Peter Reading's mean streets

Perduta Gente means Final Demands and is Peter Reading’s fourteenth book of poems since 1970. So it is positioned about halfway through Reading’s oeuvre. This story of England’s dispossessed is woven into a sort of apocalyptic narrative that feels like middle class voyeurism when read from the comparative security of one’s own home. A perusal of the accompanying notes next to the poems would seem to indicate that Reading spent some time observing or listening to the yarns of some of the “old hands” living on the street. According to Isabel Martin in the introduction to Peter Reading: Collected Poems 1970-1984, Reading has a talent for eavesdropping and can mimic a wide variety of spoken registers. So conceivably he could observe or mingle without actually having to doss down with his subjects, who he terms as a legion of the “bankrupted, batty [and] bereft” whose beds he symbolises as a “huddle of papers and rags in a cardboard spin-drier carton”. Meanwhile, we carry on by as though nothing is wrong is because “that is what we [British] are good at”, Reading writes.

Perduta Gente has no page numbers, which implies that it is meant to be absorbed in its entirety, not to be dipped into. It can be read in less than a couple of hours. Isabel Martin writes that Reading’s favourite literature is eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, which would help explain Reading’s comparison with Dickens. Reading apparently got up close enough to his sleeping subjects to read what was written in the newspapers they were wrapped in to stay warm. Or perhaps that was simply an artist’s imaginative focus at work. Whatever it was, it worked well:

Newspaper, wrapped around the torso between the
Fourth and fifth jerseys
(night attire for doing a skipper in icy December
under the Festival Hall),
carries a note to the Editor, from ‘Ex-Soldier of Telford’ ...

Towards the end of the book, Reading turns his gaze directly to the reader, warning us of our potential vulnerability:

And don’t think it couldn’t be you:
grievously wounded veteran of the Battle of Bottle,
jobless, bereft of home, skint,
down in the cold uriniferous subway ...

There’s no getting away from the misery, but by offering these poems to us, Reading is doing a public service, firstly by keeping a huge social problem to the fore, and secondly, by warning others not to fall victim to it. For some respite I flick over to the online edition of the New Zealand Herald and read of the lonely death of Brent Andrew Beattie. ‘The 38-year-old father of two died while living alone under a footbridge on the edge of Hagley Park in central Christchurch,’ the Herald reported. Beattie had lived under the bridge for at least six months and it was almost a month before anyone even noticed that he had died. A fireman had found Beattie’s decomposing body in a crouching position with his knees drawn up to his abdomen surrounded by glue and methylated spirits containers. His mother had indicated she might attend the coroner’s hearing but did not show up. The only people who were there was the coroner, a court registrar, two policemen and a reporter (NZ Herald, 17/07/08).

There is something unnerving about the crouching position the fireman found Brent in. It is as if he simply gave up on life one Christchurch night, and, resting his head on his knees, froze into a macabre statue. For days on end he stayed like that, unnoticed.

Seamus Heaney on Paul Muldoon

[Seamus Heaney and friend]

A couple of points of interest from the discussion last night:

First, thanks to Gregory for pointing out that Seamus Heaney's review of Paul Muldoon's The Annals of Chile (1994), containing the poem "Incantata," is included in his book of selected essays, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (london: Faber, 2002).

The relevant passage runs as follows:

In Paul Muldoon's new book .... personal grief and creative glee keep playing into one another's hands. One of several extraordinary poems here is called 'Incantata', a lamentation for the premature death by cancer of a young and gifted artist. This is both a cry of heartbreak and a virtuoso performance. The higher the lift-off the poem achieves, the deeper the registers it engages ...

'Incantata' commemorates the life and work of Mary Farl Powers, an artist who was much cherished because of the intensity of her striving for spiritual and technical perfection. 'Incantata' is an example of what we might call 'the Lycidas syndrome,' whereby one artist's sense of vocation and purpose is sent into crisis by the untimely death of another. Here Paul Muldoon is possessed by a subject that puts all his brilliance to the test, with the result that he blossoms into truth and humanizes his song to an extraordinary degree. [395-96]

Elsewhere he refers to Muldoon as "one of the era's true originals."

The 'Lycidas' reference is of course to Milton (Shelley's 'Adonais,' on the death of Keats, might be another example - or, for that matter, Tennyson's In Memoriam).

I don't know how Paul Muldoon would have reacted to that "blossoms into truth" phrase - or the one about "humanizing his song" ... Did that have anything to do (as Gregory suggested in discussion) with the tone of Muldoon's own remarks about Heaney in his recent book of essays The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures (New York: Farrar Straus Girous, 2006)?

One of the poignancies of "Keeping Going" is the speaker's assertion - one we don't expect from a Heaney speaker - ... [of] the insurmountable fact of the limitations of art:

But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong

This is not to say that a poem ... doesn't have some efficacy in the world, doesn't effect some change. It must change something, as these ... examples so elegantly display. One of the ways in which they do this is to clear their own space, bringin us 'all together in a foretime,' if I may borrow that phrase from section 3 of "Keeping Going" ... This condition of a "foretime" of the poem is, yet again, a version of what I described earlier as the "problem" to which the poem is a "solution" ... We appeal to the "foretime" of "Keeping Going" and recognise ... that to carry itself forward in the world - testing itself, and us, against a sense of how it itself "was / In the begining, is now and shall be' - is indeed the end of the poem.

This almost sounds as if he regards poems as self-justifying, posing a "problem" to which they themselves are the "solution." It's certainly a far less ringing pronouncement than Heaney's.

Oh, and as a footnote, I checked my ownb copy of Graham Lindsay's Lazy Wind Poems, which certainly does contain pp. 25-40. I can make a copy of them if you like, Bruce, but it might be better to send the book back to AUP and get a replacement one with the full text in it ...