Poetry review – THE DANCING MAN: John Lucas admires the new collection by Adrian Caesar – albeit with the mildest of reservations
The Dancing Man
Adrian Caesar
Recent Work Press, Canberra, 2024
ISBN 9780645973242
A$19.95
Adrian Caesar’s previous collection, the excellent Dark Cupboards New Rooms, was divided into five separate sections, each of which had its own thematic intensity as well as internal coherence. What linked the sections was the sense of a speaking presence, a voice carrying with it a guarantee of authenticity, even though the material with which the poems deal, or which they register and/or negotiate, is grief for familial death. And as we all know, this is easier done than said. The deaths of parents, of a younger sister, the death of a son – to write convincingly about such matter, to want to write about it, to be genuinely compelled to do so, is surely more difficult than may at first seem likely. ‘I was the man, I suffered, I was there.’ Even to risk making such a claim is inevitably to invite a degree of scepticism. And behind this scepticism lurks the unspoken query, whether to trust anyone who makes such a claim in the first place. ‘My heart goes out to ….’ The politician’s glib assurance. Heart on sleeve time. The strength of Caesar’s work is not to be found in its assertions but in the quality of its observation, which is carried by – and is for that matter inseparable from –its rhythmic assurance, the concern to make a convincing poem. To put it differently, and bluntly. No bullshit.
Caesar’s new collection, like its predecessor, passes the bullshit test, and then some. The Dancing Man is composed of four substantial sections, three of which build on and in certain respects exceed the overall achievement of Dark Cupboards New Rooms. The first of these, “Clearing the House,” is concerned with revisiting the deaths and, more important, lives of the poet’s essentially working-class parents. To say this may suggest that Caesar is willing to risk comparison with the work of Tony Harrison, but in fact there is nothing reminiscent of Harrison in this enterprise, and I don’t say this by way of criticising either poet. Rather, it should be said that Caesar’s approach, while unsparing, is for the most part free of the expressive rancour that feels built into Harrison’s The School of Eloquence. It’s difficult to demonstrate the quality of Caesar’s writing without quoting at greater length than a review permits, but here are some lines from “The Use We Make of Them (Material)” which may help. In this extract, the speaker, having spoken of his father’s death and his mother’s confinement to a nursing home, looks into ‘cupboards, bureau, wardrobes, drawers/ stuffed with desolate remembrance,/ accumulation of lives they couldn’t afford/ to discard ….’ That last line-break is eloquent of those whose social circumstance requires, as they see it, an effort of attainment that will make and does in some ways break them. It’s the snare in which many English people are, or anyway were, caught, the trap that defines their struggle for a recognisable identity.
The first section of The Dancing Man is perhaps the best writing Caesar has ever done, and at least two of the other sections contain work of a very high standard. Section Three, “Views from the Mundane”, is itself subdivided into ‘Inferno,’ ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradiso,’ and is taken up with reflections and/or considerations of a sometimes semi-autobiographical nature. The Inferno focusses with sardonic assurance on the self-glorying of intellectuals who are ‘locked in closed circles of endless argument, deconstructing themselves/ in everlasting theories’ – and don’t we all know them; after which attention turns, perhaps more conventionally, to the wilderness into which a young man’s sexual desires can lead – and betray – women; and, finally, the section identifies the mundane pleasures of sociable drinking and conversation in pub or garden, where, as the great Samuel Johnson recommended, we can choose to ‘fold our knees and have out our chat,’ or, as in Caesar’s poem, we chink our glasses, say ‘how blessed are we?… try to forget the venal world/and banish the fear this loving place,/our little piece of Paradise,/depends on someone else’s hell.’
But as these lines attest, the snake is never to be banished from the earthly paradise, and Caesar’s poem acknowledges its unavoidable presence in the collection’s last section, “The Dancing Man”, which, for all its endorsement of delight, for example, in observing a young grand-daughter’s ‘washing rocks’ – that is, sousing stones in water to bring out their colours and striations – knows that as the stones dry so the colours fade, and yet ‘stone and water and gift abide,/ suggesting through silent invention/sermon and parable: child’s play.’
As the above words should make plain, I greatly admire The Dancing Man, and hope it finds many readers. But having said this, I do want to pick a bone with its author on a matter which compels me to take issue. In his ‘Afterword’, Caesar writes of how
In the face of fire, flood, plague, environmental catastrophe and political chaos the
challenge is, in Auden’s words, to ‘Show an affirming flame.’ Accordingly, these poems
attempt to move from grief and loss towards consolations, however limited these might
be. Intimations of connection and inter-dependence between all living things is the fragile
basis for a first step towards spiritual re-orientation and an art of hope.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I am largely in agreement with Caesar, as I guess many, if not most, will be. I am all for an art of hope, even if I have some difficulty in knowing what this could be, and worry that I may be invited to join a chorus of cheerleaders wanting me to sing sunny side up. No thanks. For which reason I am with those all who resist the claims of any art which has designs on us, which tries to coerce us into agreement and/or submission. ‘An art of hope.’ At any cost? Include me out. I’ve no wish to get to my feet, let alone stand to attention when Hope enters the room, not anyway if it comes bearing propagandist intentions, wanting to tell us the good news of ‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening,’ to quote Peter Sellers’ words in I’m Alright, Jack. Down with anything that hints of Pollyanna in the sunny uplands.
This is, I accept, a perversion of what Caesar’s words mean to convey. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that years after I had left Reading University, Adrian Caesar, like myself a Reading student, was taught by Ian Fletcher, that wonderfully erudite, degree-less poet and Man of Letters whose unalterable mantra was that poems are made with words not ideas. This isn’t to say that ideas don’t matter. Of course they do. But it is to say that words come first. Poetry is a verbal art.
I’ve no dubt that Caesar knows this and indeed his excellence as a poet is inextricably connected to, and with, his assured handling of poetic, verbal, aural resources. (Though I notice that, like many, he prefers the English habit of adding a final s to such prepositions as ‘backward,’ ‘upward’ etc. which can lead to the awkward hissing sound on, for example, ‘towards spiritual’. Small beer, I know, but still .…
At first glance a larger problem with The Dancing Man, larger even than the Afterword, might seem to be with the collection’s second and longest section, ‘Space Walker Variations, or as this is set out on the page:
SPACE
WALKER
VARIATIONS
In the Afterword, Caesar notes that this section has had ‘a long gestation [and] explores in more distanced and metaphorical terms issues raised in the autobiographical reflections.’ And he adds that ‘here, and in some of the other poems, I’ve enjoyed playing with the ‘space’ of the page – a return to experiments I tried and abandoned some thirty years ago.’ Well, good on yer, as an Australian might say. Though I remain convinced that the ear is always subtler than the eye when it comes to fully comprehending a poem, and am therefore equally convinced that Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, with their insistence on ‘geography’ as field of vision are, to adapt Swift, the most boring, pretentious and plain ridiculous works ever permitted to crawl upon the surface of the earth, I greatly enjoyed the experience of reading the “Space Walker Variations,” one which compelled my admiration for the adroit skill with which Caesar required me to, as it were, zip about the page, up, sideways, all about, now aware of the short, virtually breathless gap that came between words, now of a seemingly vast space that kept them apart from each other, now buoyant or teetering in the air until, at the section’s close, they and we come bumping
down
to earth
once more.
Well, as an earlier poet memorably said, Earth’s the right place for love. A mundane claim, without doubt, and alerting us to the O.E.D’s definition the word, mundane, as ‘pertaining to this world.’ Add, ‘this world of words,’ and it’s a definition that would make a good sub-title for The Dancing Man.
Sep 18 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Adrian Caesar
Poetry review – THE DANCING MAN: John Lucas admires the new collection by Adrian Caesar – albeit with the mildest of reservations
Adrian Caesar’s previous collection, the excellent Dark Cupboards New Rooms, was divided into five separate sections, each of which had its own thematic intensity as well as internal coherence. What linked the sections was the sense of a speaking presence, a voice carrying with it a guarantee of authenticity, even though the material with which the poems deal, or which they register and/or negotiate, is grief for familial death. And as we all know, this is easier done than said. The deaths of parents, of a younger sister, the death of a son – to write convincingly about such matter, to want to write about it, to be genuinely compelled to do so, is surely more difficult than may at first seem likely. ‘I was the man, I suffered, I was there.’ Even to risk making such a claim is inevitably to invite a degree of scepticism. And behind this scepticism lurks the unspoken query, whether to trust anyone who makes such a claim in the first place. ‘My heart goes out to ….’ The politician’s glib assurance. Heart on sleeve time. The strength of Caesar’s work is not to be found in its assertions but in the quality of its observation, which is carried by – and is for that matter inseparable from –its rhythmic assurance, the concern to make a convincing poem. To put it differently, and bluntly. No bullshit.
Caesar’s new collection, like its predecessor, passes the bullshit test, and then some. The Dancing Man is composed of four substantial sections, three of which build on and in certain respects exceed the overall achievement of Dark Cupboards New Rooms. The first of these, “Clearing the House,” is concerned with revisiting the deaths and, more important, lives of the poet’s essentially working-class parents. To say this may suggest that Caesar is willing to risk comparison with the work of Tony Harrison, but in fact there is nothing reminiscent of Harrison in this enterprise, and I don’t say this by way of criticising either poet. Rather, it should be said that Caesar’s approach, while unsparing, is for the most part free of the expressive rancour that feels built into Harrison’s The School of Eloquence. It’s difficult to demonstrate the quality of Caesar’s writing without quoting at greater length than a review permits, but here are some lines from “The Use We Make of Them (Material)” which may help. In this extract, the speaker, having spoken of his father’s death and his mother’s confinement to a nursing home, looks into ‘cupboards, bureau, wardrobes, drawers/ stuffed with desolate remembrance,/ accumulation of lives they couldn’t afford/ to discard ….’ That last line-break is eloquent of those whose social circumstance requires, as they see it, an effort of attainment that will make and does in some ways break them. It’s the snare in which many English people are, or anyway were, caught, the trap that defines their struggle for a recognisable identity.
The first section of The Dancing Man is perhaps the best writing Caesar has ever done, and at least two of the other sections contain work of a very high standard. Section Three, “Views from the Mundane”, is itself subdivided into ‘Inferno,’ ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradiso,’ and is taken up with reflections and/or considerations of a sometimes semi-autobiographical nature. The Inferno focusses with sardonic assurance on the self-glorying of intellectuals who are ‘locked in closed circles of endless argument, deconstructing themselves/ in everlasting theories’ – and don’t we all know them; after which attention turns, perhaps more conventionally, to the wilderness into which a young man’s sexual desires can lead – and betray – women; and, finally, the section identifies the mundane pleasures of sociable drinking and conversation in pub or garden, where, as the great Samuel Johnson recommended, we can choose to ‘fold our knees and have out our chat,’ or, as in Caesar’s poem, we chink our glasses, say ‘how blessed are we?… try to forget the venal world/and banish the fear this loving place,/our little piece of Paradise,/depends on someone else’s hell.’
But as these lines attest, the snake is never to be banished from the earthly paradise, and Caesar’s poem acknowledges its unavoidable presence in the collection’s last section, “The Dancing Man”, which, for all its endorsement of delight, for example, in observing a young grand-daughter’s ‘washing rocks’ – that is, sousing stones in water to bring out their colours and striations – knows that as the stones dry so the colours fade, and yet ‘stone and water and gift abide,/ suggesting through silent invention/sermon and parable: child’s play.’
As the above words should make plain, I greatly admire The Dancing Man, and hope it finds many readers. But having said this, I do want to pick a bone with its author on a matter which compels me to take issue. In his ‘Afterword’, Caesar writes of how
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I am largely in agreement with Caesar, as I guess many, if not most, will be. I am all for an art of hope, even if I have some difficulty in knowing what this could be, and worry that I may be invited to join a chorus of cheerleaders wanting me to sing sunny side up. No thanks. For which reason I am with those all who resist the claims of any art which has designs on us, which tries to coerce us into agreement and/or submission. ‘An art of hope.’ At any cost? Include me out. I’ve no wish to get to my feet, let alone stand to attention when Hope enters the room, not anyway if it comes bearing propagandist intentions, wanting to tell us the good news of ‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening,’ to quote Peter Sellers’ words in I’m Alright, Jack. Down with anything that hints of Pollyanna in the sunny uplands.
This is, I accept, a perversion of what Caesar’s words mean to convey. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that years after I had left Reading University, Adrian Caesar, like myself a Reading student, was taught by Ian Fletcher, that wonderfully erudite, degree-less poet and Man of Letters whose unalterable mantra was that poems are made with words not ideas. This isn’t to say that ideas don’t matter. Of course they do. But it is to say that words come first. Poetry is a verbal art.
I’ve no dubt that Caesar knows this and indeed his excellence as a poet is inextricably connected to, and with, his assured handling of poetic, verbal, aural resources. (Though I notice that, like many, he prefers the English habit of adding a final s to such prepositions as ‘backward,’ ‘upward’ etc. which can lead to the awkward hissing sound on, for example, ‘towards spiritual’. Small beer, I know, but still .…
At first glance a larger problem with The Dancing Man, larger even than the Afterword, might seem to be with the collection’s second and longest section, ‘Space Walker Variations, or as this is set out on the page:
SPACE WALKER VARIATIONSIn the Afterword, Caesar notes that this section has had ‘a long gestation [and] explores in more distanced and metaphorical terms issues raised in the autobiographical reflections.’ And he adds that ‘here, and in some of the other poems, I’ve enjoyed playing with the ‘space’ of the page – a return to experiments I tried and abandoned some thirty years ago.’ Well, good on yer, as an Australian might say. Though I remain convinced that the ear is always subtler than the eye when it comes to fully comprehending a poem, and am therefore equally convinced that Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, with their insistence on ‘geography’ as field of vision are, to adapt Swift, the most boring, pretentious and plain ridiculous works ever permitted to crawl upon the surface of the earth, I greatly enjoyed the experience of reading the “Space Walker Variations,” one which compelled my admiration for the adroit skill with which Caesar required me to, as it were, zip about the page, up, sideways, all about, now aware of the short, virtually breathless gap that came between words, now of a seemingly vast space that kept them apart from each other, now buoyant or teetering in the air until, at the section’s close, they and we come bumping
down to earth once more.Well, as an earlier poet memorably said, Earth’s the right place for love. A mundane claim, without doubt, and alerting us to the O.E.D’s definition the word, mundane, as ‘pertaining to this world.’ Add, ‘this world of words,’ and it’s a definition that would make a good sub-title for The Dancing Man.