Ian Brinton reviews
Gravesend
by Simon Smith
Simon
Smith’s remarkable sequence of poems written whilst travelling by train between
Charing Cross and Chatham opens with a desire for permanence within a shifting
landscape, a narrative that contains ‘whatever occurred at that particular
moment at the carriage window, or on the train.’
I want my life to be a story once
Upon
a time a four-legged now a three-legged rose
Wood
table smashed along the railway cutting,
It
central leaf missing
As
my eight-year-old collects climate-change transfers
Hungry
for permanent structure,
A
Boost bar and We Love You magazine.
The
child’s hunger for permanence and for some sense of stability in a fast-moving
world (a ‘collection’ is dear to any child’s heart as providing a cumulative
sense of security) is undermined by the subject material of potential
catastrophe. This hunger is juxtaposed with his father’s accumulation of
literary and musical references, another form of ‘collection’. Within these
poems we will run up against Conrad and Dickens, Walter Benjamin and Paul
Weller (Jam to Style Council), Juvenal, Claudius, Caesar, Vespasian, Neil Young
and Browning, Spenser and Catullus. With a sly reference to the 2008 Tate
exhibition, ‘Cycles and Seasons’, even Cy Twombly will make a ghost appearance.
This enormous frame of reference which offers a living background to the ‘now’
should come as no surprise when one recalls Simon Smith’s 2005 review of
Bloodaxe’s new translation of Catullus by Josephine Balmer (Poetry Review, Vol. 95, No. 1). In a
scathing reference to the former Education Minister Charles Clarke’s
pronouncement that educational subjects worthy of study ‘need a relationship
with the workplace’ Simon Smith points out that if you want to become a
politician perhaps you should read Cicero, Plato or Aristotle before going on
to pose the question ‘where else is the foundation of Western democracy other
than in the Ancient worlds of Greece and Rome?’
Contrasting
with this sense of continuity, however, one pervasive tone which threads it way
through these poems in Gravesend is
that of impermanence and perhaps another shadow behind the scenes is Paul
Auster whose opening to In the Country of
Last Things (1987) drowns us in instability:
These are the last
things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back…A house is
there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday
is no longer there today…When you live in a city, you learn to take nothing for
granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else,
and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone.
A
child’s recognition of vertigo and terror finds one its most moving
manifestations in the opening pages of Dickens’s Great Expectations where the young Pip is surrounded by the graves
of his family as he stands on the marshland of North Kent one Christmas-eve. The
presence of this little seed in the opening poem of Smith’s journey sets the
scene for the injustice of life and the oppressive political insensitivity of
the adult world masquerading as the language of ‘Progressive education’ and
‘liberal democracy’
Where ‘life’ became a history to cry
out
About grey and brown flatlands
tilted
Over the edge dangling Pip.
As
we approach Bluewater shopping-city, itself an Auster or Ballard world,
‘Assessment elides policing’ and the prevailing sense of educational policy
which would have doubtless found favour with that now historical Minister
Clarke prompts the poet to mis-read a sign on a grey bin labelled ‘not working’
as ‘networking’! In this world of captions and key-words which present
themselves as a mirror of everyday narrowness Smith gives us ‘Deposits’:
Refrigeration and containment
Not that far to the jail at Sheppey
Nationalise the debt for helicopter
money
No time to think—extruded
plexi-glass,
Or
a few details from my own personal experience
Is
History in real time not sampled
The
exchange of containers from ro-ros to lorries,
The
male located in the female.
The
reference here to acrylic glass is both precise and illuminating since laser
cut panels have been used over the last ten years to redirect sunlight into a
light pipe or tubular skylight in order to spread it into a room. In the
sequence of poems details of personal human experience shed light upon the
poet’s perception of History and, as if in memory of the time when he threw a
large clock through the window of Barnwood House in order to do a runner from
the lunatic asylum in Gloucester, the poet and composer Ivor Gurney now ‘plots
his great escape from Dartford Asylum’.
Gravesend
is not a disconnected set of fragments shored against this poet’s ruin but is a
collage where ‘Opposite Burger King’ there will be ‘the outline of a Roman
temple’ and where ‘Ghost landscapes slip the train window.’ As the reader
arrives finally at Chatham, the ‘End of the line’:
The message is the text—Image, Music
Text.
Built like a Mig-21.
‘Security personnel patrol this
station
24 hours a day,’ the sign for
Chatham
Sways in the breeze to the tune of
‘Tin
Soldier,’ and our deepest
non-narrative selves.
And
yet the journey has been a narrative
in the sense used by Ortega y Gasset in Historical
Reason, published in 1984, the same year as the miners’ strike and Big
Brother:
So if we resort to the
image, universal and ancient as you will see, that portrays life as a road to
be travelled and travelled again—hence the expression “the course of life,
curriculum vitae, decide on a career”—we could say that in walking along the
road of life we keep it with us, know it; that is the road already travelled
curls up behind us, rolls up like a film. So that when he comes to an end, man
discovers that he carries, stuck there on his back, the entire roll of the life
he led.
Or
as this sardonic, shrewd and humane poet ends:
Me in
pin-sharp form,
The ring-pull moment of chance,
Reality a line right through.
Ian Brinton reviews regularly for Eyewear. He is now Reviews Editor for Tears in the Fence. His Andrew Crozier
Reader is to appear from Carcanet in March 2012.
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