BARRY TEBB
THE VOID YOU
LEFT: POEMS FOR BRENDA WILLIAMS
By David
Hackbridge Johnson
(16.vii.2016)
The poet
Brenda Williams died in July 2015 leaving a body of work that often combines
poetry with protest and social action.
She campaigned on many issues, most notably those related to mental
health provision. Poetry was for her a
natural mode of expression that allowed a channelling of sometimes bitter
attacks on the clumsiness of large organisations, by showing the deleterious
effects on individuals in her work. This
she did not in the rambling or the incoherent but in the intense strictures of
the sonnet form. In her large sonnet
cycles such as Lament for the Day
Hospital, the reality of her long protest outside the Royal Free Hospital
in 2000, which included many episodes of harassment and abuse, is given a
poetic reality in the fourteen line structure.
It focuses the anger in this short form but still the poet finds freedom
within its bounds. An even larger
sequence of sonnets, The Pain Clinic,
charts her own troubled psyche and those of her family members in an epic of
over 250 poems that holds the reader in a kind of trance of revelation and
candour, presented in often simple but hypnotic lines; there is a sense of a
mind continually exploring itself, looking for a way out, perhaps. Her poetry is what she gathers together to
make some sense from trauma; as in the opening poem of another sequence, The Poet; she speaks of retrieving the
‘Known and significant, from disarray.’[1]
Sixties
Press produced a Collected Poems in 2009 and a Selected Poems, which contains
more recent work, in 2016. As a companion
to these volumes, Sixties Press has just issued The Void You Left: Poems for
Brenda Williams, by her ex-husband and fellow poet Barry Tebb. This small pamphlet collects some older Tebb
pieces with new work written since Williams’ death. It reveals many facets of their relationship;
their family life, the struggles with health and of course the protests, in
which Tebb often played a supporting role.
Finally and most poignantly there are poems about grief, that final
relationship we have with another human being, who can now only answer in
memory and dreams. Tebb is a powerful
poetic voice, one that was silenced for over a decade by work as a carer and
writer on mental health, but which has for some time now been in full flow once
more. Tebb was brought up in Leeds and
studied there, where his student days coincided with the Leeds Poetry
Renaissance; Gregory Fellows such as James Kirkup, Martin Bell, Peter Redgrove
and Thomas Blackburn formed the poetic backdrop and Tebb met many of these
figures and remains engaged with them, particularly the neglected Bell. Geoffrey Hill was a formidable presence in
Tebb’s later student days and Tony Harrison was also active there.
Tebb
combines nostalgia with candour but in a different way to Williams; whereas the
latter lulls with iambics, Tebb’s lines are more volatile and his structures
open to jumps and digressions. Sometimes
codas of aching beauty will close a poem of coruscating emotions; the best
example is ‘Plea for a Working Class History of Leeds’, one of my favourite
Tebb poems, where after brutal attacks on ancient and egregious families of
Leeds; De Lacy and Gaunt and their vast histories, the poem narrows to the
magic of ordinary lives, chiefly the magic and intimacy of sex. After a lovely stanza on ‘the mysteries of
periods/ and the revelations of working class brides’ Tebb ends the poem with:
‘I want a history of family outings
To Temple Newsam where I saw an ass
Eating straw from the steel manger
Of Christ.’[2]
Only in this
last stanza does Tebb bring in his own intimate memory of Leeds, which is at
last found to be sacred, albeit in a steel manger; the Christ-child softening
the steel of Tebb’s opening onslaught.
These changes of register are common in Tebb’s work; they work like jump
modulations in music where no pivot chord sets up the new key; the music just
jumps. I am thinking particularly of
Schubert who slips to the submediant with a slight of hand. Tebb has achieved this in poetry and it
constitutes an important aspect of his success.
‘Cut
Flowers’, the opening poem in The Void
You Left, shows many such jumps. It
follows a swift but packed narrative of the more than fifty years of their
relationship; what could be a more telling way of suggesting the swiftness of
passing time than: ‘Decades of war with truces and battles neither/ Won nor
lost, now you are sixty-six with cancer/ And a future measured in
months.’? Life is collapsing ‘like a
bridge of planks.’ Typically without
saying as such Tebb brings us into the present with the final couplet; we are
given a glimpse of what the poet is doing as he thinks the poem out for us:
‘My foxes howl in the alley and at
the stall
The girl cuts flowers and words are
stones.’
With this
final jump to a previously unheard key, the poem ends.
‘Cut
Flowers’ was written 5 months before Williams died. Many of the poems in The Void You Left have appeared in various volumes of poetry
published over the last 15 years. ‘Song
for a Mayday Morning’ switches from the briefest of sketches about Williams’
troubled parents to her protests and finally to a lament for forgotten poets
and their ‘soaring sonatas which remain unread’ and here Tebb can’t resist a
stab at the ‘poetry establishment’ – often a target for scathing attacks in his
work. Such intensity, whether in the
service of love or hate is typical of Tebb and it leads to so many surprises,
not least the jolts of register already mentioned. From raw exposure that perhaps stems from Robert
Lowell, a favourite poet of both Tebb and Williams, in the same poem a lyricism
will emerge which is in itself shocking in context. He combines both protest and lyric in ‘To
Brenda Williams on her Fiftieth Birthday’; one of Williams’ long protests, this
time at Oxford, allows the poet to see her as becoming Oxford as the weeks of
silent dissent accrue. She becomes
‘Magdalen’s grey gargoyles’ and ‘the cement buttresses of Wellington Square’
and finally ‘Balliol, Balliol in the rain’ which acts as a gentle refrain for
the poetic conceit. The quiet voice of
protest is in contrast to the lambasting that stalks other poems about
Williams’ campaigns; the most potent of which is the long poem ‘Guntrip’s
Ghost’, co-authored by Tebb and Williams where in a dizzying array of verse
forms the whole flavour of official obfuscation is evoked.
‘The Road to
Haworth Moor’ is a long poem that has appeared in earlier Tebb volumes; it is
always powerful and I can see why Tebb wishes to reproduce it again since it is
his most important meditation on his life with Williams. He is frank about the difficulties they
encountered in their marriage (Lowell perhaps again in the background) yet he
writes about their life together as inevitable if baffling:
‘A double helix on the heels of both
that made my south
Your north and jerked the compass
till we knew
Not day from night nor wrong from
right.’
The poem,
which runs in long lines and varied rhythms, seems obsessed with place, or
rather the instability of place. The
many moves of house and town are charted through the poems course; hints of
restlessness and a desire to try to come to terms with what appears to be a
relationship doomed from the start: ‘We
were wrong from the beginning, you always said,’. We hear of Philip Hobsbaum’s view: ‘It was
the place’s fault’ as if somehow the problems could be shifted to
locality. Parenthood is again explored
in unforgettable lines about Williams’ father:
Cyril Williams,
gravedigger at Killingbeck, buried among
The graves his own
hands dug, lay beside your mother.’
There are
lines as grainy with truth as can be found in the poetry of W.S. Graham, a
truth born of struggle, not only with poverty but with a sense of deep regret
that the working class life that both Tebb and Williams knew was disintegrating
within their time; the homely intimacy of back-to-back nostalgia being swept
away for the sake of ‘machines for living’.
In work such as Tebb’s this decline is documented in personal poems as
well as in more polemical attacks along the lines of ‘Plea for a Working Class
History of Leeds’. ‘The Road to Haworth
Moor’ has a coda and typically for Tebb there is a jump modulation; Tebb is
alone and visiting the Bronte museum.
The experience is desultory and he feels divorced from the surroundings
– clearly a main theme of the poem. The
poet’s thoughts cannot find a solution to the difficulties laid out in the
previous sections of the poem and within the context of a plea for a renewal of
desire, he drifts into an ethereal description of girls on the way to a night
club:
‘One wore a veil tacked round with
sequins
Like scruples on the hem: there is
no beauty like that girl’s
Whose naked feet touched heaven in
their swirls.’
Again, a
change of key with no attempt to return to the tonic if we can imagine a poem
in musical terms, and I think we should.
A number of
poems are set in hospital waiting rooms or wards. ‘Cancer Clinic’ once more shows us Tebb
musing in a number of images; the prints on a waiting room wall, memories of
protest, and a sense of time being frozen as the patient waits to be
called. It reveals the curious way the
mind fixes on things when in a state of stress and fear, one which I can attest
to as a frequent gazer on waiting room prints.
Tebb’s attempt to engage the art historian on the painter of a print (is
it Claude or Poussin?) is met with the same frozen stare that in the ends comes
to the poet and the patient.
‘Intensive
Care’ is almost unbearable in the immediacy of its concerns: the cannulas and
drips, the drugs and pain; yet Tebb can make poetry out of the heartfelt
simplicity of ‘Are my cats alive?’ and suddenly you know these utterances are
precious for being so near the end. I
have not read a poem that attempts this with such honesty and lack of artfulness,
it speaks from the heart and goes to the heart as Beethoven would wish.
Towards the
end of the book a small cluster of short lyric poems lies; these were written
in the months after Brenda Williams’ death.
They feel like dreams; they are sad but peaceful, as if when the
protests and the pain are over a core relationship remains in grief. We see Williams in a Russian dacha, on the
steps in the market place; Tebb is always waiting for her in dreams. ‘Save Our NHS’ begins with: ‘I see each day
come riderless/ Over the horizon’ – and since the days are riderless,
directionless, Tebb once more gives a tiny poetic resume of Williams’ life as a
mother, wife, protester, as if like Williams herself, Tebb must re-run the
events from which there seems no escape.
The last
word is left to Brenda Williams; her last poem written just 12 days before her
death ends the book. In two complex
sentences and in her beloved sonnet form, she ponders her existence and the
strains of memory still invading thought as death approaches. Her determination to express even at this
late stage is remarkable: ‘always the poem, always the unheard’. In compiling this book of poems Barry Tebb
has given voice to the unheard that emerges into poetry, so that despite
Williams leaving ‘with nothing this world understands’ there is a chance to
connect with words and memory.