'1217 The Battles that Saved England.' By Catherine Hanley. Osprey 2024

1217 The Battles that Saved England. By Catherine Hanley. Osprey 2024

 1217 tells the story of a siege and two battles; one on land, one on sea, that ‘saved England’.  As a story it has a great plot and a fascinating cast of characters. But while Hanley writes with the skill of a novelist, her writing is grounded in a careful use of the available sources.   

Background.

By 1215 King John and his barons were at an impasse. He had been forced to concede what later became known as Magna Carta, but he had placed England in the hands of the Pope. In a radical about face, the Pope moved from excommunicating John and putting England under Interdict, to declaring the Charter null and void and threatening to excommunicate anyone who rebelled against the rightful King.  In response some of the barons invited Louis, the son of the French King, Phillip Augustus, to become the King of England. 

The first French contingent landed in December 1215. Louis set sail with a small invasion fleet in 1216, landed unopposed in May, and was proclaimed King of England on the second of June 1216. Proclaimed, but not crowned. Hanley suggests this was a crucial error while accepting that as an excommunicate he couldn’t take part in a church service.

John died in October 1216.  Hanley sees this as the best thing he could have done to help his cause. To anyone placing bets it looked like the Angevins were finished. Large parts of the country were in rebel hands and John’s son, Henry, only nine years old, and surrounded by a shrinking group of royalists. However, while John had often seemed to go out of his way to alienate everyone, Henry was surrounded by a small group of exceptionally capable men. Their acknowledged leader was William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest Knight’. His loyalty to the royal family was both famous and so unshakeable that it could be described as pathological. 

1217

Hanley tells the story of how those loyal to Henry  staged an improbable military comeback to insure that an Angevin King would stay on the English throne. It is far more entertaining and interesting story than most fictional ones set in the Middle Ages.

How much was at stake in 1217 is hard to see in retrospect. For the 90 percent of the population living below the nobility, would it have mattered if a French (Capetian) or a French (Angevin) king were ruling them? 

However, Hanley presents the events as crucial in the development of a sense of Englishness. She frames the sea battle off Sandwich as an English fleet defending England against a French invasion. The defeat of the French fleet is compared to the later, more well-known destruction of the Spanish Armada, with Hanley arguing the latter was of lesser consequence.  Hanley also suggests that throughout the war there is a definite shift towards a sense of ‘England vs France’. 

At the time, however, nationality might not have played a decisive role: it may have seemed clear cut. Henry was the King’s son. The royalists risked everything and stood by him.

Not all the rebels stood by Louis. As the war went on there was significant wavering in their ranks. This may have had little to do with nationalism either. Men who had hated John had no reason to hate his infant son and if successful Louis would be obliged to reward his French followers, but at whose expense? 

Hanley has a healthy scepticism about some of the leading players. Without denying the Marshall’s role in the war, she acknowledges his failure to protect the citizens of Lincoln and notes his acquisitiveness.  The Marshall’s flattering biography is one of the chief sources for the period: Hanley avoids both uncritical acceptance and uncritical dismissal. 

Likewise, while acknowledging Hubert de Burgh’s essential role in the defence of Dover, her description of his actions at the battle of Sandwich, often claimed as his great victory, doesn’t make his participation a deciding factor in the battle.

IF 1217 has a great plot, it also has an outstanding cast. At the centre, though missing from the action for obvious reasons, is Henry III, a nine-year-old boy whose father was disliked by almost everybody, overwhelmed by his coronation. William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest knight’, who at 70 was given the task of regent and the job of saving the Angevin line, enthusiastically charging into battle at Lincoln. Eustace the Monk, renegade pirate who had turned his coat so many times no one knew which was inside or out anymore, leading Louis’ fleet. Wilkin of the Weald, a commoner who led a ‘guerilla’ war against the French; Blanche of Castille, Louis’ wife who could be described as formidable without any exaggeration.

Hanley’s contribution to the story is to bring others into the limelight. Phillip D’Albini, who may have been as responsible for victory at the battle of Sandwich as De Burgh. Nichola de la Haye, who in her sixties held Lincoln for the Royalists, held her nerve throughout the siege, and was rewarded by being removed from her post so William Longespee, who had swapped sides during the war, could be rewarded. Hanley describes the regency’s treatment of Nicola as ‘one of the most astonishing acts of ingratitude imaginable’ but adds in a footnote that it was Nicola who ‘had the last laugh’. 

If one of the advantages of a book like this is it gives 254 pages to events that are covered in one paragraph of David Carpenter’s biography of Henry the Third, some characters still seem inscrutable. 

Louis is a shadow in the narrative. His father had refused the military and financial support that would have given him a formidable invasion force. His campaign stalled first in front of Dover Castle, and then came to a halt when, after the defeat of his army at Lincoln, the reinforcements sent by his wife, Blanche, were destroyed off Sandwich. He wasn’t present at either of the two decisive battles. Hanley’s narrative suggests one of the contributing factors to the French defeats was that no one seems to have been in overall command at crucial times.

Floating through this, as invisible as usual, is Isabella of Angouleme. John’s marriage to her in 1200 had been politically disastrous. In 1207 she had given birth to John’s first legitimate child, Henry, and had then given birth to three more children.  She was offered no part in the regency. This seems strange but so was her response. She returned to France at the end of 1217, leaving her son a crowned King, but a child surrounded by advisors. 

Because of the limitations of the evidence, there are always questions that will never be answered, but the book also shows history as a series of accidents. Dover did not fall to Louis because it was a strong fortification held by a commander who held his nerve and Louis didn’t have the manpower he needed. But the battle of Lincoln was lost by the French when an inexperienced commander miscounted the oncoming royalists and instead of going out to meet them, where superior French numbers might have won the day, decided to stay inside the city walls. There’s also the secret entrance no one seems to have noticed which would be considered a unacceptable flaw in a fictional account. If the wind had been in the right direction when the French relief fleet originally sailed, then the English would have struggled to meet it, and the reinforcements might have landed. If …

1217 surprised me. I don’t like writers who use the first-person plural. Although it used to be common in factual writing it has become corrupted by politicians using it as an invidious positioning technique. But Hanley returns it to its courteous usage. Her style is that of a well-informed, capable guide, and while the tour goes round the usual places, she paces it carefully and stops to provide useful background information. She is very clear in her discussion of the sources. 

Books about the Middle Ages that focus on battles tend to misrepresent the period. There’s so much more to Edward III’s reign than Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers and deeds of daring do, but in this case the siege/s of Dover castle, the battle of Lincoln, and the sea battle off Sandwich are crucial events in a pivotal year.  There are times history swings on a hinge and at the end of 1216 a King of France on the throne of England was a distinct possibility. 1217 as a date would then have had had the same prominence in collective memory as 1066. Hanley’s excellent book, ironically, explains why this isn’t so.  

 

 

The Buried Giant by Kazoo Ishiguro: The Illusion of Allusion

The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber  2015

 

‘The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.’ Blurb.

Discussions of literary allusions usually disappear into theories of intertextuality, rather than discussions of the effects specific examples have on the reading of a particular text. The Buried Giant is an example of conscious intertextuality, where elements of the story are deliberately waving in the direction of any number of famous texts.

A Saxon warrior brandishes his trophy: ‘…what they were looking at was not a head at all, but a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human like creature.’(p76). In case the reader misses the reference, a character explains: ’Our hero killed both monsters. One took its mortal wound into the forest, and will not live through the night. The other stood and fought and for its sins the warrior brought of it what you see on the ground there. The rest of the fiend crawled to the lake to numb its pain and sank there beneath the black water.’ (p.76)

A Saxon hero, two monsters, one with its arm ripped off sinking into the black water. Minor variations, but too close to Beowulf to be anything else. Later, the same hero will go into combat with a dragon. But if Beowulf is being alluded to, knowing the poem adds nothing to an understanding of The Buried Giant, and The Buried Giant doesn’t offer any kind of insight into Beowulf.

There is a knight called Sir Gawain, a recently dead king called Arthur, a magic wielder called Merlin, there are wild women to be met on a blasted plain, a dragon to be killed….but what are all these allusions doing? Instead of adding significance, the ceaseless, enthusiastic pilling up of literary references empties the words of meaning.

 All the aging Sir Gawain has in common with the hero of Arthurian romance is the name. A cross between Don Quixote and one of the Knights Alice meets in Through The Looking Glass, who just might also have spent time in Browning's Child Roland. He is every literary Knight and no one in particular.

Arthur was a gift to medieval storytellers because he provided them with a ready built story world. And the basic outline of the story, established by Geoffrey of Monmouth, gave the world a beginning and end. But since Arthur became a character in modern films and fiction, the Arthurian story world is no longer coherent. Gesturing towards it gains the writer nothing. There are so many characters called Arthur, in so many divergent versions of ‘his’ story. The recent film ‘King Arthur: legend of the sword’ could have been called King Bob and his magic stick. Prior knowledge of King Arthur is of no help in understanding either that film or The Buried Giant.

The allusions do create an air of familiarity. A post ‘Arthurian’ world of villages and knights, Britons and Saxons, evil lords and inevitably crazy sado-masochistic monks. But nothing in the story alludes to anything specifically Arthurian except the names. The king could just as well be Good King Billy Joe Bob. Sir Gawain could be Barny, Billy Joe Bob’s nephew. Change the names, leave the story set in a fantasy world set in pseudo medieval times, and lose nothing. It would still be a fine story. It just wouldn’t feel quite so superficially self-consciously ‘literary’.

The Beowulf character Saxon tells his apprentice that the stone monastery was once built by Saxons as a defensible hill fort, which includes an ingenious stone tower to trap the attackers. If this is immediately post Roman Britain, then the Saxons didn’t build in stone until very much later.

The Saxons and Britons could be Twiggles and Boggles. The story world would then create and define the Twiggles and Boggles. Instead nothing in the story distinguishes them, they are labelled Saxons and Britons, but they have very little, if anything, to do with any meaning those words have outside the story in either history or literature.

The Arthurian/Beowulf background is short hand wall paper, a cheap set dressing, not to be taken too seriously, not to be examined too closely. It gives the book a ‘literary air’, in which the writer shows off his reading and a certain type of reader gets to feel literary because they recognise the texts. But the names and the words have been emptied of meaning. They point everywhere. They are full of sound and fury, and signify nothing.

 

 

Wildcat dreams in the Death Light by Regan M. Sova

This review originally appeared in the Brazen head Here

Reagan M. Sova. Wildcat dreams in the Death Light. First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages.

 ‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.

It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.

 Set in the first decades of the 20th century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, falls in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the festival of light for his dead relatives.

 A lot happens.

 At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:

 i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission
the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J
i had the song in hand but i
could not do it without the right guitar
nor the Locksmith keys
not even the rabbis have them 

While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW.

Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names; The Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs, The IWW; recognisable conditions; whites only hospitals, and historical events like the Frist World War, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.

The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitive hucksters and frauds. An American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and where the good guys find friendship and love and win despite the odds stacked against them.

The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings to the party.

The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battle Field Where the Moon Says I love you. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he  has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.

By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm of legend.  

When Alf, the circus master, asks the 13 year old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:

i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle
i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight
i have seen bob’s jar of brandy
i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster
i have seen the blood trickling
from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating
i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness
i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain 

This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.

As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.

In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for two hundred and fifty pages.

Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating a distinctive story world.

The Release by Jeremy Hooker

 

This began as an attempt to write a review of Jeremy Hooker’s The Release (Shearsman 2022). Then I began to wonder if it is possible to write an honest response that wasn’t distorted by the paradigms of the literary poetry review.

‘The Release’ is a combination of prose journal recording time Hooker spent in hospital between June 2019 and August 2020 and the poems that grew out of the experience.

I read it in one sitting. The remains of ex-tropical cyclone Tiffany were still rummaging round the coast, occasionally crashing rain against the house. When the floor to ceiling curtains were blown horizontal, I remembered to stop and close the windows. Otherwise, I went on reading. 

A positive, enthusiastic response.

I wondered if I could review it. Then it occurred to me that what might be important was my reaction to the book, and my ability to explain that was secondary. We learn to read poetry in school, and we naturalise the idea that the appropriate response to the poem is analytical and critical. 

I am increasingly convinced that an enthusiastic response is initially more important than the cerebral one that comes in its wake. Without it, or at least an acknowledgement of its absence, criticism starts in the wrong place and is never more than a performance with a text as a starting point. I’ve read so many critical discussions of poets and poems that make me wonder if the critic or reviewer enjoyed the work they were writing about. 

In hospital, Hooker was reading Barry Lopez’s Horizon. It’s impossible for me to read his comments without remembering the first time I heard that name, who I was with, where we were, or remembering sitting on a sand dune watching the sun rise over the Pacific, reading Crossing Open Ground. 

It’s for me impossible not to be interested in what Hooker has to say about David Jones. His book on Jones is still one of the most sane and lucid discussions of that baffling writer, and over the years he’s qualified and revised his opinions and hasn’t been afraid of doing that in print. I’ve recently being struggling with a critical book on Jones published in 2021, wishing the writer had Hooker’s clarity and generosity. 

And the poems. The Selected Poems, published in 2020 were impressive, but these seem to have picked up and gone further, giving the lie to myth that poets do their best work in their twenties.  

However, to enter into dialogue with a third party about poetry it’s necessary to go beyond the subjective. Who cares about my reaction to Barry Lopez? Who was David Jones? And then there’s another immediate problem. How do you talk about poems? There are ready made tool kits available from which you could cobble a passible review if you were lazy. 

There’s The Reviewer Tool Kit. It contains phrases and words like ‘brilliantly original’ ‘innovative’, ‘genre breaking/bending’, ‘searing’, ‘coruscating’ ‘raw’, ‘honest’. The poet is ‘reinvigorating the language’, ‘redefining poetry’, ‘pushing the boundaries of the possible.’ Most of the time, if you’re honest and not ignorant or suffering from Historical Amnesia, you know they don’t apply. You can count the truly original, ground breaking genre breaking poets in the 1500 years of English poetry on one hand. 

There’s also an Academic Poetry Tool Kit which has changed so greatly in my life time. The formalist reading gave way to ‘theory’. That seems to have faded. Today, you don’t even need to read the poems. If the poet is dead, you can rifle through the biography and the letters, commenting on statements which suggest political affiliations no longer in fashion, or time bound attitudes that are no longer acceptable. Or the poems can be discussed in terms of ideologies, praised when flying the flag for whatever group is currently fashionable, or whichever particular ideology the critics are currently marching behind, damned when they don’t. 

Either tool kit allows the reviewer to sound like a wine connoisseur flaunting the appropriate vocabulary; the equivalent of a knowing wink or secret handshake for a limited circle of cognoscenti. To most people, it sounds like a wine connoisseur fraudulently trying to sell the nastiest chateau de plonk. Or for those of us old enough to remember, earnest music critics trying to intellectualise The Stones.

To strip away this sludge and get to the experience of reading a book requires an effort and the results are neither succinct nor pretty. In Joyce’s phrase, one is always going to be ‘almosting it’ teetering preciously on the border lines of an informed and hopefully intelligent subjectivity threatening to disappear into vagueness.

After all, the book that redefines your world can bore your best friends. Your highly erudite, well-read acquaintance thinks there’s something very wrong with you because you cannot see any value in the poet he or she is spruiking.

And discussing poetry becomes even more difficult, when dealing with a poet like Hooker who avoids the tricks and twitches of the fashionable. 

One of the earliest surviving comments on a poet in English is Laȝamon's succinct praise of Wace, whose work he must have lived with and known inside out and backwards as he translated the 15,000 lines of his work.

Boc he nom þe þridde; leide þer amidden.   
þa makede a Frenchis clerc; 
Wace wes ihoten; þe wel couþe writen.

‘He could write well.’ There may be few poets in history who are original ground breaking language reinvigorating or boundary pushing but there’s a host of great poets who wrote well and will always be worth rereading. Tongue in cheek, is there anything else needs be said about Yeats? 

However, (again) if I move from the subjective to the public, is my knowledge of poetry broad enough and deep enough, and have I considered it thoroughly enough, to validate the statement ‘This is well written’?

It is still not enough. There are any number of modern poets who can ‘write well’ whose work is instantly forgettable. Their books are on my shelves and once read rarely get taken down. Who would pay to hear a guitar player run scales? The poem has to be well written, and at the same time offer something to the reader beyond the spectacle of a self-applauding performance. 

I don’t know the answer, or if there is an answer.

END OF PREAMBLE.

The Prose.

The journal entries in The Release are an elegant record of a questioning intelligence moving through a difficult personal time and shaping that experience in clear precise prose. 

Presented as an integral part of that experience, there’s a perhaps unfashionable set of questions. What is the purpose of writing poetry in English in the 21st century; what is the purpose of art; is great art possible or desirable; what is the role of ego in first person poetry and why is the NHS so badly underfunded and staffed by overworked people who appear in the pages of the journal as compassionate figures doing their best.

For Hooker the first question seems as important as the last. He navigates his way tentatively, while recording his dealings with the other people in his ward, the staff, visitors and the inevitable health concerns, so the literary is not presented as something precious and off to one side but as mundane and important as being wheeled off for an ECG. 

‘Feeling his way’ [his term] allows the writing to perform its own contradictions and avoid didacticism. I might agree with him that we need admiration bordering on hero worship in poetry, immediately qualifying that by pointing out he’s hard on his heroes, but that thought is already qualified by his references to the television in the corner of the ward and the politicians we’ve been saddled with by a different kind of hero worship.

At a time when the concept of ‘Great writing’ is often treated with suspicion, Hooker advances a case for the human need for art that does more than pass the time or reassure the audience that they’re marching in the right direction with the right crowd behind the right slogans. 

He quotes Barry Lopez twice: ‘All great art tends to draw us out of ourselves’ and then Arvo Part’s wife telling Lopez that ‘what her husband composes can reassemble a person.’   

Hooker comments on the second quote: ‘This is perhaps the greatest claim for art’s potential effect that I’ve met. I know that it’s true.’   

Stand in front of a work of art, literally or metaphorically, and experience awe. Realise the gap between you and the made thing, and have the humility to recognise the gap and the confidence or faith to make that leap to embrace it in all its challenging alterity. If, as Hooker says ‘Poetry speaks human. And human is relational’ (p.30) then in doing so discover, paradoxically, in your reaction to the singularity of the work of art, a relationship to common humanity. 

Perhaps you’ve never done this. It is difficult. You’d have to overcome so much; the automatic qualifying doubt a modern literary education drills into students; the profound suspicion of art as ideological weapon with designs upon the audience; the baffling but popular idea that art should reflect the viewer’s aims and interests, should comfort it with platitudes and commonplace, should above all else agree or provide a fashionable banner to march behind, and if it doesn’t then the best response is the bunker mentality where you hunker down behind the barbed wire of your own unexamined beliefs and then wonder why the art you see, the poems you read, are so instantly forgettable.

For decades, Hooker has been engaged professionally with what used to be called ‘Great Writers’. His pantheon is personal: Richard Jeffries, Edward Thomas, David Jones, J.C Powys and others. Over the course of that engagement he has refined his own ideas about them and his own work. The knowledge that there is Great Writing, and the nagging questioning of what makes it great and what it does that other writing doesn’t, informs his own poetry. The concerns in their broad outline are common enough, what makes Hooker’s exploration of them is the honesty with which he’s willing to approach them, and the fact he does it without recourse to theory or its jargon.

There are no easy answers. There may not be any answers at all. But reading Hooker is to follow a single intelligence moving through them, and we don’t have to agree with where he goes or how he gets there, but we should be grateful someone is willing to mark out the terrain.

The journal records four stays in hospital. It provides the ground (in both the common sense and the old fashioned musical sense) for the poems. Hooker is present in the prose: his reading, his questions, his biography, his memories, but he’s absent from the poems. The prose at times risks making the reader answer the question: why are you staring over my shoulder? The poems are stand-alone works of art.

The Poems 

Escape

Over the hills

            as a shadow chases cloud

            as a clod springs up 

            becoming lark

as thought from the lamed body

            flies

beyond the blinds

as word leaps to lips

seeking a way

            over the hills.

 

One tempting manoeuvre for the bemused reviewer is to slip into a discussion of ‘What the poems are about.’ Cue memories of English classes and the teacher demanding ‘What is this poem about.’ ‘What do you think the poet is trying to say?’ Even if I thought those questions were worth asking, and outside the classroom I’m sure they are not, they are made redundant in The Release by the prose.   

The prose is a journal, as such there are parts of it that are personal: memories, the absence of a loved one, lists of names who visit or call that mean nothing to someone who doesn’t know them. An honest journal cannot avoid what Lewis called ‘privatism’. But the poems, while produced by the experience and the concerns, float free of their circumstances and stand alone as achieved works of art. 

This distinction is fascinating, not only because it seems to answer one of Hooker’s own questions: how to be a lyric poet and not be a poet who parades his own ego as subject matter. Perhaps the metaphor which allows me to get closest to what I think is happening is the idea of windows, which runs through the prose and then becomes a poem which ends: 

Truly we owe thanks 

to the art of the glazier

which lets the outside enter 

and the inside reach out

driving back the dark.

                                    In Praise of Windows. (p.76)

A man in a room, living his life, his memories, concerns, interactions, connected to the world allows the outside to enter. That’s the prose. But he’s looking outwards, and the poet practises the art of the glazier, letting the outside enter, but shaping it as poem, as objects to illuminate the dark. They capture bright moments of seeing. 

Metaphors are always inexact, therefore two quotes to qualify this image. The first is from Hooker’s tribute to R.S Thomas.

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’ .  Selected poems, p. 251

It’s so very apt for R.S.Thomas, but I’d conscript it to describe Hooker’s best poetry. I live by an estuary and every gull on a post evokes Hooker’s poem of that name in his Selected Poems. The two seagull poems in The Release do the same thing. The everyday is presented in a way that is accurate as observation, but shaped in a way that invites the reader to look again. You’re being offered a glass to look through that frames the object. If you live on the coast no poem can make you see sea gulls ‘for the first time’, that’s nonsense. But a poem can colour the way you see them. 

As for style, it’s not easy to talk about a poetic that leaves out the tricks of the modern poet yet delivers far more than the simply declarative. The best way to illustrate Hooker’s style would be to reprint the book here. 

As that is not possible, another useful quote, this time from Briggflatts, where Bunting is praising Domenico Scarlatti. Initially it might seem strange to link Scarlatti’s fifty-five notes to a bar ripple and rush with Hooker’s uncluttered poems. Bunting first, then Hooker.

 

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

Gulls

 

First, they were voices

speaking a language 

familiar to me, but

untranslatable, that

sounded like need need need 

 

I felt it was the sea

they were crying for 

the element that mothered them

restless provider, giving 

and withholding,

constantly unstill.

 

Ghost bird, pleading

theirs was the voice 

that troubled my cradle.

In age, it returns

with the night wind,

shrilling, bringing back

the beginning, promising the end.  

                                                 (p.93)

No pyrotechnical ‘see here’, no congested cadence of jumbled syntax, no boastful ‘Look at the vocabulary I pillaged from the thesaurus’ or ‘Be impressed by my references to things you’ve never heard of?’ Hooker writes well. It should be the highest praise. 

In the prose, he writes about art as conversation, and the poems have a conversational tone only someone who is tone deaf might think artless. However, Art as conversation means more than just tone. It’s difficult to explain. You know it when you read it and the effect is complex and profoundly satisfying. 

If the poet and the man in the hospital bed are the same man, unified not just by a shared flesh but by an intelligence that refuses to split them, a particular kind of intelligence which takes the world in and shapes it into verbal patterns, then it follows that the poem and the world it describes are not separate. 

The poem isn’t the world. It cannot make the sunrise or be the sun. And the sun cannot care for the poem. But the poem can acknowledge the world, frame it in a way that invites looking, and simultaneously situate both writer and reader in it. 

The last three lines of the Bunting quote get at this in a way that I can’t verbalise. 

The magic of the effect of an honest poetry in dialogue between the poet and the world and the poem the reader and the world lies in a complex of ideas clustering round that word ‘acknowledged’. 

[…] and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

The short version review. 

Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’, along with Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that Happen’, would have had my votes for outstanding poetry publications in 2020 had there been votes for such a thing. They are very different poets, but equally admirable. The poems in ‘The Release’ move on from those in the Selected with no loss of quality. Here’s hoping there will be more. 

Until then, buy ‘The Release’. And Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’. And while you’re at it, buy Scully’s ‘Things That Happen’ and contemplate how two excellent poets can be so wildly different.

 

 

   

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.

I have been rereading this little book with great pleasure for some weeks. My admiration for Alan Garner’s writing, see here for the long version, http://www.liamguilar.com/alan-garner,  is undiminished, and remains just this side of idolatry. 

But I’ve also been reading reactions to Treacle Walker. There’s a lot of discussion about meaning, and readers are off down the rabbit hole to learn about Bog Bodies and Knockout comics, folk beliefs about cuckoos and bone whistles, as they exist outside the story.

What does it mean? The question we learn in school. You read the book, or the poem, or the play, and someone asks you ‘what does it mean?’ and you have to provide a neat answer. 

It’s a linear, logical process, and it produces a reductive answer. Once you’ve answered the question you’ve made the story redundant. 

It’s one way of approaching a book, useful in a classroom where teachers have to assess language skills.

Two thoughts. 

If the story can only be understood after extensive research into a wide body of (possibly infinite) external information, then isn’t that proof the story fails as communication? By all means go and learn about Rag and Bone men, or comics and their essential role in teaching generations how to read. That won’t ‘explain’ the story.

Secondly: a more important question in terms of storytelling, rather than ‘what does this mean?’: ‘What does the story do to you, the reader?’

Between the first word and the last, there’s a space for thinking through and in language in a way that is unique to stories. Treacle Walker is not a memoir or an essay. It doesn’t matter if you read every Knockout comic or know everything there is to know about Bog bodies. It doesn’t matter if you’re not old enough to remember rag and bone men. 

What matters is what those images and phrases and individual words are doing for you, as reader, between the beginning and end of the story as you read it. Then in its afterlife after you’ve finished reading. There is no exam; no right answer, and you don’t have impose your response on anyone else, or have theirs imposed on you.

The story means itself. Let it come to you. Have the humility to trust the story teller. It may not work for you. That’s fine. That says something about you, not the story.

But If you can reduce its meaning to a couple of neat sentences, it isn’t much of a story.