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The Sunday Times
25 September, 1994
Distinct voices, still lives
Satire, feminism, elegy and vanity feature in collections celebrated by
Sean O'Brien.
Good news. Carol Ann Duffy's Selected Poems (Penguin Pounds 5.99) supplies
the pick of her four collections to date, plus a substantial helping of
The World's Wife, a new set of poems in progress, featuring the likes of
Queen Kong and Mrs Aesop ("By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory"). It
makes a good introduction to Duffy's work, and it helps to clarify what
she's been about in the decade or so since her emergence in print. One constant
has been the use of the dramatic monologue: the book opens with Girl Talking
and ends on the joke with which Mrs Darwin sets the record straight about
who discovered what and how. Taken together, the numerous voices in between
confirm that a unifying theme in Duffy's poems is power its absence, its
exercise, its place in the fantasies of those who live "like you do, a dozen
slack rope-ends in each dream hand".
In the post-postwar consensus world of her poem Education For Leisure
or the weird fairground 1950s of Psychopath, the wish becomes the violent
deed. The psychopath's language is a dustbin of styles "a right well-knackered
outragement'" into which he climbs, closing the lid behind him: "Drink
up, son,/ the world's your fing oyster. Awopbopaloobopalopbimbam." On the
other hand, the artist's model in Standing Female Nude brusquely refuses
absorption into the painter's view of creation: "I say/ twelve francs and
get my shawl. It does not look like me." Duffy is also well known as a
satirist. Here again, language itself is to the fore, dwelling in the heaven
of headline writers in Poet For Our Times: The poems of the decade ...
Stuff 'em! Gotcha!/ The instant tits and bottom line of art." Public poems
like this are supported by a continuing series of meditative and evocative
pieces about "the other country" of childhood and the past, (not to mention
the love poems), with the markers of class and power already in place.
It's hard to think of a better re-creation of insane lower-middle-class
respectability than Litany, or of the gone-forever ur-feminism of The
Good Teachers. "Look. The good teachers/ swish down the corridor in long,
brown skirts,/ snobbish and proud and clean and qualified." Some of the
strengths of Duffy's work are those associated with fiction the projection
of character and milieu, the selection of detail, and obviously, storytelling
itself. So it should be emphasised that her accuracy is also clearly a
poet's. Her organisation of rhythm and line, the
combination of detail and economy, her exemplary grasp of how sentence
construction claims or loses a poem's authority these are enviable powers.
In discussions of poetry, readers often wonder about the poet's sense of
audience. It seems as though Duffy goes some way to meet the reader not
by a sentimental courting of easy approval, but by a grounding in common
concerns. Paul Muldoon too, is also, at bottom, writing about such things,
but his imagination leads him to relish the details of inwardness, the processes
of thought or reverie themselves, and thus he invites the reader to go the
distance in that his direction.
The Annals Of Chile (Faber Pounds 7.99), his seventh book, in fact combines
some of his most accessible and most challenging work. Yarrow, weighing
in at 160 pages, delivers the challenge. A plant with healing properties,
yarrow is, "like something keeping a secret/ from itself,
something on the tip of its own tongue." Part, at any rate, of Yarrow
is the making of an everywhere from a little room Muldoon's family backyard
in Northern Ireland, where adventure stories, movies, bits of general knowledge
and much else combine with "real" experience. Equally detailed but more
readily available is Incantata, an elegy for the painter Mary Farl Powers,
which I think is Muldoon's best work to date. To his normal intricate music
he adds the scope of a longer line than he has used before, as well as
an urgent momentum through 45 stanzas that try to name as much as possible
of its subject's life, elegy being all that's left "of all that's revelation,
all that's rune,/ of all that's composed,
all composed of odds and ends,/ of that daft urge to make amends/ when
it's far too late, too late even to make sense of the clutter/ of false
trails and reversed horseshoe tracks/ and the aniseed we took it in turns
to drag/ across each other's scents, when only a fish is dumber and colder."
Hot on the heels of Dannie Abse's Selected Poems comes a new collection,
On The Evening Road (Hutchinson Pounds 6.99), which conveys the sense that,
for a poet at 70, the point is toplease yourself. In the title poem, Abse
writes: "I may as well dance a bit, too, / since no one's around to scold
me:/ 'Disgrace, a man of his age singing/ drunkenly, not knowing where
he is." Age also confers the liberty of disapproval, and, in Talking To
Blake, Abse explains that poets are no longer able to obey Blake's instructions
to "Write poems that provide a moral light,/ let a poem become a star"
because "All our permutations of despair,/ smouldering word-fires without
light or heat,/ our pursuance of the incomplete,/ leave no disturbance in
the air." Blake, who is walking through daytime Lambeth with a candlestick,
concludes: "the Rose of English Poetry is sick/ like England's green and
pleasant land." This begs the odd question, trails the odd coat and arguably
leaves the odd hostage to fortune. Yet On The Evening Road is an enjoyable
book to disagree with.
Also enjoyable and in places impressive is Caroline Price's second collection,
Pictures Against Skin (Rockingham Press Pounds 5.95). Price meticulously
draws out shape from experience the break-up of an affair, a mother and
daughter visiting Paris, literary vanity. The poems are unshowy, and Price
is a quieter, less demotic poet than Duffy. But I'd want the work of both,
for the different angles of the "moral light" they shed.