"Rapturous even in despair"

Many thanks to Robert Peake for his sensitive and enthusiastic review of The Ambulance Box. As Robert says, he and I share the grief of having lost a newborn son, so his assessment of the book is of particular significance to me. Here's a taste:

Sentimentality and easy words seem as though they might never have been invented in the remarkable worldview Andrew hands us in this book.

Robert's blog is well worth a look. He too writes movingly about his loss and intelligently about poetry. As you'll have seen below, I'll be stopping by his site for my virtual book tour on 8 July. I think that promises to be a very special leg of the journey.

Why 17?

Those of you who've followed this blog for a while and anyone who has read the information on the Salt website about The Ambulance Box will know that our first child died very shortly after birth. SANDS Lothians, the Lothians arm of the stillbirth and neonatal death society, was an enormous support to us as we began to work through the grief, pain and anger in the months afterwards. (Indeed, we made some very good friends in a couple we met through the organisation.)

UK SANDS runs the Why 17? campaign, highlighting the incidence of stillbirth and neonatal death in the country. I've just added a Why 17? banner to the sidebar. Click it and it should take you to the Why 17? site. Here's an explanation of the campaign from the site:

17 babies die every day in the UK, the tragic victims of stillbirth or neonatal death, a statistic that is repeated every single day across the country.

This shocking figure, the loss of 6,500 babies every year, is something the public is not generally aware of. Most people think stillbirths don’t happen today, yet stillbirth in the UK is 10 times more common than cot death.

At Sands, stillbirth and neonatal death charity, we feel that this level of baby loss is totally unacceptable which is why we have launched the Why17? campaign to raise awareness of this devastating loss and to ask the question:

“Why are 17 babies a day dying and what can be done to halt this national tragedy?”

Please follow the links to find out more about the aims of our campaign and the vital research that is needed to try and drive down this shocking level of baby loss.

Please consider supporting this campaign and contributing to efforts to save others from the terrible pain of losing a child.

Food and Ink

Got back on Saturday from a much-needed family break in Northumberland, then it was off to St Andrews on Monday for my Inklight reading, stopping off en route in Edinburgh for lunch with fellow HappenStance poet James Wood.

With a bit of time to kill between lunch and my train to Leuchars, I popped into the Scottish Poetry Library to do some final set building and have a quick read of James's "Song of Scotland", in the current issue of Poetry Review. I must go back to the poem. Seeing it on the page confirmed my impressions on hearing him read from it at the Mirrorball gig the other week. It's very strong, hugely entertaining and lays down a barbed challenge to a number of lazy attitudes and assumptions on both sides of the border.

St Andrews being a slightly awkward place to get to, I opted to stay overnight. The train, of course, ran somewhat late, so there was only just time to check in at the B&B before dashing round to The Grill House for a quick meal with Laila and Charlotte from the Inklight committee (£10.95 for two courses and a drink on their early evening menu; recommended) and from there to the venue.

The reading was in the North Hall of the All Saints Rectory (a Scottish Episcopal Church building I remember from previous StAnzas). An intimate room, shall we say, but all the better for that. The audience of about 20 people, mostly students, pretty much filled the seats. I really enjoyed reading to a mostly new audience, but it was great to have Brian Johnstone, Paula Jennings and Anna Crowe there too.

I read two sets, all but two of the poems coming from The Ambulance Box. The first set focused very much on the poems of loss and grief at the heart of the collection. And, following the convention Rob A Mackenzie began, here's the list:

1) The Invention of Zero
2) His Wading Light
3) A Voice is Heard in Ramah
4) Down Darkness Wide
5) Coronach
6) Saxifrage
7) Dream Family Holiday
8) 45 Minutes
9) Lullaby
10) Notes to Self

Hardly light, I confess, but the audience was attentive and very appreciative. It's always particularly pleasing to get good feedback from a set of those pieces.

The second half was shorter, less intense and more of a rag bag:

1) The Meisure o a Nation
2) Cardiac
3) Man with a Dove on His Head
4) The White Dot
5) Spanish Dancer
6) Improvisation for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time
7) The Melody at Night, With You
8) In Praise of Dust

This lot went down well too; laughs and chuckles in all the right places! I'd never read "The White Dot" before and was pleased how well it worked. Not only that, I sold six copies of the sampler pamphlet.

Unfortunately, there wasn't time for a question and answer session after the reading, but a handful of us sauntered to the pub after the Inlight committee had locked up. We had quite a good-going discussion about, among other things, Don Paterson's opinions on the connections between sound and meaning.

I had a great time, rounded off well the next morning by a hearty cooked breakfast and a chat with the other guest at the B&B, who turned out to be a regular StAnzagoer (and thanks for dropping by here already, Di).

Lullaby

this is the arm that held you
this is the hand that cradled your cold feet

these are the ears that heard you
whimper and cough throughout your brush with light

this is the chest that warmed you
these are the eyes that caught your glimpse of life

this is the man you fathered—
his voided love, his writhen pride and grief

(This poem appears in Andrew Philip: A Sampler and will also be in The Ambulance Box.)

Back to Front?

There's an extensive, thoughtful and very positive review of the sampler over at Jim Murdoch's ever stimulating blog The Truth about Lies. Jim comments on each of the poems in turn, as well as on general aspects of the pamphlet as an object and collection. This is the paragraph that most interests me:

As a poet myself I'm inclined to have my meanings at the forefront of my poems, not that I discount feelings but they've always tended to be something of an aside with me. Philip's poetry, to my mind, concentrates on feelings and the meanings are put on the back burner. These are poems you can't read, tick the box – Yeah, I get that one – and then pass onto the next one. ... A star has exploded and these are fragments rippling away, getting further and further apart, remnants; they meant something when they were whole. Now they are not meaningless but they mean less and Philip is desperately trying to cling onto that meaning. The feelings are clear and unambiguous however.

Always fascinating to see how others read your work, isn't it? I'm interested that Jim thinks I put meaning "on the back burner". I'd certainly agree that meaning is not "at the forefront" of my work as it is for him. That's perhaps the fundamental difference in our poetics: I don't discount the skill and craft of writing something with meaning at the forefront--perhaps I even do it occasionally--but that kind of poetry has never interested me as much as more layered, multivalent poetry has. So that's often what I aim for: something that layers meaning; that can access a sense beyond the surface meaning; that will draw the reader back to discover new meaning on subsequent readings.

I wouldn't call that putting meaning "on the back burner". To my ears, that phrase sounds a touch pejorative in this context. However, Jim is anything but negative about the pamphlet, so I guess he didn't mean it that way. In fact, he says the sampler is

a collection of poems by a man trying to make sense out of something that will never make sense, trying to imbue words with meanings they were never intended to hold and, where that fails, creating new words to try and get his point across.

Absolutely spot on. This is perhaps where we come to the emotions in the poetic. The poems in question being largely about grief and bereavement,* it's hardly surprising that emotion should strike a sensitive and intelligent reader as being at the forefront. Nonetheless, Jim acknoweldges the attempt to make sense (ie, meaning) out of it.

What we have here is the collision or collusion of meaning and emotion. Writing poetry has probably always been to me a means of thinking through my emotions, even more vitally so since I began writing about losing my son, Aidan. And I mean thinking through in a double sense: making sense of my emotional life; and using my emotions as a stimulus to thought. That's not the sum of my poetics, but it's probably a central part. After all, we're talking about an important aspect of the way I'm made: a reasonably intelligent/intellectual individual but, at the same time, uncommonly emotional for a man.**

Thinking again about the relative positioning of meaning and emotion in my poetry, I'd like to suggest that I'm not backgrounding meaning but foregrounding possibilities in the language. Fundamentally, poetry is about language: what we can do with it and what we can do to get beyond it.*** The poem's meaning is a function of the poem as an instance of language--a language event, if I can put it like that--with all the complexity of interaction between the text, the writer and the reader(s) that that implies. That too is a central part of what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying I apply this understanding in the most sophisticated way, but it's definitely mixed into the mortar.

Some of these thoughts have been rattling round in my wee heid for a while, but it's taken Jim's appraisal to get them out into the open, slightly random though they are. My thanks to him for providing the impetus and, above all, for taking the time to read and review the pamphlet so thoroughly.

*This holds for "Tonguefire Night" too in ways I didn't know and could never have known when I wrote it, although I understood at some level the cultural grief and bereavement that it touches on.

**Though not especially sensitive to emotional atmosphere, strangely enough. Aren't we humans complicated sometimes?

***"Poetry is only there to frame the silence", as Alice Oswald said in an interview.

A Note on Joy and Sorrow

"The joy of the Lord is your strength." (Nehemiah 8:10)

It's a verse often used in certain quarters, under the rubric of encouragement, to bludgeon the hurting for a failure to demonstrate happiness in pain. No thought given to the harm this misapplication does or what it implies, namely that God is not to be found in the pit. Not only is this scriptural illiteracy ("De profundis", anyone?), but it seems to me tantamount to a denial of the incarnation.

No thought is given either to what "the joy of the Lord" might be beyond grinning through grief. But we have here a possessive--"the joy of the Lord"--therefore, it's God's joy, not the believer's joy in him, that is the source of strength. What is God's joy? Perhaps it is the ceaseless adoration of each person of the Trinity by the others, the joy that Rowan Williams explores in relation to Rublev's icon of the hospitality of Abraham, also known as the Old Testament Trinity. We glimpse it at Jesus's baptism and again at the transfiguration in the voice of the Father coming out of the cloud. God's joy breaking through into a broken and fallen world, a world of sorrow and grief. Joy in the Man of Sorrows. That joy is in the background of Jesus howl from the Cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?", perhaps (depending on how you view it) the only time when this ceaseless adoration was interrupted.

This is not, is never, a joy that ignores, denies or glosses over suffering. It is a joy that enters pain and grief, comes alongside it and redeems it because the suffering of the Man of Sorrows, the Son of Joy, is eternally part of the life of the Trinity. ("Those wounds, yet visible above ... .") Holding joy in one hand and and grief in the other, this is the life the Body of Christ is meant to model to its members and to the rest of the world. Which is why lament and worship should always be found under the one spire.

Grief and Humanity, Pain and the Self

I don't know where Simon Barrow came across this quotation on grief from Rowan Williams, but it's worth reproducing here:

"[G]rief and desperate loneliness aren’t political things but human things. It’s only when we can get to the humanity can we begin to get beyond the sterility of historic racial and religious conflicts. Facing the abiding realities of the human condition, facing death; your own, or that of someone you love, is something that puts everything else into perspective. Change, real change, happens when we’re ready just to be human – not to use our suffering as another weapon against each other, not to argue about whose sufferings are worse, but just to recognise the same love and the same loss."

[Update: I've just discovered it's from Williams's Christmas Eve "Thought for the Day", which you can read in full here.]

And let me add to it this, which I read today, from his Lost Icons:

Authentic religious ... practice begins in the attempt to attend to the moment of self-questioning -- to refuse to cover over, evade or explain the pain and shock of whatever brings the self into question, to hold on to the difficulty before the almost inevitable descent into pathos and personal drama begins.

Weinberger on the Dead

America: the dead

People die, but there are no dead in America. The dead are those who are exhumed a year after burial, their bones washed and placed in catacombs or in a special niche in the house, their skulls painted, with jewels set in the eye sockets, their skulls set on spikes around the yard. The dead are those buried in suits of jade to live forever, with the ornaments, weapons, cooking utensils, and food they'll need in the other world. The dead are buried sitting on a chair, facing east. The dead have a rooster carved on their gravestones, to announce the soul's awakening. The dead are the ones for whom incense, candles, paper money, paper cars, paper houses with paper dishwashers and VCR's are burnt. The dead are the ones whose memorial tablets and portraits occupy a prominent place in the living room or in the temple. The dead have graves that are visited with regularity and kept from weeds, or inspire melancholy at their abandonment. The dead have graves where the family picnics once a year and misbehaves. The dead inhabit a place where the living, through chants or trance or solitude or drugs, can talk to them. The dead are those who take possession of the living. The dead are those who come back.

There are no dead in America because there are no corpses. Corpses are the invisible citizens of America, the secret no one tells, far rarer to observe by chance than copulation. We don't see them, we don't touch them, we don't dress them, we don't know what to do with them, we don't keep them in our bedrooms until they are interred, we don't watch their feet sticking out from the shroud as the flames consume them. So many people die on television in America because in our lives no one dies, they only vanish, and television is the great compensator for all we don't have or see.

There are no dead in America because there is no place. The dead are dependent on generations that do not move. The dead have graves where the family knows where the graves are. In America the ancestors are left behind in a nation constructed, like no other, on the pursuit of happiness, a dream of the future where the dead have no place. There is no happiness to pursue among the dead. The country was settled (in its historical era) as an escape from the dead. Except for those who came in the early years to practice their religion - to maintain the old ways - its emigrants have come seeking freedom from the tyranny of the dead and, like released slaves, they must wander and invent themselves. The generations move on, new people, forever "making a new start," holding the ethical ideal of being "born again" in this life.

In the dream of no history, small fears fester and infect. The standard American horror movie plot is the house, the school, the mall built over a forgotten cemetery, and the subsequent revenge of the desecrated: a story unimaginable anywhere else. Visiting the United States in 1944, the Chinese anthropologist Fei Tsao-t'ung reported that "people move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, to say nothing of other people . . . . Naturally they seldom see ghosts."

from Renga— ten linked prose pieces, published in Jacket 11 and Karmic Traces.

The Shock of that Silence

I've been meaning to post a link to this marvellous, sensitive article all week. As a bereaved parent, I relate deeply to the experiences that Alice Jolly describes. I can't recommend her piece highly enough to anyone. If you've lost a child, you'll hear your own voice in her story. If you've never been through that horror and despair (and I pray you never will), you'll hear a voice much buried. And if you've ever lost anyone (who of us hasn't or won't?), you'll hear some salutory words about our society's problem with grief and the grieving.