APOCALYPSE
AND AFTER
By
David Hackbridge Johnson
James
Keery’s splendid anthology, Apocalypse,
was generating waves long before publication; rumours are now dispelled at its
publication by Carcanet. Keery’s essay ‘Schönheit
Apocalyptica’ from Jacket 24 way back
in 2003, although ostensibly about J. H. Prynne, laid out the groundwork for an
appraisal of poets caught out between, say, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin as
having shown too sullied a hand to fit into the tighter aesthetics of Thirties
irony and Fifties doubt. The Forties
must be made to disappear, said those who might give a qualified pass to Dylan
Thomas, but shudder at the mention of Nicholas Moore or Edith Sitwell. Even prior to Keery there was some digging
down by Peter Riley – his wonderful essay on meeting Moore in the 1980s set up
the chance to republish work that had fallen from favour and into the
niche-expense of rare-as-hen’s-teeth second hand copies.[1] Some Apocalyptics have retained a firm foothold
in poetic histories; Thomas of course, but also George Barker and David
Gascoyne.
For
this reader A.T. Tolley’s book The Poetry
of the Forties gave a first introduction to the core decade where
Apocalyptic poetry reached its high water mark; it is from Tolley that Keery
borrows the terms ironic and visionary modernism. Other tuition into this neglected area came
from Barry Tebb (himself described by Keery in a book blurb of a Tebb
publication as ‘keeping the Apocalyptic flame alive’, but not in this book by
virtue of being born rather later than all the poets in this anthology) who
introduced me to the work of James Kirkup and Thomas Blackburn (both included
here), and from Andrew Duncan, himself no stranger to the rooting out of
forgotten voices, from whom I came to know and love the work of Kathleen Nott,
Peter Yates and Audrey Beecham (all included).
Needless to say these recommendations sent me on ravening raids to the
basements of Any Amount of Books and Quinto (late lamented) in Charing Cross
Road where sure enough many of these poets and others would show up – usually
at floorboard level.
Given
Keery’s broad church of inclusion there are many more poets than J. F. Hendry
and Henry Treece found to fill the pages of the three Forties anthologies: The New Apocalypse, The White Horseman, and The
Crown and the Sickle. I count 201
poets in Keery’s new book and many poems have not been published since the
Forties. The wealth of talent on offer
is simply extraordinary – time and time again I found myself reading a poem and
saying, ‘who on earth is this!’ I am
happy to confess ignorance followed by joy in the wake of reading Seán
Rafferty, John Gallen, or Barbara Norman.
John Gallen? Even Keery is at a
loss as to his birth and death dates – he gives them as circa 1920 – 1947. With some delving I can say that he was a
Captain with the Royal Irish Fusiliers and was killed in action in India.[3] His name being on the Queen’s University War
Memorial for World War II may cast doubt on Gallen’s date of death as stated by
Keery – perhaps he died in 1945 or earlier, or perhaps died later as a result
of wounds after fighting in Burma. But in
whichever years John Gallen lived, he graced them with: ‘Not hard as hard is,
but hard as soft is, / but red-berry pulp lapped in no-spored glistering – /
dreams, my child – those were lips in a dream.’ – whose second line brings a
telescoping of sensation that hints at Gerard Manley Hopkins – himself a
visionary of language with a pre-Apocalyptic bent.
Certain
threads emerge from a reading of the complete volume – airplane imagery is
quite common, not surprisingly perhaps, given that the true horror of war from
the air became apparent to many during the Blitz – some of these poems remind
me of the stories my mother used to tell me of her time in Bow before she was
mercifully evacuated to Kilvedon Grange in Essex. Religious imagery there is of course – John
of Patmos appears more than once, not just in the Edward Thompson poem I
mention below. There are also powerful
meditations on the senselessness of death and suffering – Susanne Knowles’ poem
speaks of a ‘criminal mis-channelling of the brain’[4]
– Alan Rook asks from the perilous viewpoint of Dunkirk Pier a series of
desperate questions: ‘What was our sin?’, ‘Failure to suffer?’, ‘What hope for the
future?’ – in the knowledge that the poet has only ‘puny words’.[5]
It is
true, and Keery warns us, that there are not a lot of laughs; the reoccurring
themes of death and despair militate against humour, but there are rough-hewn
lines from W. R. Rodgers that give words themselves the jostling glint of banter:
‘Needle-flute and thimble-drum / Stitched the way to kingdom-come, to Derry,’[6]
– and arch anti-Apocalypt Kingsley Amis has some fun with the genre and manages
to reference Kid Ory into the bargain: ‘O Muskrat, ramble through the living
grass / And coil the leaves on the abandoned bone / Bring to the midden your
eliding grease / And load the summer zephyrs with your bane.’[7]
– which might not be parody until you read the title: ‘Something Was Moaning in
the Corner’. Not far in truth from
Stella Gibbons’ nastiness in the woodshed.
There
are quieter voices – poets like Anne Ridler who might seem to be on the very
thin edge of the project if one recalls her magical meditations upon childbearing
and rearing – but here Keery can justify her inclusion by her bringing of an
acute feeling for landscape to the idea of distant conflict: ‘And the Pentland
howling psalms of separation’ – and later in the same poem: ‘Cold knives of
light / Make every outline clear in a northern island,’[8]
– the way she intimates violence from afar is as chilling in its own way as the
tumbling masonry threatening those under more direct lines of fire.
Of
course Keery includes the big hitters of the 1940s anthologies – the known
practitioners of the livid purple patch – MacCaig, Spender, Treece, Hendry,
Barker, Dylan Thomas, G. S. Fraser, Dorian Cooke, Moore – but in keeping with
an obvious desire to expose the unknown, Keery gives them a modest amount of
space so that they in no way dominate the book.
Despite this, it is good to have Hendry, Fraser, and Cooke, perhaps the
least known in this group, given several poems each. Hendry can generate fevers of clotted energy:
‘Frozen in the fright of light chilled skull and spine / Drip
bone-shriek-splinters sharper than the Bren: / Starve franco stroke and stave
the hooves of bulls. / I am the arm thrust candle through the wall.’[9] This enraged stanza is how ‘Picasso – for
Guernica’ begins – the reader surely feels something of the horror this
notorious event during the Spanish Civil War instilled; the language clings to
a bewildered sense. Fraser’s is a calmer
terror – he presents aftermaths rather than the fear-struck present: ‘All that
has fallen is what may befall / and that is all // and hell not ours alone is
also these / befell the world and our its miseries’[10]
– which in its trapped cycle of words perfectly encapsulates a sense of defeat
and exhaustion and yet links personal suffering with a collective grief. Cooke seems so obscure now that it is hard to
find out what he did poetically after the Apocalypse anthologies. His work on the showing here eschews the exhilarated
terror of his confrères, going for a cooler aesthetic. This pays dividends in two quite simple and
moving elegies. This is how ‘Poem in
Memory of Theodora Hendry’ ends: ‘Tides move to battle – parable or flame. /
The patchwork of huge faith / Died too; and we are outlaws / Watching from the
last, live room. / But her body only shows / The miracle of the forgiving
earth.’[11] Which makes me want to know a lot more about
Dorian Cooke. The MacCaig poems are all
early works which he later disowned; excepting ‘Stone Pillow’ they are all
absent from The Poems of Norman MacCaig,
the large volume of his work published by Polygon in 2005. Given that the poems rescued from oblivion by
Keery are both deeply thoughtful and shot through with startling images I am at
a loss as to why they have remained out of sight; perhaps even a whiff of the
Apocalypse was enough, once the powder had dispersed, for MacCaig to repudiate
the work however strong. Can we see here
a result of a backlash against visionary modernism as the poetry world closed
in for the killing zones of the domestic? We have here as additional evidence for this
conjecture some beautiful lines from the plays of Christopher Fry, someone who
hardly abandoned his style but was simply outmanoeuvred in the later 1950s by
the drama of the kitchen sink. Here are glimmers
of light on how far the Apocalyptic stock had fallen only a decade or so after
its peak. MacCaig’s two early, disowned
volumes – Far Cry, and, The Inward Eye: could the poet’s shade
not be persuaded that they be reprinted?
Lacunae
in the poetical record, reputations winnowed to chaff by changes in fashion,
failures of generosity as critics nurture amnesia; all these absences Keery
seeks to repopulate with this heartening and magnificent volume in which vivid
varieties of voice and utterance abound.
What
happens after you read a book such as this?
James Keery has given us a clue; since no biographical details of the
poets are included (I imagine these would have extended the book by at least 50
pages) the onus is on the reader to follow up any such trails as might lead to
deeper appraisals. Suffice it to say
that a hoovering up operation has now begun from a hidden base in Tooting –
there are so many poets here whose slim volumes must be sought from the usual
and unusual places. First to be had
after a bit of searching is Edward Thompson’s 100 Poems – a lovely, simply produced book from Oxford University
Press, dated 1944. Now which Thompson is
this? Not Dunstan Thompson, some of
whose war-haunted love lyrics might well have been included in Keery’s
anthology, since despite being American born he was in Britain by 1947 – (I’m
thinking of ‘What vision of violence can I plead for pardon? / I walked the
streets, a stage star hearing cheers / From blackout boys, whose lucent cat’s
eyes – in the garden / Later at leave taking – ran me through like shears. /
Guards! Guards! Blood on the white rose,
death by thorns.’)[12]
– but Edward Thompson, the father of the historian E. P. Thompson. Keery chooses ‘In Patmos I’ from Thompson’s
1942 Secker and Warburg volume, New
Recessional, but might just as easily have been attracted by this, the
opening stanza of ‘Skull and Stream’ from 100
Poems: ‘Beyond Damascus, where the air blew chill, / Snow-boding, and the
whistling wintry flaw / Round rock and crevice rang, a skull I saw / Facing the
plain, chance-tumbled in a rill.’[13]
– an opening that might head for ‘Ozymandias’ territory via Henry Treece, with
the qualification that much-travelled Thompson is not describing a scene
entirely from the imagination.
And other volumes are on the way; Frances Cornford and Valentine Ackland soon to be installed by the armchair. Budget allowing, there are many more desirable books to be had; so that the question ‘who reads Wrey Gardiner?’ may one day be answered by a few hands going up at the back of dim halls.
In a
book such as this there will still be those crying out at the injustice of
omissions, almost because of, rather than in spite of, the incredibly generous
space devoted to neglected work. ‘What
about X?’ ‘What about Y?’ The forgotten breed the forgotten. No doubt Keery had to choose from a much
greater body of work and he had to make a book that didn’t break wrists. One would have liked the complete text of
Sheila Legge’s ‘I Have Done My Best For You’ – only about a third of it is here
– another page might not have hurt. But
this is a minor quibble and the full text is accessible elsewhere. Might not the Apocalypse label be extended
beyond Keery’s cut-off point of the early 1970s? An annex to the main body of text might
include the aforementioned Barry Tebb – something like this vision from Book
Two of his ‘Bridge Over the Aire’ might suffice: ‘I am grounded in Chapeltown
from dawn to dusk / Curfewed by my body’s husk I dream of ‘Swan Lake’ / Car
after car swan after swan across the stage / The mad conductor’s baton raised
dying swans / Flying from the wings fading on the last chords / In the hyaline
air by the crystal river where / We surrendered to its flow.’[14]
Tebb’s first wife, the late Brenda
Williams, opens ‘The Fordwych House Extract’ with: ‘I drew a fire at Fordwych
House which burned / From my mind to a pale sky, consuming / In its wake, after
and before, and turned / Now into the end a shadow smoking / Dissolving deep
within the splintered wall / Of a high endless orange controlling / Flame,
overturning irretrievable / And huge once with youth’s unbroken meaning.’[15]
– which has a hint of the congealed imagery of J. F. Hendry. A poet with some claim to having an
Apocalyptic provenance is Jeremy Reed; as a teenager he wrote to George Barker,
who replied to the effect that the Muse had bitten Reed on the thigh and that he
should appear at once with his poems – shades of Verlaine to Rimbaud. Early Reed is certainly packed with a riot of
the visual that could be derived from Barker, yet without the older poet’s
propensity to stand too close to the reader: ‘We’re silver, disinherited from
gold: / the trompe l’oeil of the girl’s cosmetic brush / delineates
fritillaries for eyes – / a russet-tangerine linered with black, // the donna petrosa
implacably / resisting metamorphosis, her cold / scrutiny relieved by the
decorative; / the ersatz putto snaps a lighter flame’[16]
– this could almost be a Sitwellian off-shoot, yet one already revealing Reed’s
fascination with the masks of modern fashion and identity.
How
universal or local you want your Apocalypse to be in the end doesn’t
matter. The ironic and the visionary
don’t always have to be separated by walls of mutual distrust – the poetry wars
are over, aren’t they? What Keery does
show, regardless of labels, is a wealth of almost unknown work – work of such
high standard that history books of poetry with their neat categories and vast
omissions might need extra chapters that tease out the sheer quantity of good
poems, rather than assuming that what has fallen through the cracks of time is
best left there.
©David Hackbridge Johnson 27.xii.2020
[1]
See, Nicholas Moore, (ed. Peter Riley), Longings
of the Acrobats, Carcanet, Manchester, 1990.
[2]
His italics. See James Keery, Apocalypse: An Anthology, Carcanet,
Manchester, 2020, p. 2. Hereafter, Apocalypse.
[3]
See, Eve Patten and Richard Pine, Literatures
of War, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008, p. 156. There are a few other dates worth checking:
Elizabeth Daryush died in 1977 not 1997 (I don’t think she made it to 110!),
Maurice Lindsay died in 2009 not 2005, and if John Waller is the Cairo poet he
was born in 1917 not 1922. Peter Hellings was born in 1921 not 1924.
[4] Apocalypse, p. 149.
[5] Apocalypse, p. 140.
[6] Apocalypse, p. 135.
[7] Apocalypse, p. 318.
[8] Apocalypse, p. 158-159.
[9] Apocalypse, p. 163.
[10] Apocalypse, p. 201.
[11] Apocalypse, p. 218.
[12]
Dunstan Thompson, Poems, Simon and
Schuster, New York, 1943, p. 7
[13]
Edward Thompson, 100 Poems, p. 32.
[14]
Barry Tebb, Collected Poems, Sixties
Press, Sutton, 2016, p. 120.
[15]
Brenda Williams, Selected Poems,
Sixties Press, 2016, p. 73.
[16]
Jeremy Reed, Engaging Form, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1988, p. 51.