The Death of Poets

 

in memoriam Mangalesh Dabral 1948-2020

 

The death of poets

is no worse than of others.

All the same I grieve

for those who, like me,

labour at the very same

minor precisions,

or find themselves borne

on this or that gust of wind

that blows through their words

and sends them flying.

 

Talking of 'minor precisions' the first draft said 'fine precisions' which is ironic since, following the syllabic pattern, it is precisely that line that is one syllable short. Why should that matter? Hardly at all except that adopting a particular form is a kind of vow to stay with it, a personal thing between you and your promise, one that a reader is unlikely to notice. So 'fine precisions' became 'minor precisions'. That kept the high 'i' sound but it lost the assonance with the following 'find'. Then I remembered that when I wrote this, in bed as last thing, the phrase that flitted by me was 'fine particulars' which would have fitted the syllable count precisely. So I could change it to that now but I have used that phrase before in a poem, having picked it up, unconsciously at the time, from the American poet Anthony Hecht. The issue seems, well, 'minor' to the reader, but it is nevertheless a matter of 'fine' judgment to the poet. I still can't quite make up my mind.

But then this is 'precisely' what poets deal with, sometimes slowly and thoughtfully, sometimes fast and instinctively. I am generally of the second disposition at the time of writing. Not necessarily in redrafting. I think Mangalesh would understand and sympathise with such quibbles. The quibble is dedicated to the living self I met in person and to the living ghost of his poems.

SETTLED STATUS: WINDRUSH ON STEROIDS

Having read, and now listened, to your dreadful stories of cruelty and incompetence in trying to achieve 'settled status' I cannot but be aware that my situation is not like that of settled citizens of the EU such as yourselves. I was a refugee from Hungary in 1956 and have been a UK citizen since 1964. Becoming a British citizen however did not mean becoming English. I have long recognised the fact that it was easier to be officially British than to be unofficially English.  Having worked as an English language writer and translator from Hungarian for about forty years I now think it is even possible to become part of English literature without ever being quite English. Could I become Hungarian and start again after 64 years? I really don’t think so. That’s two close communities dispensed with.

But there is a third community of which I am historically, culturally, and psychologically part, and that is Europe. We are all part of that community, however we understand it. Europe is a continent with a history of conflict between nations that were, at more or less the same time, out in the world dividing it up among themselves.  That history has divided us in the past but has, since the Second World War, driven us together, till now, in political and economic terms. Those terms have been and continue to be under strain. And the world around us keeps changing. Nothing is stable.

The EU has offered us peace for the most part if only because we have a common interest in keeping the peace. It has also tried very hard to operate as a power in the world where other major powers are growing ever more powerful.

One of the reasons I voted against Brexit was because I felt Europe was stronger and less vulnerable as a single body rather than as a set of disparate nations. Now, even more,I fear the various schisms that are developing. I suspect the UK itself is falling apart partly, at least, because of terrible nostalgias about its imperial and military past. There are people here who are so much in love with a vanished past that they will do anything to preserve its attitudes at the cost of present unities. They depend on making enemies out of friends.

I am not entirely out of sympathy with them. There are many values bound up in language and nationhood and I fully understand that it is very painful to lose them. But modern Britain increasingly depends on those who are not intrinsically part of it. People like you and I in fact. More you than I at my age. I am a minor cultural figure with various prizes for writing and translation but I am of negligible economic or social use. You are not.  You – and all those moving round Europe – are literally the moving parts of the engine.

Since I have lived here for sixty-four years I want to think a little about what the word 'here' has meant in that time and what it means now. It is a mere sketch and very simplified but it may suggest some kind of context as I see it.

I don’t know how long you have felt unwelcome in this country but I suspect Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ campaign of 2012 will have aroused and spread and intensified that hostility. Officially, that hostility was directed at illegal immigrants, but how do you tell who is or is not illegal in the street, in the shop or at work? By their skin colour? By their accent? The way they move?

And if the nation is served with a long diet of anti-EU suspicion and hatred, how is it likely to react to those who are here because of the EU? Don’t they take British jobs and British housing? Don’t they disturb our British way of doing things?

Once you get to that point, of course, the difference between legal and illegal presence in the country has significantly narrowed. People are no longer people, many of them people doing valuable jobs. They become an alien statistic.

Personally, I have never felt the latent hostility of my host country, a country that has been generous in the past, as many individuals still are, but, as the son of a mother who survived two concentration camps, I am aware that hostility is latent in people everywhere in the world and can be roused for any political purpose. 

That is especially the case in a country that was once proud of its identity and status but is uncertain about it now.  Modern Britain is a complex country with many strands it does not itself understand. A modern country is not a family affair. It is a state that is inextricably part of the world. But it is comprised of families, yours and mine and everybody else’s. My son has just married a French citizen resident for several years in the UK and they now have a bilingual son. What is to be their fate? What is to be ours?

The Brexit process has been a short-sighted mess and the confusion and cruelty of the special status process is further proof of that.. I suspect the UK is slowly falling apart. The country – England particularly - is on edge and its nervousness has made it cruel. Cruel to you. It has a government whose fortunes have depended entirely on pushing Brexit and whose leader does not mind reneging on freshly written contracts.

I have not said anything about those whose families originally came from outside Europe, whose problems are various and a direct product of British imperial history. Their positions are part of the same complex problem as yours and mine, but this occasion is not about them

Hungary, the country of my birth is in an even worse condition. It is for me a source of despair. That does not help. Very little does at the moment. Covid least of all.

Europe is an idea based on centuries of experience. Europe too is in trouble. Now is the time to hold together. My warm best wishes and hopes to you all.

Femme Fatale by Tali Cohen Shabtai

I enjoy being this kind

Of Femme Fatale

To be pleased over a poem

And not over a man

On my way

I do not leave

Any traces

Of my virginal womb

Behind

They wonder

If I behave

The way I live

My poetry

Much more

"Maiko"

I show them things that

You'd only show to

Enuchs

They want

To learn Hebrew

And taste

My poetry

First

I decided to impose

Their words upon

My symbols

They're always

Gone

When I do so.

*

Tali Cohen Shabtai is an Israeli poet. Born in Jerusalem, she began writing poetry at the age of six. At the age of fifteen her poems appeared in Moznayim, a prestigious Israeli magazine. She has written three books of of poetry since then, the most recent of them being Nine Years Away From You (2018). She spent some years in Oslo and the USA and her poems are noted for expressing spiritual and physical exile. Her work has been translated into many languages.

FIVE BAROQUE PLAGUE SONNETS

     

FIVE  BAROQUE  
PLAGUE  SONNETS

1 Smallpox

Science for the curious, is what it says

on the slick caption. The curious are pressed

tightly into a book, still hoping to be blessed.

Each bears a coffin at which someone prays.

Crosses, coffins and cowls determine them

according to the medieval scheme

of superstition, death and troubling dream.

It’s half cosmology, half stratagem.

Do smell them, Highness, as they struggle on.
The plague exhausts them. Science moves off stage,

just one pale rider left and one bare field

to conjure with. And soon they are all gone.

There are no options here except to yield

or else keep hoping someone turns the page.



2 Black Death

The man with broad-brimmed hat and bird-mask waits

a moment before entering. His scent

wafts by you, Highness, as presentiment

of what must follow. Watch how he operates

in his full gown. Observe how he inspects
the body, turning it here and there at distance

with his cane, meeting no resistance.

Note how he prods it. He’s the bird that pecks

at corruption. He sees the patient’s hands

are black with the usual buboes. This is all

by the script. It’s the very reason for his call.
The plague is spreading. It makes strict demands.

We watch familiar birds hovering in the air.
They will not ring the bell. Nor are we there.



3 Cholera

Everything begins somewhere. Everything is ‘here’.

Here is where the enemy starts his long

arduous campaign, launching the first spear.

He has no home, has no desire to belong

to just one place and so he moves about.

Two skeletons clench by a fetid pool,

and soon a table with a glass of stout

and cloudy water carry one to stool

another to feast. You watch a man collapse

at one point on the map, one street, and soon

everyone’s falling. Death runs from open taps

and drops from the singer’s mouth. There are few

remaining, Highness. We watch the sun at noon

rise ever higher, burning off late dew.

4 Spanish Flu

The khaki flu. The extra years of war

that is no war. From country seats to huts,

from shacks to palaces. You can’t keep score

of numbers. State by state the country shuts

its eyes and mouth and soon begins to drown.

Its skin turns blue and within hours it’s dead.

The rest wear masks and camphor. The whole town

is dream terrain, a dull street-plan of dread.

The cull is on, Your Highness.. World is thinning.
Let’s call it nature or divine constraint.
It is the way we’ve lived since the beginning.
Cover the doors in blood or chalk or paint.

That is the age-old troubled human scene.
It’s time for better drugs and quarantine.

5 Covid-19

Now here we are in quarantine, our ears

sharpened to the footsteps stalking us.
We watch the passing of the empty bus

as one more phantom carrier appears

and swerves around us grinning as he goes.

Elsewhere the poor are jammed into their rooms

to gaze from blocks that reek too much of tombs

intended for them, while the virus throws

its net across the whole estate like smoke.
Observe, Highness, how some of them remain

still poorer, and while you and I should live,

survival will be harder to forgive,

though later it might serve for a black joke,

that you, Highness, might very well explain.

Magda's Boy

Film by Anthony Wilks

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/videos/bookshop-events-films/magda-s-boy-how-george-szirtes-invented-his-mother

NEW BORNS

New Borns

‘Who would bring a child into this world?’

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Alan,

For apples and arbutus, for apemen and alphabets,

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Barbara,

For boats, bats, bells, barnacles.

Beermugs and beauty.

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would said, Catherine,

For camels and cobras, cold and curmudgeons

I would enter the world

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said David,

For doughnuts and dreadlocks, damsons and dogs,

Desks and deliciousness

I would enter the world

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said, Ellen,

For ears and elephants, eggs, earth and envelopes

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Fingal.

For fruit, for featherbeds, fossils and frankincense,

Freedom and formaldehyde

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Geraldine,

For gooseberries, geckos, goldfinches, gorgonzola

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Helen,

For hoarfrost and hazelnut, hairdos and hedgehogs,

Hotdogs and honeycombs

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Ian

For inkblots and India, ice-cream and igloos

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Jennifer

For jellybeans, January, jumbucks and jeopardy,

Joysticks and Jericho

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Kieran

For Kettering, kilowatts, kecks and Kilimanjaro

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Lukas,

For leopards, lollipops. limericks, linseed,

Letters and longing

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Marlie

For mysteries, margarine, mothers and mistletoe

I would enter the world

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Natalie,

For nuggets and nougat, for night and for necklaces,

Nostrils and nostrums

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Ossie

For oranges, oblongs, offside and orang-utans

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Pamela

For pepper-pots, popinjays, pickle and palaces,

Penguins and porridge

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Quinn,

For quadrilaterals, quails and quaint quackery

I would enter the worlds.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Richard

For rodents and rattlesnakes, roses and robots,

Reindeer and relevance

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Stephanie

For Saturdays, sausages, seagulls, serendipity,

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Tom,

For tenterhooks, tambourines, tablespoons, tangerines,

Toast and topography

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Ursula,

For umbrellas and undergrounds, urns and Uruguay

I would enter the world

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Vivienne,

For verdicts, variety, velvet and viscousness

violets and vortices

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said William

For woods, winds, waves, woodchucks

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would said, Xavier

For xylophones, xylographs, xiphoids and Ximenes

x-rays and xenocrysts

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Yolanda

For yearlings and yesterday, yarrow and you

I would enter the world.

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Zoe,

For zeniths and zithers, zeal and zoology,

Zebras and zips

I would enter the world

What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?

I would, said Al,

Bonnie, Cal, Dot, Ed, Fee, Gareth, Hattie, Imogen

Joe, Kit, Lol, Mo, Ned, Orville, Pip, Queenie

Rosemarie, Sid, Tess, Uli, Vi, Wendy,

Xi, Yann and Zero.