A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
hurt and hurtful poems, in which Harrison's grief swells into anger at the divisive effects of education and social class that had already separated him from his family. In fractured, nonconforming sonnets of 16 lines, he plays out a bitter drama between working‐class solidarity and self‐improvement, repeatedly sticking the boot into his own educated sensibility. The grim pun in “Book Ends” prepares us for a stark confrontation between learning and loss, with the image of book ends cleverly suggesting both separation and togetherness in the relationship between father and son. The poem is all the more affecting for its casual opening, imbued with the cadences of conversational speech: “Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead / we chew it slowly that last apple pie.” (I. 1–2) The syntactical inversion is rhythmically true, but it also cunningly allows the attention to focus on the familiarity of the domestic setting, eventually letting the opening word “Baked” explode in the final word “books”: “what's still between's / not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books” (I. 15–16). The uncomfortable contraction of “us” and “is” in the penultimate line is a telling instance of Harrison's insistent disruption of conventional lyric smoothness in his sonnets. Sometimes, a single isolated line of rough‐hewn iambic pentameter is just as effective: “Your life's all shattered into smithereens” (Harrison 1987, 126, I. 13). Harrison's distinctive achievement as an elegist is in combining an educated knowledge of convention that goes back to the classics with a working‐class struggle for articulacy. As he tries to devise an inscription for the mother's gravestone, he imagines his father quipping: “You're supposed to be the bright boy at description / and you can't tell them what the fuck to put!” (II. 11–12). In other ways, though, Harrison's dilemma is that of any other elegist: “I've got to find the right words on my own” (Harrison 1987, 127, II. 13).
Harrison's father is mourned in several elegiac sonnets, including “Marked with D,” which powerfully invokes the language of prayer (“Our Father”) to recall the daily bread of the baker, while (again with a grim pun) denying either resurrection or social advancement to “The baker's man that no‐one will see rise / and England made to feel like some dull oaf” (Harrison 1987, 155, ll. 13–14). In “Continuous,” father and son find common ground for once in a shared love of gangster films—“James Cagney was the one up both our streets.” (l. 1)—though that admission is prompted by a rueful comparison of the cremation service with a day out at the cinema (Harrison 1987, 143). The desecrated graves of Harrison's parents in a Leeds cemetery are the focal point of his controversial and confrontational v. (1985), which in the style of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) contemplates the changing social order and ends with the poet's own epitaph. Written in the aftermath of the Miners' Strike of 1984–1985, v. is one of the great elegiac works of the postwar years, despairingly pitting the depleted pastoral resources of apple and hawthorn against the violence of the times, and finding solace only in song. “A Kumquat for John Keats” (1981) deserves its place among the best of English bitter‐sweet self‐elegies, while “The Heartless Art” (1985) shows Harrison at his most skeptical and self‐reproachful, penning an elegy for a friend and neighbor in America and opportunistically storing up the name Seth to rhyme eventually with death.
Don Paterson, who has acknowledged Harrison's influence on his own hard‐hitting and wryly self‐questioning poems, is keenly aware that seeking a rhyme for death might seem heartlessly detached or dubiously self‐serving. In “Phantom,” his seven‐part elegy for Michael Donaghy, his willingness to confront these moral and esthetic scruples underwrites the risk he takes in composing a poetic conversation with the spirit of his friend and fellow poet. The closing section draws on Dante's encounters with the dead, but it also vividly recreates the voice of Donaghy and emulates his style.
I knew the game was up for me the day
I stood before my father's corpse and thought
If I can't get a poem out of this…
Did you think any differently with mine?
(Paterson 2012, 167, Section VII, ll. 47–50)
The interrogation here is skillfully done, with Paterson allowing his doubts about the legitimacy of elegy to surface through Donaghy's own misgivings about the genre in his poem “The Excuse.” The metapoetic dimension of “Phantom” does not diminish the emotional power of its intimate address. Paterson works toward the final confrontation with his dead friend in a speculative mode, delicately approaching it through the image of the skull in Francisco de Zurbarán's painting, “St Francis in Meditation” (1639), until the skull becomes his own.
Paul Farley, a close contemporary of Paterson and Donaghy, shows superbly well how a modern elegy might position itself between heaven and earth, reaching out for transcendence while fearing a fall to the ground. “Laws of Gravity” is an elegy for his father, a Liverpool window cleaner, in which the ladder functions as a metaphysical conceit. Like Harrison, Farley uses the language of his father's occupation to denote the struggles and aspirations of working‐class life, while also marking his distance from them. The son fondly imagines that the father had sublime visions at the top of the ladder and that his ledger book contained a kind of poetry, so that their “stories overlap” (Farley 1998, 8, l. 56), but a shared fear of failing and falling is what most obviously persists. Even as it seeks to elevate the father, the elegy senses the laws of gravity and notes how its own verse “descends the page” (l. 67). The poem's precarious balancing act is movingly summed up in the son's closing homage to his father: “I'll hold the foot for you” (l. 67). If the elegiac poetry of the past 50 or so years has sometimes questioned its own procedures and doubted its own consolatory powers, it has nevertheless sought to extend and modify, rather than simply reject, the well‐established conventions of the genre.
As the work of Douglas Dunn amply testifies, the contemporary elegy has also shown a remarkable trust in lyric forms, including the sonnet, and lyric devices of rhyme and meter. Dunn's Elegies (1985) is dedicated to his wife, the artist and curator, Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died in 1981. Like Thomas Hardy's “Poems of 1912–13,” these conjugal elegies recall the blissful days of early love and grieve over missed opportunities, but they do so without bitterness or blame. At the same time as acknowledging the painful emptiness of the present, they tenderly evoke the pleasures and privileges of the past. The opening poem, with its allusions to Katherine Mansfield's short story “Bliss,” establishes a voice that is candid and confiding, seeking consolation and continuity in memories of a shared artistic and literary life: “I flick / Through all our years, my love, and I love you still” (Dunn 1985, 9, ll. 11–12). The sonnets in Elegies keep alive a dedication to art and beauty in the face of death, though the decorative mobiles of aeroplanes and birds in “A Silver Air Force” and “Sandra's Mobile” are delicate and fragile. “The Kaleidoscope” rehearses familiar elegiac conventions, but these are modestly confined to ordinary domestic rituals and settings. There is a subdued urge for transcendence in the opening infinitive, “To climb these stairs” (l. 1), with the speaker offering himself consoling fictions that he “[m]ight find” (l. 5) his wife alive again. The sonnet risks sentimentality in closing with a rhyming couplet, but the rhythm is skillfully measured and controlled: “Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry / For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why” (ll. 13–14). For all its epistemological uncertainty, the poem cannot refrain from summoning a theological vocabulary of “prayer and hope” (l. 8). In many contemporary elegies, a residual religious imagery seems to reassert itself in the absence of any other sustaining scheme of belief, and here the speaker of the poem notes how domestic objects and situations are transformed by grief into a sacramental offering and communion: “My hands become a tray / Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin” (Dunn 1985, 20, ll. 11–12).
Vestiges of sacredness inform Andrew Motion's early elegies for his mother, who had a riding accident when he was 17 and died in hospital after remaining in a coma for nearly 10 years. “In the Attic” invests the mother's clothes with “patterns of memory // a green holiday, a red christening” (ll. 12–13), and the speaker kneels in that “upstairs” place, trying to relive the time she wore them. The attic dust takes