London Grip Poetry Review – Seán Street

 

Poetry review – RUNNING OUT OF TIME: Nick Cooke appreciates the reflective and reminiscent mood of Seán Street’s latest collection

 

Running out of Time
Seán Street
Shoestring Press
ISBN 9781915553461
£10

Seán Street’s literary career has evolved alongside several other iterations, which have encompassed roles as actor, radio producer, teacher, Radio Studies pioneer, and academic leader. Over the course of a half-century packed (as if heeding Kipling’s advice to fill every unforgiving minute) with intellectual curiosity and creative endeavour, he has produced fifteen collections of poetry, of which Running Out of Time is the most recent and arguably among the very finest.

Thomas Hardy expert James Gibson placed Street in the ‘great tradition of Hardy, Thomas and Larkin’; and all those influences (among others) are at play in this volume. In addition to a later poem entitled “Aubade”, the book’s opening lines attest to a Larkinesque feel, with the beauty of poetic creativity somehow born from the tedium of the humdrum:

	It happens on ordinary days, 
       a bored pencil tapping a glass
       and the morning post leaking in,… 
                             (“Breaking News”)

Leakage, slight movement, seeping, the slow processes of daily existence, are a common Street subcurrent. The next poem, “Building a Cairn”, highlights the gradual communal construction of a Newfoundland mountain-top ‘obelisk of rocks’, with ‘each climber / adding to the pile to prove that they’d been there’ while the static poet, on the shore looking up, perhaps at a metaphorical as well as physical level, reflects that his own cairn is but verbal, as well as one constructed individually:

	Instead of which I’ve just this heap of words that’s mined
	from where I stand, a shape of sorts for someone else to find.

That ending obliquely recalls Heaney’s “Digging”, and in “Pickaxe” a similar contrast is implied, between the nebulous world of the intellectual and the assured, realm-controlling self-possession of a skilled manual worker (‘he and its T became one instrument’):

                                  Together they [the man and his axe]’d own  
        the job in hand, ‘no such word as can’t’ –

	a man of few, but those he meant, he’d say.

The central theme of time gathers prominence as the collection goes on, as though Street were hinting that, significant though other concerns might be, one cannot escape the biggest topics of all. In “We Stopped Cutting the Grass”, a tongue-in-cheek surrender to unpredictable creeping wildness (‘let it meadow itself, heath itself, whatever’) imagines the poet finding the patience to witness the ultimate graduality of evolution:

	I sit here and watch
	for change happening, new time,
	a gate into the field beyond the fence,
	watch lawn reverting, progressing,
	walls crumbling.

The theoretical result will be the ultimate natural integration, a removal of boundaries, ‘an undetectable join between heathlands’, but the final line neatly posits a contrast between on one hand a Wordsworthian cyclical immortality of nature, and on the other the human experience, lacking in power but not conscious choice and freedom of thought: ‘and I am mortal, though not convinced’.

A particularly fine offering, “Apocalypse at Swaffham”, covers a visit to a Norfolk church whose roof contains 88 carved angels, ‘their wings pulsing on the edge of perception / over the short struggle toward dissolution’, with a typically Streetian wryness on that very relative use of ‘short’ if it refers to a human life (perhaps less so if to the monasteries). As so often he asks us to consider the true meaning of time in its wider historical context, where only death is the real clock-stopper, as the almost Donne-like final lines remind us:

	Through the graveyard, Pentecostal winds beat on stones
	with the force of seven invisible trumpets.

The more he proceeds, the more Street is drawn to the conclusion that time is the ultimate controller of life. Instead of Donne it is Herbert who is quoted, in “David’s Bench”, as Street shares an empathetic moment with the dedicatee of a park bench, quoting ‘we are but flowers that glide’ from “The Flower”. ‘For the journey Time dictates / let us be clear’, opens “Epithalamion”, and even art’s supposed ability to impose itself on time is questioned, with the delightful “Coliseum Nights” celebrating a youthful opera night in 1969, in which he and his wife ‘sat among gods’ (another nicely whimsical play on words) and imagined themselves ‘Flying from that great height into the space / beyond us’, but the ending gently modifies their flight of fancy, with an injection of hedging and even a deliberate bathos, once more entailing the use of ‘short’:

	For we were five shilling gods, come from sky,
	invincible, with what seemed immortal songs
            in our own follow-spot, for a short season.

Whatever our ambitions, we are subject to a higher master, the one commonly portrayed as a Father. “Harlech Sands” alludes to ‘the shapes / time makes out of us’, and several later pieces take on a largely and deliberately “Four Quartets”-ian tone and range of reference, concluding with the title poem:

	I run out of Time
	leaving matter to itself
	the clutter of it

	A new radiance 
	A timeless continuance 
	Timeless – no matter.

‘Run out of’ appears to be another of Street’s puns, and in this case, as Mandy Pannett has noted, in her recent review of his work for Tears in the Fence, it could actually work three ways: the poet is short of time, in terms of his own mortality, is in some way out of step, like a dancer on an off day, and seeks to escape time (good luck with that!). I also enjoyed the additional play, on ‘no matter’ – just how indifferent can one be to the concept of time/timelessness? Perhaps ultimately, ‘all manner of thing shall be well’?

For me the most memorable poem of all is “Hollywoodland”, compassionately commemorating the life and death of Peg Entwistle, the Welsh actor who in 1932 jumped to her death from the letter H of the Los Angeles Hollywood sign:

		Twenty four years
	it took to nail her to this letter
	through the long brief years always moving
	to the high pause where life brims and spills,
	and she can no longer be contained.

With time’s relativity now boiled down to an oxymoron (‘long brief’), the reader senses a double meaning in ‘contained’– both ‘held back’ and ‘limited’. Peg has, at least to an extent, defied time through her action, achieving a different form of immortality from the one she sought, though ultimately such matters are (as hinted earlier, in “We Stopped Cutting the Grass”) not objective, but subject to the degree of sensitivity in each viewer, or listener:

	What we hear and what we think we hear
	matter most; we can be aerials,
	signals incoming, sharing messages,
	or silent stations, deaf, oblivious.

Thus the sonic expert Street remains well-attuned to the realities of varying human interpretation, in a moment of unsentimental candour that typifies this splendid and precious collection.

Perhaps still more hauntingly honest is the climax to “Contrapunctus XLV”, which celebrates both the music of Bach and the musicianship of Glenn Gould, while simultaneously uniting the poet’s primary themes of sound and time, by pointing up the inadvisability of considering a work of art (and by implication an artistic career) fully finite.

	Gould, Bach: past, present, to come
	held together in music’s arms,
	as though on the score was written
	that something should always be unfinished,
	for sound teaches us how to die,
	reaching toward the next note,
	the intention that stays unplayed inside us.