A Rose for the Betrayed World
[In the following review, Lucas looks at the political nature of poems in Szirtes's collection Metro.]
At the end of “Five Men”, a poem which records with level, factual honesty the assassination of political dissidents (or so one assumes them to be), Zbigniew Herbert remarks that a poet can also “once again / in dead earnest / offer to the betrayed world / a rose.” He does not intend to mock such earnestness. But then what is the subject for poetry? Or rather, is it possible to find a procedure—a tone, a style, a formal manner—that makes possible the negotiation of subject-matter might seem to lie beyond the possibilities that poetry can encompass.
In his new book, George Szirtes is engaged with these issues, not because he debates them but because they are prompted by what he chooses, or feels himself compelled, to write about. Thus, in “A Card Skull in Atlantis”, Szirtes moves from the paper models of a shop dealing in artists' materials, through a mention of a crystal skull in the British Museum, to
skulls like paper, piled high in ditches,
two sets of grandparents, an uncle or two,
… cousins boarding trains, securely labelled.
and people watching one another from windows.
Under the eyes their bones flare for a minute,
collapse to powder on a distant planet …
and finally, as ash, settle “dumbly among rocks and bells”. Dumbly is probably wrong: it's a word that requires us to recognise what for the most part this calm, utterly shocking poem manages only too well to convey: that unspeakable horrors have to be spoken, and the victims of such horrors have to be spoken for.
In the long, central section, from which the volume takes its title, Szirtes goes back, in memory and in fact, to the underground of Budapest, which becomes a political underground of 1944-45 and also the deep tunnellings of his own imagination into the lives and circumstances of those trying to keep ahead of horror. I wish it were possible to explain at length just how and why this is so good.
The epigraph comes from Derek Mahon's great poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”: “What should they do there but desire.” And Mahon's poem takes as epigraph a line from the concluding section of George Seferis's even greater poem, “Mythistorema”: “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.” All three poems are about the need to bear witness and through answerable styles to speak for those whose voices are otherwise lost. “Pebbles cannot be tamed,” Herbert says in a poem which finds the perfect metaphor for his hard, despairing poetry, “to the end they will look at us / with a calm and very clear eye.” The calm clarity of Metro is classical in the only worthwhile sense: that it gives lasting utterance to experiences which poetry must be able to engage with if it is to speak in dead earnest to the betrayed world.
Medbh McGuckian's new volume, like her previous ones, is opaquely playful. She uses language as a kind of angled mirror, a means of making unfamiliar reflections out of familiar material. You can read her poems and feel that you're catching the comet's tail as it disappears past the mirror's edge, but the glitter is somehow unsubstantial, offered as ingratiating but often irritatingly whimsical.
The best poems are, then, the ones that work hardest to deliver meaning: “A Dream in Three Colours”, say, or “The Time Before You”, a love poem which is sumptuously aware of how to use words in order to bring the world alive, and able to be witty and slyly ardent all at once. As is usually the case with her best poems it can't be quoted from because perceptions elide so smoothly—and yet startlingly—into one another. And indeed to quote is inevitably to do her an injustice, because any one moment is likely to look maddeningly fey, or merely arch. Because of her successes it wouldn't be fair to conclude that this is all she has to offer, but it's frequently a close thing.
The Air Mines of Mistila is an engaging fancy and one which is inventively carried through by the two poets involved. They've created a society which exists somewhere in an imaginary South America and this allows for a range of satiric commentary on societies a good deal nearer home. (“Sexy Frolics in Mistila” is the headline of one of the poems.) There is a neat account of how one of the Mistilans makes it big in the art world: “Such insubstantiality! / The art form we've been waiting for. To call it minimal / would be too gross”; and an even neater one of how this exemplar of kitsch post-modernism is himself superseded: “Poppinlock discards the mere meaningless of meaning in favour of multiple metaphors of no meaning which actually appear, in the fullness of their dissolution.” An obvious target, perhaps, but well worth hitting. And though there are some signs of flagging towards the end, The Air Mines of Mistila is well worth buying. After you've got your copy of Metro, that is.
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