Review
Richard Poole: Words Before Midnight
Richard Poole: Words Before Midnight; Poetry Wales Press, £2.95 paperback.
According to Eliot, Webster was 'much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin'. The same might be said of Richard Poole in this new collection. In 'Hands', a poem which adapts the medieval and Renaissance allegory of the body politic, his hands are addressed as if they had a separate identity and were in league with the poet. In the course of enumerating their experiences together, the whole of his life, past, present and future is reviewed. The hands are servants who, in witty imitation of Donne, are
...like heralds,
John the Baptists of love,
intricately travelling the body of another.
You are connoisseurs of curves and crevices.
And in this you are discretion's very soul:
accustomed to report upon your findings
in silence.
But servants can also betray, and in looking to the future he fears they will fail him as he declines in age toward death.
Death is never far beneath the surface of these poems, for to Richard Poole it is the last thing, the nullity which strikes a line through all our precarious achievements and hopes. The Metaphysical poets were often obsessed with death in a similar way; but with the crucial difference that for them it could be transcended through Christ. In 'Marriage lines' he takes the idea of marriage, one of the great Christian symbols of transformation, but keeps it firmly rooted in an earthly relationship between a man and a woman, with all its dissatisfactions and inconclusiveness:
One reason we go on lies in the absence
of alternatives
which might, in any way, offer the chance
of transcendence.Do we not, together,
question the chimaera of transcendence:
do the gates of the body lead
to nothing but the body?
For Poole the answer to the last rhetorical question is yes: for all its pain and imperfection, there is nothing beyond his marriage on earth; no consummation into something other and perfect, which the Christian symbol promises.
Very occasionally in Words Before Midnight he does see human love as transcendent in itself - a moment in the act of love when time is at a standstill. But, as in 'Back', it is hardly transcendent in religious terms, for it is 'the realm of sense' which the two lovers inhabit and which in retrospect seems 'a marvellous island obscured by a soft haze'. Such a description of the moment when time was 'transcended' by love seems more appropriate to Bali Hai than profound experience. Luckily Richard Poole is too tough and honest to be taken in for long by such vague romanticism. Nearer to the truth of his world is the conclusion of 'Falling off', a poem about his child's growing awareness of the harsher aspects of living, and Poole's own role in the process as father:
He must discover that the universe
is rock-hard,
is jagged.
There is a part cruel in paternal love.
Poole the father can offer little consolation to his child because he has none (in ultimate terms) for himself. As a non-believer he has to live with the implications of non-belief: that love is passing and being passing. He is a modern, rooted in the now of daily experience and seeing no solution in devotion or mysticism; too honest to pretend to religious feelings and insights he has not had. Death therefore is a finality for him which it is sometimes hard to confront, especially where his own child is involved. In 'The dark', the father attempts to dismiss his child's fear of the dark through ridicule. But he knows in himself that he is being hypocritical, for he too is afraid of the dark; though his fear, as the end of the poem suggests, is of the fundamental darkness which ends everything:
I am simply a hypocrite
for I too am frightened of the dark.That once before I slept
in the perfection of absence
unknowingly, and undisturbed by dream,is powerless to bring its consolation:
whose father lights a candle
in that infinite and that empty room?
Other poems explore ageing and death from different perspectives. An interesting and ambitious poem, 'Old women living together', is a dramatic monologue in which an old woman reflects on her life and on her probable decline into senility, which she witnesses in the person of her companion. The poem is bleak: 'old age is a hurt that never finds a cure'; but it brings stark consolations, at least. If nothing else, she has learned compassion and self-knowledge, and the ability to endure 'even the end'. The poem bears comparison with Roethke's 'Meditations of an Old Woman', though Poole's poem is more firmly rooted in the realistic mode and lacks Roethke's search (through the person of the old woman) for a mystic dimension to experience.
Richard Poole has two basic styles in this collection. A high style which has its roots in the witty, ironical mode of certain kinds of Metaphysical poetry; and a plain style familiar to readers of Post-war English and American poetry. Both styles are handled well, as the quotations above will have shown. Only occasionally is he tricked into prosiness which is the bane of so much contemporary verse. 'For the future, perhaps' begins:
I'm scraping ancient varnish
off a long-neglected door
when William comes to me.'A present, Dad!' he calls out,
smiling irresistibly,
blue eyes brilliant.
Colloquial ease in poetry is one of the hardest things to achieve. Here the lines remain flat and prosaic; they lack any rhythmic tension (something which Poole usually has under control); and he has reached for the easy, predictable adverbs and adjectives, 'smiling irresistibly', 'blue eyes brilliant'.
Such slack writing is rare in this collection, however, and one of the pleasures of Words Before Midnight is Poole's control of imagery and rhythm, and the sense of an alive, alert mind behind the poems. In 'Lovers, wind, night', one of the finest poems here, two lovers lying in bed on a stormy night want nothing more than their own temporary warmth and security, even though they are aware of the wind shouting
...that life is an accident,
the chance propagation of matter in time,
flesh a poor house
and love a flickering light within, incapable
of illumining
the monarchy of nothingness, wind's black kingdom.
A pessimistic view of life underlies this poem, but pessimism is not despair. The wind may be right, but out of the poem as out of the collection as a whole, comes a sense of the worth of living, even if we are only 'poor passing facts', as Lowell said.
Page(s) 92-96
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