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Being at a reading of selected poems by Anna Crowe, Zaffar Kunial & Clare Shaw. At Todmorden book Festival, The Todmorden Unitarian Church, Honey Hole 3^rd November 7.30 – 9.30 p.m.

I could not stay longer than Monday tonight at Todmorden despite other events long wished-for, so this was my last event. But what an important and rich final experience it turned out to be. Having attended lots of readings in book festivals, this was not what I expected.

These three poets could not have been more different from each other.

 Anna Crowe’s first set of readings were in part from her own recent volume, Not On The Side Of the Gods (2019 ARC publications, Todmorden) but in main from her translation of Catalan poets, including a wonderful poem on ‘Shitting’ by Pedro Serrano, that convinced me that we hadn’t yet tried enough analogies for the act of writing poetry in the English language.

A poetry that is human is necessarily perhaps excremental rather than transcendent, of and from the body rather than some unthinkable thing such as the spirit or soul. Her second set were entirely from her recent volume – perhaps because her publishers were present at the event. Publishers must be listened to, mustn’t they, especially independent houses like ARC. These poems reference other writers, painters and art generally but my favourite for the reason given above I think was Wasp-Byke (p.41) that I liked most: a poem that investigated the sensual ageing female body (see its final lines) through images of memorial architecture and its experiential relation to animal life as growing resistance to life. Resistance of the sense-driven human that animals sometimes can be used to represent.

When I put my ear to the wall

the sound burned like shock.

Not anaphylaxis’ torpor and chill

but rage, desire, dangerous life.

When I rapped with my knuckles

the clamour rose like fever

until I thought they’d come

bursting through lath and plaster

into the room. We had them poisoned.

The shock of that last sentence is Wordsworthian in its recognition that adult humans like children can be so antagonistic to life and perhaps love. There are lovely poems here that make thoughts about ageing accessible, thinkable and rich – not least the one of Crowe’s reflections on a painting in the Scottish National Gallery – Velasquez’ Old Woman Frying Eggs – that sings of how an onion-skin might look like a courtesan. How rich that reading.

Kunial is a very great and complex poet, whose grasp of life is continually moving in deep waters of allusion to past literature. These works are so deeply re-imagined however that they become the flesh of his thought. And this emerges more in their live reading not least in the poem he ended on, Prayer (Us p.5), which he prefaced by saying (rightly of course) that the word had the same root as the term ‘precarious’.[1] You need this to understand, if not to respond emotionally, to why the poem both quotes and interrogates a seventeenth century ‘metaphysical’ sonnet by George Herbert of the same name.[2] In Kunial, I think we need to know the poem, hinted at in, ‘if I continue the poem’, particularly Herbert’s line 8, which defines prayer as:

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

That precarious balance of ‘heav’n and earth’ in Herbert’s sonnet matches prayer with a balance between blasphemous threat and love addressed to God: the harsh and the soft (you’ll need to read following the link I previously gave to test your view of this). In continuing from the joy of his father in Zaffar’s own birth into this emotionally ambivalent territory Kunial (l.5) remembers his mother’s death. Memory he glosses as ‘keep in thought’ (l.7) in order to emphasise that one thing prayer does is to attempt to hold back effects in time of loss.

But Herbert’s certainty that prayer tests God with violence, in a ‘Christ-side-piercing-spear’, at the same time as seeking solace, never gets more than half-balanced by Kunial in his own poem. His poem ends precariously in denial rather than belief in knowledge of a communion having happened. Herbert’s ‘Church-bells beyond the stars heard’ (Herbert’s l.13) are referenced in the critical term Kunial uses to substitute for rhyme, ‘chime’, positively (l.7) but are nullified in the use of the homonym ‘rings’ to mean both bells sounding and the marriage-jewellery removed from his mother’s finger (l.12).

This is a very difficult poetry then but one which in hearing is still extremely moving with or without these background speculations and critical allusions. He does with another seventeenth-century metaphysical, John Donne, much as he does with Herbert in another poem he read that night, Spider Trees, Pakistan (p.14 Us).

In the Unitarian Church Kunial’s gentle voice manages almost nerve-rending emotion with some solace for his hearers. We should be in no doubt however that this poet lives in language, sometimes that of a subjectively well internalised past literature, which it enriches as it cites. One way he does this is by subjecting the past to the doctrine of binary (at least binary I should say) ambivalence – in a permanent sense of being neither one or the other or neither half of a ghostly whole.

When Kunial spoke about this as the origin of his use of the Cricket term ‘Six’ as a half-score, a mid-term of a dozen, half-way though half a day’s hours, and poems about the state of the half-cast art – unfinished things. This is an art of a well-wrought urn, (I suspect his early education in English was much like mine) only half of Cleanth Brookes’ ‘well-wrought urn’ but in sound it also recalls the ideological self-abuse of knowing himself, when a boy in the Midlands, as the ‘half-caste’ (the spelling being important here) son of an English mother and Pakistani father. This moved me intensely as he read The Lyric Eye (p.28 Us), with an epigram from his beloved Bottom who sees things ‘with a parted eye’ and which concerns how Zaffar has compared himself to Shakespeare in a portrait covered by reflecting glass.

Scanned my own face, on and off, in the glass.

A cloud eclipsed. Vaguely before, or behind

You. Half cast, at a loss.

                                           Even the gloss

…..

What mastery here of rhyme, rhythm and metre but also what a paralysing half-sense that all comparisons get tainted by ideologies of which diminish one half of the comparison as in-genuine, impure, especially when I, as a poet, ‘lapse’ into borrowing ‘the line between your’ (in this case Shakespeare’s) ‘lips’. The metalanguage of poetry make this a poem into one about feeling oneself to be a belated poet (singing still what is already sung) but it also points to racist theories that complicate theories of belatedness. Nevertheless, affirmatively the ‘half-caste’ (sic.) poet’s ability to half cast himself into Shakespeare’s image also validates and insists on his own experience of racism (even that he internalised), an effect of old cultures on real experiences that in raising the profile of a white Western Shakespeare had marginalised the rich cultures it ‘othered’ and drained for its own purposes.

One could say so much, because of the immersion of this poet in ‘English’ language as itself a deep and ambivalent experience, one I first noticed a few months ago in a hidden but deeply moving allusion to Rupert Brook’s definition of Englishness[3] in Kunial’s ‘cricket’ poem The Opener (p.7 Six):

a gaping field, some foreign

corner of my eye clocking

the far finger raised to the sky

and pointing out …

my black curly hair

almost like my master’s.

Even the word ‘like’ here carries a history of racial contention in psychocultural history.

The final readings in both halves of the programme were from Clare Shaw. I had read only a little of her work before but enough for me to understand, in her self-introduction, the sentence: ‘and am now from Hebden Bridge (pause): Don’t judge me!’. Shaw electrifies her audience as a reader and it is hard to over-state the joy that rippled through, as far as I could see and feel, the whole audience in her reading of poems about the Calder Valley floods of last year. Except, of course, they weren’t about just floods but about submersive experience in all its complexity. About a complex ambivalence so deep it was not just alive, but there too, in ambiguities of language. Because even the language of statement carries the threat of an opposite: the double-bind in Ronald Laing of infinite love and infinite threat, ultimate security and ultimate vulnerability:

My mother was an angel, my mother was fallen.

She suffered the children and fed them on nothing.

my mother was bread

and my mother was broken

And she was the ark. She was darkness. The ocean. (Flood p. 49)

The allusiveness of this lies (especially to that rich concept of the communal in ‘breaking bread’) in the ambiguity of huge cultural myths – of the mother as ocean for instance in Jung (although it’s also in George MacDonald’s Phantastes), of the fear of that which ought to feed you but does not – of a deeply riven religious inheritance (riven when it claims even to be sole, unitary and simple). If an ark saves you, it only does so because it presupposes the ocean that might drown you. These huge effects where bodily, mental, and social breakdown and recovery mirror each other are brilliantly handled in the writing. In the voice though, they are many, many more effects. They are the pain and sometimes the pleasure of life itself. The poem Flood as Redemption (Flood p.75) has so much to wonder at if read or heard in Clare’s wonderful voice: despair and hope, over-simple and complex desires for security, the redemption of pain and collapse:

In what you thought

would hold forever:

earth gone to water,

trees turned to river;

the shifting of boulder,

the bringing together of neighbour and stranger

in the swim of it.

In what it did

To our town.

In knowing it will come again

And in singing it.

Writing it down.

As a poem about what poetry does it would suffice alone, about an idea of secularised redemption it passes all compare. The complexity here is different to that of other poets that night and valuable because of that. I felt shattered by its emotions. So did my husband and not just because Clare Shaw is electric as a singer of songs about being a lesbian and being the mother of a boy but because life flowed between us – maybe everybody in that monumental church edifice, even as the cold of the evening set into our toes. The word ‘swim’ has never before in my experience carried the weight it does here.

This poem she also read and it feels so wonderful – a hymn to Hebden Bridge and diversity (my own people/My kin):

So this was a feel of an evening that fed mind and senses and made them interact most forcefully. Todmorden – thank you. I have never been to a poetry reading so fulfilling in and of itself. To the poets – you know your worth. You write like it matters because it does. Thank you, nevertheless.

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[1]Doubters should refer to:  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/precarious

[2] See it on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44371/prayer-i.

[3] If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England. … (The Soldier)