Neil Gregory
reviews
Misadventure
By Richard Meier
Misadventure
introduces
Richard Meier as a voice so familiar you could almost swear you’ve heard him
somewhere before. It is not surprising
then, that this collection – which won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize in
2010 – now sits alongside books by established Picador poets like John Glenday
and Ian Duhig, whose works compliment Meier’s gentle yet engaging lyrics.
Misadventure’s themes – growth, death,
passion, regret – are similarly recognisable, but the conceits that explore
these themes are transformed to become more, and sometimes less, than we might
expect. Meier’s various subjects – a man
with a patio pressure-washer determined to ‘achieve
one thing today’ by giving new meaning to the term ‘self-cleansing’
(‘Misadventure’); a grandchild astonished by the wisdom of their supposedly
senile grandmother with no time for ‘small-talk’ (‘Compos Mentis’); the
inevitably disappointed person who entrusted
their dream of sublime comfort to the
‘long admired / […] elbowed arm-rests’ of a ‘birch-ply’ chair (‘The Promise’) –
fluctuate between worlds that are wondrous and commonplace, yet never fully
come to rest in either extreme.
Typical
of Meier’s acknowledgement, or appreciation, of the simultaneity of the magic
and the mundane in life is ‘Routine Scan’, the fifth part of a series poem
seemingly inspired by the birth of his daughter. This piece juxtaposes the titular scenario of
a routine ‘twelve-week check’ on a foetus, with the awe-filled image of the
unborn child’s digits glowing ‘like five, ten / of the tiniest light-bulbs /
ever manufactured’. The wonder of the
expectant parent shines through in this precise image-making; crucially though,
it is a wonder tempered with the realisation (reinforced by the series poem’s
industrial-sounding title, ‘Building Matilda’) of its own artifice, its
undeniable and inevitable subjectivity.
Meier is the student of his own poem, ‘Write about what you know’, but realises
that what he (or any of us) knows, and loves, can only have relative
significance which diminishes beyond our lives.
We perhaps understand why Meier’s daughter is expressed in such a
conflation of the natural and man-made.
Like
many of the pieces in Misadventure,
‘Routine Scan’ conveys a sense of life lived, and being lived. The focus of the collection is largely
retrospective, but the nostalgia and regret of poems like ‘We’ll always have
Paris’ and ‘Maddened by this world’ is nearly (though never quite) balanced by
the in-the-moment joy of others such as ‘Walking near Arundel’, a celebration
of ‘[h]ow exactly the wind fits our faces’.
Meier never lapses into exclamation, or proclamation, though; these are
short, quiet poems that speak when listened to, yet linger in the mind long after
the book is closed.
Meier
possesses a command of the rhythms of colloquial speech that makes his poems
accessible and (again) familiar. In
pieces like ‘Three weeks to go’, the reader is addressed as though an old
acquaintance:
I was sitting, as I often do
at lunchtime, in the burialground
off Church Street
(there’s
not much green in Acton) [...]
This is not
difficult poetry; Meier’s fluid, conversational tone and natural diction lend
his poems an approachability that sometimes belies their complexity. This is not to say, however, that re-reading Misadventure is a fool’s errand. Even when Meier’s subject seems a little too
familiar, as in ‘White out’ (is there a poet without a snow poem?), or when his
touch seems a little heavy, as in ‘For a bridge suicide’ – perhaps one instance
in this collection where a poem sets its stall out too early – his work is rich
enough with movement and subtleties of sound to retain its pleasure well beyond
the first reading:
From four,
six, eight feet, maybe even ten,
water’s a
giving, all-embracing thing.
Above that,
it begins to darken, starts
to slap, to
harden, till by fifty or sixty
limbs get
broken. Still [...]
(‘For
a bridge suicide’)
Perfect rhymes,
half rhymes, assonance and consonance tumble down throughout this poem,
enriching its theme. Reading such poems
aloud is an experience to relish. Like
any accomplished piece, it seems there is something new happening each time you
read it.
The freshness of Meier’s poems is a
consequence of the freshness of his vision, which, with the exception of one or
two borderline cliché pieces – ‘Three weeks to go’ and ‘Moment’ are somewhat
blunted by their romanticism – is sustained throughout. Misadventure
is a collection of timeless themes and sensibilities filtered through a recognisably
twenty-first century experience of the human condition. The gods of Greek mythology are seemingly
alive and well in the playfully (yet darkly) titled ‘Sky Sports’: they ‘whoop,
marvelling at this deft / gift of ours for shifting misery / that makes for
such great viewing. Kills some even.’ As
ever with Meier, things are neither transparent nor quite covered up; there is
always something ‘not quite under the shelter’ (‘Winter Morning’) in his
poems. For the contemporary Western
reader at least, the comparison between the gods’ and our own comfortable lives
at the golden end of the satellite rainbow becomes clear.
The
recognition of what we have and haven’t got, what we have and haven’t learned,
resounds throughout Misadventure. Again, we recognise a meditation on
contemporary times and contemporary desires, a meditation upon disorientation:
the misadventure of misguided lives, perhaps.
All a modern-tongued King Canute really wants is ‘to prove [him]self /
alive – to feel’ (‘Canute explains’).
Similarly, in ‘Fabric’, the speaker recoils from a potential lover’s
soulless world:
I stepped inside her Edwardian conversion
to find a stripped-pine, bookless space complete
with kitchen like an operating theatre,
bathroom more a boutique marble quarry
and something too near horror at the thought
that she could live like this,
unstoried […]
For Meier, this ‘unstoried’
life, lacking in both depth and history, is not life at all; experience, good
and bad, counts for everything. This
quietly confident debut is a collection of meditations on the everyday mistakes
and triumphs that define a romantic, yet never overblown vision of contemporary
life. If Misadventure literally were fabric, it would be something like
linen. It is a work of delicate texture,
layered in folds, so that the space between the fibres of the words shows
through variously with light and dark, hope and hopelessness.
Neil Gregory has completed, with first class Honours from Kingston University, his BA Eng Lit and CW; and is off to UEA to take an MA on the Poetry CW strand. His poetry appears in Lung Jazz.
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