Category Archives: Poetry

The World’s Wife: Carol Ann Duffy

30 Saturday May 2020

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History and myth have often focused on men: Sisyphus, Lazarus, Herod, Pilate, Midas, Faust, Freud… But what of their wives? Who were they and what did they think of their men?

These women are brought to life in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems. The wives of the men mentioned above, female figures like Salomé, Circe, Eurydice, Delilah and Medusa, finally have a voice. She also reimagines King Kong and the Kray Twins as women. The result is delightful.

The collection starts with Little Red-Cap, a take on Little Red Riding Hood, where the girl is at “childhood’s edge” when she sees the wolf, “a paperback in his hairy paw,/red wine staining his bearded jaw. … I made quite sure he spotted me, / sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink”. As you can imagine, it doesn’t end well for the wolf.

I love reworkings of well-known tales, and this collection delivers. The women are, on the whole, unimpressed with their men. Mrs. Midas watches with a mixture of fascination and horror at the way everything her husband touches turns into gold.

“He tried to light a cigarette. I gazed, entranced,
as the blue flame played on its luteous stem. At least,
I said, you’ll be able to give up smoking for good.”

Mrs. Aesop is bored to distraction with Aesop’s fables. Mrs. Sisyphus is a woman married to a workaholic husband who spends all his time and energy in rolling a boulder up the hill, just to have it roll back down. She would rather he spent more time with her, but he can’t give up his “work”.  

Orpheus and Eurydice aren’t quite the happy couple they’re made out to be in myth. Eurydice is happy to be dead and in the Underworld, away from Orpheus:

“It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole
where words had to come to an end.
… the one place you’d think a girl would be safe
from the kind of man
who follows her around
writing poems”

But to her dismay, Orpheus turns up in the Underworld and persuades the gods to let him take her back. They agree, provided he doesn’t turn around to look at her even once on his way out. But Eurydice flatters him into turning around. His promise to the gods broken, she is free to disappear back into the shadows.

The Kray Twins, reimagined as women, are gangsters like the real Kray Twins (who ran organized crime in London in the 50s and 60s), but the female Twins avenge women who have been ill-treated by their men.

And finally, Mrs Darwin: “Went to the Zoo. / I said to Him – / Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.”

This is a thoroughly enjoyable collection, turning the legends about men on their heads. The title is a reference to the phrase “the world and his wife”, which denies women the right to be part of the world. Duffy has put them back on the centre of the stage, where they should be.

Kumukanda: Kayo Chingonyi

15 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Poetry, The reading challenge

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I’ve discovered new poets as part of the reading challenge, and two of them have blown me away. One is Kendall Hippolyte from St. Lucia, and the second is Kayo Chingonyi from Zambia.

In north-western Zambia, tribes have an initiation ritual for young boys called kumukunda. During the ritual, the boys live apart from the community and are taught skills that will help them in life. Chingonyi was born in Zambia but moved to the UK when he was six. This book is Chingonyi’s substitute for kumukunda. It packs so much in just 50 pages: what it means to grow up black in the UK, identity, racism, music, love and death. And it’s powerful stuff.

In “Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee”, Chingonyi writes affectionately of making mixed tapes as a boy, sneaking off with cassettes he hoped his mother wouldn’t miss. (Remember how big mixed tapes were before digital music and playlists came along?). He finds an unmarked TDK cassette and slips it in the player, only to hear his father’s voice asking him how old he was “in the slight twang of a lost tongue”.

Music is the magic that transports him, as it has done so many others, giving him a space that is his own, away from the store detectives that stalk him, away from the “the look of disgust / on the face of a boy too young to understand / why he hates but only that he must”. After a cricket match, a boy in the locker room asks him why “I’d stand here, when I could be there, with my kind”.

The poems follow Chingonyi as he goes to university and RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). Auditioning for roles, he gets tired of playing “lean dark men who may have guns”. He moves to his own place and “learns to walk in a grown man’s shoes”. But his mother falls ill and eventually dies.

On a grey ward, two months in to size elevens,
she speaks in my mother tongue, bids me trace
the steps of music, but the discord of two
languages keeps me from the truth I won’t hear.

She’s dying but I won’t call her dead, can’t let mum
become a body, a stone, an empty hospital bed.

He writes about Africa and colonialism. In “Kung’anda”, he contests the one-dimensional portrait of Africa in the media: the “broken man, holding / a dying child with flies around its mouth: / a story that didn’t tally with my mother’s / of childhood smiles on granddad’s farm / or the laughing dance across the hot soil / to the ice-cream stand”.

Chingonyi’s writing conveys strong, powerful emotions in brief snapshots. There is no hyperbole here or wordy sentences. For example, in “How to Cry”, which is my personal favourite:

I’m going to fold, as an overloaded trestle folds,
in the middle of Romsford Market and bawl
the way my small niece bawls for her mother
when she leaves the room. In spite
of our assurances, the little one knows
that those who leave might never come back.

…

I’m tired of this strength. Let me be bereft,
watching the white limousine as it drives away.

Get this book. You won’t regret it.

Life’s sentences

25 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Poetry

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I have several books of poetry on my shelf…and now, on my Kindle. I leaf (or swipe) through them in the spaces between fiction, when I am recovering from an intense or troubling story or when the weather puts me in the mood for contemplation rather than escape. There are some I return to periodically, like making a phone call to an old friend, in an attempt to find those pools of quiet in my noisy life. Mary Oliver, A K Ramanujan, Elizabeth Bishop, and good old Eliot. A recent happy discovery has been Clive James, whom I first encountered on a New Yorker podcast reading his very popular “Japanese Maple”–which you can listen to here.

coverSince then, I have dipped into James’ poems often, and my most recent favorite is the collection Sentenced to Life (Picador, 2015), work written between 2011 and 2014, a period when he seems to be settling into a comfortable relationship with death. James is a memoirist, critic, television commentator and poet, and in each of these roles the gentle power of his words–and an underlying humor and empathy–is unmistakabl

Many of the 37 poems in this volume reflect a sense of sadness yet an eye for the beauty of small things, such as that Japanese maple in his backyard. So in “Driftwood Houses”, while he acknowledges that “Disintegration is appropriate” he remembers the driftwood houses that he built “…for our girls to roof/With towels so they could hide there in the shade/With ice creams that would melt more slowly.” Or, in the title poem: “My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool/With six fish, each a little finger long./I stand and watch them following their rule/Of never touching, never going wrong:/Trajectories as perfect as plain song.”

Reading through the poems is like spending a lazy Sunday looking at life in slow motion, stopping at moments that suddenly seem meaningful, telling you something about yourself, your vanities, your loves, and your frailties. Clive James recalls scenes from old movies (he is after all a film buff); in one we might suddenly encounter  Catherine Zeta-Jones and in another, Ava Gardner. At other times he unearths cultural trivia (remarking that Tolstoy makes “a midget of your [Napoleon’s] memory”), but refusing to take any of it too seriously.

“While you were reading this/Millions of stars moved closer/Towards their own extinction/So many years ago–/But let’s believe our eyes:/They say it’s all here now.”

Not all of it resonates, of course, and not all of it is lyrical, but there is enough in the slim volume to make dipping into it worthwhile, on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

 

The House of Belonging: David Whyte

29 Sunday Oct 2017

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“At the centre of this life
there is a man I want to know again.”

Do we lose something of ourselves as we scurry through life, running to make the next deadline and dealing with the mundane business of day-to-day life? David Whyte’s poems is a reminder of how important it is to come back to yourself and remember who you really are. To belong to yourself again.

Whyte finds his way back to himself though solitude and quiet: a man with no company but “his own/well peopled solitude,/entering/the silences/and chambers/of the heart/to start again.”

Whyte’s various ways of belonging are like ripples: himself and his house at the centre, “the bright home/in which I live”, the “temple of my adult aloneness/and I belong to that aloneness/as I belong to my life”. Moving out from the core are the places that shaped him: Yorkshire, where he is from, and the US, where he lives. The pull of centuries of history bind him to Yorkshire and run in his blood. His new home is a new beginning, an opportunity to be reborn. And finally, the outer ripples encircle those he knows and who are a crucial part of his life.

Whyte’s poetry is sparse and deceptively uncomplicated, packing layers of meaning into simple phrases. And like all good writing, it is something to go back to because each reading yields something new.

I have to thank my sister-in-law Gina for introducing me to David Whyte. Over the last few years, I’ve started reading poetry again, and it is a treat to discover a new poet who speaks to me. I will be going back to this collection time and again.

Sentenced to Life: Clive James

14 Saturday Nov 2015

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sentenced-to-lifeThese are poems written by a man who is sick and dying. But, surprisingly, this is not a depressing book. Clive James—a writer, critic, broadcaster and more—looks at his life and imminent death with honesty, clarity and a sense of humour. As he says in the acknowledgements, “you can say that you’re on your last legs, but the way you say it might equally suggest that you could run a mile in your socks”. There is no false cheerfulness—he is at the end of his life and not at all well, and there is no getting away from that—but in a strange way, I found it uplifting. Maybe that is because he appreciates how fragile and therefore how precious life is, and that is something worth being reminded of.

James talks about the travails of being sick and frail, of taking more time to do everything—write, climb the stairs and walk down to his favourite café. But he keeps his sense of humour. My Latest Fever finds him on drugs at the hospital, hallucinating about Sylvester Stallone: “Teeth/were gritted… No one grits/Like Sly: it looks like a piano sneering”. The poems show a man still interested in the world around him, writing about subjects as diverse as female pandas, the wife of Bashar Al Assad and ham actors.

James spent a lot of his working life travelling and being away from his family, and being forced to stay home makes him realize the precious moments he has lost. In Balcony Scene, a love poem to his wife of many years, he apologizes for hurting her but does not take her forgiveness for granted:

“Or so he says, you think. I know your fear
That my repentance comes too easily.
But to discuss this, let me lure you here,
To sit with me on the stone balcony.
A hint of winter cools the air, but still
It shines like summer. Here I can renew
My wooing, as a cunning stranger will.
His role reversed, your suitor waits for you.”

The overwhelming feeling in this collection is the preciousness of life, of living and appreciating every moment: “he feels the power/Of all creation when he lifts a book/Or when a loved one smiles at his new joke”. And of coming to terms with his life as it is now. His deafness, in a way, is a release: he does not have to guess at meanings at parties; he is content to sit there. “You were the ghost they wanted at the feast,/Though none of them recalls a word you said”.

In conclusion, I am simply going to quote from what has become one of the best-known poems of this collection, Japanese Maple:

“My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. …
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.”

 

Night Vision: Kendall Hippolyte

01 Sunday Jun 2014

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The blurb on the back of this collection of poems from Kendall Hippolyte, a Santa Lucian poet, says “He writes in sonnets and villanelles, in idiomatic dramatic monologues that capture the rhythm of Caribbean speech, blues and rap”. This juxtaposition of the formal and informal, the old and the new, intrigued me.

And I was not disappointed. One of the things that comes through Hippolyte’s poems is his love of language and its rhythms, which he uses to capture moments—and sometimes eras—in time.

Hippolyte’s poems are rooted in his country, the island of Santa Lucia. He worries about the growing distance between people; he writes about soulless high-rise buildings taking over the old, often poor, neighbourhoods, where people formed communities and looked out for each other (“shortcuts that hello past a back door”). He also writes about violence and crime on the island, and its history and beauty—“the uncounted, unaccountable acts of grace”. And he has written what I think is one of the most moving poems, called Mamoyi, for a child. Holding the child, Hippolyte “feels a vow so deep/it does not reach the flower and fade of word”, and he wishes the child “the trust, the self-astonishing joy that he has now/and he can draw from them the strength to make/his true path”.

I am going to look out for more of his work, which for me was a discovery and a real pleasure to read.