Stephen Payne reviews last poems? by Brendan Cleary (Tall Lighthouse Press, 2023)
Just seventeen. Each poem in this short collection could stand on its own, but they certainly belong together; they are all extremely similar, both in form and concern. Formally, they are all presented in short lines of between two and six words, with no stanza breaks and no punctuation, capitals only for proper names and ‘I’. Every poem, bar one, is addressed to a ‘you’ (‘you’ being a lost lover, one gathers, though the lover seems more present in some, and more distant in others). Every poem says: Look at these things, and listen to what they make me think, what they make me remember about us. If these are elegies (to a person or a relationship or both), they are also love letters, all except the seventeenth, the only one without an addressee. The collection’s questioning title might make the reader wonder whether these are last poems to, rather than last poems by.
In some ways this is clear, even plain work. The vocabulary and rhythms are those of speech and there are few figures or flourishes. But the absence of punctuation and the compressed syntax introduce occasional ambiguities, and some mystery, so that the emotional weight is revealed gradually and subtly (at least, it was to me). Here is how the collection begins:
observing trees
far away
from us tousling
on the mattress
the beautiful look
in your eyes of shock
as the mornings end
so now I’m here
observing trees
Is the title also the beginning of the first sentence? If not, what else but the trees can be ‘far away’? Why is ‘mornings’ plural? Why the ‘so’, in a structure that doesn’t seem to express cause and effect? My own answers, for what they’re worth, are these: it’s not (necessarily) a run-on title; what is far away is the author – far from his memory of the tousling, the look of his lover waking late on many mornings, and remembering also that he would watch the light in the trees while the lover slept, and so now choosing to observe them once more.
… the emotional weight of the poems is revealed gradually and subtly
I hope my reading does the piece justice, but I must admit that my analytic approach seems out of kilter with the voice of the poems and is probably not what Cleary most hopes for from his readers. I’m reading as a reviewer, of course, and I can’t help myself. Preferred, I suspect, is to let the meaning, especially the emotion, cumulate across fragments; seep.
Here is the start of the second poem:
viaduct
lest I dream it
lest it is a dream
you do say it
‘I’m a force of nature’
crossing the viaduct
London Road below
windows & fire escapes
on our way to my bench
in Southover Gardens
Again a strange, sad blend, I think, of present and past. “Our way” to “my bench”. The poet continues with a few sensory impressions at the bench, before he finishes:
this fateful morning
crossing the viaduct
This lends ominous weight to the earlier quoted speech, now perceived as over-optimistic.
It’s worth asking what is lost, and more especially what is gained through the chosen poetic form. Skilled reading is surely slightly disrupted by the lack of punctuation, which insists that the reader attend more to the surface of each phrase, each fragment. We learn from the texts that Cleary is a jazz-lover, and this seems to me a jazz-like effect, as suggested, indeed, in the poem ‘jazz’: “at times free form / discordant notes / fractured sax / your face falling”.
Skilled reading is surely slightly disrupted by the lack of punctuation, which insists that the reader attend more to the surface of each phrase, each fragment
The brief appearances of other people, animals and things, like the fire escapes and bench, become, perhaps, more readily symbolic just because they are a little less readily integrated in the scene or narrative. For example:
“across on the avenue / where I think the owl is / that Siamese cat / is appearing again / sorta high magic” (‘that cat’)
“the waitress outside / waiting for the sun / setting up our table” (‘this garden’)
“pastries you fancy / creamy with luxury” (‘cakes again’)
The final poem, ‘trial run’, tells of the poet’s attempt to console himself by listening to a particular recording of Chet Baker’s ‘Trav’lin Light’: “my crow agrees […] it has to be / that version”. The Acknowledgements tell us that the trumpet number in question is on Baker’s album ‘Embraceable You’, which is as if the poetry has spread to the back matter: the album title would have worked very well for this pamphlet.
Stephen Payne is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath, where until September 2020 he taught and conducted research in Cognitive Science. He lives in Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan. His first full-length poetry collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published by HappenStance Press in 2015 and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. His second collection, The Windmill Proof (2021), and a pamphlet The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments (2022) were published by the same press.
