Feature: Poetry - Lord Gawain Douglas talks about poet John Calder
Published: 18 August, 2011
by LORD GAWAIN DOUGLAS
JOHN Calder’s third collection of poetry is the product of elderly and solitary reflection.
Being-Seeing-Feeling-Healing-Meaning, published earlier this year by Herla Press, is divided into sections which include Poetry, Politics, Philosophy, Places and People, Facing the End, Restaurant Poems and, in conclusion, Five Aphorisms.
Many are imbued with a deep pessimism about the human condition and despair over our greed and selfishness, our propensity for mindless waste and cruelty, and our ignorance – especially our historical ignorance.
He writes:
To know not history
is not to know what life itself is all about.
Yes, these poems bring in their train an ambience of philosophical disquiet, tinged with melancholy and regret for lost youth and past friends and mentors such as Beckett, Burroughs and Russell.
But, of course, that is where the poet’s pen must often lead.
The section on politics and current affairs contains some of Calder’s best and most telling poems.
This is above all poetry with a message, and the message, which is sometimes obscured beneath a Hardy-like awkwardness and angularity, is worth digging for.
Here we get sharply trenchant, throw-aways which stick in the mind, as on the financial crisis of 2008:
The banks are bust, the houses are going
we’re reaping all of Thatcher’s sowing.
Many of these poems have, one senses, taken wing from some restaurant table over the darkly coloured panorama of a night-time city, Paris or London, after the third or fourth glass of the evening.
Chablis or Sancerre.
And indeed the restaurant poems by this cosmopolitan bon-viveur who knew Eliot and published Beckett, have on occasion a lighter touch – the prandial environment inducing perhaps a more genial wit and introspection:
Life is better after wine
if followed by a glass
of Hine
it’s better still.
Getting to know these poems – and thus, their author – has been rather like restoring an old painting. As the removal of layers of paint can reveal a hidden portrait underneath, so reading these poems has slowly exposed a youthful personality within.
Someone who has retained his innocence and sense of childhood, someone who has never grown up in the wrong sense, in the way most of us grow up, forgetting the child within.
One of Calder’s intellectual positions is of the impossibility of answering the final questions life throws at us. He has, as he says in his introduction, an incurable curiosity about the human condition, but at the same time, as is evinced by his verse, a profound scepticism:
Religion’s just a stupid bribe
to hide a cupboard that is bare.
He expresses despair about our purpose and destination, if any:
Hope for nothing! Nothing hope
Take what’s coming, don’t ask why
Life’s an ever-falling slope
the only luck is when you die.
When, as children, we ask “Why?”, grown-ups usually tell us.
When, as adults, we howl, moan or mutter the same question to the echoing air or dispassionate moon, there is no answer, except perhaps in the eyes of our own children.
And, of course, those eyes confirm that there is really no question anyway.
And what is truth?
Does it exist
somewhere there in
the deepening mist? asks Calder.
In a way he answers his own question in another poem.
One of his main interests has always been the performing arts, and, like many of us, has found that the intellectual questions somehow disperse or become less relevant in doing, in performance.
“Art is the engine of the human race,” he tells us. “Only art can find the truth that’s true”.
It’s something many of us, in our confused, uncertain, fragile world would agree with.
In this intriguing poetic self-portrait by a very significant 20th-century figure there is occasional optimism beneath the gloom – but you have to dig for it.
• Lord Gawain Douglas is the great-nephew of author and poet “Bosie” – Lord Alfred Douglas