POETS I GO BACK TO

 

Beverley Bie Brahic

 

 

ÒA cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucketÓ

 

Reading—the bliss of childhood.  Was it the rainy climate?  ÒNo reading at the table!Ó mother pounced.  No reading under the bedclothes with a flashlight!  Reading and  eating, reading in bed: high on my list of guilty pleasures. 

Books behind the sofa at my grandparentsÕ place in Victoria, B.C.—ReaderÕs Digest Condensed Books—they subscribed—a half shelf of Dickens, red, with gold-stamped spines, more visibly displayed.  My earliest olfactory memory is a bouquet garni, three-parts mouldy boards, one-part dirt-spackled potatoes straight from the garden.  When I rummage in the stacks of libraries I get a whiff of it.

But poets?  Dad liked Robert Service, and Robert Frost, a love he handed along to me:

                   Whose woods these are I think I know.

                   His house is in the village though;

                   He will not see me stopping here

                   To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 

 

Mother, from her student days, kept a volume of Tennyson.  Edgar GuestÕs Collected Verse decorated the guest room.  It had the heft of a Gideon bible. .  .  and the same spidery inscription on the flyleaf as in the King James bible my grandmother gave me when I learned to read: 

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

 

ÒSounding brassÉtinkling cymbalÓ:  Wallace Stevens, with his extraordinary auditory imagination, would have kept these lines safe in a spare room of his mind.

Reading and writing:  my oldest dream might be to see my name on the cover of a book.  English teachers helped this dream alongÉwe held our breathe as BJ tromped across the front of the classroom drumming:

                   Foot-foot-foot-foot-sloggin' over Africa -

                   (Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)

                   There's no discharge in the war!

 

                                               ~

 

                   Only an old man harrowing clods

                   In a slow silent walkÉ

 

                                               ~

 

                   This darksome burn, horseback brown,

                   His rollrock high road roaring downÉ

 

~

 

       But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

                   Of hammered gold and gold enamelling. . .

 

 

and—who knows—maybe this is a later love—even

 

                   A snake came to my water-trough

                   On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heatÉ .

 

I still learn poems by heart, jogging around the Luxembourg Garden from Delacroix to the bust of Baudelaire, or indoor-biking.  They come in handy in the middle of the night; they keep my mind off other things.  Sometimes I get up, switch on the light, to find out where—Hughes, say— has broken the line:

            A pail lifted, still and brimming—mirror

            To tempt a first star to a tremor.

 

The poets I go back to squat my tables, sprawl on the floor.  When a tower threatens to collapse, I re-shelve, resolve to re-build—and I do—but the old ones are always there, shoring things up:

The still explosions on the rocks,

the lichens, grow

by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.

They have arranged

to meet the rings around the moon, although

within our memories they have not changed.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, of course. No matter how often I put her on the B shelf, sheÕs back on my table, tiles, carpet (these days we move between cities a lot).  I see her blue cover on the window ledge over the fold-out bed in the tiny redwood cabin we had in Inverness, California; I see her in Paris; I see her in the Vaucluse farmhouse, once a plaster factory with traces where the horses went round crushing gypsum, and which belonged to my husbandÕs great grandfather.  The same blue-covered edition: paper brittle, pages loose, flyleaf scribbled, coffee-drippedÉa couple of years ago I bought a new Elizabeth Bishop Collected.  Now I have one for here and one for there.  I also have a couple of individual volumes: Questions of Travel and a recent re-edition of Geography III.  Good for getting a sense of each separate collection and how it relates to her development as a poet; also of the subtle links between poems in a volume, something one doesnÕt see in a Selected, and which may be overwhelmed by sheer quantity in a Collected.  Milosz is particularly instructive:  time and again I have been through his book Provinces seeing how cunningly he moves from poem to poem.

Marianne MooreÕs another unwavering love.  IÕm fascinated by the disjunction between her sense of decorum, of repression—the tight-lipped persona—and the exhibitionist diction.  Moore might be the most original and least-appreciated of the modernists.  If she were a painting sheÕd be cubist, late Mondrian, jazzy, ÔBoogy-Woogy.Õ  A couple of years ago I bought a book which reproduces the original texts, as they appeared in little magazines, of her poems—and discovered what a difference it made when she re-lineated ÒThe Fish,Ó whose original staid quatrains metamorphosed into their now-familiar zigzags, as startling as a Braque still life.  It impressed me with the role of visuals in lineation.  I knew MallarmŽ, of course, but Moore was more approachable, more concrete. 

            Wherever I move, in my nomadic life, Zbigniew Herbert goes into my backpack. I am never not deeply moved by the sleight of word that allows him to instantly—mysteriously—touch the essential.  Herbert is a more political, more ironic, more public private poet than Bishop, but the two of them share elements of a vision of what poetry should be, with their na•ve-seeming speakers, self-deprecating senses of humour and deliberate—if deceptive—economy of means.

            AndÉand I write this in California, where I have access to a fine library and could only bring from home—which I think of as Paris—what fit in a suitcase.  Who—without speaking of living contemporaries—have I left out?  I go to the shelf in this house that belongs to a Spanish professor, whose books I double with mine, spines cantilevered—and there are Cavafy, Hughes, Plath, Su Tung-PoÉand Francis Ponge, the French celebrator of ÒthingsÓ—a washpot, cow dung, mud—whose poems I am translating.  One of my favourites is about how the rain

comes down at very different speeds.  In the centre, it is a fine discontinuous curtain (or mesh), falling implacably but relatively slowly, a drizzle, a never-ending languid precipitation, an intense dose of pure meteor. . . .

 

I imagine him sitting at the window, a book on his lap. . . .