by Anthony
MARK HADDON
I have never much liked sentiment in poetry, and sentimentality is the death knell for pretty much all literature (‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,’ as Oscar Wilde reportedly said). It doesn’t happen often, but what moves me most profoundly is the sublime sublimely articulated, a feeling that language has somehow taken me beyond the boundary of language. For obvious reasons it’s hard to say precisely how this happens – though Shakespeare’s poetry does it most often – but it’s close to the feeling I get in certain landscapes or standing under a starry sky on a clear night, a kind of ecstasy which is neither happiness nor sadness nor fear nor contentment but some paradoxical combination of all four.
And Derek Walcott’s poem? It’s the details, to begin with, the sky flickering like a TV set, those ‘teeth broken as dice’, the way it then breaks free from history and geography, sweeping us upward to a high, cold point from which we find ourselves looking down on all time and space in the company of an old man for whom it means nothing, who simply turns his pony round and walks away into the endless, white forest.
Midsummer: ‘Sonnet XLIII’
Chicago’s avenues, as white as Poland.
A blizzard of heavenly coke hushes the ghettos.
The scratched sky flickers like a TV set.
Down Michigan Avenue, slow as the glacial prose
of historians, my taxi crawls. The stalled cars are as frozen
as the faces of cloaked queues on a Warsaw street,
or the hands of black derelicts flexing over a fire-
barrel under the El; above, the punctured sky
is needled by rockets that keep both Empires high.
It will be both ice and fire. In the sibyl’s crystal
The globe is shaken with ash, with a child’s frisson.
It’ll be like this. A bird cry will sound like a pistol
down the avenues. Cars like dead horses, their muzzles
foaming with ice. From the cab’s dashboard, a tinny
dispatcher’s voice warns of more snow. A picture
lights up the set – first, indecipherable puzzles;
then, in plain black and white, a snow slope with pines
as shaggy as the manes of barbarian ponies;
then, a Mongol in yak’s skin, teeth broken as dice,
grinning at the needles of the silent cities
of the plains below him up in the Himalayas,
who slaps the snow from his sides and turns away as,
in lance-like birches, the horde’s ponies whinny.
(1984)
Mark Haddon (b. 1962) is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003), won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award, and was staged by the National Theatre. His subsequent publications include a poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (2005). His most recent novel is The Red House (2012).
In Blackwater Woods
MARY OLIVER (1935– )
MARC FORSTER
The first thing I did after reading this poem for the first time was to stop. It was like I had been chasing after something and suddenly I just stopped and looked around me. I stopped inside and my mind became peaceful and clear. We don’t know what it means to let go. It is very hard to discover that nothing is permanent and we invent numerous beliefs to protect us from the fear of letting go. We are frightened of letting go, because we have postponed it.
To find out what actually takes place when you let go, you must die. Not physically but psychologically, considering yourself dead to all things you have cherished, which is very hard for me. So I started crying at the end of the poem because of my love for life, humanity and stories. Those stories that someone has lived evoke a melancholy emotion of a time gone by. One that you can’t hold on to and need to let go. But I believe that only through that act will my mind be free and able to truly experience what true freedom is.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
(1984)
The Swiss-German filmmaker and screenwriter Marc Forster (b. 1969) directed Monster’s Ball (2001), Finding Neverland (2004), Stay (2005), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), The Kite Runner (2007) and the twenty-second James Bond film Quantum of Solace (2008). His most recent film is World War Z (2013), starring Brad Pitt. Forster has also worked with the Red Cross and the Swiss federal health department’s HIV prevention campaign.
Love After Love
DEREK WALCOTT (1930– )
TOM HIDDLESTON
I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, ‘enough’. Most of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a need to be better, stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. We are driven by a sense that we are not, as we are, ‘enough’.
But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It’s like the embrace of an old friend. We are each of us whole, perfectly imperfect, enough. ‘Feast on your life’ feels like permission, as though Walcott is calling time on all the madness, the mayhem, the insecurity, the neuroses, the drama, and with a big, broad, kind smile, he brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything that we have. I read it to my dearest friends after dinner once, and to my family at Christmas, and they started crying. Which always, unfailingly, makes me cry.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(c. 1984)
The screen roles of Tom Hiddleston (b. 1981) range from F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) to Henry V in the BBC TV Shakespeare series The Hollow Crown (2012), Adam in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and the supervillain Loki
in Marvel’s Thor (2011) and The Avengers (2012). He has also appeared in Archipelago (2010), War Horse (2011) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011). His stage work includes Coriolanus and Othello at the Donmar Warehouse and Ivanov (West End).
Extract from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos
JOHN BERGER (1926– )
SIMON MCBURNEY
Love joins. Love’s opposite is separation. And death separates eternally. It is an unbridgeable gap that we constantly yearn to close as we pledge to love eternally.
‘. . . So long lives this and this gives life to thee.’
My father was an archaeologist. He knew about bridging gaps. There were bones he dug which were more fragile than the earth that surrounded them. Shards of flint were reassembled to reveal the hands that knapped them. He uncovered, analysed, and reassembled artefacts, suggesting conjunctions that revealed a truth about our past and joined us with it. This is what John Berger does. He also joins. His tools are words. And in his exquisite book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, he uses these tools to dig like an archaeologist, distil like a chemist, theorise like a cosmologist, excavating in the earth of vulnerable human experience, and then joining the fragments he uncovers with an eye as sure as an astronomer and a hand as gentle as a carpenter. And in this poem, written in prose, he does something extraordinary. He joins love and its enemy separation. He makes, he constructs, a promise. A promise that is, perhaps, indistinguishable from the promise of poetry itself. A promise, as Berger puts it ‘. . . that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.’
Extract from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos
What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.
(1984)
The actor, writer, and director Simon McBurney (b. 1957) cofounded the theatre company Complicité in 1983 and remains its artistic director. His productions for the company include The Elephant Vanishes (2003), A Disappearing Number (2007) and The Master and Margarita (2012). He has also directed Broadway productions of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, starring Al Pacino (2002), and All My Sons (2008). He has acted in films such as The Last King of Scotland (2006) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), and in the television comedies The Vicar of Dibley and Rev. His publications include a volume of essays, Who You Hear It From (2012).
Sandra’s Mobile
DOUGLAS DUNN (1942– )
RICHARD EYRE
There are not many poems about death which don’t carry some baggage about the life eternal or, in offering comfort, offer advertisements for religious consolation. What moves me so much about Douglas Dunn’s poem – which comes from a collection called Elegies, all relating to the death of his wife – is that it’s about love and the survival of love.
Sandra’s Mobile
A constant artist, dedicated to
Curves, shapes, the pleasant shades, the feel of colour,
She did not care what shapes, what red, what blue,
Scorning the dull to ridicule the duller
With a disinterested, loyal eye.
So Sandra brought her this and taped it up –
Three seagulls from a white and indoor sky –
A gift of old artistic comradeship.
‘Blow on them, Love.’ Those silent birds winged round
On thermals of my breath. On her last night,
Trying to stay awake, I saw love crowned
In tears and wooden birds and candlelight.
She did not wake again. To prove our love
Each gull, each gull, each gull, turned into dove.
(1985)
Director of Britain’s National Theatre from 1987 to 1997, Sir Richard Eyre (b. 1943) has won numerous awards including five Oliviers for productions ranging from Guys and Dolls to Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. His film credits include Iris (2001), Notes on a Scandal (2006) and The Other Man (2008). His opera productions include Carmen for the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2010.
Brindis con el Viejo
MAURICIO ROSENCOF (1933– )
JUAN MÉNDEZ
I read this sonnet only in 2012, although for decades I had known the story of the inhumane conditions in which the Uruguayan ‘hostages’ were held for eleven years. Coming at the very end of the remarkable Memorias del Calabozo, the poem brought tears to my eyes because it made me think of my own father and his unyielding moral support for me when I was a political prisoner in Argentina. I remembered also how I imagined my dad’s sadness and at times distress, as I spent my days in a cell under conditions that could change for the worse at any time. They did for several friends of mine and I can only imagine the despair of their own fathers.
The poem is written in the familiar Spanish of the River Plate and it describes a Sunday ritual that is very common to families in the Southern Cone of South America. My father was also fond of a drink with family before a Sunday luncheon. He preferred vermouth to grappa, but the effect is the same: an opportunity to share a loving ritual with offspring and to share the events of the week and plans for the future with sons, daughters, and grandkids. When those moments are rendered impossible by prison or exile, their remembrance stings with nostalgia, guilt, and love.
Brindis con el Viejo
Yo sé que los domingos, casi al mediodía,
Abrís con cautela el viejo aparador,
Y vertís en un vaso el mismo licor
Que en los buenos tiempos con vos compartía.
Yo sé que a ese trago le falta alegría
Y que al tomarlo no le hallás sabor,
Porque a veces suele borrar el dolor
Su gusto al vino y la luz al día.
Pero vos sabés que la tormenta pasa
Y que el implacable sol no se detiene
Cuando un nefasto nubarrón lo tapa.
Por eso sé que volveré a tu casa
Algún domingo que el almanaque tiene,
Para beber con vos una risueña grapa.
(c. 1987)
Raising a Glass with My Old Man
I know that on Sundays, at around midday,
You cautiously open the ancient sideboard
And pour a glass of the same grape liquor
We used to share in better times.
I know you’re not happy now when you drink it,
That it’s lost all savor for you,
Because sometimes sorrow can quite erase
One’s taste for wine and the light of day.
But you know, as I do, that the storm will pass
And that the implacable sun doesn’t simply stop
When obscured by a dark, pernicious cloud,
Which is why I know I’ll return to your house –
On a Sunday that’s there on the calendar –
And laugh with you over a glass of grappa.
TRANSLATION BY MARGARET JULL COSTA
The Argentine-born human rights lawyer Juan Méndez (b. 1944) was adopted as an Amnesty International ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ in the mid-1970s after his arrest, imprisonment and torture by the Argentinean regime for representing political prisoners. Now based in the United States, he launched Human Rights Watch’s Americas Program, has served as president of the International Center for Transitional Justice and is currently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture.
An End or a Beginning
BEI DAO (1949– )
WUER KAIXI
Bei Dao, one of the leading thinkers in my generation, enlightened ten
s if not hundreds of millions of Chinese with his poems. In the time of the Cultural Revolution or the years following it, the people of China had long forgotten the ability to think independently. With his words, Bei Dao truly showed us that concepts like integrity, honesty, courage and, most of all, the longing for freedom are so beautiful and worth living for, worth fighting for, worth crying for.
I came across his poems when I was a teenager. It was the 1980s in China, when people were waking up. Yet one thing the regime did not want to stir in the deeply hibernating minds of the people was the consciousness of independence. His words, particularly these lines from his celebrated poem ‘An End or a Beginning’ – ’If fresh blood could make you fertile / The ripened fruit / On tomorrow’s branches / Would bear my colour’ – brought tears to my sixteen-year-old eyes, and have kept the flame of ideas kindled in my heart.
An End or a Beginning
(for Yu Luoke)
Here I stand
Replacing another, who has been murdered
So that each time the sun rises
A heavy shadow, like a road
Shall run across the land
A sorrowing mist
Covers the uneven patchwork of roofs
Between one house and another
Chimneys spout ashy crowds
Warmth effuses from gleaming trees
Lingering on the wretched cigarette stubs
Low black clouds arise
From every tired hand
In the name of the sun
Darkness plunders openly
Silence is still the story of the East
People on age-old frescoes
Silently live forever
Silently die and are gone
Ah, my beloved land
Why don’t you sing any more
Can it be true that even the ropes of the Yellow River towmen