Skip to main content

yasmin-mannan
6th October 2015

Painfully life-affirming poetry

Book Editor Yasmin Mannan selects four breathtaking pieces of poetry, and each sharpens, yet blunts the edge, of what it is to be alive
Categories:
TLDR

Poetry can, like a sealed crypt, appear inaccessible, impenetrable, and without reason. However, like any other art form, certain poems can, and will, move certain people. I don’t think there is a such thing as “getting” poetry, but the closest I’ve come to this is through encountering poems that kicked me in the stomach in some way or another. I have selected four poems from the ‘Staying Alive Trilogy’, published by Bloodaxe, which I find almost painful to read… but in the best possible way.

They “distil the human heart as nothing else,” as Jane Campion commented on the collection. They draw upon love, mortality, godlessness, and the meaning of life. These poems are heavy but with a light, readable touch.

1. You Don’t Know What Love Is by Kim Addonizio

but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with
an ache and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

 

2. A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the
stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

 

3. Missing God by Dennis O’Driscoll

His Grace is no longer called for
before meals: farmed fish multiply
without His intercession.
Bread production rises through
disease-resistant grains devised
scientifically to migrate His faults.

Yet, though we rebelled against Him
like adolescents, uplifted to see
an oppressive father banished –
a bearded hermit – to the desert,
we confess to missing Him at times.

Miss Him during the civil wedding,
when, at the blossomy altar
of the registrar’s desk, we wait in vain
to be a fed a line containing words
like ‘everlasting’ and ‘divine’.

Miss Him when the TV scientist
explains the cosmos through equations,
leaving our planet to revolve on its axis
aimlessly, a wheel skidding in snow.

Miss Him when the radio catches a snatch
of plainchant from some echoey priory;
when the gospel choir raises is collective voice
to ask Shall We Gather at the River?
or the forces of the oratorio converge
on I Know That My Redeemer Liveth
and our contracted hearts lose a beat.

Miss Him when a choked voice at
the crematorium recites the poem
about fearing no more the heat of the sun.

Miss Him when we stand in judgement
on the lank Crucifixion in an art museum,
its stripe-like ribs testifying to rank.

Miss Him when the gamma-rays
recorded on the satellite graph
seem arranged into a celestial scorem
the music of the spheres,
the Ave Verum Corpus of the observatory lab.

Miss Him when we stumble on the breast lump
for the first time and an involuntary prayer
escapes our lips; when a shadow crosses
our bodies on an x-ray screen; when we receive
a transfusion of foaming blood
sacrificed anonymously to save life.

Miss Him when we exclaim His name
spontaneously in awe or anger
as a woman in the birth ward
calls to her long-dead mother.

Miss Him when the linen-covered
dining-table holds warm bread rolls,
shiny glasses of red wine.

Miss Him when a dove swoops
from the orange grove in a tourist village
just as the monastery bell begins to take its toll.

Miss Him when our journey leads us
under the leaves of Gothic tracery, an arch
of overlapping branches that meet
like the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation.

Miss Him, when, trudging past a church
we catch a residual blast of incense,
a perfume on par with the fresh-baked loaf
which Milosz compared to happiness.

Miss Him when our newly-fitted kitchen
comes in Shaker-style and we order
a matching set of Mother Ann Lee chairs.

Miss Him when we listen to the prophecy
of astronomers that the visible galaxies
will recede and the universe expands.

Miss Him when the sunset makes
its presence felt in the stained glass
window of the fake antique lounge bar.

Miss Him the way an uncoupled glider
riding the evening thermals misses its tug.

Miss Him, as the lovers shrugging
shoulders outside the cheap hotel
ponder what their next move should be.

Even feel nostalgic, odd days,
for His Second Coming,
like a standing in the brick
dome of dovecote
after the birds have flown.

 

4. Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

And did you get what you
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on this earth.


More Coverage

Summer Daydreaming: Literary escapes from the winter blues

Why not escape winter with these sun-soaked reads? We offer a few recommendations that unveil the warmth of summer reading regardless of the season.

Recommending a book for each Taylor Swift era

Taylor Swift is now more popular than ever and we can’t get enough, so we recommend a book for each of her albums.

International Women’s Day book guide: Celebrating feminists and feminism

Women’s writing should be spotlighted and celebrated all year round, but in the lead up to International Women’s Day, there’s no time like the present so we recommend some of our favourite books

More than Murakami: What does Japanese fiction have to offer?

Why is Japanese fiction becoming so popular? We give some insight into the rise of modern Japanese literature and recommend some of our favourite reads!