Poetry (Sheepishly) Returns

A combination of factors, most notably my own lassitude, caused the great poetry project to fall into abeyance in recent times. My reading continued during this fallow period, but was limited to work by poets I’d already written about here – the lesson being to only buy slim volumes, so that I don’t spend weeks on end waiting to finish a poet, before I can move on to write about a new one.

Stung by guilt, I popped into the bookshop (Hodges Figgis has the best poetry section, in my own opinion) and picked up a few volumes. On previous searches I was unable to find a Selected Poems by Langston Hughes (about whom I wrote here) so upon sighting one, I fell eagerly upon it. I remembered liking John Donne a lot in school, so I figured that a collection priced a mere €2.90 was too good an offer to refuse. Finally, Id been meaning to look into the work of Robert Lowell for some time, so this collection, bound in a classy-looking pamphlet style made up the trio.

All are, in their own very different ways, rewarding purchases. Hughes’s work sometimes veers toward the lightweight, but has a constantly present musical sense, that makes reading it an almost physical pleasure. Donne is elegant, witty and polished and will probably be subject of a post here, as soon as I can decide on an individual poem.

That leaves Lowell, a New England aristocrat who, by the time he reached his forties, would more or less go mad every January, like clockwork. Confined to mental institutions for the spring, he would return home in summer and write the poems that would see him described as a pioneer of confessional poetry. This is an unfair label; “confessional poetry??? is the kind of thing that bad singer-songwriters deal in. It is all confession, precious little poetry. Lowell’s subject matter was personal but he was a poet above all; his work is literature, not therapy.

Here’s Home After Three Months Away, from his ground-breaking collection “Life Studies??? of 1959.

Gone now the baby’s nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze–
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.

Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair–
they tell me nothing’s gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child’s play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush. . . .
Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.

Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin’s length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year’s snowballing enervation.

I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

The relief, the sense of back-to-normal in the earlier part of the poem is such that Lowell’s return is almost a triumphant one. A mere three months is nothing, “child’s play??? and though Lowell may be older now than before, at forty-one he is still young. The nurse is banished, no longer required, without even a pause to correct her getting his name wrong. He returns immediately to life as a father. Things will be alright. And yet, as in film where the camera leaves an upstairs room and pans down to the ground outside, the poem draws our eye to the small garden outside. The ground is tended to, it’s size described as a “coffin’s length???, the first suggestion that there is not enough life left for the poet to be able to lose three months at a time. The tulips, once imported as bulbs of pure potential, are spent. Of expensive varieties, they, like Lowell were “pedigreed???. Now they can be weeded away; having endured the punishment of another winter, they will not live to see the next one. Lowell’s relaxed optimism is suddenly no more. His gaze leaves the tulips and returns to himself, cured, yet lifeless.

In fact, Lowell lived another two decades, and produced more of his finest work after “Life Studies???. He never ceased to suffer from manic-depression, though, and his best work examined the experience in a voice that, as in this poem, is casual, yet frank, powerful and often devastating.