Words getting in the way

David Harsent

Dannie Abse Fun/and and other poems (Hutchinson E1.75; paperback, 75p) Anthony Thwaite: Inscriptions (OUP £1.30)

It's difficult, most of the time, to decide whether the dominant ernestness iniDannie

Abse's poems is a virtue or a vice. It lends his work a definite and sustained fervour, which is a quality not necessarily to be despised, but ,in addition to that it frequently prompts in

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the poet 'a desire to explain and emphasise 'and thereby 'leave the poems !coking wordY and overworked. This apparent need to en' large on what has already been adequatelY stated can rapidly dissipate a poem's potential force; casting about for a further image of metaphor where none is needed, usually, results in the introduction of something bane' or inappropriate, as in ' mysteries ' where we are told that "a magnesium flash cannot iliamine,/for one single moment, the invisible." The use, there, of the faintly archaic "illumine," is typical of what happens La Abse's vocabulary when he is attempting ..enrich the merely discursive. The trappings 0' a consciously 'poetic' 'vocabulary abound, turning a magnifying glass into 'a prowling convex lens' and producing lines like: "Long ago my kinsmen slain in battle,/swart flies on all their pale masks feeding," in whiCh "kins. men," "slain" and "pale masks" all give the appearance of having been painstakinglY selected to substitute for words less weightY (though, in the event, probably less distract. ing). These problems are all symptoms of the difficulty with which Abse gives expression to a rapidly formulated motion. It's an ironic problem for a poet to have to face, but the fact is that with Abse, the words quite simplY get in the way; long, before the poet has, finished, kicking the proposition around — offering images, alternatives, and studiously varied comparisons — the reader has caught the drift, guessed the conclusion, and preempted the whole poem. A good example of this is 'Demo Against the Vietnam War, 1968: in which the poet is asked to "Praise just one thing in London"; obediently, he goes through the likely candidates: " . . . the blurred grasslands of a royal, moody park," "sootY scenes, good for Antonioni . . , "the stylised catalogue/of torment in the National Gallery," and so forth. The slow progression of the list, far from building any apprehension or anticipation in the reader, leaves him nodding disinterestedly at each fresh addition to the catalogue until he reaches the entirely unsurprising appearance of " . . . that tatty group, under Nelson's column,/their homemade banners held aloft . . . " Making that choice may well put the poet on the side of the angels, but the process by which it is made puts the poem out in the cold.

The tendency to prolixity, is particularly unfortunate in those cases where Abse freams up some bizarre or eerie images for an imagined situation a tactic he can use well at times. In 'Moon Object,' for example, it is. supposed that the mythical powers of the moon are not dispelled by man's intrusion, and that moon-rock samples are exerting strange powers on an unwitting scientist. Here, the familiar image-laying has some relevance and a less self-regarding vocubulary contributes to the intended menace:

Through a rainy city a car continues numb. Its radio blanks out beneath a bridge.

In a restaurant, your colleagues with a cold is trying to taste his own saliva.

Lines which show that Abse can be effective over a short sprint, but will insist on allowing the poem to run on until it is thoroughly winded. This tendency leaves him little hope in the middle-distance 'Funland': a poem in nine sections which stages the world as asylum, God as the ironic Superintendent, and writes in parts for Elijah, Pythagoras, Homer, Fat Blondie and (you guessed it) Mr. Poet. It's an uncertain performance: one in which concern and indignation are always are always evident but are seldom invested with any real power.

Anthony Thwaite's concerns often lie in the past; or, more properly, in recorded events,;

historical figures and antique objects which, through invention, can be invested with the Poet's preoccupations, These are most Cogently (which is to say, most openly) expressed in 'The Antiquarian,' where the apparent pointlessness of unearthing fragments of dead civilisations is half-admitted — Why indeed, Do I peer attentively at holes in roads/Or fossick about in the earth's distur bances — then quickly retracted in the face of a numinous "pattern I have not guessed at yet, and may never/But go on living with, and through, no doubt."

There are times when the shards of that Pattern are subjected to an awkward juxtapositioning, as in 'Monologue in the Valley Of' the Kings,' which has an entombed Pharoah cocking a derisive snook at the archaeologist Who each day searches in vain for treasure Which lie beneath his feet; the situation never seems more absurd than when we hear the mummy saying:

When you die, decently cremated, made proper By the Registrar of Births and Deaths, given by

The Times

Your two-inch obituary, I shall perhaps Have a chance to talk with you.. ..

The remark about the 'two-inch obituary' seems particularly catty. An altogether more manly monologue is given to Augustine: a little euphistic, maybe, but coming close to the intended meditative depth despite the early carelessness of "I stand on this spit of sand, pointing north from home,/Stale spit sour in my mouth . . " Unless the repetition is deliberate — a thought too awful to contemplate.

Notions about the universally of experience are implicit in a good deal of Thwaite's work, and they are the notions he deals with best. When he leaks his own personality — or, more obviously, his opinions — into a poem the result is often a paradoxical loss of credibility. 'Entry' takes as its starting point the recorded death of a bastard infant, named Moses Ozier for having been found among reeds; from speculations about the incident, we are led via the poet's retrospective compassion to his own fears:

.. Almost two hundred years

Since you briefly lay by the cold and placid river, And nothing but nineteen words as memorial. I hear you cry in the night at the garden's dark edge.

That last line looks suspiciously like an easy conclusion for poem and poet alike: a spuriousness to be found elsewhere in the book. 'Worm Within,' for instance tries to inject a sense of the sinister into suburban domesticity with its tale of a woodworm which . . could bring the whole house down,/Ithink to myself wildly, or a whole town ... /Why do we do nothing, then, but let Its course/Run, ticking, ticking, through our nights and days?: Well, why indeed? After all, we can't really be expected to believe that the incident is in some way redolent of a clandestine love of disaster, any nore than we can accept that there is something eerily primeval in a bonfire which smouldered for a few days, then caught, "fierily aglow/With days of waiting, hiding deep inside/Its bided time, ravenous to be fed." It's noticeable, too, that Thwaite's style and tone are largely custom-built for endowing some historical figure with a dramatic monologue, or extracting an irony from the leavings of antiquity. A more immediate or contemporary event is quickly bogged down by the language, as in 'At the Frontier Post: Om' where the poet, waiting CO have his passport stamped, catches "glimpses/Of cruder appetities: a brown thigh, supple/With

bourgeois blandishments, coyly entices.//Ripped from some old Paris Match or Playboy,T his functionary's unofficial decor

" The inescapable feeling is that the poet would have been happier had he spotted a naughty hieroglyphic.

Don't Blow Out the Candle Zena Marenbon (Hart-Davies, MacGibbon Ltd. £1.25)

In these memories of a Jewish childhood in Liverpool in the twenties, Zena Marenbon records the incidents she remembers best — the excitement of her sister's wedding, the embarrassment of her first day at a new school (being Jewish, she was the only girl not to go into prayers); the family meeting to discuss whether they could afford to send her brother to University, and her own first attempt to earn her living as a ' mannequin 'in a dress-shop. (She left after two weeks.) An appealing book, because the stories are told so simply and freshly, as a child would tell them. And it's easy reading.

The Wipers Times edited by Patrick Beaver (Peter Davies £3.75)

This is the word-for-word copy of the famous trench newspaper, produced by the soldiers stationed at Ypres during the first world war. Edited by one Captain Roberts, under most adverse printing conditions, the paper is remarkable most of all for its humour. It jokes about gas alerts, lack of soap in the dug-outs, poisoned feet, the English inability to speak any other language but their own, and, of course, the 'Huns.' But even when it mentions the Huns, one gets no impression of malice. Surrounded by death, disease, and uncertainty, these English soldiers are not embit tered. Although their type of patriotism may be considered outdated, one must admire the main characteristic shown in these pages — the refusal to give in.

Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples Nena and George O'Neill (Peter Owen £3.25) An American best-seller, if that's any recommendation. Written by a couple of sociologists/anthropologists, who have remained married for twenty-seven years, the book begins by listing the traps to avoid if you don't want a ' stagnant ' marriage. Among these are ' ownership of the mate,' playing couples game' and rigid role behaviour.' we are warned that: "The assumption that your mate will definitely be the parent of your child is a kind of self-delusion and fantasy that may tend to get in the way of genuine relationship between you and your mate." Thanks for telling us.

The O'Neills also talk much about ' individual freedom.' We are left slightly in the dark as to what this means as regards ' open marriage.' Does it mean that a woman can nip off to the Caribbean for a couple of weeks with whatever new lover takes her fancy? Or does it only mean that a husband can shut himself in a soundproof studio for a few hours whenever he wants privacy, as one member of a couple in their examples does?

One point that the O'Neills seem to be making beneath all their sociological jargon, is that the best way to get on with one's' mate' is to be tactful. But surely we all knew that already?