Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes: Selected Poems. London, Picador.
[4] Clive James (2018) Injury Time at p81 of the collection of the same name.
Poetry quote of the Day – Jennings
From Invocation and Incantation by Elizabeth Jennings
I took a leaf and held it in my palm.
It sent no shiver through me but pure calm.
I went out late at night to taste the air.
A star shone back at me like my own prayer.
This is part of a lovely 12-line poem by the great Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001)
Gally Maxwell
6 April 2024
Work Free?
That question ain't no predicament
In light of my predicament, here
In my Inferno. The work I'll do for
Free? Whatever the warders tell me.
One day free work may turn to freedom.
Gally Maxwell
3 April 2024
[From a prompt: What job would you do free?]
Poetry Quote of the Day – Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope is a fine poet with an irrepressible sense of humour. In I Worry, she expresses concern that an ex-partner may be downhearted, dispirited, broke, sad or lonely, and she concludes:
They say that men suffer,
As badly, as long.
I worry, I worry,
In case they are wrong.
Cope, Wendy. Serious Concerns (p. 71). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.
Gally Maxwell
9 April 2024
The Struggle to Love, to Eat, to Escape the Redressers of Wrongs
On a wall at home, I have a print of the full text of a fine poem by Christopher Logue, Be Not Too Hard, the core of which is succinctly put at the beginning, with these words:
Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man
Be not too hard when he is sold and bought
For he must manage as best he can.
Investigators, including investigatory-lawyers, are often perceived by the alleged wrongdoers as relentless, pernickety, aggressive, unfair and many other negative epithets. There are enforcement staff who have one or more of these traits – and they need to be moved on quickly.
How many high-profile investigated people think that they are the subject of a witch-hunt? Many, if not most: Trump, ad infinitum and ad nauseam; “From crying ‘witch hunt’ to a guilty plea, calls for Trump ally Duncan Hunter to resign immediately”;[1] Prince Andrew;[2] friends and others about Ghislaine Maxwell;[3] a full list would be very long.
The reality is often very different. A busy investigator’s heart sinks to hear of a new case that is going to be very hard work, very time-consuming, and fraught with counter-attacks. The case is not pursued lightly. Usually, there is a core of inescapable wrongdoing that means there simply has to be an investigation.
True, the harder the suspect fights, the more determined investigators tend to become.
Donovan set the poem to music. The lyrics involved a few changed words and a version sung by Joan Baez can be seen at GENIUS.
The poem should be on the walls of every police station, prosecutors’ office, and enforcement regulators.
Yes, it is necessary to be hard at times, usually in response to obstruction or counter-attack, but it should stop before becoming too hard.
Be fair.
Recognise the human condition.
Enforce to protect the public.
And of course the poem is not directed at enforcers but to all of us.
Samuel Beckett warns of the damage that life inflicts, including by enforcers:
And what can have changed him so? Life perhaps, the struggle to love, to eat, to escape the redressers of wrongs.[4]
Be not too hard.
Gally Maxwell
18 April 2024
[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/12/03/from-crying-witch-hunt-to-a-guilty-plea-calls-for-trump-ally-duncan-hunter-to-resign-immediately/
[2] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/prince-andrew-hits-back-over-witch-hunt-duke-of-york-insists-claims-by-epsteins-sex-slave-are-categorically-untrue-a4223011.html
[3] https://www.spreaker.com/episode/a-look-back-ghislaine-maxwell-s-trial-was-a-witch-hunt-according-to-this-socialite–57432426
[4] Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, in Three Novels, 220.
Tom Waits and Ogden Nash
In his masterpiece, Tom Traubert’s Blues, Tom Waits sings:
"And the old men in wheelchairs know
That Mathilda's the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go"
A note about the song suggests that it arises partly from time Waits spent on Skid Row ( a visit, not living there!), learning that the men there all felt that a woman had caused their downfall.
The wisdom of old men.
Ogden Nash's fine poem, Old Men, notes that old men are expected to die and are not really noticed or mourned, but his final line is a great truth:
"But the old men know when an old man dies."
Gally Maxwell
20 April 2024
Poems that Light Up My Life (3) – getting serious
On the first day of July 1916, my grandfather was aged 17. He would be 18 the following month.
If he survived.
He was five-foot three, the product of malnourishment in Ireland where he was born: in County Meath.
And he was a private in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
He was deployed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, that terrible day when the British Army suffered its highest ever casualties, 57,470 men, including 19,240 killed. My grandfather was at the village of Thiepval, his battalion having held the forward trench there from 26 June. They were relieved on 30 June but held in reserve, until they found themselves sent back the next morning when fierce machine gun fire from the Thiepval Fortress had pinned down their comrades trying to take it. The attack failed, but they held the new line, modest as it was, and were relieved on 3 July.
They were fighting again on 9 July, capturing enemy trenches, beating off a counter-attack and strengthening the new positions while engaged in ‘severe hand-to-hand-fighting’ in resisting two counter-attacks. They left the front line on 14 July, by which time the operations:
“had cost heavily in casualties: two officers killed and five wounded; of other ranks, 34 killed, 163 wounded and 63 missing.”
My grandfather was part of an unsuccessful rescue mission a couple of weeks later. He was wounded in the leg and repatriated.
He never returned.
He never spoke of these horrors.
I learned of them from his Army records.
The Battle of the Somme continued until mid-November, when the allied attack was abandoned. Only five miles of territory had been gained at a cost of 650,000 German casualties, 420,000 British, and 195,000 French.
I am not sure now when I first understood the Great War. For decades, thinking of it has dismayed and disturbed and angered me. So many men and boys suffered, pointlessly, died horribly, or lived on horribly, because the men in power could not maintain or find peace. The pain of the mothers, sisters, fiancées, wives, who lost their beloveds or who themselves served in ambulances, in nursing.
I am not going to write about “war poems” because they are too well-known and their writers are numerous: Owen and Rosenberg, Sassoon and Graves, Brooke and Blunden, Ledwidge and Nicholls.
Instead, let’s start with Six Young Men by Ted Hughes, the contemplation of a happy photograph of the six youngsters, followed by the punch:
“Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile,
One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,
One is ridiculous with cocky pride –
Six months after this picture they were all dead.”
After a meditation on the beauty of their country home – where “You hear the waters of seven streams fall/To the roarers in the bottom,” we hear of three deaths: one shot in an attack, another killed when he went to rescue him, a third risking practice pot-shots, head exposed over the trench, “Fell back dead with his rifle sights shot away.” The others are simply lost.
Hughes ends with how the photograph, combined with the deaths, will hit the viewer, suggesting that this “might well dement” them and “shoulder out/One’s own body from its instant and heat.”
The fierce focus here is on the personal, the beauty of young men, their violent deaths. In prose, the novel John Harris’s Covenant with Death widens the concern by quietly illustrating the inexorable procession to war and the Front. For many, the Great War tragedy is underpinned with sorrow that workers found it impossible to unite and refuse to fight the aristocrats’ war for them. Imagine if the German, French, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British and Ottoman workers Just said, no, we will not kill our comrades.
Decades later, Philip Larkin captured the whole in perfect concision. His poem MCMXIV, meaning 1914, ponders the enthusiasm for war, war as a lark. His comparison of (1) lads in queues signing-up to die with (2) those waiting outside The Oval and Villa Park to see cricket or football, grounds the scene for English people, iconic venues of the national sports, symbolic of peaceful enjoyment.
Were the young men joining the Army expecting the fair play of cricket?
The safe mud and bloodied knees of football?
Probably, but there was no such innocence again. Larkin lovingly recreates the times, “the shut shops, the bleached/ Established names on the sunblinds”, “farthings and sovereigns”, kids named after Royalty, the high tin advertisements nailed to walls, the ancient “fields/ Shadowing Domesday lines”.
To end, he turns to the universal, “Never such innocence, Never before or since”, and to the touching family details, the departing men “leaving the gardens tidy”, and a subtle stiletto to the heart, stealthily bringing in the time that will elapse before the men die and the women suffer their lasting pain:
“The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.”
Characteristically, Thom Gunn came from another angle, and he was writing about the Second World War. His ironically titled Innocence is a meditation on the evil of Nazis, very likely the SS in particular, beginning with the training and honing of fit – “the egotism of a healthy body” – young men’s bodies and minds, in this chilling stanza:
“The Corps developed, it was plain to see,
Courage, endurance, loyalty and skill
To a morale firm as morality,
Hardening him to an instrument, until”
Until… he is fully indoctrinated into “a compact innocence… No doubt could penetrate, no act could harm.”
This enables the SS man to watch a man burned alive and be disgusted not by the cruel act but by the smell he himself has to endure, as the body liquefies and falls by his boots.
The Irish poet Michael Longley is one of the best writers on the Great War. His father was wounded, awarded the Military Cross, and suffered for decades before dying of that wound. Longley approaches war from different, agonising angles. His Ghetto is a devastating picture of the treatment of Jews by the Germans, made ever more painful by the perspective of children:
“Lessons were forbidden in that terrible school.
Punishable by death were reading and writing
And arithmetic, so that even the junior infants
Grew old and wise in lofts studying these subjects.”
There is genius in this, the placing of routine life – reading and writing and arithmetic; the junior infants; studying these subjects – against punishment by death; and that desperately sad image of small children understanding the horror, slyly calibrated as being “old and wise”. We want our children to be young and innocent.
Longley concludes with an image familiar to us from traumatised children: their troubled drawings. They draw the usual: farms, butterflies, animals, but this twists into the ugly truths, colourful crayon into monochrome ink, joyous animals replaced by barracks and latrines, and their final cutting-off from life. Still drawing, but now their
“…mothers, fathers
Who survived in crayon until in pen and ink
They turned into guards at executions and funerals
Torturing and hanging even these stick figures.
They were drawings of barracks and latrines as well
And the only windows are the windows they drew.”
Longley’s main focus is on his father. An early poem, In Memoriam, subtly yet perfectly summons up the young man who went to war, while starting with his death, imagined as re-enlisting with dead comrades:
“I read you like a book. Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory.”
Longley can see his father in France, “in close-up, in my mind’s eye, / The cracked and splintered dead for pity’s sake” and:
“You, looking death and nightmare in the face
With your kilt, harmonica and gun,
Grown older in a flash, but none the wiser”
Poems involving his father are numerous. In Wounds, we hear of the Ulster Division being “Wilder than the Gurkhas”, going over the top to death “Screaming, ‘Give ‘em one for the Shankill!’”
And the conclusion, the death after fifty years:
“At last, a belated casualty,
He said – lead traces flaring till they hurt –
‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’”
Wounds is in two parts. The first concerns Longley’s father, the second is a distressing account of sectarian murder in modern Belfast. This reminds us of the complex relationship, the ambiguities, in Irishmen enlisting in the British Army to fight on the Western Front – dying for King and Country – at a time when Ireland was part of the Empire and a rage for independence had boiled over in the Easter Rising of 1916. W.B. Yeats famously declined to write a poem about the war and, as for his even more famous, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death “nothing in the poem necessarily locates Gregory’s death in the First World War”.[1]
These complexities are analysed in Fran Brearton’s The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley, including several pages on the traumas of the Ulster Division on the Somme.[2] They are familiar to me. How do I deal with the mixed Protestant/ Catholic marriage of my parents, the Catholics refusing to attend the church wedding, the arguments about whether I should go to Catholic school, my Irish grandfather’s favourite album Irish Rebel Songs, my Scottish grandfather’s reported prejudice against the Irish? Celtic/Rangers? I was born in Scotland of Irish and Scots. Protestant or Catholic? Neither now. And here is my uncle, son of my Catholic Irish grandfather, another in the British Army, serving, of all places, in Northern Ireland. How? Auden told us in September 1, 1939: “We must love one another or die.”
Longley often returns to the Great War, most notably in several poems in his A Hundred Doors collection, including Gunner Longley and the well-known Citation which is based on the official account of how his father earned the Military Cross. (There is an excellent documentary film about Longley available on BBC iPlayer and, apparently, Apple+: Michael Longley: Where Poems Come From.)
I’ll share a recent discovery (for me): Mary Borden. An eyewitness, intelligent, gifted, observant, worked as a nurse at the Somme; daughter of a Chicago millionaire, she had also paid for the hospital to be constructed. There are five poems about the War in her book The Forbidden Zone.[3] The first, The Hill, begins with what we quickly realise is a destabilising sarcasm:
“From the top of the hill I looked down on the beautiful, the gorgeous, the superhuman and monstrous landscape of the superb exulting war.
There were no trees anywhere, nor any grasses or green thickets, nor any birds singing, nor any whisper or flutter of any little busy creatures.
There was no shelter for field mice or rabbits, squirrels or men.
The earth was naked and on its naked body crawled things of iron.”
She sees tanks, “Obscene crabs, armoured toads, big as houses,” and a turbaned black man riding a horse while driving a German prisoner “as one drives an animal to market”. The three creatures pass in silence into a shadowed valley
“… where the panorama of invisible phantom armies moved, as if swimming.
And as I watched I heard the faint music of bagpipes, and thought that I heard the sound of invisible men marching.”
From her eyrie-like overview, she descends into The Song of the Mud, emphasising her affinity with Walt Whitman and his various Songs, and vivifies the “invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.” This is the mud that gets everywhere, “a slimy inveterate nuisance”, that pollutes food, engines, and guns, and, she asserts, “soaks up the power of armies” and stops the battle (which perhaps it did in the end). The song becomes the hymn:
“This is the hymn of mud; the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies.
It has drowned our men.
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.
Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing.
Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;
Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.
Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!”
There is a towering empathy in Borden’s work.
Although he disliked it and considered it dishonest, W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939 resonates with the corrupt atmosphere of the time (and now) and with the evil of impending war. And his Epitaph on a Tyrant is a small masterpiece. But in these days of millions of people in flight, we must turn to Refugee Blues, a chilling evocation of how the vulnerable – particularly at the time (March 1939) – the existentially vulnerable, are rejected:
“Came to a public meeting; speaker got up and said;
‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.”
These poor, fleeing people sense Hitler saying that they must die, “O we were in his mind, my dear…”
I started to write above that Mary Borden showed a towering humanity… but, to me, that last word is no longer a symbol of empathic behaviour.
Humanity is a murderous species.
Auden was well ahead of me. He heard birds in the trees, singing easily – “They had no politicians” and
“They weren’t the human race my dear, they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.”
You may be asking: how do these vividly painful poems light up my life?
It’s the wisdom, the understanding.
Hughes imagining a reader demented with the horror.
Larkin warning of innocence and naivety, conjuring a doubly lost world.
Thom Gunn acutely analysing the evil man, giving us his own warning.
Michael Longley living the predicament of ghetto-ised children, taking us to France with his father’s kilt and harmonica, quietly recording the – what? Irony, ambiguity? – of his father’s death for King and Country.
Mary Borden gives us almost surreal yet sharp and graphic reactions to the miserable war-cursed landscape, and to the grotesque, routine, horrifying terror of so many young men drowned in mud. No wonder her next poem questioned Jehovah.
And Auden. A difficult man, yet a gay man who married a woman to help her escape the Germans.
Refugee Blues is wholly transparent, focused, a shattering indictment told with strange, haunting gentleness. We should learn from it.
Gally Maxwell
6 May 2024, updated 7 May.
[1] Fran Brearton (2000) The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley. Oxford, OUP, 56. I wonder a little about this conclusion because the poem makes clear that the airman is not fighting for the country of the Air Force in which he serves, and, as it was for neutral Ireland, the outcome of the war would not directly effect the Irish people: “Those that I guard I do not love; / My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, / No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before.”
[2] Fran Brearton (2000) 26 et seq.
[3] Mary Borden (1929) The Forbidden Zone. London: William Heinemann, Ltd. Poems begin at 75.
See also: W.H. Auden ed. Edward Mendelson (1979) Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber; W.H. Auden (1969) Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber; Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes (1963) Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Michael Longley (2006) Collected Poems. London: Cape Poetry. Michael Longley (2011) A Hundred Doors. London: Cape Poetry.
Quote of the Day – Ultimately, we are alone
alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes
Wallace Stevens, Re-statement of Romance.
This is one of Stevens's great poems. It holds an enigma within it. The quote above resonates with me: in extremis, at the end, and at moments in life, we are on our own, truly alone. However much a parent wants to take a child's pain onto themselves, it cannot be done. The child is alone with its pain, the parent with their own.
But I understand that this poem is read at weddings, as a statement of romance and togetherness. I imagine that is because the words leading to the quote suggest that it is a couple who are "alone", alone together, it seems:
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone….
Typically, Stevens subtly undermines that. If I am following the syntax correctly (So much… that…):
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
…
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
Stevens was no naive romantic. His marriage was difficult and he felt alone.
Perhaps his assertion that Only we two are one means that the nearest we can get to being one with another person is in romantic couple-hood. But even that finally gives way to our being Supremely true to our separate self.
Enjoy the lovely, short poem, and decide what you think. My opinion is worth no more than anyone else’s, but I feel the solitariness of experience.
Often, introverts contrast welcome solitude with loneliness or isolation. I love the line, So far beyond the casual solitudes. We all experience casual solitude and, ultimately, we understand that there is, or will be, a profounder state when we are truly, wholly alone, so deeply by ourselves.
Gally Maxwell
7 May 2024
Blistering Beauty: Coda to Poems that Light Up My Life (3) – Getting serious
Too moved to write, I have had to reflect and take time to absorb and come to terms with the outstanding documentary Michael Longley: Where Poems Come From.
Michael himself and his wife Edna are wonderful on screen. Both are experts on literature. Michael speaks carefully and gently, with a persistent undercurrent of humour. Edna is all business and practicality. Her answer to Michael asking her if she is going to read a poem out loud is, “No.” She, he tells us, is a superb critic of his work, often identifying a weakness in a poem and suggesting its correction. To see them going about their business, elderly now, is a touching privilege.
For perhaps the first half an hour, we are entranced as Michael (and occasionally Edna) reads his poems aloud and he chats about them. All his nature poems are love poems, he says. There seems to be a hint from Edna, professional literary critic, that she does not have much time for categories such as “love poetry”! For those who have read his evocations of Carrigskeewaun (see an example, featured in the film, here), to be taken there in the programme is a joyous enhancement of the poem’s impact: its remoteness, its massive beach, Michael’s friend, an ornithologist who lives there. The rolling Atlantic waves, gathering brown seaweed, make me long to return to my origin on the west coast of Scotland.
We hear many poems, all read in full. Badger and Swans Mating.[1] Film of otters gambolling in the surf is accompanied by the lovely Otters:[2]
“I lie above Corragaun and watch an otter
Tying and untying knots in the undertow”
Michael explains that hares sleep in what is known as a form,[3] hence his fine short poem – four lines – of that name.
The film turns dark and distressing when it reaches The Troubles. Michael says that he is only a Protestant at the barrel of a gun: he has no religion. When the conflict exploded, he was enjoying the company of Seamus and Marie Heaney, and their friends, the first Catholics he had known. This terrible time inspired – no, wrong word – this time provoked poems that, ignoring or dismissing politics, celebrated and mourned for the murdered. The film shows the couple shopping on the Lisburn Road and the peaceful normality, the kind shopkeepers, constitute an indictment of the killings of:
The Greengrocer[4]
He ran a good shop, and he died
Serving even the death-dealers
The Ice-Cream Man[5]
Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
After publication, Michael received a letter which he keeps close by him. A letter of thanks for remembering, signed The ice-cream man’s mum. The pain in the film is building and hurting.
The Greengrocer is the second of three poems under the overall title of Wreaths, each of which celebrates ordinary people living their lives until they were not. Here are two extracts:
The Civil Servant
He was preparing an Ulster Fry for breakfast
When someone walked into the kitchen and shot him:
A bullet entered his mouth and pierced his skull,
The books he had read, the music he could play.
The Linen Workers
When they massacred the ten linen workers
There fell on the road beside them spectacles,
Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:
Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine.
The agony becomes unbearable when we are reminded of the atrocity at Enniskillen and we see Gordon Wilson, who held the hand of his daughter Marie as she died, say that he had forgiven the killers and prayed for them. (One of Bono’s finest moments is in the concert film Rattle and Hum, U2 playing just after the atrocity, when he condemns the murderers with a massive, righteous, mighty rage.)
With the prospect of a truce in Northern Ireland, Michael wrote of Priam visiting Achilles to ask for the body of his son, Hector. Ceasefire[6] ends with an agonising couplet:
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
Michael thinks often of his father. The Linen Workers develops into a memory of preparing his father for burial, polishing and placing his spectacles on his nose, slipping in his teeth.
He confides that his favourite poem is Harmonica,[7] and that his father had learned to play while at war.[8]
A music-hall favourite lasts until the end of time.
My dad is playing it. His breath contains the world.
The wind is playing an orchestra of harmonicas.
The film returns to peace and beauty when The Troubles are over. Michael shows us where he wants his ashes left and reads the beautiful Above Dooaghtry.[9]
Where the duach rises to a small plateau
That overlooks the sand dunes from Dooaghtry
…
At Carrigskeewaun, bury my ashes
…
Let boulders at the top encircle me,
Neither a drystone wall nor a cairn, space
For the otter to die and the mountain hare
To lick snow stains from her underside,
A table for the peregrine and the ravens
Michael Longley is an extraordinary poet. Empathic and spirited. His Collected Poems should be on everyone’s bookshelf. The documentary film is a glorious characterisation and tribute, and a work of art in itself. See it, and weep, and laugh, and love.
Gally Maxwell
8 May 2024
[1] Michael Longley (2006) Collected Poems. London: Cape Poetry, 47 and 48.
[2] Page 168.
[3] Page 197. “The main habitat of the Brown Hare in Britain is open farmland. Unlike Rabbits, hares do not dig and burrow into the ground, but instead live their whole lives above ground. They do not have a particular ‘home’ and will sleep in any suitable place, continually shifting from one place to another. When a hare rests, it will usually scrape away the vegetation and then lie down on the bare earth. Where a hare has been lying, a shallow depression is made, which is a bit deeper and wider at the back than at the front. This is known as a ‘form’. They are often made in the shelter of a grass tussock or a rock which will give some protection from the wind. Forms which are used to give birth to young may be lined with fur which the mother has plucked from her own fur coat.” http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/devon_bap/hare.htm
[4] Page 118.
[5] Page 192.
[6] Page 225.
[7] Page 309.
[8] Other fine poems about the Great War and/or his father include In Memoriam (30), Aftermath (31), Wounds (62), Last Requests (119), Second Sight (120), Ghetto (187), Anniversary (258), and The Front (309). See also his collection, A Hundred Doors and my post Poems that Light Up My Life (3) – Getting serious.
[9] Page 289.
Circling the Wagons
Circled
But not round, an audience,
And a performance of sorts:
Nursery nativity
School play, local band belting
It out, a Library Theatre
Play, full-tilt, but more actors
Than paying bums and still we
Loved it, whatever it was,
Stomping Christmas musical
Crucibled or Royally
Exchanged or a dwarfed quartet
In a Symphony Hall, grand
Even the full Orchestra
Choired for Beethoven Nine’s
Epic blast, attempted joy.
No: real joy; wagons circle,
We play and sing into dark.
Gally Maxwell
25 May 2024
House Clearance
House Clearance
Back to her forlorn house, stinking drains, rains,
Arctic-blasting February; to start to clear
Fifty year old Toby jugs, (such gurning
Grotesques), chair, narcotic TV, bedding;
To get her in, sheltered, from this grimness:
The widowed home, the house that bound her
Until it bent and beat her; stairs rising like
A mountain range tectonically shoved,
Vertical, unscalable, a death threat.
Gaping flat deserts opening up, vastness of carpet
Between furniture, door-handle handholds
To totter to.
Don’t take her back there! She sleeps by our fire.
We stand, cold-wet and winded, revisiting
The scene of the grime, dismantling a place we too
Lived: presents and past markings, babies, snaps,
Raucous drinking, tensions and rude naps.
Coloured memory turns monochrome, chill, afraid.
A foreshadowing
A living, just, life-clearance.
Gally Maxwell
25 May 2024.
RIP JS.
For a Newday
At midnight in Paris, Man Ray sees
A photograph, Buñuel sees
A film
He may say words no longer
Help; until, yes, he knew too
They are the courage, the painting.
From Lucy Barton’s life
I see a dark, wide space
And shafts of sharp light:
How do words get so far
Beyond words, into light,
Pain, our being, her very being?
Gally Maxwell
12 June 2024
A Response to The Fine Film Paterson
The Bus
Fine films lull you to calm, but Paterson
Has you awake at the cold plum moments:
The full bus as it breaks down, the kindness
Of Paterson, shepherding of the children,
The awesomeness of a truck come to tow
A great big emptied out broken down bus,
The older lady fears a fireball
(Too much Speed perhaps)
And you enhance with
Your image of the bus-riders, each rising
From a different bed, hugs and canoodlings,
Dilapidation and renovation,
Titivation, prosaic patching up
Of ravaged faces, dodgy knees, ankles
That were once well-turned, now aching and loose.
From pristine curtains and threadbare carpets,
Stories of each satchelled, cell-phoned, cherished
Child, uniformed in primary colours,
And hard-hat, tough-boot workers, and ladies
Going to town to take tea or volunteer:
The invisible spread of lines as they
Meander, run or stride to their bus stops,
Then board and sit and think or chat or gaze.
I remember those buses. The frozen
Wait, parka-wrapped, before packed animal
Heat welcomes, all coats smelling of damp dog.
Or hard humid summer mornings after
Unsatisfying semi-sleep, glad of
A manufactured breeze through the windows,
Hot summer exams awaiting. Years of
Expertise in timetables, running to
Intercept, or interdict the bus route
To shin up and down the stairs like monkeys,
Grabbing the front or the racy back seats,
Knowing without knowing every last inch:
Those three miles along the A6, each shop
Familiar, morning-closed, that chippy run
By a classmate’s dad, and the jeweller
By another, and now the glowering
Hospital where mums work nights and we make
Guest star appearances each year with limb
Damage, pride-busted, sidelined from the game
Limping or slinged, stitched up in Casualty.
Conductors who refused a nurse’s fare
And when your bus money was forgotten
You might get away with a sprint and curse
And a week of fearing life in prison.
Instead, we leaned against the cool window,
Watching the, learning the, town and the life.
We will all take the bus to Paterson.
Gally Maxwell
12 June 2024
This is my response to Jim Jarmusch’s (2016) superb Paterson, a warm, touching film about a bus driver who is also a poet. It is a homage also to the wonderful poem with the same title written by William Carlos Williams (hence the cold plum in line 2 above – This is just to say) in which he sought to capture that New Jersey Silk City. An excellent essay on the website of the Poetry Foundation includes:
Breslin revealed that “Williams spent some thirty years of living and writing in preparation for Paterson.” … His devotion to understanding his country, its people, its language—”the whole knowable world about me”—found expression in the poem’s central image, defined by Whittemore as “the image of the city as a man, a man lying on his side peopling the place with his thoughts.” With roots in his 1926 poem “Paterson,” Williams took the city as “my ‘case’ to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the ‘thought.’”
In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson, Williams explained “that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.” A.M. Sullivan outlined why Williams chose Paterson, New Jersey: It was once “the prototype of the American industrial community … the self-sustaining city of skills with the competitive energy and moral stamina to lift the burdens of the citizen and raise the livelihood with social and cultural benefits.”
Amy Amy Triptileen
Amy on a Winter's Dawn
Those thoughts I had (but never said aloud)
You drilled and inflamed them until I bowed.
I tried. So many times I meant to say…
But doctors don’t listen, in their busy day:
"I'm more stressed than you" is what they think:
And it may be true, since they often sink
To the same, enticing, terminal thought
To become unbecome: inardently sought.
Oh Amy Amy Triptileen, short course
And I'm gone, through my bloodstream you force.
Amy Amy Triptileen, friend of the lost:
I find the high window, fall into frost.
Gally Maxwell
13 June 2024
Last and First Days
Last and First Days: Friday to Saturday 12-13 October 2018
It began with apparent dismissal
You don’t look yellow
You look better than I do
That pressed on my lifelong fear:
Time-waster, crying wolf. But
The ignorance was in the science
Or sadly in the people, not all,
But so many, such cold denial.
Take a battler with you.
You are too weak. A slump
Back into bed so preferable
To the white light of Emergency.
My fighter fought, insistent,
Preying on her thirty years
Knowledge that I am not even little bit yellow,
And never sunbathe now.
The formidable gates of Hippocrates
Open and in quick time the yellow
Is obstructive jaundice which doctors
Care and worry about. Pressing again and again.
But I cannot give the right answer.
Then there was the long single take,
Rubber-wheeled through quiet corridors,
Sitting, the pushing porter murmuring, a queue!
A woman waiting, nightgown, red socks,
Non-slip, I saw later on others:
Hospital issue, not to her taste.
The life-changing scan: warm contrast
Liquid through the bloodstream and pelvis.
Back, back, back, in another gentle-paced rolling
Through the small silent hospital, wards darkening.
Tomorrow, they say. To wake waiting, waiting:
The doctors will come later, later,
But he came alone and I knew immediately
Grave-faced, he displaced the tenor
With chat. He was solicitous, struggling,
Until we had The Conversation.
15 October 2018
Gally Maxwell
Posted 15 June 2024
Romantic Andante
Question: What is your definition of romantic?
Romantic is:
For living, not defining.
Not glowing, but shining.
The trattoria of life, not the ristorante.
Not presto, adagio, but andante.
The sharing of pain, uncaring of gain.
Rushing to that late-night train.
Ageless and timeless,
Mortal, defenceless.
Embracing childlike fun
Resisting childish gurn.
Running with the kindly whimsical
The uncynical, apolitical, metaphysical.
Cheek-to-cheek in a freezing St Mark’s Square
Our warm exhaled breath hanging in the air,
As the bells of midnight welcome your birthday
And a tremor of parting haunts our yesterday.
Gally Maxwell
24 June 2024
Find Comfort Where You Can
Question: What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
Find Comfort Where You Can
I cannot comfort myself.
I cannot be comforted.
Dreaded disasters descend
On us, and all we can hope
Is ordinary despairs
Are not outdone by evil:
Life and death work out in time.
But fear ye the abnormal:
Genocide or massacre,
Torture or horror disease,
Children dead before parents.
Gulag and Stalag, far China,
Incarceration US:
Those behemoths of cruelty.
Is it a comfort? That all
Are at risk and some succumb
To the abnormal torment?
I fear our premise distorts.
Terror becomes normal and
Bubbles like blood from the mouth.
Humanity has little humanity.
For Nadezhda Mandelstam:
‘To think that we could have had an ordinary family life with its bickering, broken hearts and divorce suits! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realise that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!’
Nadezhda Mandelstam tr. Max Hayward (1971) Hope Against Hope: A Memoir. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 19.
‘I also would have been glad, if not of “happiness,” at least of a little well-being … – a peaceful life with its ordinary despairs, its thoughts about the certainty of death and the vanity of earthly things. None of this was granted to us…’
Nadezhda Mandelstam tr. Max Hayward (1983) Hope Against Hope: A Memoir. New York: Atheneum, p262.
Gally Maxwell
30 June 2024
Legal Fiction
Legal Fiction
If you want lies, go to law.
Yes, the court was juvenile.
The chairwoman a Lady.
Wielding that crystal accent
That so sharded us in place.
Our lad had thumped another.
Faced a criminal complaint.
To make him comfortable
She asked What do they call you
At school, and honesty burned
Back: They call me Wanker, miss.
No aristocratic crack was shown:
And can you tell me what happened?
Smacked him, miss, to shut him up.
You will never hear a court
Say, honestly, go now, free:
He so fucking deserved it.
See also: 'That one word judgment of your peers' in Flash Fiction
Summering in France
Five foot seven and seventeen, hungry
In Kells, brought up near the pits of Blantyre
Where his father hewed coal and fed the fire,
He joins up in nineteen-fifteen, with Scots,
Deserts to Belfast to choose the Royal
Inniskillings who take this bad character,
Shipping him out to France in changeable June
Of the next year, where the coming attack
Would end the war to end all wars, wishful
Thinking by the innocents: we know now.
An early, misty morning on the first
Hopeful day of the new month and the soldiers
Rise into the sights of machine-gunners,
Fall when volleys and swathes of bullets rake
Through their soft skin and organs of beauty.
At Thiepval, the Inniskillings relieve
The remnants and violently battle
To hold the pitiful advanced line and
Here he is, in the midst of death, a child,
And there his truth remains, unspoken, silent.
Two dead weeks in this ninth circle, until
A rescue mission for captured comrades
Fails, and shrapnel pierces his leg, grants
Remission, hospital, England, Ireland.
He reports for duty, trains at Dublin,
But what trigger sends him away, AWOL,
Deserting again, risking firing squad?
Never brought to book, he’s a logical
Escapee who survives the Somme’s first day
To become my grandfather, a hero.
2 September 2024
Gally Maxwell
Levi’s Carbon Atom
“It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth,
lifted ten kilometres high.
It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs,
but did not penetrate its rich blood
and was expelled.
It dissolved three times in the water of the sea,
once in the water of a cascading torrent,
and again was expelled.
It travelled with the wind for eight years:
now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds,
over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice;
and it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure
…
The atom we are speaking of was …
borne by the wind
along a row of vines …
It had the good fortune
to brush against the leaf,
penetrate it, and be nailed there
by a ray of the sun.”
Primo Levi
This is prose text which I have broken down into lines. The text is in Chapter “Carbon” in Primo Levi (1986) The Periodic Table. Abacus, 226-7. tr. Raymond Rosenthal.
Gally Maxwell
26 November 2024