RESCUING TIME FROM THE GUTTERING WICK

CONSTRUCTING THE HUMAN

Estill Pollock

Poetry Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, Akademiester. 24, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria.

www.poetrysalzburg.com

[123pp, Pub.2001, no price, ISBN 3-901993-08-8]

ANCESTRAL HAUNT

Glen Cavaliero

Poetry Salzburg (As above)

[117pp, Pub.2002, no price, ISBN 3-901993-11-8]

If nothing else, Estill Pollock is certainly well-travelled. From birth in Kentucky to itinerance in the Southern States to expatriation to England, and a gazetteer of other towns, cities and landscapes along the way, it’s hardly surprising that the major pre-occupation in his poetry is that of place. Yet, only sometimes does he sculpt meticulous observation of his environment into poetry to say much beyond that it’s there, it exists, and we should be, as he has been, awed by its splendour.

‘There’s hymn enough in voyages

for those dispirited by the old routine

of fences strung like cages

for the keeping-in of beasts and men…’

(from ‘Man from Earth’)

Awed, too, should we be with his wonderfully erudite diction and dazzling inventiveness in word combinations, an all too rare contemporary skill.

‘Such lodestars render worlds familiar,

as though light were a fever forever breaking,

and the slow wick these paragraphs allow

were time enough for moons and shadows quartering.’

(from ‘Captain Blood Returns’)

‘…the parchment of a thousand years decayed,

the names of the elders illuminated dust,

the list of tithes for their souls’ repose now monkscript

scattered in the evening’s merest rays.’

(from ‘Man from Earth’)

However, Pollock doesn’t stop at one pre-occupation. As might be expected of someone who has lived elsewhere for so long, he returns repeatedly to explore, both through its consequences and emotional complexities, the notion of being a foreigner in a strange land - a position that allows the simultaneous juxtaposition of objectivity and subjectivity in his work. Of course, this pre-occupation bundles easily with that of place, as in any place other than ones own is, to varying degrees, going to make a foreigner, an outsider, a stranger of the best of us.

‘It is strange, to walk in the scrub of gorse, in this land

which is a memory of the same land for others gone now.

It is strange, to stake a time to the purpose of this island

where crake song evaporates on stone and the wind drives

low along the coast until the brownstone canyons echo.’

(from ‘English Studies’)

And the bundle grows with the third of Pollock’s pre-occupations - the past. As he says in ‘Versions of Sanctuary’, ‘How is it / the present tense / eludes us…’, and again earlier in the same piece, ‘…the paths / the poets took / declining future tense.’ Effortlessly, he makes an amalgam of past, place and alienation.

‘In that May the April rains continued, boulevards bound

in steely mist and cold for the time of year. As we walked

grimy pigeons shoaled, scavenger eddies near the Metro

insinuating rhythms where still deeper waters flow.

We returned exhausted to the room, our stamina balked,

wrung by tourists and the tannins in a heady red we found.’

(from ‘Writing Home’)

The significant other in this points to the fourth of his pre-occupations - family, friends and lovers, in their various pasts and places, sometimes sharing in his sense of alienation and sometimes not, often written in such a way as to make a voyeur of the reader, then as a cry for help from the middle of the street - ‘…let me relive my life… rescue time from the guttering wick.’ (from ‘Fortunate Aspects’). On top of all this, given that some fifteen years passed between sections of the collection, his ageing and changing of attitudes also positively influences the terms of engagement he has with the reader when remembering people past - his more recent work being less intimate, more public.

‘She was shopping when we met, thirty years

and no word but the sound our lives make

like ships breaking up; we said we both looked great.

She remembered her hair in beaded plaits

and that everybody died, gone to hell

or California working in computers.

We stood on ancient ground, in aisles of bread

and six-pack Coke, converts to a toothless time.’

(from ‘Leave of Absence’)

Though all this is not to say he doesn’t cover a lot of ground, with other minor pre-occupations in flora, astrology, love and war. Nor does it mean he doesn’t take these pre-occupations to their logical conclusions in occasional snatches of philosophical riddle - ‘Consider this: the life one led leads here.’ (from ’Nomad Frescos’) - ‘The past is carried with us, in the oxygen-rush of syntax / and the satchel’s weight of handmedown, collected fates.’ (from ‘ Diary of a Has-Been’) - ‘The ghost walking with you is your own.’ (from ‘Facing South’) - ‘In my rehearsals of the past, a memory / of time to come confronts each traveller, / defines the present sense of things.’ (from ‘Leave of Absence’) - ‘The present simplifies the past, assigning it / a retrospective future, defining who were are, / who we were, and what the difference meant.’ (from ‘A Saved World’), and, finally, in a longer snatch…

‘We become what we believe,

the nothing of everyday remade, nudged

change by change to imitate a life

as though the world still turned,

turned too, the room within the world.’

(from ‘Emblem Heart’)

What could be argued is that Pollock is too busy with the outside world to do justice to the inner. But this would be too shallow a view. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As a collection, it provides a detailed model of the writer’s psyche throughout a large chunk of his lifetime. And when it comes down to it, you can’t travel much further than that!

And I’m sure it’s only coincidence (or maybe an emerging predilection at Salzburg), but, ‘Ancestral Haunt’, seventy-five year old Glen Cavaliero’s fifth offering since 1973, is another collection of poems of place. In fact, three out of four of Pollock’s pre-occupations are mirrored exactly in Cavaliero’s work, though that’s not to say they’re handled in the same way. As the introductory, written by D.M. de Silva, states:

‘He is conspicuously a poet of landscapes and localities, and the scenes his eyes light on are apt to have - among other monuments of man’s raising - churches in them, for he is also a poet much possessed by faith, a poet of pronounced mystical tendency. The landscape of his verse… mutates from the mystical to the surreal, accommodating both the private ghosts of memory and the satirical grotesqueries of a sometimes mischievous invention.’

And sure enough, just a few poems in…

‘There is no telling and no hearing

in this sound-box of a gale.

The waves storm inland, roll and grapple

with the flood that rages to emerge

from an equitable meander among marshes. Sentinel,

three church towers shoulder dusk in a uniform of black.’

(from ‘Harbour Bar’)

Though, de Silva does go on to state that the poems in this collection, ‘the reader will be rejoiced to find, illustrates the whole variety of his musical styles offering as it does the complete range of his [Cavaliero’s] poetical pre-occupations and moods.’ Now I’ve rejoiced sufficiently, not to mention having puked at this sycophantic drivel, I can see what he means in the way he says it - this is a ramshackle collection by an academic who is desperately, if not embarrassingly, showing his age in both subject matter and style.

‘…it would seem

old age is an abandoned market place.’

(from ‘Going Places)

‘With pupils he is understanding,

the family finds him undemanding;

he’s much admired in Summer Schools,

avoids the angry, suffers fools.

A serious-minded friendly bloke,

He likes a quiet good-natured joke,

Hates bankers, Tory ladies’ hats,

Pop music, cars and bureaucrats.

He drinks his pint of local ale.

His poems reflect a steady sale.’

(from ‘Acceptable’)

There is an undeniable between-wars home counties tweeness to it all that makes it rather quaint, in a Betjemanesque sort of way. Indeed, quoted on the back cover is the man himself, telling Cavaliero, ‘I very much liked your poems. They are sharply observant and have that sense of place which such poetry needs.’ Recommendation indeed, but the only difference between them, as far as I can tell, is that Betjeman is no longer with us.

‘Crisp and bossy, how she bustles

doing good to others! Bird-bright eyes

a-snap with managerial kindness;

blue rinse, a headscarf

keeps it tidy - flaring glasses -

“Nescaff” - OXFAM and a cheery word for all -

she organises Country Dancing for Young People

to keep them from the Disco. “Come,” she rallies you,

“that’s cheap and cynical! We don’t want

such silly nonsense here. Grow up!

You’re with the happy people now.’

(from ‘Jam’)

Yet, de Silva argues that, with Cavaliero, it, ‘…is done without Betjemanesque nostalgia, without any endorsement of values which may be described as philistine. The value in terms of a moral education for the reader…’ Now wait a minute! Moral education? What are these guys on? These are frivolous, whimsical, vaguely scatty musings, from the ivory towers of Academia, on a cast of thousands from one man’s time-warped mind. And that cast of thousands? ‘They are none of them saints or intellectuals or poets but simply normal people of the middle and upper middle classes. They and the world they inhabit, that blissfully stable, nearly fabulous world between the wars, are evoked with undeniable grace and tenderness.’ Strange, but de Silva appears to have forgotten 1926 and the strife of millions, or is it just a matter of privileged perspective?

‘A full compartment. And so close to home -

one would have thought it was unthinkable

that such an outrage

should be allowed to happen.

Up north, perhaps; abroad, yes, or America;

But here?

…These uppity youngsters need to be taught to mend

their uncouth ways.’

(from ‘Carriage Trade’)

No, really, that’s enough. There were so many other points I was going to make, but now find myself thinking it a waste of space to give this collection anything more than the few sentences I’ve given it. It’s as simple as to say that, if the weightlessness of old JB was your thing, you should buy Cavaliero’s book; but if you don’t like being patronised and believe society has moved on, positively, towards something more akin to classlessness, moral freedom and independent thinking, be warned, this book is not for you.