D. A. Prince reviews Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet, 2023)
Tristram Fane Saunders conjures poems out of layers of meaning and alternative meaning with a real sense of enjoyment in the way words can play together. It starts here, in the title. This could refer to travel, a journey or choice of route; equally, it might be a pause in an argument – that point where you assess what’s been said up to now. Or it could be that drawing of breath before a leap into the future, whatever that might be. In this title poem – the one that’s significantly placed (he’s also a wizard at ordering his poems) at the end of the first section – it manages to be all of these, as well as a love poem.
Let’s tether our hot, sore hearts
to the post. Tie up our lungs,
leave our breath to catch itself.
Somewhere down the hill – in light-touch equine puns – are “the soft bronchi / that buck, still hoarse from shouting”. At the top of the hill, after a pause that is both surreally out-of-body and tenderly physical, two people return to “pick up right where we left off.”
Where is it, this place they’ve escaped from all too briefly? The first section – the collection is in three parts – centres on the dystopia of modern living, taking two lines from Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ as its epigraph: “The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever, / But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.” I share that ear-worm: it’s a bleak place. But – and this is where the ordering of poems is so important – the epigraph is preceded by a poem that roots poet and reader somewhere else: ‘Home,’ with its essential comma, a drawing of breath even in its title, that leads into:
like pigeons do. We follow
the pull of sockets deep
in our thick, wet heads,
our sodden radar: warm,
warmer, colder, warm.
This homing instinct, the small domesticity of a pigeon (well, it’s not an eagle, is it?), the companionship (it’s “we”, not “I”), the half-recognised trail of “breadcrumb, breadcrumbs, dust”, the final “Tug, tug.” that we trust in: it’s protection, safety. Familiar words, before poems begin to look into that other reality: living in the 2020s.
Where do we live? It’s not simply a locality (London, in this case) but also the web of ideas, images, wordplay and echoes that stretch us and surround us. For Tristram Fane Saunders it’s the mental landscape of film, paintings, music, poets (of course), myth, faux folk song: not discrete subjects but part of the charivari we live in. I’ve lifted “charivari” from ‘The Somnambulist’, where its riot of references include The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, J.H. Prynne, The Joker and Edward Scissorhands, culminating in the “rough music” surrounding an attempt to connect with one other person.
Tristram Fane Saunders conjures poems out of layers of meaning and alternative meaning with a real sense of enjoyment in the way words can play together
It’s a challenging opening, as is the following poem, ‘The Oneiroscopist — Edith Rimmington, Dulwich Picture Gallery’. Rimmington was a member of the British Surrealist Group and it’s worth finding this painting online, not just for its intriguing presence but also to pick up the links in this poem. I have a basic rule when reading poetry: if the poem doesn’t engage with me as a poem (i.e. rhythmically, verbally, emotionally, a crafted thing) I don’t spend time online looking up related references. A poem isn’t a collection of facts or Wikipedia with line breaks, nor a set of tricksy verbal games, nor a sequence of cryptic crossword clues: AI could do all that. It’s the human / personal that draws me in; in this poem it’s the companion, the “you”, and the developing relationship that gives warmth and wit.
I like this one, you said. You like the dark,
and birds in galleries, and bones in galleys.
British Surrealism, a Noah’s Ark
of you-like animals. I kept a tally.
Rhyme doesn’t drive the poem but sits, lightly and playfully, as though supporting this growing attraction, building up the “tally”. Who doesn’t build up lists like this? And, for the sake of the emotional register of the collection, I am grateful: it is a counterweight to the poems showing loneliness, late night phone calls, insomnia, how we try to support each other. “At 28 I have more pets than friends / and do not give them names” (‘Silkworms’); “my blue-grey hesitations, the charcoal of your tssks” (‘Weather about the talking’ – yes, it’s a good title). Then there’s ‘Lullaby’:
No one sleeps. Matt living with his parents
again and two days sober, almost. Jackie
taking pictures of the moon
that wakes above the thumbtacked desk
she rests her cheeks on when
she inks her picture books
Surviving, getting through: while ‘Lullaby’ shows the monotony and threadbare texture of daily life, ‘Health — Botanic Gardens, Ventnor’ delves deeper and at length, spiralling in 50 lines via a form that has something of the sestina and something of the canzone in its repeated words, teasing the reader.
What is that? Something honeylike that makes me lean in closer,
a tag in Latin dangling from its next below the bloom.
Every flower has a stamen — do I mean a stigma? —
at its heart to lure the needle-bearing honeybee
doing its rounds from bed to bed, fretting like a doctor,
looping its indecipherable cursive in the air.
The opening question simultaneously refers back to the title (what, after all, is health?) and forward, to the plant; there’s an acknowledged confusion over “stamen” and “stigma”, and a doctor conjured from the bee’s movements. “All my friends are sick. I love them and I’m scared. / Z is sick. I mean, she’s ill. An ill wind boding ill.” The garden surrounds a former sanatorium; “stigma” shape-changes into “stigmata” in this “shelter we’ve made from words.” “Water” (one of the repeated words) is both part of healing and also part of the illness (tuberculosis) haunting the place. Haunting? – yes, ghosts appear in the second section, sometimes in houses, sometimes in the cinema.
There’s a risk in dividing a collection into three sections: it can look as though three pamphlets have been bound together, each a discrete entity. Fortunately that’s not the case here, and the second section prefaced by a quotation from Coleridge (‘Limbo’) continues to explore the contemporary landscape by way of poets, film, music, folk art. It’s an unsettling place from the start. ‘The Squat Pen’
rests in the visitor’s centre.
Or, rather, does not rest
but, surreally, dangles
up in a plastiglass
pillar, moisture-, odour-
and temperature-controlled
above a digital montage
already showing its age:
green shapes swirl closed, then open.
Yes, it’s that pen: Seamus Heaney’s, now in a museum, trapped forever in “the pen’s vivarium”. It’s a poem about poems and writing them: truth, silence, honesty, air, how his own words are trying to escape from “this airless alcove.” The trapped pen is an uncomfortable image – and you can see it online if the poem isn’t disturbing enough.
There’s also a clever set of faux-translations of lyrics from Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Old Scots, allegedly by A.E. Pious, prefaced by an earnest faux-essay by “Margo Pil, University of Y—“. Tristram Fane Saunders has done something similar before in two pamphlets, Woodsong (Smith|Doorstop, 2019) and The Rake (The Poetry Business, 2022). I’d wondered if this set, too, might be better placed in a pamphlet (light verse is notoriously difficult to integrate into a collection) but I was won over: a dash of witty pastiche reminds us we need poetry that isn’t deadly serious.
The collection in one word? Exhilarating
Epigraphs lacking a citation are intriguing; tracking down the quotations online makes the reader participate. The epigraph from MacNeice was easy; it’s well-known. The second and third epigraphs, however, share a common feature: neither is included in the poet’s Collected Poems. The final epigraph – satisfyingly – completes the arc from doom through Limbo to “Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise …” and comes from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Keaton’, published in the New Yorker in 2005, twenty-six years after her death. I never knew she was a Buster Keaton fan: did you? It’s proving harder to hold my attention solely to the poems on the page because they reach out, spin away into ideas, fantasy, hidden gems like this, and all the stuff of imagination.
That’s how this collection works, playing imaginatively with ideas, words, literature, even etymology, while dancing with serious subjects. A sequence about the concrete artefacts created in 1854 for that must-see destination, the Crystal Palace – sphinx, a massive head, dinosaur etc – plays with other poets and classical links: Oedipus, Pandora, ’Ozymandias’, ‘The Tyger’, while reminding us slyly how the three roads of Thebes are “trivia”. And how good this poem’s trivia are: meet Clifford, Big Red Dog; explore the cod Latin “Lorem Ipsum Dolor Est”. (How did we cope before Google?) A solitary lunch, sitting on the sphinx (“Astraddle or astride”) ends:
The thermos spirals open with a sigh.
Pandora’s dog-red lunchbox will be empty,
the lone and level sandwich gone. Still, why
not give the box a shake. It sounds like hope.
So many shareable lines to quote. Towards the end this collection starts to look back, to the opening ‘Home,’ with a renewed sense of connection. In ‘Under — after Jonas Hanway’ the poem opens ostensibly about Hanway, the first man to use an umbrella (women, being practical, used them much earlier) before widening out to those with no means of shelter, then on to Lucia, the dedicatee of this collection.
But pity more the wretched few caught short
with only, say, a newspaper for shelter,
or, worst of all a single sheet of paper —
what good’s a page against the whole damn world?
But if you’re ever under, really under,
nothing between you and the falling sky,
beloved, take this poem. Hold it up
like you hold me, that it may lead you,
however far it’s able,
homeward, dry.
It’s difficult to sum up briefly what this collection is ‘about’ but this poem comes close: surviving, getting through, all the ways of coping. What good’s a page against the whole damn world? – literally, not much, but metaphorically the words on the page, then the words on the next page, will – like this collection – help. When the words, lines, poems are as good as this they help a lot. The collection in one word? Exhilarating.
D.A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. A further collection, The Bigger Picture, also from HappenStance, has just been published.
