Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2014

Pasternak Time: "Quasi people, with more haste than voice"

Pasternak Time: "Quasi people, with more haste than voice"   Quasi people, with more haste than voice, Face book opinions ephemeral as crosswords; Friends more by accident than choice. Stasi people brandish orders of boss words; Watch hallways; their digits rip-off files. Incognito always, they engineer lost words. Power people, in private frantic, in public smiles, Know who they banish are stars they fought. Half a people respect them, the rest revile. Non-people, sorted or bought or fraught, caught On the wrong side of the street, the wrong year; Grew up wanting something, last left with naught. Anti-people paraded in news reports, raise fear By their every mention, have nowhere to hide; Live abroad, by the sword. Their fate is clear. Real people, with normalcy on their side, Stay silent wrong times; asked something, rave. We live and let live with their small prides. Near people, here, we will go with to the grave; Think dear about

Pasternak Time: “The Bible improves with years”

Pasternak Time: “The Bible improves with years” The Bible improves with years. How useless the cynic with “It’s all useless!”, The optimist absurd as the pessimist. The psalmist knew many days Who waited with joy for sunrise, Gave thanks for small beauties it revealed. He had seen enough for a lifetime And exile was always just around the corner. Comes a time faith alone is all that’s left. The Bible, returned to as we do to home, Home’s landscape and meetings in all weathers. There rages argument about Russian, Which words in what order work and why. Tongues proliferate across the Soviets, Out across the world of raging nations. And Job sits amidst the results Sorting out how it’s them and it’s him, both: We sit down together gazing at loss. Tyrants may scan the borders, Send their enemies to the bombed frontline, But it is still a child governs the household And hope alone, immaterial hope, persists. The Bible, fragments left from b

Pasternak Time: “She listened long after there was much to say”

Pasternak Time: “She listened long after there was much to say” She listened long after there was much to say. There was always something to say. Winter days, remembering the times all day inside. So much to forget, inside. Imagine no-one to talk to while winter lasts, Sharing the spoken word, while time lasts. Those with no-one to talk to live so long. It is fearsome how much we long. Hermits receive visitors’ needs and uncertainties. Novelists write alone vastly from uncertainties.

Pasternak Time: “Flat on its face the old movie”

Pasternak Time: “Flat on its face the old movie” Flat on its face the old movie Stands up again. It stands up well. Crowds run one way, bullets the other. Someone must lose. A speech is made. They all wore clothes like that, Hard to believe. Broad coats and hats. Clackety-clack like the intercity The film unwinds. Cities disintegrate. One thing about people who disappear: They disappear. You could be next. Opens its mouth without a voice, Only cue card words. We hear no screams. Comedy or tragedy, epic or farce? That is the question. It does not say. Credits are an historic custom To reward the winners. That’s another story. Ah! All the time in the world to consider The captured revolution! The editor died.  

Pasternak Time: “Green glassware and silver bowls”

Pasternak Time: “Green glassware and silver bowls” Green glassware and silver bowls, White linen and wide open windows Are not so much to ask for. Close writing and secret psalms, Firm friendships and wild private visions – Who says there will be no more? Grown ideas and saving themes, Greek knowledge and deep inner doubts – Excuse me, here is the door! Dark vigils and feast day meals, Rich motets through long summer twilights The party will not ignore. Lost mornings and afternoons, Hereafters and pained after effects: After is not like before.

Pasternak Time: “Anti-poems pass by the censor”

Pasternak Time: “Anti-poems pass by the censor” Anti-poems pass by the censor: “The thousand-room castle – tear it down!” “Crumble crumbs for the hungry ants” “At the end of the day there are outcomes” Your kind of anti-poem has sonorous sunsets, It is edged around with indulgence. Her versts of bursts are self-referential, They beg for a visit to Vladivostok. Anti-poems on the fall of the florin, The collapse of the edifice Inevitable. Anti-poems for every occasion: Birthdays, assassinations, funerals. His kind of anti-poem fixates on facial hair, Is too lukewarm about the Great Leader. My kind of anti-poem is whispered round midnight After they’ve hauled the ‘traitor’ away. Follow these rules for partyline anti-poems: 1.  Keep the similes simple. 2.   Use the root word ‘work’ at least once. 3.   Improve your basic crescendo.

Pasternak Time: “The five minute phonecall took no time”

 Pasternak Time: “The five minute phonecall took no time” The five minute phonecall took no time For such a famous phonecall. Yes, comrade. They have talked about it ever since, A lifetime of conjecture. What was the tone? Lives hung in the balance on the weight Of a single sentence. It’s not poetry. A lesser writer would stumble with words Or make false claims. Not Pasternak. He learnt dialectic in the days of glory When his parents wowed  Moscow. The Pasternaks. The Georgian psychopath knew all that But he had a mission. Vendetta. Lifetimes fill with connected incidents To break the receiver. Friendships founder. And time hangs heavy in her two books Who lived to remember her call. Silent decades writing. Where all roads lead to the five minute phonecall, One name traded against another. Hang up! Now! For what is Mandelstam, tell me again, What kind of damn fool name is that? Mandelstam.

Pasternak Time: “The narcissistic psychopath”

Pasternak Time: “The narcissistic psychopath” The narcissistic psychopath Has them all doing his dirty work. Main motive: his own only-ness. Who he wouldn’t kill to keep control, What he wouldn’t say to hold them in sway, What he wouldn’t will. Statues he commissions for town squares, In his own likeness. His own inscription Makes a murderer of millions their liberator. His records reach every room in the land: His signature must be a death’s head. For what is he without his fame, His appetite for his own power Beyond reason to satisfy? O what might they do to dethrone His prospering claims to supremacy? What do to reconstruct the bodies He destroyed in his will to tyrannise? Shall short lines prevail? Witticisms Spotlight his blind acquisition? They could ignore him, leave time alone To end the cruelty of silent assent. They may take up the wisdom that is folly, Render their lives to powerlessness. Share common food. Speak

Pasternak Time: “Summer stops us in our tracks”

Pasternak Time: “Summer stops us in our tracks” Summer stops us in our tracks, The heat wave and the heat wave City roads and gardens empty as flyleaves, The heat wave and some reading time Behind the louvres, in the parlour cool. Averbakh, Troshchenko, Kirpotin, Gidash, Party names denouncing Pasternak ‘fellow traveller’ ‘class warfare’ ‘bourgeois’ ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ ‘formalism’ Only names now in a book on Pasternak. Their words are an entire climate Stopping everyone in their tracks, Oppressive and disempowering and heated, As if the city should endure no let-up, Empty of any vehicle for new words. Between paragraphs our eyes take a rest. Only in the surviving pages of Pasternak, The supporting letters of friends of Pasternak Does life go on behind the louvres: Bright lines, some rewarding reading time, Rumours of a cool change by the weekend.

Pasternak Time: “Two-timing takes its toll”

Pasternak Time: “Two-timing takes its toll” Two-timing takes its toll As the secret gets out And everyone is drawn in Whether they take sides, or not. Mistress Revolution or Lady Art: Will he never make up his mind? Who’s it going to be? Their beauties so transparent, Their expectations almost eternal, Their moves fabulous and fickle. Someone is going to get hurt, Someone else tries not to care. Divides become apparent. Mademoiselle The Present and Madame The Past: What’s the choice? Who will he stay with? Will they all just stick it out? Or will someone get the flick? Commentary circulates: Only death will come between them. Everybody is talking, No two opinions quite the same, But on this they agree: It’s an uneasy truce Where no-one is completely happy, No side gets everything they want. Life must go on now this is the situation. Watch the calculations start! Miss Chance or Dame Fortune? The compromises settle uncomfortab

Pasternak Time: “Twelve versions of Hamlet”

Pasternak Time: “Twelve versions of Hamlet” Twelve versions of Hamlet Were found among his papers. Workmanlike, as critics say, Or was this, say, just an honest day’s pay In the worker’s paradise? The father will be obeyed, He will not be denied: Twelve versions of Hamlet Write and rewrite that writing counts And the state is corrupt, Lying all over the place. The established playgoer Watches the playacting prince Do his twelve versions of Hamlet So socially so really really real He could be mistaken For a social realist, While murders happen offstage, Women go mad for some reason, And you would dearly wish yourself To be living in another country. Where are the armies going now? What’s to laugh about in a graveyard? As one after another the leaders Are disappeared or reappeared Or kill each other out in the open With words or swords, Lying all over the place. The lucky ones leave at midnight For the writer’s dacha in yo

Pasternak Time: “Life herself comes about”

Pasternak Time: “Life herself comes about” Life herself comes about, The messages scramble to keep up. Once upon a time solitary for a while, Impossible not to see Every existence is wonder – He was a light-hearted, serious young man. Miracles are the vast trees against the blue, Trains riding over the hillsides, The healing silence and their faces. It was his to sort through until he found It is only his for now, It is not his. This someone, he enters trying to say how We are told there will be defeat, So when there is defeat We overcome. They were not always exactly to blame Who came to take him down. Only when empty again He raced to put the words in order Knowing it can never be enough. It is too late, it is not his. It is not ours, But we read Sensuous, personal, Angry, at the last fearless words, Entry after entry.  

Pasternak Time: “General Fear commands the theatre”

Pasternak Time: “General Fear commands the theatre” General Fear commands the theatre, His orders paralyse the provinces. Sycophants are victims by daybreak, Bragging dogs go silent. Up in the gods they hold breath Who prefer to attend nameless; His box is empty after interval, The players sigh with relief. Out on the Front his same old words Are enough for macho souls Who by nightfall will be more Of his brave, misplaced statistics. But it’s into the best Red surgery he goes. They attend to his secret wound While his thieving mistress jokes outside On her thirteenth cigarette. She’ll be a footnote in biographies. His kind of cancer’s inoperable. The curtain will fall on old wars As the provinces go out for a stroll.

Pasternak Time: “Cities stained with gold”

Pasternak Time: “Cities stained with gold” Cities stained with gold, Their streets rife with snowy walkers, Their apartments edged with extra masterpieces. Their promises increase with youth. The promises of cities – Vast as the shifting panorama, Qualified by insistent commitments, Oblique in their midlife directions – Prove transitory, youth itself. Someone should lighten up, Turn crude surface into gold, Take that choice even then inevitable, Make the hard decision. Not that the revolution would win, No one said that, No one said that then. The revolution came into the cities, Came with its own youthful ways, With its speeches and kitchen cabinets, With its own desolations.  

Sentences in ‘Doctor Zhivago’ by Boris Pasternak

The grassy smell of earth and young greenery made your head ache, like the smell of vodka and pancakes in the week before Lent. (page 84) The book fills up effortlessly with resonant descriptions. Having only this week started a book the plot of which I have known for over forty years, it is these close descriptions, together with the internal thoughts of the main characters, that stun with their immediacy. Here, for example, is an analogy that isn’t an analogy, more like an opportunity to raise up the evocation, for indeed nature and religion are at one in this seasonal image. Where else but Russia? we think And its reality of “vodka and pancakes” only enriches the nostalgia. We observe Lent at the end of the sentence, wondering in anticipation whether the church seasons will be mentioned in the same intimate way after the Revolution in 1917, or if they will be slowly replaced in the narrative by other ways of marking out time. Only by reading the book will we find

New and Selected Poems by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

A Trick of Lightness New and Selected Poems by Chris Wallace-Crabbe (Carcarnet Oxford Poets; 2013) Chris Wallace-Crabbe, New and Selected Poems Reviewer: Philip Harvey Weighty words and heavy ideas are the very stuff of this poetry, and yet one after-effect of reading Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a sense of lightness. Lightness was a recurring theme of praise for his work at the recent Melbourne symposium held in his honour, as he entered his eightieth year. The Psalmist talks of fourscore years being one of labour and sorrow, but this is not the main impression given by the new poems here. A marvellous delight in wordplay is coupled with a stable ability to describe the multidirectional mind and blessed body, as they walk lightly across the earth. Lightness does not mean lightweight, for indeed this book is packed with material that obeys the laws of gravity. One eye is trained permanently on tradition. Nor by lightness are we talking about light verse, that underr