When I read Laurie Smith’s review of David Constantine’s Collected Poems in Magma 31, I was startled by the fact that the poet he described seemed to bear so little relation to the poet I had read. Who was this poet of feelings ‘scarcely related to the real world’ who ‘does not write at all in the humanist tradition’ and what had he to do with the David Constantine who seemed to me one of the most obviously sensitive and humane of our contemporaries?
But at the time I had not read the Collected Poems. Having done so, I see there is something to be said for both perspectives. Several of the poems Laurie Smith thought weak are so, and the class of poems he particularly criticises, those based on myth or dream, are the most variable. But the review misinterprets or bypasses most of Constantine’s best work. The effect is as if another fine but variable poet, Wordsworth say or Byron, was judged by their weaker efforts alone.
The review seems to go wrong at the start. It begins with poems from the beginning of the book which it says describe people ‘with decided lack of sympathy,’ including Misshapen Women, which it quotes, about women coming out of a factory and which ‘expresses contempt for working women, chiefly because of their sexual unattractiveness’. Is that a fair reading of the poem? The poem is surely a bitter spontaneous response to the sight of what poverty and deprivation can do to people. Similarly the other poems are written in bitter irony not disparagement, as the one on Dennis Jubb he quotes,
who lived to be forty a good age
and got his death by burning on the front page.
Sometimes the sympathy is explicit, as in Shoes in the Charity Shop, not mentioned in the review.
Having got up a head of steam over this, the review powers on with a propensity to think the worst. The Quick and the Dead at Pompeii mentions the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which must be ‘a tendency to reduce human atrocity to mere image’ whereas its purpose is simply to bring home the shared unexpectedness of these events. In Lamb, crows by a newborn lamb are ‘as inclined to mercy as a Kray or a Mengele’ which implies that ‘violence is as natural among people, and as little worthy of comment, as the violence in nature.’ But it is surely obvious that violence is all too natural among people, and the poet cannot consider this unworthy of comment as he is in effect commenting on it. In any case the poem is not a statement about how humans see the crows; it is an attempt to imagine how the lamb would see them if it was capable of knowing what was happening. And so on.
The review is further fuelled by admonitory views as to what poetry ought to be about. Its mistaken view of the early poems implies that poetry ought not to be disparaging of people, though plenty of good poetry is – think of satire for example. Then Constantine ‘shows no interest in’ the political role of poetry, which is not so if one thinks of the human implications of his poems rather than explicit politics – is poetry only interested in the political if it carries a banner and shouts a slogan? The symbolic or dream poems ‘make no effort to inhabit the world of actuality’ – as if our emotional and internal worlds were somehow less real than the world outside us, and as if people wrote in terms of dream and symbol as an escape from reality rather than in a attempt to articulate realities that go beyond external facts. In a description of a gathering round a coffin ‘there is scant reference to the dead person’ – why should there be? The point of the poem is the human reaction to a death, not the particular character of the deceased.
The reviewer sees as overwritten what others will see as audacious, often with a touch of humour – the cervix of Poppy, the clitoris of Pleasure, the nipple of Cycladic Idols.
The collection also has great range of successful forms,an aspect not mentioned in the review – iambics, free verse, ballads, quatrains, triplets and so on.
But it is chiefly by omission that the review gives such a one-sided impression. It is true that two fine poems are praised, and others seen as of a ‘sustained brilliance’. Yet the general tone is negative, finding that ‘few poems deal centrally with other people…in the present world…who are determinably separate from the poet’. By contrast, take just a few poems from one of the collections here included, Something for the Ghosts – what of the sensitivity and emotional range of the relationships in wonderful poems like Nude (lovers), Dear Reader (mother and child), The House (how the experience of loving repeats itself between different pairs of lovers), Sleepwalker (sensing from afar), Man and Wife (wife in a house and husband wandering the night outside) Ashes and Roses (poet with a bereaved woman) and so on. What of the cast of other people in Monologue, Legger, The Senator, The Portleven Man, besides those in the relationships?
Such poems seem to meet the reviewer’s requirements by way of topics – so do they fail them in their treatment of the topics? Possibly so. One gets the impression that the reviewer, with his focus on external facts, hankers after solid and external descriptions of other people, akin to how they are shown by someone like Trollope. But this would be a restrictive requirement. Constantine is more glancing, less omniscient. He writes of the particular moment; character is shown as the moment evokes it and the people share the moment – more like Chekhov perhaps.
Also, Constantine writes successfully about other topics altogether. For example, he moves easily between the present and the past and their inhabitants. When most contemporary poetry is all too confined to ‘people in the present world’, how refreshing to read Dramatis Personae with its vivid and lively monologues by the Chorus, Servant and Messenger of Greek drama, or Mosaics in the Imperial Palace, where the emperor Maximianus stands for all potentates, a thoroughly political poem. Legger is an astonishing metaphor for the strangeness of the past, fulfilling one of the central functions of poetry, to show us afresh and as if for the first time what has been dulled by familiarity.
There is not space here for extensive quotation, so I will close with one reasonably characteristic poem, Ashes and Roses. By a poet of feelings ‘scarcely related to the real world’, who ‘does not write at all in the humanist tradition’? Surely not.
Ashes and Roses
She is size 10 again like the girl under her banns
But so disconsolate the falling of her hand
I worry the diamond will slip to the grey earth.These are only the bare bones of roses
This is a garden of little twists of iron
The dressing of ash does not look nourishing.Let me look away at the sunny hills and you
Look at nothing for a while against my heart.
You feel as breakable as things I have found on the hillsAfter the weather when their small frames are evident.
You need to put on again.
The roses need to flower. Come homeTo your empty house. He is more there than here.
What do you think about David Constantine’s poetry? Laurie Smith was critical in Magma 31. David Boll has defended a poet he admires. Click here to join the online debate in the Magma Respond to the Editor Forum
