Poetry Review – THE LONG HABIT OF LIVING: Stephen Claughton admires the undiminished creativity on display in M R Peacockeâs new collection
The Long Habit of Living
M. R. Peacocke
Happenstance Press
ISBN 978-1-910131-68-8
ÂŁ10.00
This is M. R. Peacockeâs eighth collection of poetry, which is no mean feat for someone who didnât start publishing until she was in her fifties. Now in her nineties, she has had what her publisher describes as âanother rush of poems, unexpected and joyous in their arrival.â One mustnât judge a book by its cover, or necessarily by whatâs written on it, but in this case I share the excitement: itâs a fine collection, showing no diminution in her creative powers.
The title is taken from the bookâs epigraph, a quotation from Sir Thomas Browneâs Urn Burial: âThe long habit of living indisposeth us for dyingâ. Not surprisingly, much of the book is concerned with mortality, although this isnât a new subject for Peacocke. It begins, fittingly enough, with a poem called âBookâ, an apparently amorphous catalogue, starting:
The Book of the unknown foetus.
The Book of cats in bags, pigs in pokes,
Moses in baskets with all the eggs.
The Book of errors, terrors, accidents (happy),
accidents (unhappy, Vol. II).
Itâs the book of her life (the poem ends: ââŠThumb through it if you must, / itâs written and canât be amended, this book.â) However, rather than attempting to shape experience, as an autobiography would, the poem presents life in all its randomness. The you in âif you mustâ refers to the poet herself, or in a more generalised way to anyone looking back on their own life.
Words (âcats in bags, pigs in pokes / Moses in baskets with all the eggsâ) are central to the next poem, âSyllabaryâ, in which the reading lessons in the first stanza (â⊠Her formal father / snipped small picture cards: pen, cup, bedâ) are contrasted with her relief to be out in the garden afterwards (ââŠThe wind / sang and shouted for its own delight, / the whole green world its playground. / Clouds scribbled and smudged outâ) and in the third and final stanza with her fatherâs death (âLater, a phone rhymed and rhymed. / There lay somebody dying, defying / inarticulacy âŠ)
In âPutâ, she finds a single word to express the stage she has reached in life:
At last my door, and putting everything down
to fumble for the key before life to come
and becoming aware of Put: these bags, weight
of potatoes, a couple of jars, all the stuff
settling into a sideways loll, and there it is,
put: burdened but neutral, awaiting guidance
This is followed by a childhood memory of the milkmanâs clip-clopping horse: (â⊠the dead stoop / of gravity in the lift and plant of his vast // and simple hooves. No decision, but inherent / in each put, the atlastness of arriving.â Itâs more about living in the moment than laying down your burden in any religious way. Peacocke isnât a religious poet and âlife to comeâ refers to life in this world. Ultimately, her attitude is stoical. In âWhat the Bird Saidâ:
A loss, a death, was stuck
hard as a gall in my throat.
I was foolish for consolation,
wanting a god to be angry with.
Shadows. December sun.
Oak apples, twigs, dry leaves. A bird.
Nothing but this, it said.
The poem clearly has a particular significance for Peacocke, having previously been included as one of the new poems in Finding the Planes: New and Selected Poems (2015) and in her 2018 Happenstance pamphlet, Honeycomb. The use of heavier punctuation at the end than when the poem first appeared emphasises the finality.
Before she began publishing poetry, Peacocke had given up her previous life to run a small hill farm in Cumbria and she has a farmerâs practical, though by no means heartless, attitude to death. âCandling Eggsâ describes examining a clutch of eggs to determine which are fertile (âPierce the shell / with your needle of lightâ) and ends:
Iâve counted her chickens. Twelve, has she?
Thereâs a tender brutality about life
thatâs not to be questioned. Soon sheâll wake
to their waking, sing to them, comfort, cajole.
Some will prosper and some wonât. May those
who know how to be get on with it.
One of the pleasures of reading Peacocke is not just the imagery she uses, but the strong sense of the actual that she conveys and there are a number of poems here about the physical aspects of ageing. In âSkin Narrativesâ:
Body transcribes itself monkishly
over seven years, each edition
less well bound, the scribal errors
grosser, blanched code of scars
a faulty braille still legible
even in palimpsest
on the thin vellum of hands, shins, wrists,
record of accident and skirmish
As its title suggests, âSkin Narrativesâ goes on to describe incidents from her life that have left their mark on her body. Reminiscence is a natural part of getting old (âEverything about me is a long time ago,â she says in âFliesâ). There are personal memories (âPracticeâ, âLeavingâ, âThe Clever Girlsâ) and also poems about photographs (âMothâ and âSweet Thamesâ).
Mortality and remembering have been among her key themes, as has close observation of the natural world. There are several examples here, whether describing a beetleâs slow progress through the grass, or âhouseflies riding an invisible carouselâ, or depicting more violent incidents: an axe striking an old stump and revealing âsmall peculiar creatures legging it / or on their backs in a slow sprawl, or brought up short / with half a body, as though theyâd been keeping shop / or shopping, when an earthquake struck or a bomb fellâ. âRockabyeâ makes a similar link between a fallen nest (âA bough breaks, and down go all / the babies, the quilled gapers / smashed in a porridge of leavesâ) and âHouses unroofed, walls tumbled, / windows burst, the black, distraught / figures of women scouring / among ruins. How they cried.â If we find the imagery shocking, itâs meant to be.
Other familiar subjects are poems about characters (âThe Sistersâ), ekphrastic poems (âRembrandtâs Penâ) and retellings of myth (âThe Minotaur Problemâ and âJonahâs Taleâ), but even if everything about her is a long time ago, Peacocke hasnât lost touch with the world as it is today. Though âGig Economyâ is actually about the tenacity of plants growing in unlikely places, there are genuinely topical poems: âFrom Recent Recordsâ about the loss of Australian animals thought to be newly extinct (âI had never heard of you, small lives / that seem to belong to the land of Lear. Still / the loss of you accusesâ; and âExposuresâ about the plight of refugees, juxtaposing photographs and objects on display at Ellis Island with asylum seekers landing on the Kent coast. The exposures are multiple: photographic exposure in the first case and exposure to the elements in the second; people feeling exposed, having lost their possessions; and the exposure of our Governmentâs hostility towards refugees compared with the historic welcome immigrants were given in the United States.
But there are lighter poems, too. In âExerciseâ, a chair being used as a piece of keep-fit apparatus segues into the French for flesh, quoting MallarmĂ©: âLa chair / est triste et jâai lu tous les livresâ. After a contretemps with âtwo young blokesâ barging past her in the street, it ends: âSomebody tell the Ministry: / Yelling is the best exercise.â
âFrom Captain Cookeâs Journal, July 1770â describes the killing of a kangaroo from the point of view of both Captain Cooke and one of the other kangaroos. The marsupialâs account is written in imperfect, almost pidgin English, a device used previously in her sequence of poems about Caliban and to an extreme extent in âGoose Hymnâ. The poem gains from the fact that the necessarily imagined speech of the kangaroo follows a completely unimagined âfound poemâ drawn from Cookeâs own journal. Another poem, âTheendâ, is composed of typographical chaos. It reads in full:
I am odl an don seee towell
i can no longre TYPe Whic
his a nisence. Pety Iâm a Pot.
i dont wanâto post so what can I
dobut in vent a styl of my one,
rewit all pems agangule,
in some rar nugalage, and galaunge
the hole thing off course in Sybillics.
I donât know about syllabics, but itâs perplexingly Sibylline.
The poem that does actually end the collection, âPebbleâ, is one of a number set at the seaside, all of them involving a letdown of some kind, but all very different. âEvacueesâ Outing, 1940â describes a resolutely unmisty-eyed trip to the seaside (the coach driver âsays theyâll be putting scaffolding all along / so everything shut off for the Duration / and no more trips to the sea thank you very muchâ). âReflexâ intersperses quotations from a scientific book about sea anemones with memories of a childhood encounter with one (âa single, weak siphonoglyph. Tentacles close / to swallow me. I pull back, wake into my book, / quivering like a shrimp.â) âDunnerholmeâ is about the dangerous crossing on foot of a tidal estuary (âI shanât go there again.â) âPebbleâ itself is about picking an attractive stone out of the water:
But now itâs in my palm, orphaned
from water, it takes on dullness
as though a vein had clogged, the way
a dying animal loses lustre,
so I give it back to the sea,
and go on hunting for the stone
I shall never find, which will hold,
till seas run dry, its mastery of light.
It is a measure of Peacockeâs imagination that she can take two symbols of permanenceâa rock and the seaâand turn them into an image of the ephemeral.
Beginning her career late and continuing to write excellent poetry into her tenth decade, Meg Peacocke is an inspiration to us all. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope that there will soon be a collected edition of her poems.
London Grip Poetry Review – M R Peacocke
August 8, 2021
Poetry Review – THE LONG HABIT OF LIVING: Stephen Claughton admires the undiminished creativity on display in M R Peacockeâs new collection
This is M. R. Peacockeâs eighth collection of poetry, which is no mean feat for someone who didnât start publishing until she was in her fifties. Now in her nineties, she has had what her publisher describes as âanother rush of poems, unexpected and joyous in their arrival.â One mustnât judge a book by its cover, or necessarily by whatâs written on it, but in this case I share the excitement: itâs a fine collection, showing no diminution in her creative powers.
The title is taken from the bookâs epigraph, a quotation from Sir Thomas Browneâs Urn Burial: âThe long habit of living indisposeth us for dyingâ. Not surprisingly, much of the book is concerned with mortality, although this isnât a new subject for Peacocke. It begins, fittingly enough, with a poem called âBookâ, an apparently amorphous catalogue, starting:
Itâs the book of her life (the poem ends: ââŠThumb through it if you must, / itâs written and canât be amended, this book.â) However, rather than attempting to shape experience, as an autobiography would, the poem presents life in all its randomness. The you in âif you mustâ refers to the poet herself, or in a more generalised way to anyone looking back on their own life.
Words (âcats in bags, pigs in pokes / Moses in baskets with all the eggsâ) are central to the next poem, âSyllabaryâ, in which the reading lessons in the first stanza (â⊠Her formal father / snipped small picture cards: pen, cup, bedâ) are contrasted with her relief to be out in the garden afterwards (ââŠThe wind / sang and shouted for its own delight, / the whole green world its playground. / Clouds scribbled and smudged outâ) and in the third and final stanza with her fatherâs death (âLater, a phone rhymed and rhymed. / There lay somebody dying, defying / inarticulacy âŠ)
In âPutâ, she finds a single word to express the stage she has reached in life:
This is followed by a childhood memory of the milkmanâs clip-clopping horse: (â⊠the dead stoop / of gravity in the lift and plant of his vast // and simple hooves. No decision, but inherent / in each put, the atlastness of arriving.â Itâs more about living in the moment than laying down your burden in any religious way. Peacocke isnât a religious poet and âlife to comeâ refers to life in this world. Ultimately, her attitude is stoical. In âWhat the Bird Saidâ:
The poem clearly has a particular significance for Peacocke, having previously been included as one of the new poems in Finding the Planes: New and Selected Poems (2015) and in her 2018 Happenstance pamphlet, Honeycomb. The use of heavier punctuation at the end than when the poem first appeared emphasises the finality.
Before she began publishing poetry, Peacocke had given up her previous life to run a small hill farm in Cumbria and she has a farmerâs practical, though by no means heartless, attitude to death. âCandling Eggsâ describes examining a clutch of eggs to determine which are fertile (âPierce the shell / with your needle of lightâ) and ends:
One of the pleasures of reading Peacocke is not just the imagery she uses, but the strong sense of the actual that she conveys and there are a number of poems here about the physical aspects of ageing. In âSkin Narrativesâ:
As its title suggests, âSkin Narrativesâ goes on to describe incidents from her life that have left their mark on her body. Reminiscence is a natural part of getting old (âEverything about me is a long time ago,â she says in âFliesâ). There are personal memories (âPracticeâ, âLeavingâ, âThe Clever Girlsâ) and also poems about photographs (âMothâ and âSweet Thamesâ).
Mortality and remembering have been among her key themes, as has close observation of the natural world. There are several examples here, whether describing a beetleâs slow progress through the grass, or âhouseflies riding an invisible carouselâ, or depicting more violent incidents: an axe striking an old stump and revealing âsmall peculiar creatures legging it / or on their backs in a slow sprawl, or brought up short / with half a body, as though theyâd been keeping shop / or shopping, when an earthquake struck or a bomb fellâ. âRockabyeâ makes a similar link between a fallen nest (âA bough breaks, and down go all / the babies, the quilled gapers / smashed in a porridge of leavesâ) and âHouses unroofed, walls tumbled, / windows burst, the black, distraught / figures of women scouring / among ruins. How they cried.â If we find the imagery shocking, itâs meant to be.
Other familiar subjects are poems about characters (âThe Sistersâ), ekphrastic poems (âRembrandtâs Penâ) and retellings of myth (âThe Minotaur Problemâ and âJonahâs Taleâ), but even if everything about her is a long time ago, Peacocke hasnât lost touch with the world as it is today. Though âGig Economyâ is actually about the tenacity of plants growing in unlikely places, there are genuinely topical poems: âFrom Recent Recordsâ about the loss of Australian animals thought to be newly extinct (âI had never heard of you, small lives / that seem to belong to the land of Lear. Still / the loss of you accusesâ; and âExposuresâ about the plight of refugees, juxtaposing photographs and objects on display at Ellis Island with asylum seekers landing on the Kent coast. The exposures are multiple: photographic exposure in the first case and exposure to the elements in the second; people feeling exposed, having lost their possessions; and the exposure of our Governmentâs hostility towards refugees compared with the historic welcome immigrants were given in the United States.
But there are lighter poems, too. In âExerciseâ, a chair being used as a piece of keep-fit apparatus segues into the French for flesh, quoting MallarmĂ©: âLa chair / est triste et jâai lu tous les livresâ. After a contretemps with âtwo young blokesâ barging past her in the street, it ends: âSomebody tell the Ministry: / Yelling is the best exercise.â
âFrom Captain Cookeâs Journal, July 1770â describes the killing of a kangaroo from the point of view of both Captain Cooke and one of the other kangaroos. The marsupialâs account is written in imperfect, almost pidgin English, a device used previously in her sequence of poems about Caliban and to an extreme extent in âGoose Hymnâ. The poem gains from the fact that the necessarily imagined speech of the kangaroo follows a completely unimagined âfound poemâ drawn from Cookeâs own journal. Another poem, âTheendâ, is composed of typographical chaos. It reads in full:
I donât know about syllabics, but itâs perplexingly Sibylline.
The poem that does actually end the collection, âPebbleâ, is one of a number set at the seaside, all of them involving a letdown of some kind, but all very different. âEvacueesâ Outing, 1940â describes a resolutely unmisty-eyed trip to the seaside (the coach driver âsays theyâll be putting scaffolding all along / so everything shut off for the Duration / and no more trips to the sea thank you very muchâ). âReflexâ intersperses quotations from a scientific book about sea anemones with memories of a childhood encounter with one (âa single, weak siphonoglyph. Tentacles close / to swallow me. I pull back, wake into my book, / quivering like a shrimp.â) âDunnerholmeâ is about the dangerous crossing on foot of a tidal estuary (âI shanât go there again.â) âPebbleâ itself is about picking an attractive stone out of the water:
It is a measure of Peacockeâs imagination that she can take two symbols of permanenceâa rock and the seaâand turn them into an image of the ephemeral.
Beginning her career late and continuing to write excellent poetry into her tenth decade, Meg Peacocke is an inspiration to us all. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope that there will soon be a collected edition of her poems.