Michael Hamburger, Wild and Wounded
Anvil Press, Neptune House, 70 Royal Hill London SE10 8RF
C K Stead, Dog
Arc, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs OL14 6DA
Gillian Clarke, Making the Beds for the Dead
Carcanet Press, Alliance House, Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ
George Szirtes, Reel
Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 1RP

Michael Hamburger’s Wild and Wounded is published to mark his eightieth birthday. it charts the progress of one of the most austere and cerebral poets of the last fifty years in coming to terms with illness, absence and the final embargoes on the artistic process, invoked in his Apology that opens the collection: ‘…difficulties with grammar now, with tense, / With mood, with person, case – and,yes, the sense.’ In terms of diction and preoccupation some of the pieces remind me very much of the late Roy Fuller’s attempts to confront the same lengthening of the shadows. In fact, at times, almost uncannily, it could be Fuller talking: ‘roused from a nap, with music on, I hear / the telephone’s buzz, no longer loud and clear’ (‘Mr Littlejoy’s Belated Response’). Hamburger explores the humiliations of age without flinching, lamenting the lot of the ‘Bags of old bones left with no privacy / Until they’re coffined or compelled to rest.’ (‘Mr Littlejoy’s…’)
   In so many ways, then, this is a book that explores the many
meanings of valediction. Though cosmic events have died back to
the heron descending to the garden pond, breeding a sort of muted
vulnerability in the writing, the old monumental pride and rigour –
the flash of the stature – suddenly resurfaces like a fish’s back: ‘I was in London again, / Jefferies’ jungle of steel, stone, brick / reverting to sludge and slime, / Gissing’s whirlpool of lonely schemers dragged down…..’ (‘Chauffeuse’). To be fair, though, frailties do show up in the text, mainly in odd examples of discordant metrical clogging and even ill‑judged phrasing, though this might be unduly to carp about a book that is moving and tender in turns, especially in its contemplation of November light, songs at closing time and the final river‑crossing ‘…Till it matters least of all / Whether we cross or turn back.’

   Dog is C K Stead’s twelfth collection. this is an idiosyncratic book that wears its seriousness lightly but is nonetheless serious for doing so, at times complex and intricate, suspended between two major projects. The first, ‘King’s Lynn and the Pacific’, a sequence of thirteen poems which opens the collection, is dramatised through the personae of James Burney and George Vancouver, sort of singing to one another as they sail with Captain Cook into the Pacific, employing a demotic which is both memorable and highly appealing: ‘Mud knows how water slides / and Jem knew mud but longed / for the bigger picture…’ The second project,’ at Wagner’s tomb’, a sequence of eight poems which closes the collection, examines Wagner’s lifespan through his personal relationships with, say, Hans von Bulow, Cosima and Nietzsche, to name but three:
‘Passion’s advocate who fears / his client, he turns his back / at last on Wagner.’ (‘VI Nietzsche – The Renunciation’). For my part, I was drawn to the lyrics which fill in the space between these two extended sequences that run the risk of overshadowing—starving of oxygen—the less ambitious work between: the shorter poems, nonetheless, still pick up the themes examined in more detail by the giant bookends, not least that of the dog: ‘Every Dog has his day / but this one taketh the Prize.’ (Psalm).

Gillian Clarke’s Making the Beds for the Dead continues with more of what we most expect from her: the clarity of her narrative drive, the acute observation of the natural world. ‘A Woman Sleeping at a Table’, ‘The Piano’ and ‘Woman Washing her Hair’, however, strive way beyond this, and possibly the best poem in the book is ‘Stranger on a Train’, a chilling update on Hardy’s ‘Faint Heart in a Railway Carriage’, brilliantly focusing a post‑millennial sense of menace and shifted expectation: ‘A seaman, maybe. A soldier. Nothing odd, / but his glittering straightahead unblinking stare. / He didn’t once look at the perfect morning.’ But the book takes off when we arrive at the title sequence which charts the details
of the Foot and Mouth crisis of 2001. To all the poems she has
written over the years which draw upon a kind of post‑Hughesian
epic appreciation of nature must be added this new unadorned,
plain‑speaking evocation of men and animals locked together in
endurance:

   First the animals lost their voices,
   then the people.
   ‘We couldn’t speak.

   We couldn’t hold each other.’
   Words drowned in a howl of wind,
   in the howl of a man in a hollow barn.
                            (‘Silence, February 2001’)

The Foot and Mouth poems are poems of witness, the
authentications of one who knows how the virus ‘…..travels like
loose talk, / on the tongue, on the hoof, / on the air, word of
mouth, /faster than breathing.’ (‘On the Move’). The best of them
are outstandingly good, vivid with their own intensifiers and breed a
new kind of language for Clarke which is infused with muted anger,
as in Plague, part of the title sequence: ‘ A pedigree Holstein with a
fancy name / hangs, grotesque from the JCB hook/against an inferno
of flame and smoke.’ But there is some inconsistency at work here.
The best lines occasionally yield abruptly to lesser lines and these, in
turn, risk reductionism, losing their tension and their antagonism in
the act: ‘Why can’t we vaccinate? / It’s no worse than ’flu / They’ll
be shooting people next.’ (‘Plague’)

If i needed reminding, George Szirtes has become one of the great
formalists. There’s James Merill, there’s early Geoffrey Hill, and
there’s George Szirtes. There are very few contemporary poets
who would attempt, let alone pull off, the twenty five pages of terza
rima which make up most of the sequence ‘Flesh: An Early Family
History’. What’s more he’s able to control and extend this most
unforgiving of forms almost without it being noticed, so organically
involved is it with what is being said, as in ‘My father, crawling
across the Floor’, from ‘My Fathers’, part five of the aforementioned sequence:

   He crawls across the floor. His dangling tie
   Distracts the child. He hauls the child in the air
   And swings it round, once, twice. He holds it high

   Above his head. In the forest, a bear
   Lurches towards the cabin…..

   Whatever else Reel is, it’s a formal tour de force. There are one
hundred and thirty six pages here moving from couplet to sestina to
quatrain and sonnet, to name just a few of the forms he attempts.
This has the effect of clarifying the diction throughout the book.
What’s most obvious is that Szirtes (paradoxically for some) is at
his freest from within forms most of us might find constraining and
even disfiguring. He is never distorted into archaic twists of diction
by the demands of form. The kind of loose, self‑evolving blank verse
declaring a track for itself when written is rare in Szirtes’ new book
but, when it does come, it is informed with the formal ease of the
natural sonnet‑writer, subtle awarenesses of assonance and a sweet
ear: ‘You little green friend, read my father / from Dan Dare. No,
fiend, I told him / The endragoblins were at it again, / monkeying
with the language.’ (‘Endragoblins’)
   But Reel is much more than a formal achievement. It is a
deeply structured book, comprised of three sequences which
go on dividing and sub‑dividing without ever losing the ambitious
symphony they comprise. Budapest looms large, as you’d expect; its
thrown and isolated moments ‘…ache for tenderness.’ So the book
must draw closer and closer to the cinematic image to explore its
own life‑force, as in the title poem: ‘Bells of the city chime, round
upon round. / The film rolls on.’ The long obsessional journeys
back into memory, before and after crossing the Hungarian border
in 1956, seem to crave a state of not‑knowing in which it would be
‘…right / To forget this, to remember absolutely nothing.’
   Formalism is one thing, but were it not lived in and tested by
the deeply felt emotion Szirtes can summon it would be very little
indeed. In ‘The Matrix’ he writes:
   …and I trace the path of the bullets in the air, seeking the holes
   in our lives, in our curiously combined souls
   which must somewhere have had a beginning
   and come to this point in your hands and my eyes, in one space.