London Grip Poetry Review – David Clarke
Neil Fulwood compliments David Clarke on not putting a foot wrong in his poetic assessment of present day Britain
The Europeans David Clarke Nine Arches Press ISBN 9781911027690 ÂŁ9.99
On page 53 of The Europeans, in a poem called âLetter to George Gordon Byronâ, an undergraduate student wonders of the great Romantic poet âWhat would he likely say / to Brexit?â Up to this point (with ten pages and four poems left) I had begun to think that Brexit was the collectionâs via negativa, ever-present by dint of the word itself remaining unused. But use it Clarke does, just the once, and it flares like a Molotov cocktail.
The particular aspect of Brexit on which Clarke focuses is what stands to be lost, and what is already slipping away. In the title poem, Europeans are viewed through various lenses. The poem opens idyllically:
I saw the Europeans drinking wine under trees. It was August and their children seemed wise beyond their years, moving with the dappled light.
A stanza later, the Europeans are âwearing bright uniforms / simultaneously grand and preposterousâ; and later still the narrator notes bullet holes in mortar where â[s]omeone had been shot / heroically on every cornerâ. The narrator marvels as they take to forests in winter:
People were wolves or wolves were people. These matters were increasingly unclear.
National characteristics seem ambiguous (âvolatile or taciturn, hearty / or shiftless. Really, you could take your pickâ) but what is certain is that the Europeans have âmuch to say of poetry and much silence to pay it intoâ. The sense of the slightly bewildered Englishman abroad, half fascinated and half perplexed, is underlined in the final stanza. Iâll leave the reader to discover it for themselves; it rounds the poem off beautifully.
âInvitationâ, which opens the collection, is a masterpiece of understated fin de siĂšcle.
Meet me in the lobby of the Hotel Europa, The high lobby shadowed by palms, where men in uniform stride with stiff purpose and the pianist gifts us bland jazz.
No EasyJet budget package tourists stumbling comically about here! This could be the the Grand Budapest Hotel of Wes Andersonâs film, or is that Dirk Bogardeâs von Aschenbach in crumpled white suit and panama in the background? Melancholy swirls through the poem like the Adagietto of Mahlerâs Fifth: there will never be enough time to âwake just once in all its pristine rooms, / to step lightly onto every balconyâ.
If all of this makes Clarke sound like a dewy-eyed sentimentalist ruing everything the Leave hard-liners and the no-deal Parliamentarians are trying to trample down into the landfill of international relations, then the fault is probably mine. There is no false nostalgia to his work. Consider âAn Exchangeâ, which captures in squirmy detail the combination of overawed excitement and social embarrassment that will be familiar to anyone who participated in a foreign exchange during their schooldays: from the âmuggy coachâ to the âreasonable townsâ with their âclosed arcades, precincts tiled / in abstract formsâ to the overnight accommodation
in a bunk above a snide Johann or sporty Yves, their dadsâ impromptu lectures on the futureâs dull cascade of peace[.]
The experience is coloured by an unshakeable cloud of suspicion and mild resentment that can probably best be described as simply being English, where even an ice cream courtesy of oneâs hosts tastes
mildly strange, like some holiday liqueur that lurked behind your auntieâs sticky sherry, made from god-knows-what in god-knows-where
and behind everything is the thought of âall those grandpapas // who came home missing pieces of themselvesâ. âAn Exchangeâ bridges the poems about Europe and those in which the quintessence of Englishness is pinned down like a butterfly under glass: âTo a Black and White Portable Televisionâ, âTo a Public Houseâ, âTo a Stately Homeâ, âThe Townsâ and âThe Villagesâ, all of which deserve to be quoted from an discussed at great length. However, this is an online review not a monograph and, as noted previously, the reader deserves to discover the facets of this collection for themselves. Suffice to say that the unvarnished, realistic âway things wereâ aspect of these pieces, refuting little England wistfulness for a past that never was, is a slap in the face to Brexitâs chief architects â as is âIn the Snugâ, a hand grenade of a villanelle:
Little man, you are my grinning birthright, frog-faced in your better bookieâs coat. You lean against the ale-damp bar of England ...
Hmmm, wonder who that could possibly be?
While âIn the Snugâ targets one particularly nasty piece of work, the prose poem âLet Me Be Very Clearâ is an amalgam of similes that politicians and those in the media have employed to try to describe Brexit and how the machinery of the UKâs withdrawal will work. Random sampling: âItâs like the Blitz, like a military coup, like a punishment beating, like the Treaty of Versailles. Itâs like Schrödingerâs cat, like a wolf without a collar, like a dog that caught the car.â
These nakedly political pieces â along with âThe Defence of Bureaucracyâ and âEngland, I loved youâ â are the stepping stones to âLetter to George Gordon Byronâ. Like âIn the Snugâ, it embraces a set form â the ottava rima. The first stanza acknowledges Byronâs mastery of the form as well as functioning as an apology of sorts. âWe keep / on coming back to you, we scribblers, entitle / ourselves to your estate of rhymeâ, Clarke notes, adding âMy weak / efforts more a sideways way to speak // of troubles you would no doubt recognise.â The self-deprecation is winning but itâs a case of false modesty: Clarke shifts into overdrive for the second stanza and doesnât let up for two and a half pages.
âLetter to George Gordon Byronâ is a showstopper, an excoriating state-of-the-nation piece, a takedown of a âpuffed-up Englandâ which âsneers again at all / thatâs foreignâ, a country that has lost its way under the incompetent guidance of âtoffs [who] are cheered by plebs they despiseâ and the divisive rhetoric of âour free press, / the voice of Englandâs bigotry and smugglersâ. Clarke swings hammer blow after hammer blow against everything thatâs wrong with the contemporary state of affairs.
It would have been all too easy to end the collection with this poem, but Clarke is smart enough to allow the reader the decelerate through four more pieces, including the slyly structured âStation to Stationâ (which includes a bluntly accurate summation of Nottingham Central, the rail hub that serves my home town) and âThe Vision of Albionâ. This latter is the poem that actually does close The Europeans and Clarke foregoes the earlier howl of furious protest for something quieter, deeper, more insistent; a perfect conclusion to a collection that doesnât put a foot wrong.
Why Iâm seeking solace in The Brexit Book of the Dead, and other poems | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | Opinion â Gwadar and CPEC
November 7, 2019 @ 8:09 am
[…] / lonely with itself and howls / for something, like a dog gone old / in the head,â writes David Clarke in The Vision of Albion. Poetry is not the solution to that howl, but it […]
Why Iâm seeking solace in The Brexit Book of the Dead, and other poems | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett - NewsGroove Uk
November 7, 2019 @ 8:12 am
[…] / lonely with itself and howls / for something, like a dog gone old / in the head,â writes David Clarke in The Vision of Albion. Poetry is not the solution to that howl, but it […]
Why Iâm seeking solace in The Brexit Book of the Dead, and other poems | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | Opinion
November 7, 2019 @ 8:38 am
[…] / lonely with itself and howls / for something, like a dog gone old / in the head,â writes David Clarke in The Vision of Albion. Poetry is not the solution to that howl, but it […]
Why Iâm seeking solace in The Brexit Book of the Dead, and other poems | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | Opinion
November 7, 2019 @ 9:42 am
[…] / lonely with itself and howls / for something, like a dog gone old / in the head,â writes David Clarke in The Vision of Albion. Poetry is not the solution to that howl, but it […]