If I Don’t Know, Wendy Cope, Faber £7.99 &
Electric Light, Seamus Heaney, Faber £8.99

Faber has just released two collections which, though different in diction and tone, possess an urgency and exhilaration that comes from a life more abundant, the sense that there are riches and miracles everywhere if the senses are attuned, and a generous readiness to communicate the fullness. They make me think of D H Lawrence’s poem ‘Look! We have come through’, because they are both a series of love poems, for individuals and for the community, and they both contain a feeling of relief that, after all, love is possible, and will endure through individual and civil breakdown. Wendy Cope’s ‘The Teachers Tale’ tells, in Chaucer’s measure, the story of a boy, who oppressed by his parents, almost goes under, but is rescued by the loving attention of a teacher who tells him the truth about himself. Twenty pages is a long time to sustain a narrative in rhyming couplets, especially one where nothing dramatic happens, yet she handles it so naturally that you’d think she lived her whole life in rhyme.

     Seamus Heaney honours suffering himself in ‘On His Work In The English Tongue’, a poem in memory of Ted Hughes, and a meditation on the part poetry can play in suffering:

And the poet draws from his word-hoard a
                                                       weird tale
Of a life and a love balked, which I record here
Remembering earth-tremors once in
                                                    Dartmoor,
The power station wailing in its pit
Under the heath, as if our night walk led
Not to the promised Tor but underground
To sullen halls where encumbered sleepers
groaned...

In a three-page poem, this is the only explicit reference to Hughes. The rest uses the analogy of King Hrethel in Beowulf, pressed by grief into further grief, to explore Hughes’ gift ‘in language that can still knock language sideways.’

     But most of each collection are discussions upon joy: joy in remembering:

It wasn’t asphodel but mown grass
We practised on each night after night prayers
When we lapped the college front lawn in
                                                       bare feet,
Heel-bone and heart-thud, open mouthed for
                                                       summer.
The older I get, the quicker and the closer
I hear those labouring breaths and feel the
                                                          coolth.

(Heaney: ‘Bodies and Souls’.)

Thirty-five years afterwards
at evensong on Day 19
the choir sings Nanna’s psalm.
At last, I pay attention
To the words she chose.
O sing unto the Lord
A new song. Nanna,
It is just what I wanted.

(Cope: ‘Present’.)

And joy in the transcendent nature of places and things:

Seed packets to begin with, pink and azure,
Sifting lightness and small jittery promise:
Lupin spires, erotics of the future,
Lip-brush of the blue and earth’s deep purchase.

(Heaney: ‘Lupins’.)

Later we’ll stroll through Kinsgate Park.
My leg won’t hurt, and we’ll go home the
                                                     long way.

Asked to imagine heaven, I see us there,
The way we have been, the way we sometimes
                                                                 are.

(Cope: ‘Idyll’.)

Heaney’s verse is denser and more springy than the bright clarities of The Spirit Level. In Electric Light, everything seems to bring to mind something else: the poems are drenched in personal and cultural memory; we are moved from ancient Ireland to ancient Greece, to contemporary Eastern Europe and Spain; the trade routes of the imagination connect them all into a tapestried, shot-silken present. And through it all, the thread of hope, and belief, that the work (his own, and other poets whose lives he honours) is worth the ardour:

‘A dividend from ourselves,’ a tribute paid
By what we have been true to. A thing allowed.

(Heaney: ‘On His Work On The English Tongue’.)

There is a sense, too, in Wendy Cope’s poems, of having reached a still point, a lively place of peace and relaxation.

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion - I’ve used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last,
If nothing much happens, I’m thankful.

(Cope: ‘Being Boring’.)

Wendy Cope would have to go it a bit to be boring. It’s very hard to tell good news enchantingly, but she does enchant. And she should be given a medal for the number of reluctant readers of poetry, of all ages, she’s laughingly and tunefully returned to the fold. How many fewer readers would Heaney have if Wendy Cope weren’t there, training us up in her school of hilarious intelligence, ready for the long haul?