Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Living in the Real WorldWest Strand Visions by James Simmons; Living Room by Andrew Waterman; High Island byRichard MurphyReview by: Robert JohnstoneFortnight, No. 96 (Jan. 10, 1975), p. 15Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25545295 .

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FRIDAY 10th JANUARY 1975/15_

millenium. Poor Sister Winifrede,

leaving hush money in the lavatories of Self ridges, will need

a whole chapter of exegesis to

herself. But if you're going to read this book, it's not fair to

give away all the secrets. The

problem is, what is left at the end

of it all? It's a bright, ingenious idea that Muriel Spark mercifully knows how to handle. It is often funny, but more often not. It is

often elegant, but often that

elegance is spurious. And the

usual Sparkian shying away

from moral engagement domi

nates the book: everyone is an

insignificant pawn in her own

game. She makes it quite clear

that she despises the lot of them. And she manages, in the last

pages of the novel, to slip between the holes of the net she casts. It's a clever performance. But it is also an ominous sign when a novel has a long list of acknowledgements at the front

for quotations from copyright poems?and they're the best

bits.

Living in the Real World

Robert Johnstone

I James Simmons

j West Strand Visions (Blackstaff Press, ?1.50)

I Andrew Waterman

| Living Room

| (The Marvell Press, ?1.40) Richard Murphy I High Island

(Faber & Faber, ?1.25)

| There are eighteen poems and

I the lyrics of twenty-three songs in James Simmons' latest book.

The songs may go down well

with a few pints in a bar, but only a couple are interesting on the

I page. Claudy is the best, with

| the virtues of a good folk song: I it's simple, honest, and records i an important event in the

! language of the people amongst l whom it occurred. I think I enjoy

the songs more having heard

them. Why couldn't Blackstaff i have given the tunes? ! Simmons is always aware of

his audience, but in the songs he

seems assured of the effect he ! will have. In the poems I sense a

constant determination to be as

simple and comprehensible as in

the songs, even though the

poems may be more complex and ambitious. This surely is

I what poetry should try to do,

! and it lays the foundation for some of the best poems I've read

for a long time?anywhere. ' They rework familiar stories,

| worrying at the gap between the

\ encumbrances of necessity and

i our dreams and plans of simple, ! uncompromised happiness.

Thus Robinson Crusoe leaves I Man Friday on the island, but

having nightmares that he has

followed him and is making his new, civilised life impossible.

Ego and id, perhaps. On Circe's

| Is/and is a totally convincing I portrayal of Odysseus' conflict

ing emotions towards the

enchantress on one hand, and

| his responsibility to his wife, his | men and his own self-respect on

the other. The Younger Son inadvertently commits himself to

the sleeping princess and

thereby loses his chance of

further heroic adventures. This is

the third stanza:

His life? It had been stumbling in her direction.. And what

was she but beautiful? Yearning for beauty had been his youthful nature, his dream; but now, to kiss, to create a life and offer years of variable bliss. what people do in marriage? The boy was kneeling in tears.

In a desperately uneven book, the best pieces have an honesty and love for the ordinary world

Simmons addresses in his songs

which, while they may lead to contradictions, also distinguish the achievement of someone

who increasingly looks like a

major poet. + + + + + +

Andrew Waterman's first book is a Poetry Book Society choice. He's a Londoner and, like

Simmons, lectures at NUU.

Much of his work is documen

tary, full of novelistic detail about rooms, work, city land

scapes. I frequently felt that there wasn't much time for such

detail: I prefer intense poems

dealing with essentials. But the

sequence of eleven Railway Poems shows the strength of his

technique. Their fidelity to things, incident, and dialect give the authentic feel of men at

work, a very worthwhile subject. Short symbolic lyrics like Only

Connect and Solstice show the

influence of Robert Frost, on

whom Waterman lectures, but

they're not vivid enough to

compensate for their lack of

anchoring in a recognisable experience.

At times Waterman's imagina tion is rather prosaic. It's

diminishing to say, for example, in Man Cycling Home in

Donegal, "He has no ideas '. He can have a Larkinesque despair about Larkin's flashes of brilliant

imagery. And the unfortunate

long poem, Derry Images

1968-71, trots out every hoary relic I've ever heard about that

city. I found this offensive: It may be an accurate log of a

visitor's thoughts, but I hope to

find in poetry self-criticism in the

thought as well as in the form.

However, I'm happy to say that as I read on he got better and better. Re-Entry, Waterman

& Co. and the excellent Not That One Can Go Back show a man

taking stock of his life with

dangerous and moving honesty. He seems at his best in deeply personal poems which try to

make some overall evaluation

and carefully select the images to do so. Here are the first

stanzas of Living Room:

Once, a barroom, a sill to lean from. Easy, when

spring took the streets with a simmer

of blossom androof guttersparrows wrung from themselves ever fresher

song, to pack up and go.

Now seasonable lusts,

regrets, again infest the blood like viruses, I keep indoors, although out on the common, grass bursts through dumped chairs,

stoves, cars. + + + + +" +

High Island is the most consis tent of the three. Murphy deals

with the natural world, but

mostly with people, depicting confrontation between the

poet's sensibility and the puzzles of otherness?nature and ani

mals, the strange cultures of

Connemara peasants and tink

ers, and Celanese.

Song for a Corncrake and

Stormpetrel show Murphy's technical mastery. Their delicate

lyricism evokes both his love for his subjects and the special

qualities of the subjects them

selves. Here's the second stanza

of Stormpetrel: Guest of the storm

Who sweeps you off to party after party,

You flit in a sooty grey coat

Smelling of must Barefoot across a sea of

broken glass. These are poems of the imagi

nation reaching out towards the

mysterious and the beautiful.

But they aren't airy-fairy, for

Murphy faces the darker implica tions. If there are intimations of

unity with the world and of

magic, there's also the aware

ness of violence, sexual "per

version", death's horror, and

meanness of spirit due not only to man's failure of imagination but also to nature itself. Seals at

High Island begins like this: The calamity of seals begins

with jaws. Born in caverns that

reverberate With endless malice of the

sea's tongue Clacking on shingle, they learn

to bark back In fear and sadness and

celebration. The ocean's mouth opens

forty feet wide And closes on a morsel of

their rock.

Murphy's poems don't give the answers (with certain

exceptions), but they're affirma

tive because their sense of

wonder leads us outwards to

infinite possibilities. I suspect some people might find a couple too slight to really set the

darkness echoing. There's cer

tainly such a danger in this sort

of poetry, but Murphy's so firmly rooted in the tangible that he

doesn't succumb.

I heartily recommend all three books.

The Truth About Marriage j James Simmons

Philip Roth My Life As A Man

(Jonathan Cape, ?2.95)

I have only read two of Roth's

books, Goodbye Columbus and

Portnoy's Complaint. He has written a lot of thick books. I like these funny, clever Jewish

writers. I wish I was Jewish.

Bernard Malamud is my favourite

living American writer. I've read all his.

This one is abut an unhappy,

marriage. A Jewish writer being crucified by a mad woman. The

serious and comic way into the

copious material is that seriously studying literature gives you inflated notions about "the

meaning" of life, and the need for

complexity._

We find the hero "going down on" his wife: "I took no pleasure in the act. she

gave no sfgn that she did; but at least I had done what I had

been terrified of doincL. . .

as though?it was tempting

jto out it this way?that

wouldredeem us both." As though that would re

deem us both. A notion as inflated as it was shallow,

growing, I am certain, out of 'serious literary studies'.

Where Emma Bovary had read too many romances of her period, it would seem that I had read too much of the criticism of mine.

Funny and clever and even true; but somehow he hasn't found

the way of doing that would make

it all clear as a myth, needing no

explanation as he did in Portnoy.

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