READING ALL WE SHALL KNOW

In your hand, this book – is it a novella? A short novel? - is a confidently beautiful object. Hardback, holding 190 pages, set in 11/15point Electra on soft white paper, offering good contrast for the text, with plenty of white space on the page, cushioned by a clean design, including an elegant font, a fading blue leaf-motif with embossed author name and title on the front cover, accolades by luminaries of the Irish literary world for this and previous work by Donal Ryan on the back cover, ALL WE SHALL KNOW by Donal Ryan is another sure-fire literary hit, sure to be mentioned in the long and the short of all the lists for prizes, as much of his previous work has been. A section of it is available as a pdf. file on the BBC radio site, where it was an 'open book'. Doubleday/Transworld/Penguin/Random House, the complex corporate entity that brings the book before us, give us strong production values and make a fine job of getting ALL WE SHALL KNOW to the reading public.

The story is timed to a pregnancy, running from week fourteen to week forty with a postscript, called post partum. It is mainly told in the voice of Melody Shee, who lapsed from a journalism career that promised much into a downbeat scatter though substitute and one-on-one teaching. Being a journalist means Melody Shee has a strong command of English and the writing benefits from her professional word hoard, though at times, this reader hears the writer's voice too clearly, for instance when one of Melody's teachers is described as 'priapic' for horny, or when the narrator names her husband's penis as his 'john thomas'. When she says that there is 'some irreparable fault in me. There's something broken inside my head that stops me from being normal', the reader wonders at her capacity for such self-analysis. It reads like psychobabble. Try this humdinger of a sentence, a description of a Traveller child, and ask yourself if it's the narrator's not the writer's voice you're getting. “He had the didactic, machine-gun voice of a barroom braggart and the insouciant swagger of a seasoned villain”. Perhaps this is the narrator, in one of a number of the varied registers she uses. Such a gross dismissal of a child means it's no surprise that the narrator can have sex with a seventeen year old Traveller she is teaching (caring for?).

The reading pleasure for this reader increased when the voice changed to that of Mary Crothery, the young Traveller woman who tells the story of her failed marriage, again broken on the rack of conception and child-bearing. We hear her voice, sounding her story.

Every character is broken in the story. The Travellers on the halting site including Martin Toppy the teenager the narrator abuses into a sexual congress that leads to pregnancy. Her father, lonely and lost at home. Her husband Pat who appears to be able to have sex with prostitutes in the city but not with his wife. Pat and Melody's relationship is fetid, though it is never exactly clear why that should be the case. Her husband's mother is straight out of Oirish Central Casting.

The key relationship the narrator has, apart from the self-absorbed relationship with herself, is with a former school-mate, Breedie Flynn. From early on the reader senses Breedie is coming to a bad end, partly because it is flagged up on the book's fly-leaf cover, but also in the manner in which she is presented as odd and an outcast early on, bullied by class-mates and abandoned and denied by her one friend, Melody. The reader is reminded of his own father's remark, while watching tv Westerns, about the cowboy in the white hat – he won't last long. And sure enough, come the first showdown, the cowboy in the white hat, long-foreshadowed for a short life, bites the dust. In this book, it is presumed suicide that does for Breedie early on, though Melody Shee's complicity in the death of her friend is a key driver of the story.

The story's action proceeds in bite-sized chunks of narration and reflection, expertly organised and sequenced to bring the reader along. The reader enters a well-formed world, which, though very small, feels adequate to the matters being addressed. It is the stuff of an extended short story. Set in a community where the ancient Irish game of hurling is important, where her father's voice lilts a form of Hiberno-English and given that Donal Ryan lives outside Limerick city, it suggests we are in a semi-rural area near that city, in the border country of counties Tipperary, Limerick and north Cork. Yet the reader feels he is in a literary Nordic land, cold as Wallander's stare. There is a permafrost feel to the book, though the reader is never clear what seasons we're living through.

At the heart of the matter are madness and transgression. The narrator's mother is mad. The narrator herself is mad. And they join a long-line of contemporary Irish women driven mad simply by being who they are. And of course, they are lustful, in, it appears, unhealthy manners.

It is a brave move by Donal Ryan to write in women's voices and this reader suggests, the work is only partially successful. Perhaps he is too close to the narrator Melody Shee. He is a neat feint away from Mary Crothery, so her voice works better.

Essentially, this is a further instance of highly literate, contemporary confessional writing from semi-rural Ireland; inordinate madness, antic activity and violence among and around Travellers, enough babies to fill a creche, outrageous language and terrifyingly cold relationships. Are Ireland's writers and readers so suffused with self-hatred that these are the matters that draws them? Are London publishers so in thrall to such gothic manifestations of modern Ireland that beautiful prose, masking the heightened horrors of poverty, stunted relationships and personal mis-development, is the lucrative ore they mine from Ireland's best writers?

Some one has to die, as the story plays through its run of violence and madness. There is always sacrifice; blood spilled for the good of further living, yet no sanity is achieved. By the end, Melody Shee invokes 'love of the perfect kind, the kind that exists above all earthly things', in a form of religious super-humanism.

The pregnancy neatly runs forty weeks. For all the raging and ranting the work feels manicured. Perhaps this is the achievement Donal Ryan seeks. No doubt there will be more good work, but this reader would like to see it looser and hear the voices stepping closer to characters than to writers. A challenge, always. It's not that you know the ending. It's just that the ending has the neatness of fable, rather than the raggedness of lived art. That such work can be considered redemptive makes it a telling parable of our times, times of alienation, aloneness, self-absorption, violence and sketchy hope.

All We Shall Know; Donal Ryan, Doubleday/Transworld, London, 2016

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BLOGPOST SEASONAL SPECIAL:JOEY'S DIGITAL CHRISTMAS

BLOGPOST SEASONAL SPECIAL

A SHORT STORY PUBLISHED BY THE DERRY JOURNAL, 16.12.2016        ©Dave Duggan

JOEY'S DIGITAL CHRISTMAS

We were looking at the lights on Shipquay Street when Bridget said it. The white lights stretched across the road, like silver waves on a starry blanket. It was the Saturday after Bridget finished the tests. I knew she was going to pass them and go to the school she wanted. She has Mary, her mother's, brains. And my looks. Hah!

Mary got a couple of late care shifts at Culmore Manor and there's no way she could say no to them. Since we took the mortgage on the wee house, I don't know, it's all go, all go out the door and gone, just as soon as we get it.

So I had Bridget up the town to look at the lights, because she's past twelve now and she knows there's no Santa, but Christmas still has to mean something.

Bridget pointed at the lights and smiled.

“It's Christmas, Daddy. Really, like.”

I didn't know was it really. I want things to be better for Bridget. We both do, Mary and me. We called her Bridget because its an old name in Mary's family, rooted in us, like. We only have the one wean. With the way we are now, we're just as well off.

We have a tree right enough. I always get one. I do a few weeks in the forest at the back of Galliagh with Barney Goodman and he gives me cash, an armful of holly with fiery red berries and a small tree in a pot. I put it in the yard, almost black, like, the green so dark, soaking up the rain and spiky as a hedgehog. Barney knew my father. I get a few jobs from him. In December with the trees. In March with the lambs. I'm kind of in between the town and the country. I don't know where I am, like.

Bridget and me stopped at Shipquay Gate and looked back up to the Diamond. The lights swayed in the breeze, like stars sailing. She was smiling again. I could see her teeth, dainty and white. The Guildhall clock chimed five chimes, loud enough to chase the pigeons from the city walls. They flew over our heads and scattered up and beyond the lights and then vanished.

“I'd love a computer, Daddy. For the Christmas. But there's no Santa, so …”

She left it hanging, not like a request, no, definitely, not like a demand, not even a plea or a prayer, more a statement, no, more a wish, like.

Bridget was asleep by the time Mary got home after midnight, her ankles swollen and bags under her eyes, the same eyes as her daughter, only with grey embers in them. I made her tea and toast and told her Bridget wanted a computer for Christmas. She stopped chewing the toast and put the cup out of her hand onto the floor beside her. When she looked up again, there were tears in the ashes in her eyes.

I got her up to the bed then. She pushed her feet down to the bottle I put in earlier and she gave a sniffle and smiled. We do our best to manage the oil. We're not poor. We're not at the food banks or anything. We just never seem to be far off it, with the bills, like.

I heard Mary's voice in the dark, when I turned off the bedroom light.

“We have some stuff for her, Joey. A computer? That's hundreds of pounds.”

I'd been watching Match of the Day. I usually like it, only that night it left a sour taste in my mouth, because all the talk was about money, not football, all about the value of players and the wages they were getting, thousands every week, like, not one word about if they were any good or anything.

Me and Bridget brought the tree in the next day. We let Mary lie on. The tree made the room smell fresh and clean and country. I nearly lost it with the lights, all tangled up, but not Bridget. She just stayed calm and untangled them, loop by loop, coil by coil, then laid them out along the floor and plugged them in to light up the carpet in tiny blue and red flames and she smiled and said “Da dah” like a magician. I hugged her close and thought what could she not do if she had a computer.

I said it to Mary, when she got up and before she went out to work again and she warned me to not be thinking about getting into debt, because, and she's right, we'd end up losing the house and what would a computer be to Bridget then, but I said she'd need it in the big school and Mary left in bad form, which, I know, isn't good. She's right in what she says, but. She knows the ones who call round here and give you a loan at your own front door and they only want an arm and a leg and any self-respect you have as interest on it, like.

When Barney Goodman phoned and said he had three days work for me, lugging furniture, I said yeh straight away. I mean, in the mouth of Christmas, who's going to say no? Barney owns things. Like the bit of land and forest. A van and a small truck. Sheep for lambing. Hens for eggs. We're only starting to own things. The car. The wee house. And we don't really own them. The bank does. Barney can take on jobs and move people out of this big house, under the new bridge, at the end of its own driveway, six bedrooms and two garages, with the doors going up and down on a remote.

The first day we lifted the furniture and took it to a lock-up in Pennyburn, not too far away, while two other fellas boxed stuff up and brought it to the front hall. The man who owned the house came on the third day and took two bags of decorations, baubles and lights and tinsel, like. He told Barney to take another day, if he needed it. I was carrying a box marked with a big X and when I put it on the ground, beside other boxes marked X, the man opened it and looked inside for a long time, then he turned to me and said

“You give them the best ye can, eh.”

Barney says the man and his wife are decent people, just caught in a bad situation with money they're trying to sort out. Barney told him he wouldn't need another day and your man nodded and smiled. Barney reckoned he would get more work from him in the new year. No point bogging the arm in now, like, it being Christmas and all.

When the man left, I looked in the box and, even though I know nothing about computers, I knew there was some kind of laptop, in an aluminium case, a white keyboard, two white speakers the size of milk cartons and a black flat thing like a wallet and cables and connectors and plugs.

Barney said to put the boxes with Xs on them in last and we'd take them to the dump on the way to the lock up.

I stood a minute and thought about Bridget and her voice with the wish in it and the way she got the lights working, then I took stuff out of the box, the obvious computer things and a few other items I didn't really know what they were, but they seemed to be part of it, then I got a black bin liner and Barney gave me a hand to fill it, saying

“You going all digital now, Joey?”

All I said was I hadn't a clue about any of it, but Bridget wants a computer and, I don't know, just.

Barney said he'd give the bag to his Michael, who does nothing 24/7 only computers and see if there's any good in it. Better than it going to the dump, like.

That's how we got a computer for Bridget for Christmas. Michael put it together and I picked it up on Christmas Eve. Me and Mary put it all in a big box and wrapped it in paper with spangling stars. Bridget opened it on Christmas morning, on the ground under the Christmas tree, lights blazing blue and red, her eyes shining bright as any diamond. She figured it out herself. She said we'll have to get broadband and Mary said we'd go about it in the new year, because she can see the good in it and that's all we want for Bridget. Even though we're just getting by, we're doing our best, fighting the bills, like.

We watched the telly later, me and Mary. Bridget was busy with the computer, connecting it all up, taking it apart, connecting it again and working it out, like an engineer she was, and just then, after the dinner and all, with the lights blinking on the tree and Mary snoring gently beside me on the sofa, me with a cold can going down on a belly full of food, I got the notion that this was what Christmas was really about. The bit a' plenty and sharing it around so everyone gets a fair portion of it.

© Dave Duggan December 2016

Dramatist and novelist Dave Duggan's latest book is RELATED LIVES – an imagined memoir (Guildhall Press, ISBN: 9781911053163), available from bookshops, including Little Acorns Bookstore, tel. 07776 117054 and via Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle.

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READING A POEM A DAY 9 9.12.2016

Men Talking

Wendy Cope

Anecdotes and jokes,

On and on and on.

If you’re with several blokes,

It’s anecdotes and jokes.

If you were to die

Of boredom, there and then,

They’d notice, by and by,

If you were to die.

But it could take a while.

They’re having so much fun.

You neither speak nor smile.

It could take a while.

Twelve short lines. Rhyming couplets, then broken triplets.

jokes/blokes/jokes while/smile/while

The rhythm is bouncy, as with lively conversation in a group. Then the banter turns serious.

If you were to die

would they notice? The seriousness is made comic by wondering if you were to die

of boredom, there and then.

Would the poem be stronger if you were to die of a heart attack? It would certainly be different. Then, of course, you do not actually die of boredom. You're just bored. And who is 'you'? The poet?

Is this a skirmish in the 'war of the sexes', with the poet as the only woman in a bantering group? Seems possible, as the poem is called Men Talking and Cope is a woman. Would it matter? Perhaps 'you' is a man. Men die of boredom too.

Though it is dangerously hackneyed, the brio of the versifying and its disarming simplicity catch the reader, as if overhearing a boisterous group in full swing.

Time is skilfully drawn through the poem.

On and on and on/there and then/by and by/But it could take a while/It could take a while.

The repetition presents the boredom. The only antidote is Time. Or to move on to another set of friends, perhaps with less, or different, jokes and better anecdotes.

Might they be just as boring? Is this a scourge of the human condition?

Try calling the poem, People Talking, and rewrite using folks for blokes?

Naw. Boring. The hackneyed is the humorous. And the humour, gentle yet telling, is Cope's poetic gift, leaving the reader wanting more.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/wendy-cope

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READING A POEM A DAY 8   8.12.2016

Carol Singers

John Hewitt

A seasonal offering today: a poem from John Hewitt who, in Northern Ireland star-poet terms, predates Heaney, Longley, Muldoon and notable others.

He wrestles with memories triggered by seeing some carol singers.

Christmas children sing my childhood back

Hewitt remembers walking to church with his father, a believer.

He held that faith, I think, until he died.

But Hewitt didn't hold that faith. He held to another, more secular, belief. He was a socialist, active in Labour politics in Belfast and Coventry, where he had day jobs in museums and galleries.

Here, he is a doubt-filled atheist, agnostic to

the myth, the magic of the Holy Child.

And yet on hearing the carol singers, each face intent, Hewitt finds that

such sadness gather round my heart

and wonders why it affects him, this upsurge of nostalgia

when every sense reports it unfulfilled

as the story his father held is out of date.

This sonnet presents a momentary distillation of the personal, familial, cultural and religious influences that feed Hewitt's doubting and wonderment, thoroughly seasonal sentiments for a socialist wrestling with

…...................... hollied memories, innocent,

that lie discarded on my lonely track.

The Collected Poems: John Hewitt, edited by Frank Ormsby, Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1991

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READING A POEM A DAY 7 7.12.2016 Ashes Paula Meehan

We are at the sea-side burial site of someone close to the poet, Paula Meehan, recent holder of the Chair of Irish Poetry. Ashes were thrown into the sea at this beach and now Meehan wonders where the remains will come ashore.

So I think on where her mortal remains

might reach landfall in their transmuted forms,

The poem reeks of regret, pungent as iodine-loaded bladderwrack.

She who died by her own hand cannot know

the simple love I have for what she left

behind. I could not save her. I could not

even try.

What is this simple love? What did she leave behind? Herself, the poet, the one who scattered the ashes, cold as regrets?

Yet the craft of life remains afloat, windblown, taking the poet on.

….......... the stress of warp against weft

lifts the stalling craft, pushes it on out.

Can we depend on warp and weft? As time passes, can solace be found?

The tide comes in; the tide goes out again

Is there a yarn that knits us together following loss, whereby regret can be woven into a blanket of peace? For Meehan, such solace is not a blanket but a slack sail, bound to billow and bulge, tense and ease as days and life go by to the ticking of the inexorable clock.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ashes

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READING A POEM A DAY 6  6.12.2016

Ireland with Emily

John Betjeman

It starts with a bustle of b's, an alarum, alliterating with Betjeman himself

Bells are booming down the bohreens

And we're off, crossing Ireland, in the warm June weather

When we bicycled together

Down the bohreens fushcia-high.

There is an old-world Anglican gentility about Betjeman's cycle tour of Ireland with Emily. Are they daisy-daisying on a bicycle made for two? They are in tandem, at least, on a straight line east to west taking in Kildare, Leix and Westmeath, reaching

Roscommon, thin in ash tree-shadows.

There are six stanzas of precise, clever descriptions, rhyming ababccdde, in a rolling rhythm the reader feels as wheel turns, while the tar bubbles on the small roads, sun-soaked and smelling like

Lush Kildare of scented meadows.

Of course, it being Betjeman, there are churches, Catholic to start, Protestant to finish, written as tidy, charming word pictures, almost like greeting card testimonies.

Twisted trees of small green apple

Guard the decent white-washed chapel,

and, what seems like Betjeman and Emily's destination, reached in the final stanza,

There in pinnacled protection

One extinguished family waits

A Church of Ireland resurrection.

There is genuine allure in the work of Betjeman. It is old-fashioned, yet pert as budding new growth and when, not very often, it leans into darkness, it takes on earthen tones, echoing Hughes, best seen here when Betjeman and Emily make it to the Burren and further west.

Stone walled cabins thatched with reeds

Where a Stone Age people breeds

The last of Europe's stone age race.

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/831

Collected Poems: John Betjeman; John Murray, London, 1958

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THE NEXT USA-CHINA WAR WILL BE NUCLEAR

Is Trump playing war games with China? According to John Pilger, in the December issue of New Internationalist, if he is, he is simply continuing work that the Obama administration committed to and prosecuted throughout that President's tenure.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an ‘existential threat’ to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific.

This strategic decision led to a massive shift of US military hardware and personnel into the region around China, including nuclear-weapons armed ships and submarines. China's own military outreach stretches into Tibet and to contested islands in the seas off the mainland, including the largest, the island of Taiwan.

That's where Donald Trump picked up the joy stick of the war game player. The mandarins in Washington diplomatic service got into a tizzy when Trump had a phone conversation with the President of Taiwan, Ms Tsai Ing-wen, then followed through with a Twitter storm. Sources close to the Chinese Communist Party are more relaxed, as reported in The Irish Times.

Meanwhile, the Global Times newspaper, which is published by the same group that publishes the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily, said Mr Trump may have been keen to test how China would react by taking the call, “and therefore prepare him for dealing with the country and gaining some advantage after he takes office”.

Since 1979 there has been a delicate relationship between the USA and China regarding Taiwan, keeping trading relations in full flow between the countries, while the USA makes it clear that it favours 'One China', the mainland one.

So why did Mr Trump take the call from Ms Tsai? Did he want to thumb his nose at the Communists? Or, as many suggest, did he not really know the form and didn't take advice on it? Perhaps, more fundamentally, is this part of Trump's promise to be his own man, keen to make decisions as he sees them, without the interference from, as he and his supporters might call them, the inhabitants of the Washington swamp, mandarins and all, the swamp Trump vowed to clear out.

All of this brings into sharp focus concerns expressed across the world that the delicately balanced military jousting perpetually underway by large imperial powers, ranging from the USA, through Europe and across to Russia and China, may take a jolt, as Trump and his cabinet grab power into their own hands. Already matters are in the control of gung-ho generals and now they ramp up.

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, ‘Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See, I got to be tough… I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.’

In response, China has been building airstrips and installing other military infrastructure throughout their territories as both imperial states assert their power, like hairy-chested gorillas indeed, or, more realistically, head butting like male goats.

However, ‘for the first time,’ wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy… Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.’

There is no reason to assume that the Trump administration will renege from the previous Obama administration's policy of pivot to Asia, though spoof news site Waterford Whispers News reports that Trumps advisers are keen that the President-elect pull back from his full-on Twitter assaults.

“Well, imagine that you could launch a nuclear strike against that person, from your desk. Not only that, you had the full support of millions of people to do so. Well, that’s what we don’t want Donald to realise. And if that means letting him run his mouth on Twitter, well, it’s a small price to pay. But I really do wish he would take a fucking break now and again”.

Unfortunately WWN's satire roundly echoes Pilger's analysis that

There is a demented quality about this war mongering.

That is what is most disturbing about the rapid build-up of imperial military hardware and personnel off the shores of China.

https://newint.org/features/2016/12/01/the-coming-war-on-china/

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2016/12/05/twitter-war-with-china-preferable-to-actual-war-with-china-say-trump-advisors/

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/don-t-read-too-much-into-trump-s-taiwan-call-say-china-state-media-1.2892720

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READING A POEM A DAY 5 5.12.2016 The Second Coming W.B. Yeats

Could it have started on line three?

Things fall apart? The centre cannot hold:

getting straight into the matter, beyond the images of widening gyres, falcons and the falconer?

Perhaps not, for Yeats writes a poem about revelations and the second coming of salvation or damnation, with symbols and their resonances providing the drive for the sturdy verse, verse that reads so timely at present.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Though the words best and worst imply an easy split, that begs the question 'who decides?'. The reader wonders what Yeats would make of Donald Trump. Might these lines apply to him?

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Such revelations and possible comings are always at hand as the symbols reverberate down the ages. Is it Albion, the early name for Britain as seen by visitors to that white-cliffed island, that Yeats sees in the desert?

A shape with lion body and the head of a man

The poem was written not long after the Easter Rebellion, the Russian Revolution and the horrors of the First World War. As an Anglo-Irish cultural revivalist, Yeats poem carries political resonances that deepen the echoes of its religious soundings. The gyres are always widening. The cradle is always rocking. And

The twenty centuries of stony sleep

continue to a seasonal threat that is eternal, captured in the marvellous closing lines

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The choice of the word slouches is terrific, Yeats on top form, as he is throughout this exemplary poem.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-second-coming/

Collected Poems: W.B. Yeats; Macmillan, London, 1952

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READING A POEM A DAY 4 4.12.2016 Relic Ted Hughes

The jawbone the poet found on the beach is as rugged and square as Hughes' own, pictured on the cover of his Collected Poems.

The jawbone and Hughes know isolation, learned where

…................................... The deeps are cold:

In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:

The poet creates a mythic, pagan sense of matters deep in the planet, where failure is the common order.

…........................... None grow rich

In the sea.

Even the jawbones are

….................... spars of purposes

That failed far from the surface.

Yet there is success. In the list illustrating Hughes' trademark earthy word-choices

Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

And in the occasional felicitous end-rhymes, notably dark in the humorous final couplet. Perhaps we're reading a sixteen line sonnet.

….............. This curved jawbone did not laugh

But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

Is the jawbone a relic of the past or of now? Or of someone, devoured?

Nothing touches, but clutching, devours.

Perhaps it is Hughes' own, clutching and losing his grip.

http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/ted_hughes_2011_6.pdf

Collected Poems: Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, London, 2003

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READING A POEM A DAY 3 3.12.2016

from The Gaze of the Gorgon, a film poem

Tony Harrison

Soon, in 1994,

in this palace Greece starts to restore,

in this the Kaiser's old retreat

Europe's heads of state will meet,

as the continent disintegrates

once more into the separate states

that waved their little flags and warred

when the Kaiser's Gorgon was abroad.

So to commemorate that rendezvous

of EU statesmen in Corfu

I propose that in that year

they bring the dissident back here

and to keep new Europe open-eyed

they let the marble poet preside …

Broadcast in 1992 by BBC2, this instance of Harrison's marvellous film poetry is prescient to these Brexit days, with Gorgons looming across Europe, amidst Kaisers fumbling as the continent disintegrates.

As ever with Harrison, there is pleasure in the robust rhyming couplets, tight as steel hawsers, clean catching the reader's eye and ear.

1994/restore; warred/abroad; rendezvous/Corfu

The ten syllable lines hold right through to the end, then falter there, when the marble poet runs out of verse. What dissent does Harrison wish for, when the classical foundations of his Europe are shaken and the great fabric of humanity becomes no more than separate states and their little flags?

Is the dissident a woman, to face the EU statesmen?

Merkel? Le Pen? May?

Not likely.

More likely a steely poet. Like Harrison. Built

… to keep new Europe open-eyed

And hearted.

Collected Film Poetry; Tony Harrison, Faber and Faber, London, 2007

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