Writings on the wall
D. J. Enright
SELECTED POEMS, 1933-1993 by Gavin Ewart Hutchinson, f9.99, pp. 197
Since the warnings are seen to have failed, we may be tempted to say that all a Poet can do today is be light. Or, 'For the daily me and you/maybe "Light Verse" will have to do.' In one sense Gavin Ewart's famous naughtiness has been overtaken by history. What with him was daring is now the dead-serious commonplaces of the printed word from Marie Claire upwards and downwards. An agile stealer of march- es, he touched on this eventuality in the Poem that closes his Collected Poems 1980-1990, 'A Critic Speaks': 'all this old- fashioned stuff: as fresh modes come in, We drop it in the bin. The difference, a con- siderable one, being that Ewart could write, was enormously knowledgeable, and funny and truly fresh into the bargain. As the great poet Anzeiger says of his Young friend Ponsonby's feelings for Gertrude, in 'Fiction: A Message', 'I realise they have something to do with sec/or secs or whatever they call it.' And elsewhere, while the Dildo, 'a big heavy cumbersome sort of bird', is worshipped by some people, most real Nature-lovers think it should be taken down a peg'. Moreover, in contrast to our earnest experts, Ewart is more often than not politically incorrect in matters to do with sec or secs (or could it be sects?). auperta Bear's Feminist Poem' surely won't get by: 'Already many women can only read books by women — /if they acci- dentally read something written by a MAN/ at once a horrible feeling comes over
`Gervase, the sixth earl, added the gift shop and car park in 1983.' them.' And below par in other departments too; one poem (not here) begins, 'But how, they seriously say, can you ever compare/ the death of your mother to the death of your cat?! I answer: easily.' Tut, tut; read no further. (If you did, you might have to stop tut-tutting.)
In this connection 'light' and 'serious' are inapt descriptions, the one suggesting frivolity, the other portentousness. Ewart's manner may be sprightly, cool, lucid, but and no matter how much one respects or simply enjoys the genre — to talk of him as a specialist in light verse doesn't do justice. `The kisses that were hot as curry/are bird- pecks taken in a hurry', one poem observes, and others refer us to 'time's creeping cold sad requital': more Larkin than larking. Nor are these sombre reflec- tions, where the poetry is in the pity, solely the perquisite or pain of age, for they occur throughout Ewart's long career, early and late. More to the point are the love poems — 'Wives work hard', and 'the car-/ing for babies is the real and most test-/ing fact of a union. The children are the shar-/ing' which subvert or temper the sex poems capering around them. Some of the latter collapse under their own weightlessness; perhaps, in this otherwise rewardingly representative self-selection, there are just a few too many of them.
But then, there are the masterly mimicries, parodies and pastiches, of Heine, Yeats, Blake, Betjeman, Carroll (grim, this) and Wyatt (`The affair is no longer on-going./She can, as of now, explore new parameters'), all of them springing from intimacy, shunning easy short cuts, not travesties but changes of clothing. And there's Ewart as story-teller in the intriguing •`Fictions', potted novels (as so many novels could usefully be) of high life and low. Also the touching, enter- taining trip through history both public and personal, 'The Sentimental Education', embracing childhood memories, Jabber- wock-induced nightmares, fried bread and cocoa, school and university, the war, the British Council and the Battle of Beaver- brook, copy-writing, children, a mortgage ... And an occasional jab straight from the shoulder ('if men's lives are worth giving, they're also worth saving', 'The Falklands', 1982), and a scattering of mod- est ambitions: to be 'a Verdi of cornflakes or detergents' in the world of advertising, 'consoling all'; to write some silly poems, some of them funny; to see his old cat enjoying another summer; to steer clear of nuclear war if possible; and at the end to go out like a light.
Readable Ewart certainly is, to a danger- ous degree; in his backwash other poets come to sound like Gavins gone oddly agley. And what wouldn't one give to have written that luminous haiku, 'Creation Myth'?
After the First Night the Sun kissed the Moon: 'Darling, you were wonderful!'
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