A speaking silence. Photo: Photo: Richard E Freeman / flickr CC.
A speaking silence
Stephen Yeo reviews a new anthology of Quaker poetry
Delight first, followed by analysis. A speaking silence: Quaker poets of today is a grand subtitle to a collection that is the first of its kind in Britain for more than a century. The anthology, which is edited by RV Bailey and Stevie Krayer, gives Friends a timely opportunity to take some soundings.
Delight
The delights are easy to find and, once found, enthusiasm to read every line in the book quickens. As expected, there are two wonderful poems about Meetings: ‘The Timeless Hour’ by Clive Sansom and ‘Mosedale Meeting House’ by Brigid Sivill:
‘Grey cloth and bridled tongue.
The hat placed, just so, upon a wooden peg
before the elder shook God’s words
out of his mouth.’
There is another poem imagined as if volcanic ash had sculpted a Meeting, ‘The Quakers of Pompeii’ by Philip Gross, after a sculpture by Peter Peri. And then there is Ruth Terrington’s ‘Storing Apples’, ‘their glut/makes me a fool’. Some wrinkled, some turned:
‘to pulp, their failure palpable.
Some act of violence, I think,
must resurrect them, hurling stones
and earth aside. Or could one word
change everything, as quietly
as north reverts to south, unrecognised?’
And Gillian Allnutt’s ‘The Road Home’ conceived as a Hansel and Gretel ragged road to God, through the wood:
‘You won’t be going back to the hut
where father, mother plot
the cul de sac of the world
in a field
that’s permanently full
of people
looking for a festival
of literature, a fairy tale’
More, more! Read Sibyl Ruth’s ‘Chapel, Women’s Hospital’ in which the partner of a woman who has given birth is remembered going into the chapel, only to find dry flowers and lists of dead babies. The partner (‘you’) is celebrated and celebrates.
‘And you knew we had done nothing.
Nothing to deserve
the size, the shape, the sheer weight of our luck.’
The poem ends with the brave, well-earned bathos of a ‘Thank you very much’. Equally daring are the long lines of Mavis Howard’s poem ‘Translation’, in which the survival of pygmies in the Congo is pitted against ‘the loggers and the miners’ and depends, in the poem, on distant NGOs and ‘impartial’ grant applications. The ironic anger in this piece is perfectly judged, as is the title.
Analysis
So much to delight in, identify with and meditate on. Friend poets, thank you very much. It is clearly time to extend the Quaker Arts Network from visual art to poetry.
It would be easy to go on, omitting any analysis. I will not attempt to address form, diction or technique, although I am unsure that the editors’ hope ‘to find words being pushed to their extreme’ has been realised. And RV Bailey and Stevie Krayer’s understanding of what ‘recognisably contemporary voices’ sound like today may be a bit parti pris. Modern feet and lines, rhythms and rhymes can be as full of sound as of sense, hard as well as soft, clotted as well as clean, and still be accessible.
But thank God for Jackie Bartlett’s ‘Memento’; for the thickness of Basil Bunting’s music; and for the shock and intimate edginess of Philip Gross’s phrasing and lineation.
It would be fascinating to place each poem in this collection on Fiona Sampson’s Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry. Where Quaker poets cluster on such a map might say something about the Religious Society of Friends in 2013.
Private or prophetic?
What might an attender conclude about Quaker poets of today when dipping into this new anthology? Most obviously, that the majority of them are women. I counted sixteen men, one of whom died in 1971, one in 1981 and one in 1985, alongside forty-five women. About one third of the poems are first person or ‘I’ pieces. Approximately a quarter reference the divine or its absence: in a word, God. About the same number set out to capture a moment in ‘nature’ of some kind, a Here and a Now which, as it were, ‘I must tell you about…’ Maybe as many as fifteen out of the ninety-six poems are impelled by father or mother, partner or family.
Basil Bunting (1900-1985) – with two poems here – listed ‘socialist politics’ alongside ‘Quaker mysticism’ among his influences. Have we become more private than prophetic? Overt indications of our Peace Testimony, let alone other out-of-doors commitments, are rare in A speaking silence: Quaker poets of today, rarer, for example, than death.
Poetry and action
Indeed, I was surprised how little the heat and thundering noise of what Eric J Hobsbawm called The Age of Extremes: The short twentieth century 1914-1991 intrudes on Quaker poets of today, still less the manifest crisis of the public and the private, the state and the market, global warming and the financial and other violences of 2008 to 2014. But, as Clive Sansom (1910-1981) wrote in ‘The Timeless Hour’, ‘The Word may come’.
How does Quaker poetry – ‘about trying to tell the truth’ (page 11) – deal with Clive Sansom’s stanza in the same poem:
‘Let action go; and with it all the thought
Of action. Even when the world is racked,
It may be worthier to refrain from action
Than it is to act.’
My question is not based on a simplistic either-or: poetry or action. It derives from the possibility of the modern poem as a ‘making’ or construction rather than a comment (‘no ideas but in things’ as William Carlos Williams recommended), as a Thing that the wicked Powers that Be must walk around rather than enjoy. Is there more such poetry, even if it’s a tall order, among Quaker poets of today than this collection suggests?
A speaking silence: Quaker poets of today. Edited by RV Bailey and Stevie Krayer. Indigo Dreams Publishing. ISBN: 9781909357303. £9.95
