Anthony Hirst, a new voice in English poetry

Anthony Hirst - a new voice in English poetry

Memorials, nightscapes, etcetera: poems of several decades, Colenso Books, December 2020

This is a substantial volume of poetry (275 pages), really four collections in one, a significant achievement by Anthony Hirst. The poems, written over a period of fifty years, are not presented chronologically, but they reveal many aspects and voices of a sensitive, thoughtful and radical poet, who has developed his own forms and stanzas, both short and long, who has mastered many tones and registers, and can surprise us by being provocative, at times self-mocking, at times unexpectedly open to laying bare his deepest intimations of mortality.

I have been reading them in sections over several years and more intensely in print for the last few months. Most of the poems I have read ten times, some of them more often, and each close reading of the book offers up new favourites, associations, dimensions and meanings. Some poems increase in resonance as a result of a delayed-action effect; new riches are uncovered with each repeated reading. I have come up with at least three versions of my ‘favourites’ list, which becomes longer with each listing, and currently stands at thirty-five poems, which I regret I cannot include here. In presenting this collection for ‘critical scrutiny’, Anthony Hirst can be confident that he will win many admirers, all of whom will come up with their own choices. There is so much variety of poetic voice and enduring value that it is hard to do justice to the range of inspiration and mood.

If I had to choose just two poems to quote in full, I would include one from the last section (Remnants of religion), called To the Ayatollah Komeini: an oblique tribute, and another from the first section (Memorials), called The  last breakfast.

Some poets seem familiar, especially if they have submitted their work regularly to journals. Others, like Anthony Hirst, prefer to save their poems until they are satisfied with the sequencing and grouping, the subtle interplay and retrospective cross-associations of late-discovered patterns.

This is a brave collection. Occasionally the reader may feel like an intruder or voyeur, although even the most personal or erotic poems cannot be categorised as ‘confessional’, since they may be more fictional than autobiographical, unlike some of the poems on religious topics. If there are any indirect influences, which are really references to other poets, one might point to Cavafy and Seferis, and to some fellow-feeling with Wordsworth and Bashō. The notes at the end of the book are very enlightening and scholarly in their own right, but are not essential for an understanding of the poems.

Greek locations occur frequently, Corfu, Crete, Athens, Salonica, Kastoria, Asine, Daphni, Poros, Thasos, Kefalonia, the Aegean and Ionian Seas. The Greek poems were the first to stand out and appeal to me. I felt as if I had been standing at the same spot in Thessaloniki on the same day as the poet, when reading In Salonica today the sea.

It’s a strange sensation to read poems which evoke so many similar or shared sensations, observations and images. Some of his poems written in East Africa and the USA produced a feeling of recognition, partly as a result of my own travels.

Anthony Hirst’s acute observations and angles of vision are very much his own and I quote a few striking examples at random:

At breakfast, two rabbits on the lawn,

aware of me but unconcerned,

knowing about glass and the doubtful

reality of what’s behind.

***

Half a Cornish pasty in the mud.

Point down, mouth up.

Still fresh. Almost inviting.

***

…through “art” our own

small opportunity to add

our shards to the untidy heap

that constitute our foolish species’

supposèd understanding of itself

and its domain…

 

In his dedications, addressed primarily to the younger members of his family, Anthony Hirst suggests that the family's future generations and other readers may, “years from now, find things here to surprise, inform, amuse, perplex, disturb or even shock them”.

I am certain that he will find those readers, both now and in the future, and that he could well be right about the range of reactions to individual poems and sequences.

This essential collection is available from the publisher, colensobooks@gmail.com, at the selling price of £13.75.

ISBN 978-1-912788-05-7

It will shortly be available from amazon.co.uk

Two poems by Anthony Hirst:

The last breakfast

On the morning of the day he died,

after Ralph, the night-nurse, had gone home,

my father, forty, months now in bed,

announced — so, years later, I was told —

that today he’d like a proper breakfast.

And though she knew he’d never eat it,

my mother went downstairs into the kitchen.

Fifteen minutes later, I would guess,

she came back carrying a tray

(bacon-and-eggs, buttered toast and coffee)

and found him standing, clutching the cill

of the window he’d pushed open wide,

leaning out in his striped pyjamas,

gasping for breath in the summer air.

She held him, and helped him back to bed,

covered him up and, once his breathing

settled, went downstairs again to phone;

came and sat with him, now barely conscious,

until she heard the doctor’s car outside.

Sensing the condition of his patient

and deciding that the end was near,

he filled a syringe with morphine, sufficient

to ensure there’d be no more distress.

On the morning of the day she died,

my mother, twenty-six years later,

emerging briefly from her coma —

where, perhaps, wandering in the past,

she’d finally retrieved the husband

she’d never had the chance to mourn

and whose face, she had once said to me,

she couldn’t remember any more,

and had at last mutely understood

her own condition — now announced,

having eaten nothing for a week,

that today she’d like a proper breakfast.

To the Ayatollah Khomeini : an oblique tribute

I have read in translation a speech you delivered,

some months before your death, to teachers and students,

members of religious institutions,

on the third of Esfand thirteen-sixty-seven.

And from that seamless flow of twisting rhetoric

there fell into my lap, like a diamond

flung from the unravelling turban of a dervish,

one short sentence, startling in its imaginative power.

Speaking of the Shah’s time you recalled

how the “ulema and clergy” of your faction

“prepared themselves against all kinds of poisonous arrows

being fired at Islam”, and then you declared —

and these are your words as they’ve reached

across the frontiers of language — “They arrived,”

you said, “at the slaughter-house of love.”

“They arrived at the slaughter-house of love.”

I saw this sentence poised on your narrowed lips,

like a burning angel emerging

from the dark cavern of the mouth of God,

tiny as the struggling figures of Rustam

and the White Demon on the spine of Rushdie’s Verses;

poised for a moment before he leapt

across the fourfold abyss of language and culture

and race and religion, over the disjunction

of time and date between us, into my mind,

where, as he grew to full stature,

with a creaking and grinding of rusty hinges

a great door opened and I looked

    into the Slaughter-House of Love.

And there they were, “the World Devourers”,

mild mannered, awkward of speech,

with their thin smiles and their pale skin,

proud horses once, between the thighs

of the Spirit of War, now riderless,

their “explosive wrath” all spent

against the towering adamantine walls

     around the Slaughter-House of Love.

And they were there, “the seekers and enthusiasts”

who had “torn away the black breast of ambition”

and, fulfilling their pact “with the white dawn of love”,

had “achieved their goal of martyrdom”.

But they were small, so small, less than atoms,

not visible to the naked eye,

not though they gathered in their thousands —

so vast this Paradise, so limitless

      this Slaughter-House of Love.

And the infant girl was there,

she who was buried alive, and when asked

for what crime she was thus slain

replied with questions of her own:

Do you burn books, do you cover

the faces of women for the same un-reason?

Is it for fear of the flames that flicker

behind the dark screen of your eyes?

Tell me, is it there

      the Slaughter-House of Love?

I swear by the turning planets

and by the stars that rise and fall

I do not hate your religion

any more than I hate my own,

but I hate all religion when it makes

hatred a virtue, when it sits easy

in chambers of commerce with makers of bombs,

when it “cleanses the jar” in contempt

from which your “own child Mustafa drank water”,

when it would rise up and kill to defend

from words printed in books the Lord of Creation,

or the Word Made Flesh

from the Slaughter-House of Love.

O come, let us reason together,

in the name of the Compassionate the Merciful,

untouched by any insults which our mouths can fling,

immune to the “poisonous arrows” of our hearts,

beyond our reach, unknowable, enthroned forever

in the Slaughterhouse of Love:

when the earth is rocked in her last convulsion

when each soul shall know what it has done,

may we not both be victims, you and I together,

in the Slaughter-House of Love?