A New Slant
[In the following review, Palmer writes favorably about The Slant Door.]
George Szirtes has achieved in The Slant Door that rare thing—a book that cannot be wrapped in a five hundred word review and dropped to oblivion. It is one of the best first books of poetry to be published in the past few years, that is, if we judge by successful poems and not by promise or critically adduced intentions.
This, of course, is to take the book as a whole, and in an unusually meaty book, with poems crowded together on the page, there is a fair amount of XXth century poetic stock:
Sunlight laces the book
The dying light shudders
The trees fling their doily patterns high
The last line is from one of those of poems about the pathos of old age that now seem obligatory in any young poet's book.
But there is also this:
Look, it has snowed in the light
And the roads are bright as skin
Lit by the moon: the snow is moonlight
And there will be no morning ever again,
We shall live in white like brides
Never stirring, nor shall light be over
To discover the bed unmade or the windows thrown wide
Or the street stopped in its course like a river.
This may appear slight at first, and this is the whole poem, but it is a whole poem and shows a quite unforced balance and subtlety of thought and rhythm as the language is moved through modulation and oppositions, moved to that last line and held there. It has mastery and fitness; the scene is general, we can supply the detail; what is left out is the presence of the poet; for its duration we exist in the poem.
In ‘Salon des Indépendants’, the view is specific, frozen in the past and lifted out like a glass slide; unless I am mistaken the poem is an accurate translation into words of a painting by the Douanier Rousseau. Another poem, ‘Nativity Scene’, seems to imitate the spring steel lines of a Crivelli:
The caged god turns in his mother's arms and presses
Against her ribs with a unique strength …
Where in a lesser poet this cold yet fiery poem would be typical of a number of cold look-alikes, the brilliance of description causes one to turn back to another poem, to these lines describing the half human strangeness of our own children:
And now their sleep is quite impregnable;
The secretest of dungeons deep below
Our scratched age, into which our love affords
A dim and partial entrance …
and all too human lovers:
They missed the touch of one another's skin
And all the love of habit that disguised,
Insurances against one troubling theme;
They feared to find themselves too much surprised.
George Szirtes knows poems are made of words, that words make ideas and not the other way around, and it is not only from the jacket's information that he was born in Budapest that I think one could infer the wide intellectual concern and peculiarly East European tenderness without sentimentality in the face of horrors that most young Englishmen have not come even geographically close to:
and set to build a tomb of grass
in a field by the church
ringed with space only,
the pronged wire distant,
Nevertheless, the emergence in the last five years or so of a number of very promising younger poets has led to what seems to be a growing confidence, a lack (literally) of self-consciousness on the page. This has led—not paradoxically at all—to a rejuvenation of stanza forms, metric experiment and semantic rhyme—all that, despite Auden's curious uses and the Movement's exhumations, had fallen into disuse and discredit until quite lately. There is at last a returning awareness that language is the medium and not the accompanying gesture.
Like the poets of the first half of the XVIIth century, we have been led in through an archway of dead giants—in their case the Elizabethans, in ours Yeats and Eliot. Well, these two ghosts are at rest for the present—although the spirit of Auden still rides, mischievously refusing to become a great poet and be buried.
It is a miracle as great as any that poets continue to arrive before us. Unhindered by the cautions of academics or the puerilities of an ageing avant-garde the stuff comes like a spring fed from the sea.
Mind you, there are some pretty exotic fauna on the sea-shore. John Mole's new book, From the House Opposite, contains an hilarious ballad, ‘with acknowledgment to the student who confused “socialists” with “socialites” when writing about Orwell, Auden, etc.’.
They're utter fascination,
They go abroad a lot;
Apparently they don't like girls.
I think that's rather rot.
My party is tomorrow
And George's is next week.
Stephen's going to grace them both
With his marvellous physique.
‘Social Engagement (or Cynthia's synthesis)’
I hope John Mole doesn't think me insulting when I say that the truest poetry in his book is the funniest. After all it is a damn sight harder to be even a bad comedian than to be a bad poet. And Mole is not bad as either.
His sequence ‘The Tales of Rover’ is gravely funny; as funny as people and dogs are, and as sad when both are bones:
Years hence, two clowns turn up a laughing skull.
Great Alexander smelt thus in the earth, and so does Rover.
Strange that the liveliness of language and sure touch of these poems is replaced in the more personal (?) and domestic by the usual standard issue grey of a hundred other sensitive poets much oppressed by life at home. We are becoming almost Victorian in our reverence for the domestic.
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