Poetry Notebook (27 page)

Even though there would clearly be not much more of it, this was magic talk of the kind that I, like all his friends, had grown so used to over the years that we tended to take it for granted. I
often had to remind myself that hardly anyone could speak like this. Alive a long time and active all over the cultural map, Peter joined several literary groups together, but in one of them I was
lucky enough to be included, and when the gang now known as the Friday Lunch used to meet each week, often he and I would be the last two left at the end, and the subject of the conversation was
almost always the arts. He was a walking university, except that you rarely encounter that kind of range in a university. As time went by I got better at playing feed-man in a routine that I could
see was a stage-show in the making. This was proved true one year at the Melbourne Festival, when, at short notice, Peter and I were pushed on stage by the tridents of the organizers, having been
told to improvise an hour’s conversation. As usual we both quoted reams of poetry from memory. It caused a sensation among the young people in the audience, not because what we remembered was
so unusual, but because for them it was so unusual to find someone remembering anything.

The ABC arts producer Jill Kitson was in the audience and she suggested that we might, when we got back to London, go into the ABC’s studio in Great Portland Street and record a set of six
broadcasts along the same lines. Eventually there were six seasons of them recorded at the rate of one season a year, and in Australia they became a staple of arts broadcasting, with Peter’s
knowledge and easy eloquence remarked on by thousands of listeners. Though he never knew, in my opinion, how to read his own poetry aloud, Peter was an ace broadcaster from a script. But he was
even better off the cuff, and in those shows he is at his dazzling best, as fluent and entertaining as he was in real life. On behalf of his reputation, if not of mine, I might suggest that it
would be good if the BBC could pick them up. They are all on my website (an enterprise he rather approved of, because it took endless labour and made no money, a pattern he recognized) but his
contribution deserves a far wider audience that that.

The forthcoming book of selected poems,
The Rest on the Flight
, will doubtless provide the core of his heritage. I hope it will sell the way Larkin’s
Collected Poems
did,
like snow-cones in the Sahara. Wedded to tumultuous simultaneity and sometimes, it seemed to me, to outright obscurity, Peter was rarely as approachable as Larkin, but he shared the gift of the
phrase that lodged in the reader’s head. At its best, his poetry spoke the way he did. ‘Auden didn’t love God, he just found him attractive.’ I can hear him saying it now.
In the broadcasts, he proved that he could say things like that all the time. Dr Johnson might have talked for victory, but Peter seemed to talk for posterity.

When we last met, it was the only thing I said that was good enough to match him. Complaining away as hilariously as usual about the injustice of the literary world, he said he didn’t care
about posterity. ‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘For you, it’s already here.’ Surely I was right for once. While he yet lived, so many people thought he was great
that not even he could have believed they were in league to do him down. But he could never have played the hero, because for him it was creativity itself that had the heroic status, beyond
politics, beyond patriotism, beyond even personal happiness. It’s the reason why his work is like that. His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how
much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.

Not yet fifty years old, the American poet Christian Wiman has recently been stricken with a serious illness. At the moment his doctors say that he is likely to survive it, but
for anyone in doubt about the magnitude of the possible loss, one glance at his latest collection,
Every Riven Thing
, should serve to state the case. In a poem called ‘Sitting Down to
Breakfast Alone’ he remembers the Longhorn Diner:

The risk for any American poet following Robert Frost into a pastoral mode is to sound the way Norman Rockwell looked. It’s not the worst fate, but the aspirant was after
something less comfortable and more intense. Wiman attains intensity often enough to remind you of just how great Frost was, and often there is a touch of another of his masters, Richard Wilbur:
the apple butter like edible soil might have been on the menu if Wilbur had ever written a poem about a cheap American eatery.

But the best thing to say about Wiman is not that he reminds you of previous poets: it’s that he makes you forget them. His rural landscapes might start off by sounding like Seamus Heaney
with more machinery, but soon they are all his. Wiman’s poem ‘Five Houses Down’, which caused such a stir when it came out in the
New Yorker
last year, is a piece of
American Gothic so sharply seen that it brings back, for any reader in the English-speaking world, that eccentric junk-buff who lived nearby. If he never did, he does now.

Wiman has retained his childhood fascination with the disassembled engines, to the point where, though well capable of strict forms, he would rather take them apart and leave
the pieces in approximate touch. Though an outstanding poem, an instant classic, ‘Five Houses Down’ is only one of his many backyard masterpieces, as if the Wright Brothers were still
turning out flying machines at home. Actually the brothers had a flourishing bicycle business and Wiman is the powerful editor of
Poetry
(Chicago), but once those wide open spaces start to
work their magic it’s hard to shake the impression that every complex mechanism in America was invented in a barn, up to and including moon rockets.

Rangy and soft-spoken in real life, definitely a Sam Shepard type, Wiman seems ideal casting for a would-be rocketeer raised in the flyover (he was born in West Texas), as long as we remember
that only an extreme technical sophistication can produce such simplicity. He knows all about having more. You need to know that if you are plausibly to long for less.

Here one of his illustrious predecessors, Randall Jarrell, would have recognized a fellow sufferer, a sad heart at the supermarket. But Wiman can go only so far towards despair,
because he has God for solace. On the rare occasions that I find a Wiman poem less than profound, it’s because it claims profundity, usually by employing an ellipsis . . . those deadly three
dots that indicate a thought too deep to be dealt with just now. Such gestures towards the unsayable mark his religious poetry, which he might think of as his strongest, at this time when the
threat of death is so real.

But we must hope that what this fine poet faces is more life, and the obligation to go on with redoubled force. In which case, the poems he writes will be among the best written by anybody, at
this favourable time for poetry, when everything is against it – in the same way that the wind, blowing against the bows of the aircraft carrier, lifts the aircraft into the air. If one so
often thinks of being airborne when reading Wiman’s work, it could be because he seems to be thinking that way too.

Those lines are a fragment from ‘The Reservoir’: the longest single poem in the book and an indication of where his work might go next, towards larger constructions.
It would be a welcome development, although not without its dangers. Even in ‘The Reservoir’, which I find enviably fluent, the ineffable looms. It’s so hard for a poet to be
clear that anyone who can manage it should embrace his duty never to be any other way. More power, less smoke! But that’s the kind of thing we shout only at the greatly gifted, as they go
flashing by.

Michael Longley started out in Northern Ireland at about the same time as Seamus Heaney. But Longley, over the course of a long career, has done a steadily more effective job
of not doing what Heaney did. By now, with Heaney so firmly established on the international scene that he makes the secretary general of the United Nations look like a filing clerk on a short
contract, Longley remains such a local poet that one would not be surprised to hear of his beard being taken over by squatting leprechauns.

There is still a serious gift, however, lurking among the shrubbery of his localized vocabulary. His new collection,
A Hundred Doors
, gives us a small poem that should settle any doubts
about the intensity of the lyrical talent we are dealing with. It is called ‘Twayblade’.

For a while there, early in the poem, the reader must wrestle with the possibility that it is not the tiny plant, but the poet and his interlocutor, who are inconspicuous with
greeny petals in long grass. But the last line is delectable, written as if meant to be remembered. If, however, you take memorability as a desirable criterion for any poem, many of Longley’s
later things seem designed to circumvent it by itemizing the landscape with a thoroughness which would surely bring weariness even to a naturalist. A naturalist, after all, must occasionally rest,
and see what’s on television.

Longley, when naming names, is rarely off the case. The Carrigskeewaun area was already present near the end of his
Collected Poems
(2006). Here it is again, with all its plants and
animals. ‘Otters are crossing from Dooaghtry to Corragaun.’ Do they later cross back from Corragaun to Dooaghtry? Luckily, we trust him: ‘How snugly the meadow pipit fits the
merlin’s foot.’

And that’s just the first poem in the book. As we delve deeper, we approach the landscape always more closely, and find the poet tangled up in it. This was already happening in the
Collected Poems
but by now he blends into the shrubbery like a sniper laying up for an ambush, or Dick Cheney out hunting his friends.

Good to know that the scrotum is safe from detection. Pretty phrases, though, keep popping up in the seed catalogue. All the children get at least one poem each, and a girl
called Catherine will now always be remembered as ‘the harbour seal’. What a sweet notion. There is an appropriately well-wrought little poem about Chidiock Tichborne (not the famous
claimant) who wrote a masterpiece before he was torn apart, and very lovely it is: ‘And now I live, and now my life is done.’ One of the great lyric poems in English, it can’t, of
course, be matched, but Longley sensibly makes a subject out of its deeply underlying mystery: how on earth did Tichborne concentrate on the fabrication of so exquisite a thing when he knew that he
himself would soon be dismantled?

All poets will acknowledge that Longley is on to something here. The delights of composition are indeed wonderful. If Longley has a drawback – or if he has arrived at one
after decades of detour – it is that he writes poetry more often than he writes poems. The self-contained, stand-alone thing has become more and more rare in his work. Back when the Irish
boys were all starting off, some of them thought they would make it as singers. They had the towering example of Yeats looming behind them, but they were more impressed by his fey gush than
chastened by his sculptural monumentality. One of the reasons that Seamus Feamus (it was my joke, so let me use it) broke into the clear was that he put the poem before poetry. James Simmons,
movingly lamented by Longley, was only one of the poets who found out the hard way that a tone of voice wasn’t quite enough. The hard way tended to be spread over the long run, and that made
it harder.

But Longley himself is ever cheerful, perhaps because the land of his birth, always within reach, is a natural world that will never cease to move him to a phrase. In ‘A Swan’s
Egg’ he handles a ‘century-old / Alabaster emptiness’ and notes the ‘collector’s particulars’ that are written around the black hole in its surface. The display
cabinet is ‘Brimming with bird silences.’ We know that the egg’s history is safe with him. He isn’t going to drop it. Here is a wealth of noticing and sympathy in one little
poem, ‘A swan’s egg among wren / Pearls and kingfisher pearls.’ The tactile tact, as it were, is uniquely his: a big man with a light touch.