The face of someone who could die
Alan Brownjohn
A TIME FOR FIRES by Vernon Scannell Robson Books, £10.95, pp.66 he first poem in Vernon Scannell's col- lection concerns an escapologist fighting his way out of his 'canvas shroud'; a grim and scary struggle, but he does finally emerge. Quite a lot of Scannell's poetry has been about emerging, battered but happy, from dodgy situations, mostly (though not all) of his own choosing: the drinking, the affairs, the boxing rings, the battlefields. He seems to have been experienced, worldly-wise and ruefully middle-aged from the beginning. So now that he's 70 the Scannell personality remains strangely youthful, still jaunty and resilient despite the autumnal subject-matter of the poems. When that escapologist is free, a shabby, impoverished crowd throws pennies in his cap. I urge penurious poetry-readers to put down their pennies for A Time for Fires. At £10.95? Yes, at only 24p a poem it's excep- tional value.
Long ago Scannell decided that poetry was not the preserve of the precious, as he 'And now for the wedding breakfast. relates here in 'The Party's Over': you would hear them say...
How the poet or the painter with his innocent eye Perceived a world rinsed by primeval dew,
And marvelled like a child. Maybe. But I .
Was never quite convinced....
He has made his verse a celebration of ordinary, though more than averagely sensual, experience, with its accompanying gratifications and hard knocks. In A Time for Fires it's a world of drinking clubs (now gone, but recalled with wry nostalgia), of love in shadowy hotel rooms, of an 'English Summer' so cold that all he can hear is 'choirs of brass monkeys all singing sopra- no'.
And yet it's also a poetry of gratitude for simple pleasures, and for some unusual ones — not only a snowfall at night, the flowers in his garden, and his child's delight in a bonfire but also the compensations of poor eyesight CA fallen paper bag starts to bark./ In the distance I see trees as men talking') and the Martian pleasures of a fish-and-chip shop in 'Frying To-night', one of his best-ever efforts:
Sleek, plump bottles, bodies almost black Hold vinegar on all the table-tops Like little holy sisters in white caps.
And on the counter in a gallon can, Floating blindly in translucent brine, Small green dirigibles loll still, becalmed.
He adds fruitfully, too, to his small stock of stubbornly enigmatic, even difficult, poems with 'The Other Word' and 'Apostate', the second recounting a memo- rably disquieting dream; and to his slightly larger number of female character studies with Joan, the terrified colonel's daughter, and Bobbie, the easy lady who frantically wants him to believe her tatty life was once an idyll.
Scannell may have 'impure thoughts' about the woman eating a banana in the Melton Mowbray train, but it's difficult to credit that 'the wicked rule and have the final say' in his writing, as he avers in 'Interview with the Author'. Much of his work is vulnerably innocent and appealing, embodying a genially uncomplicated vision of life. It can court the risk of clumsy or obvious effects, which means sentimentali- ty; these days death too often turns up in the last lines as 'chill breeze', worm, or abyss, a waiting ambuscade or a 'black full- stop.' But his eye for the arresting image (humorous when zebras stand like 'great dusty humbugs on four stilts', sinister when a quartered apple produces four owl faces) repeatedly saves the ordinary from becom- ing banal. Philip Larkin asked of his favourite poets that they persuade him he was 'in good hands'. The Scannell hands fumble occasionally, but they are broad and generous, and their owner is good compa- ny; which may be a little less rigorous and more entertaining.
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