A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
poem enacts an unsettling move from commonplace to mythic. An uneasy, hopeless experience is embodied in a deviant sonnet with deviant rhymes. It ends on a sinister ambiguity. Who is the ghost?
Paul Muldoon, “Moy Sand and Gravel” (2002) (Muldoon 2002, 8)
Despite its business‐like, seemingly realia‐based title—Moy is a documented place, there is a River Blackwater, and it is certainly credible that the town has a gravel‐and‐sand business and an Olympic Cinema—this poem is an ellipsis, a puzzle, a riddle. The reader is invited to ask what the hidden narrative might be that connects a film, its stars, and two industrial washing towers. The text does not offer much help.
The language is neutral to informal (“smackety‐smack” [line 5]). The references are to popular entertainment of an unspecified period and to the local. Technically, the poem seems—and is—hugely disordered. It is made up of one long quasi‐sentence, which is not really a grammatically acceptable sentence, lacking as it does a subject and main verb. Who comes out of the cinema? Who is taken aback? When? Under what circumstances? Line length varies wildly—from 6 to 17 syllables. Lines have three to five main stresses and no clear metrical patterning.
But there are intricate symmetries. There are two six‐line stanzas. There is a complicated rhyme scheme (abacad ebeced), but it is symmetrical, and it has full rhymes. There is clear phonological patterning—for example, /t/ sounds in lines 1–3, /s/ sounds in lines 4–6, and the /t/, /w/, and /l/ sounds that run through lines 7–12. There is internal rhyme in line 10: “dredged / Blackwater's bed.” Alliteration occurs symmetrically: “smackety‐smack” (line 5) and “load by load” (line 11). Of course, there are two film stars and two cleaning towers.
Thus, the poem establishes a riddle and a disorder, but suggests a pattern behind the elisions. The reader is left with much freedom, but must try to make the connections (as in a traditional riddle poem). Perhaps it is thus. In the Olympic Cinema (surely a place for the gods, unconstrained by mortal issues), there is popular, romantic, glamorous love. Outside, there is the Blackwater and the attempt to make something clean. Surely, a sexual subject matter underlies the text. On the one hand, there is the cinema's illusion; on the other, there is the reality of an irredeemable defilement. But the poem is so—fruitfully—ambiguous that other readings can also convince.
Jackie Kay, From The Adoption Papers (1991) (Chapter 3 “The Waiting Lists”—“I Thought I'd Hid Everything”) (Kay 2007, 20–21)
This poem tells an anecdote clearly and captures a historical moment with accuracy and benignity. It is written in a relaxed free verse, with line length (from 11 to 3 syllables) and numbers of main stresses per line (from one to five) aiming to give the sense of a voice recounting an incident. One's sense of a voice talking naturally to someone is reinforced by a lack of metrical patterning (although three iambic trimeters—lines 13, 26, and 44—do occur). The three‐line stanzas do not serve any purpose other than to break up the narrative into smaller and more accessible units. One wonders, indeed, if the poem would lose anything substantial if it were written out as prose.
The voice is that of a woman who is being assessed by a child adoption agency for a baby that she desperately wants, although it transpires that she values a political honesty too. The woman is Scottish, and the language has several markers of standard spoken (and sometimes written) Scots—“hid” (line 1), “widnae wan” (line 2), “she's no be” (line 5), “willnae” (line 18), “times” (line 35). The reader is made privy to an account by a woman, a Scottish woman, delivered in an accessible and informal manner. The account is humorous. The woman conceals all (or almost all) the objects that will identify her as a communist. The copies of The Daily Worker and the Paul Robeson poster are hidden away, and so on. The historical and national moment—this must be sometime in the 1950s in Scotland—is captured through artifacts. The narrative ends happily. The assessor, a woman too, turns out to be for peace, and not averse to the speaker's aversion to nuclear weapons. A clear, accessible, and instructive story is told, as a prelude to the darker complexities of the rest of The Adoption Papers.
Carol Ann Duffy, “Adultery” (1993) (Duffy 2004, 116–117)
The title is unassuaged, unsoftened. It is impossible to break up the 11 stanzas into smaller thematic units. The poem is an emotional cascade uttered by a (probably) female speaker. Is it addressed to anyone? A “you” is mentioned throughout the poem, but it is better to recognize this as a piece of self‐address, rather than as address to another.
The poem seems utterly disordered. There is no rhyme. Line length is extremely variable—from 5 to 15 syllables. Numbers of main stresses per line are also variable—between three and five in most cases, although line 2 has two or three, and line 32 has seven. Indeed, it is difficult to see any regular pattern of stresses and feet in the whole poem. Single‐stress feet and four‐ or even five‐syllable feet occur frequently. For example, line 33—“in a marital bed, the tarnished spoon of your body”—appears to be patterned, thus: xx/xx/|x/x/|xx/x. This is a typical line scansion in the poem. Main stresses cluster—for example, in lines 4 and 5, in line 12, and in line 20. There is much enjambment—lines 2, 3, 6, 7, 15, 16, 25, 26, 29, 30, 41, 42, 43, and 44, and the radical interstanzaic enjambments of lines 8, 9, 12, 13, 20, and 21.
The abrasive and disjointed quality of the above is augmented by aspects of the language. Imperatives organize the text: “Wear” (line 1), “Suck” (line 13), “Do it do it do it” (line 17), “So write” (line 37). Fragments are rife: for example, “A sick, green tint” (line 4), “Sweet darkness / in the afternoon” (ll. 17–18), “Then, selfish autobiographical sleep…” (ll. 32–34), “And all / for the same thing twice” (ll. 41–42). Syntax breaks down: “up against a wall, faster” (l. 15). Punctuation goes by the board at times: “Do it do it do it” (l. 17). Questions do not have question marks—lines 28 and 43. Repetitions give a raw intensity to the text: “Do it do it do it” (l. 17), “all for the same thing twice. And all / for the same thing twice” (ll. 41–42), and “Fuck. Fuck” (l. 43).
Part of the text's disturbing quality lies in its conjunction of the literal and the figurative—simile/metaphor/metonymy. Indeed, this juxtaposition structures the poem. For example, in stanza 1, “dark glasses” (literal) join with looking “as though through a bruise” (simile). The gloves and hands of stanza 2 (literal) meet with the speaker's sense of being “naked under your clothes all day / slim with deceit” (metaphor) in stanza 3. The “telltale clock” (metonymy) morphs into the adulteress's excited face on a bed sheet (literal) in stanzas 5 and 6. And so on. This intense and powerful poem pushes constantly at the containing forces of verse, of language constraints, and of consistency (literal or nonliteral) to produce something very like a dramatic monolog of a speaker who is shaken and disturbed by the joys and terrors of her actions.
Mimi Khalvati, “Ghazal: The Servant” (2007) (Khalvati 2011, 21)
This poem announces its extraterritorial quality from the start. It is a ghazal, a Middle‐Eastern and Asian form (although it has been practiced in English). The text is addressed to “Ma'mad” (the informal Persian for Mohammed). The speaker refers to herself (such reference is traditional in a ghazal) as “Maryam.” The speaker is in some distress. There is a curfew. There is blood on the streets. The addressee is delayed. Children are missing. But this is a highly elliptical poem. The context and its outcome are unknown. This fragmentary quality contrasts with the text's extreme regularity. Each of the five stanzas has two lines followed by a refrain. Two eight‐syllable lines are followed by a four‐syllable one. Only lines 4, 10, and 14 deviate, and then only by one (possibly elided) syllable. Main stress placement is regular, and follows a 4‐4‐2 pattern. The refrain recurs. Rhymes are regular and predominantly full—“grows / flows / blows / throws / goes”—although there is deviancy in some rhymes—“rose” and “so,” and “flame” and “time.” Also