poetry

Paul Batchelor is impressed by Sinéad Morrissey’s intimate poems of childhood

The cover of Sinéad Morrissey’s excellent TS Eliot prize-shortlisted collection, Through the Square Window, shows a young girl in the head-bowed, arms-raised, slightly knock-kneed posture of a preacher channelling the word of the Lord. It’s an unsettling image that resolves itself into a picture of innocence when we read the title of the photograph on the back cover: Girl About to Do a Handstand (1957). To have been wrong-footed makes a fitting first impression, for the book’s central theme is early childhood: a time when expectations will be flouted and outflanked. In “Cathedral” the speaker addresses the infant, saying “I wanted the words / you attempted first to be solid and obvious: / apple, finger, spoon”. But language will not be bidden or held back, and the two-year-old surprises his parents by announcing: “at six o’clock the ghost / of a child might come and eat porridge. / We are speechless.”

Morrissey is too clear-eyed to allow anything whimsical to encroach on her observations: a baby is born “crook-shouldered, blue, believable, beyond me – / in a thunder of blood, in a flood-plain of intimate stains”. Nevertheless, the experience of motherhood returns the poet to something like a child’s perspective, and many of the poems strike a tone of hushed excitement. This is particularly effective in the poems about situations that bring out the inner child in all of us, such as listening to a thunderstorm at night, brilliantly evoked in the opening poem, “Storm”.

Childhood brings with it a host of real and imagined dangers, and sometimes the source of the danger turns out to be the child itself. “The Innocents” engages with the 1961 film of that name and with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, ending with the image of “Master Miles / . . . considering his goodnight kiss”; and in “Telegraph” we follow a child through the depressingly familiar arc from abused to abuser. The poem is a sestina, and the repeated end words tell much of the story: child, house, witness, window, night, fault. The poem cannot escape these end-words any more than the child can outrun his circumstances: “Whose fault that for twelve years afterwards in that house / a man slipped into the room of a child, kept back from the tiny window, / and nightly undid what only the hawk moths witnessed?”

The title poem is a dream vision set in l’heure bleue. In an unnerving matter-of-fact tone we are told that the dead have “arrived / to wash the windows of my house”; though the speaker senses that they have really come for her son, who “sleeps on unregarded in his cot”. The poem subtly draws together the book’s motifs – children and the dead, clouds and water, windows and witnesses – while the observing eye remains as precise as ever: “The clouds above the Lough are stacked / like the clouds are stacked above Delft. / They have the glutted look of clouds over water.”

The reference to Delft evokes the distinctive blue porcelain named after the city, and also Derek Mahon’s poem of imagined childhood, “Courtyards in Delft”. When one of the dead appears as a “blue boy”, we recognise another suppressed allusion, this time to EE Cummings’s enigmatic question “how do you like your blue-eyed boy / Mister Death”. The poem is concerned with inheritance, both in terms of literary precursors and the world that awaits the sleeping child. The anxiety that the child may be threatened by the dead asks to be read in terms of Morrissey’s Belfast upbringing. Suddenly, the speaker wakes from her vision: “flat on my back with a cork / in my mouth, bottle-stoppered, in fact, / like a herbalist’s cure for dropsy.” Dropsy is an excess of water, returning us to the image of those ominous, glutted clouds: the speaker has absorbed the poem’s dangers, in an attempt to protect the child from them.

Along with Colette Bryce and Leontia Flynn, Morrissey is one of a number of younger poets from Northern Ireland who are negotiating the mixed blessing of having such illustrious antecedents as Mahon (also a cloud-watcher poet) and Seamus Heaney (”The Invitation” features a child-Narcissus, as in Heaney’s celebrated “Personal Helicon”). To honour such an inheritance requires all the confidence and care of a high-wire act, and Through the Square Window shows Morrissey is more than up to the task. With its incisive imagery and taut rhythms, the collection is a formal triumph; but what makes it truly marvellous is the emotional pressure Morrissey maintains: the poems come to us with the intimacy of whispered secrets.

Paul Batchelor’s The Sinking Road is published by Bloodaxe.

Ruth Fainlight – Ageing

Ruth Fainlight – Ageing

From White Egrets, published by Faber

42

for Lorna Goodison

This prose has the gait of a mule urged up a mountain road,

a slope with wild strawberries; yes, strawberries grow there,

and pines also flourish; native trees from abroad,

and coffee-bush shining in the crisp blue air

fanning the thighs of the mountains. Pernicious ginger

startles around corners and crushed lime

leaves its memory on thumb and third finger,

each page has a freshness of girlhood’s time,

when, by a meagre brook the white scream

of an egret beats with the same rhythm as crows

circling invisible carrion in their wide dream;

commas sprout like thorn-bush alongside this curved prose

descending into some village named Harvey River

whose fences are Protestant. A fine Presbyterian

drizzle blesses each pen with its wooden steeple over

baking zinc roofs. Adjectives are modestly raised in this terrain,

this side-saddle prose on its way to the dressmaker

passes small fretwork balconies, drying clothes

in a yard fragrant as Monday; this prose

has the sudden smell of a gust of slanted rain

on scorching asphalt from the hazed hills of Jamaica.

From White Egrets (Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

‘Late one night we set out with ladders and lanterns (poetry should be subversive), looking for lamp-posts.’

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 4 March 2010

The piece below about street poetry – poems posted in public locations – referred to Lympstone in Devon as “the string of lights you watch across the estuary of the River Exe from the train as you travel to Exeter from London”. That would put Lympstone north of Exeter, whereas it lies south. For a view of the village or the estuary, a reader notes, “you will need to continue your journey to Dawlish or beyond”.

Last September I telephoned an old friend in Devon. He had just published his beautiful book on Devon churches, and far off in Kent I had just published my novel The Man in the Wooden Hat. We were waiting for reviews and I asked him how he was passing the days. He said: “With street poetry.”

“What is it?”

“Sometimes it’s called random ­droppings.”

Harland Walshaw came up with the idea years ago, long before Poems on the Underground or the National Trust were attaching good poems to trees to be come upon casually in the grounds of country houses. In Yorkshire, working for a poetry festival, he took to commissioning poets not then famous: Roger McGough, Patricia Beer, Peter Redgrove. He displayed them on hoardings all over north Devon – beautifully printed, laminated, poems old and new, putting them up most of the year, without explanation, around his village of Lympstone.

I haven’t been to Lympstone. It is the string of lights you watch across the estuary of the River Exe from the train as you travel to Exeter from London. Lympstone is a village of around 2,000 people but very much ­visited in summer – and, thanks to Walshaw and others, the visitors are the sort who understand poetry and history and the arts.

I wondered whether we could randomly drop poems into a very different place – the market town of Sandwich, where I live in Kent. Its visitors tend to live in second homes and are involved in the Royal St George’s Golf Club, a mile or so across the sand dunes.

With a friend in Fisher Street, who is a teacher and writer, we began to prowl the town. Sandwich is small and compact, and almost every street is ancient, quiet and beautiful – half empty except at times of tournaments. It is a Cinque Port (pop circa 6,000), has three massive medieval churches, an ancient quay and a narrow, sluggish tidal river, once one of the waterways of the nation. There is a small supermarket built over the old slaughter-house, near Blood and Guts Alley, a couple of doctors’ surgeries, some rows of very good little shops, a police station quite often open, and an Elizabethan-style bus shelter. At one time the railway station waiting room was a delight, like something from old ­Russia, with potted plants, a writing desk and paperback books – but these have been banished.

We began by choosing ­poems, mainly by poets who had something to do with east Kent. We spent a fortune on print and board. We laminated the boards to make them indestructible by weather. We tried to avoid parochialism – there is plenty in the town already, and poetry should have nothing to do with it. Courteously, however, we sent our first poem to the golf club: the reverie by Patric Dickinson (he is called the Golfer Poet) about a Roman centurion looking north towards Cape Wrath and feeling the weight of the ­Roman empire ­behind him. He is on the edge of the world. It is said to have been written on our cliffs. (Maybe between holes?) There is a rumour that Dickinson was “a member”.

It was not a success. The Royal St George’s said he couldn’t have been looking north from the white cliffs of Dover. However, we tried. And when we gave a copy to the Bell Hotel, it was put on an easel in the foyer.

We found some Chaucer next. Chaucer must have passed through Sandwich with the whole troupe when he came from France to the great shrine of St Thomas 10 miles upriver at Canterbury. He may have ridden past my home on the Haven. He may even have stayed in it, for it was an inn. Or he may have stayed in the haunted house in Strand Street, where they packed the pilgrims in like pilchards in a tin. This house has an upper room scrawled with 14th-century butterflies and grasses by some medieval Banksy.

In the end, we chose a poem known to have been written in Canterbury: Richard Lovelace’s “Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage”. It was written while he was incarcerated in the West Gate of the city, which the pilgrims had clattered through for centuries.

Next a snatch from a poem down the coast at Margate. TS Eliot wrote The Waste Land in a seaside shelter built on Margate promenade, now presented to the National Trust. Next, Coleridge, who was fond of Dumpton Gap near Broadstairs. You can go into the cave where he took off his clothes and laid them on a rock shelf (still there) before galloping down to the sea.

Late one night we set out with ladders and lanterns (poetry should be subversive), looking for lamp-posts. But there were none suitable and we went instead the next morning around the shops, offering poems for their windows. No explanations. “What about copyright?” some asked. We had gone into that. All was well so long as we were never displaying more than one copy. “Do we pay you?” “No.” “But what is it for?” We said: “Pleasure.”

It was a great success. A doctors’ surgery was delighted with a poem by Francis Burroughs (little known) that urged the waiting-room to think not of the body’s malfunctions but of the miracle that it works at all. Our valiant independent bookshop filled two ­windows with our local laureate ­Gawain Douglas. The dogfood shop was besieged for copies of the New Zealand laureate Elizabeth Smither’s poem “On the Euthanasia of a Pet Dog”. Our wonderful fruit shop ­(”Everything local”) put up Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”, and we allowed the manageress of Wy­man’s Electrical to keep Yeats’s “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” because she had loved it all her life. The children who go to the ice-lolly shop in the afternoons liked Spike Milligan’s “Things that go ‘bump’ in the night” so much that we let them keep it till Christmas. The art gallery owner fearlessly chose Anon’s “Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!”, which she hung on the outside wall and it stopped the ­traffic twice on Breezy Corner. A young man – all in black gear –came down Paradise Row, stopped outside the house with a sonnet by ­(local lad) Christopher ­Marlowe, ­”Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”, on the door and ­recited it aloud all through.

We were refused by the public ­library because its noticeboard was ­”reserved for library business”, and we lost one poem to drunks on the quay on a Saturday night, but probably only because we’d hung it on a very expensive board enticingly low, near the iron beacon that stands by in case of Armadas. It was the lovely “Canoe” by Keith Douglas, in which he predicts his coming death in wartime France. It was probably thrown in the Stour and washed over to Calais where it is bewildering the populace at this moment.

We did another poetry drop at Christmas. The mayor agreed to let us have a prime site in the horse trough in Market Street “so long as the poem was in good taste”. We gave him Betjeman’s “And Is It True?”, resplendent in a holly wreath.

On St Valentine’s Day last Sunday the town was “All for Love”.