The conversation of poems

John Bayley

PRESENCES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by P. J. Kavanagh

Chatto & Windus,

There are poets in any age who can give the impression of talk; of poems that are a sort of muted conversation in a tentative limbo between the poet and himself, the poet and his reader. Wyatt could do it, and Donne and Cowper and Clough and Browning (overpoweringly) and Edward Thomas: to name only a few, and the tone is different with each. It may look easy, but probably few things in the art are more difficult, for the discrepancy has to be overcome between the poet who is labor- iously intent but must not seem so, and the reader who is not at all intent but must be made to be so. Each must share in a high form of self-satisfaction: the working out of query and discourse together, to which both appear to contribute.

P. J. Kavanagh is a real craftsman at this difficult form, and his poems seem to get better at it all the time. The new ones in this volume are outstandingly good, whether reflecting on Heysel Stadium 1985, or on Louis MacNeice as a blackbird in 'Ars est celare artem' (. . . `it sounds like praises/Duly delivered, that roofs have aerials, that rain can stop'); or on John Cowper Powys's walking-stick, accom- panying the poet on a constitutional. He is good on the lost feel of England today, the miasma which hangs alike over car-parks and hedgerows, trees, toilets, places of outstanding natural beauty. Perhaps Betje- man was the last poet who could take all that to his bosom, turn it into jolly orderly reassuring enjoyment. Kavanagh feels and conveys the angst in it, the sense that even cows and pigs, once at least creatures with their own place in the rural world, however enslaved and temporary, are now a dis- placed yellow-tagged mass in a concentra- tion camp, meaningless and wretched in field, lorry, wired compound.

Kavanagh conveys that feel in poems like `Beyond Decoration'.

Stalled in the middle of a rented room, The couple who own it quarrelling in the

yard Outside, about which shade of Snowcem They should use . . .

But he does not fall back on piling up forlorn detail. This poem is eloquent with suffering faced and examined, the kind of suffering which is always present, never in the past. The feel of the country now which `is not homely but it is my home', might make him wonder what the dead feel about it.

Do this morning the dead, turned inwards towards brightness, Over their shoulders feel pictures of living arrive? Recall the old tenderness of dusky, windswept mornings, Overgrown verges bent under weight of sky, Everything blackish, solid, with clear-cut edges And birds splashing like fish in soaking hedges? The dead still live, as it were, in Edward Thomas country, of which Kavanagh man- ages to suggest their perfect recall. The change, as reflected in the poet's con- sciousness, is remarkable: between the England of the Georgian poets, and that of today. The former was not cheerful Thomas is one of the gloomiest poets of the century — but he clung to the English countryside, then still existent, with corn- flowers, poppies and charlock in what Larkin called 'wheat's restless silence', in a way that seems unthinkable today. Where a sense of such things is concerned Kava- nagh is an unobtrusively precise and accu- rate recorder of an irreversible change in poetic sensibility. He is as open to the country as Thomas was, but it is not the same country. For the farmworker too it has shrunk to a `world /Of foxed perspex' in which Hedges lie doggo Hoping to die where they are, To suffer birds and not have to answer.

On the other hand there are poems of extraordinary tenderness and perception, like `Commuter', which notices, as Hardy might have done, and yet wholly in Kava- nagh's way, two `deaf and dumb lovers in a misty dawn/On an open railway platform.'

Making shapes with their fingers, tapping their palms, They stopped and smiled and threw themselves Open-mouthed into each other's arms While the rest of us waited, standing beside our cases. `Goldie Sapiens' considers the famous eagle who escaped from the zoo and sat about wondering what to do next — 'the only free eagle in captivity'.

Later that evening the Nation breathed a sigh.

Goldie like us, Goldie the human and sage, With tail between talons, had lolloped back to the cage.

Like all the best conversational poems, like Edward Thomas's in particular, Kava- nagh's gradually extend a perspective of inner meaning behind the subject of each poem. In Thomas's case it was the discov- ery of himself, the freeing of his own private being by means of discovering them, into the dark but clear and entirely

real world of the poems, in which he was at home, in which the scent of Lad's Love, or the birds of Oxfordshire and Glou- cestershire, enchanted him in the end into non-being, an avenue 'nameless, without end'. Kavanagh's poems have the strength of the same kind of inner drama, unfolding naturally and as if without words. Berry- man's conversation poems did the same thing, but much more deliberately and spectacularly, and Berryman was a friend remembered in one of the most haunting of later poems here, `Breakfast in Italy'. The poet who `jumped to darkness' is lucidly commemorated for the `Self-pity for the tribe you wrote, and showed', but also, and affectionately, for the feel of his `dreadful beard'.