Laurence Peddle
Review of Dialling a Starless
Past
Mike McNamara moved when he
was eight, or more likely was moved, from Larne, County Antrim, Ireland to Newport,
South Wales, where he lived in Halstead Street for at least some of the time.
This is across the George Street Bridge from the Church House Inn, 14 Portland
Street, Pillgwenlly, where W.H.Davies (1871-1940) was born and brought up.
There is a plaque on the wall to commemorate the most famous of Welsh poets in
his day, perhaps now best known for “Leisure”, in particular its opening
couplet:
What is this life if, full of care
We have
no time to stand and stare.
Davies left Newport for the world, whereas McNamara left the world for Newport, or so it must have seemed to him. Davies was a hobo in America where he lost one leg jumping off a train before, as it were, finding his feet and becoming a published writer. McNamara, too, has travelled light, but he has always shouldered questions, some relayed to us when we stop at his poems and stand and stare. Davies, on the other hand, has answers to impart, and in this and other ways the paths of their poems never cross. That said, they are both in the poetic mould, or one was and one is, except that their poems live on if read, which brings us, by boat rather than train, and the crossing of bridges not yet built when Davies returned from America, to Dialling a Starless Past.
McNamara’s latest book is an anthology of 36 poems, unified more or less by time and place; but also by the view he takes across the straits between wayward young man and regretful adult. This is the area in which one searches for the poet as having survived; but one feels, too, that his writing throughout the decades, with its dredging of sentences from an emotional abyss, together with his musical gifts, have tightened the grip by which loving hands have righted his overturned soul. Clearly he still bears the scars of many a shipwreck, and the pain of the wrench away from childhood Antrim, as in “Never to Return”, the poem with which the book opens. We are with him, he makes us feel, when his life as a child capsizes, and then the heartbreak when washed ashore at Newport. Shortly after that poem another—“Adrift in the Asylum”— this time not so much adrift as drowning, with its descent into addiction and a psychiatric ward. And, too, into homelessness and the acts of self-piracy that might have sunk him.
But the work itself is a pleasure
to read, the words skimming across the water, and then to read again and go
deeper, knowing that the author precedes us, even on the darkest days that are
rawest in the telling—but not in the technique.
There is, for instance, “On Newport Bridge 1988”, a particularity of place and
seemingly of time; but the first stanza goes:
Years later now, an older man it seems
in contrast to the boy with visions lit by hopeful
schemes,
sated now, misled by blind addiction
but spared at least self-pity for this
self-imposed affliction.
It is on the bridge itself
that one pictures the older man, and the sameness and difference of the river
would speak to him; and the physical structure as a memory of itself that spans
the years. And this is how the fourth stanza flows between feet of stone:
I stumbled willingly across the bridge each night,
over the river Usk, blessing the patterns from the
docked boats’ light,
every winding backstreet seemed like the blueprint
for some plan,
That led me onward to a knowledge of
the ways of man.
This is language as a love
that is never lost, despite the demands that it makes, and that he makes of it.
The loss would be the reader’s, too, for it is love as partial recognition. The
fresh familiarity in the words is with ourselves when seen from the poet’s
isolated tower. McNamara holds objects up to that elevated height; and the way
in which it strikes the reader varies with the individual. For me the
backstreet line is richly evocative, the associated images not all pleasant, especially
if I picture a city grid of terraced back-to-backs. The occupants are unseen as
we pass, the poet and I, and each house that fronts for them is cold as the
face of winter. Here are windows looking
out, and at night their harsh glare hurries you along the pavement and quickly
away, as if afraid that a mouth will abruptly open, or opened slam shut.
This is one of the poems in which the lines join
hands as if in memory of play; and in others in the collection there are
buildings, backyards, roads, rooms and houses, all with their hidden meanings, their
coded stops and semi-colons. The rooms, one feels, are vacant in the poem’s mixing
of senses but occupied in just the one way: by ghosts as the tenants now, the
arrears paid in sadness and loss. This is the common currency by which each of
us, grown-ups that we are, trade with the past or pay the premiums on a house,
a street, a front door locked into childhood and shutting us out—or a flat, as in the poem “Empty”, a single sentence
which begins ‘That flat’ and ends ‘is empty now’.But the final debt to be paid,
when the bailiffs wrench your arteries out of their sockets, will totally empty
you,
even of the pronoun itself.
It is all there in this
collection: the connected themes in their different guises and the names of
things but never, this being one’s impression, the essential thing, perhaps
because it cannot be grasped and held steady. Even the deities are elusive, as
in “God of the Locked Ward”, this latter re-visited by the poet as ex-patient,
the last stanza containing the lines:
Aye, once we walked together on one way streets
Darkening stained glass windows
Knocking bolted doors in vain.
Cursed, we searched for him for even then
His simple chair was cold. God was
gone
Here as elsewhere the
author seems to seek in vain the essential thing; perhaps known only by this or
that empty space. But a space is a shape in waiting, and it casts a shadow that
we may recognise, its outlines gaining definition as the poems progress.
One feels that there is
much to be afraid of in this work; for ghosts have their dark side, even the
ghost of the past, but above all else the ghost of the dead, and the spectre of
one’s memory of them. Here is the last stanza of “Dialling a Starless Past”:
Now I dial the past but the connecting line is dead.
The codes have changed, my coins no longer legal
tender.
The In Place is derelict, the market steps a
no-man’s land.
Tonight, I would share my starlit secrets with you
That shine beyond the bottled backstreets I once walked
But prison, grave and forty years
divide us.
Such divisions may vary in
each of us, the headstone differently inscribed; but the abyss is always the
same, and the primal fear that never dies, as in “Never to Return” again:
The outside
toilet
whitewashed
walls
legs dangling
in the darkness, wide eyed
scanning
walls for scurrying eight legged predators
Reading it, we are far from
home, having made our fortune or misfortune; but either way the words bank up
in such a wealth of nameless dread. Reading it, I tremble again at the foot of
the stairs, caught between shadows on the landing and the black void of the
glassed front door, the stars having fled the night sky. As with the child, so
with the adult; and even if we do not speak of it the haunting never goes away;
for the terror takes one shape and then another when shadows loom over the bed.
Re-reading this work, we know that we are not alone, and when we put the book
down we are less afraid to turn off the light. But also, something more….
This is how “On Newport
Bridge 1988” ends:
I walked across that bridge once more tonight,
A squanderer of words and empty years and love’s
lost light,
Just a wanderer in a 60s suit from some Dock Street
Oxfam shop
Wishing with every wasted breath this cold night
crossing would stop.
Again we are with him on
every tread, for the state we are in is one of eviction, dispossession and
loss, of longing and not belonging, the view from the orphan adult being always
the same, like the river that never is. The subsidence of the road we travelled
cannot be filled back in; and here, too, McNamara winds us up the street, the
corner a comma as we turn into another terrace, each house unsmiling as the
gauntlet is run. And yet….
And yet he speaks of the
blessed boat lights and of a blueprint and a plan, which unfolded may overlie
the city grid, for the light strikes a warm glow from a hearth re-kindled, and
the harsh glare softens through the glass if the time is right; or the distance
if the reader looks up and beyond the city limits. There are no stars, or so
the poem goes, but in the blackness against the darkness of hills above the
city a farmhouse light switches on, and there is no explaining the way one then
feels, or why it is that this light, as if a clifftop beacon seen from the sea,
commandeers our wistful gaze. We picture a sleeping sheepdog, unseen, unheard,
and its uncontainable joy when its ears prick up, the gate having clicked, as
if its dreams and ours have sped us home.
Each poem is a connection,
a link with bridges burned long ago and with rows of houses all the same but
not the ones that we knew, or not as we knew them, when we now pass along the
street. And yet, there are moments when it is hard to look forward not back, as
if our name called, and not to spin around. Is it as if we have been glimpsed
through net curtains, and then a hurrying to the door, and in the open doorway
if only we turned—what is it one would
expect to behold? Or to feel? Would it be a transcendent awakening from this
archetypal nightmare: that on a summer’s day on a crowded beach you became
separated when playing in the shallows and were swept out to sea; and seared
into your soul the sight and sound of the frantic searching; and suddenly you
were on your own. Is this what it means to be that foolish thing—grown-up? Not that we simply miss them but that we
grieve, both for them and for the child that the years have killed.
But also that we are foolish
indeed; for we never cease to hope for that homecoming; and each time we awake,
for the brief moment between opening our eyes and bringing the present into
focus, we are ready to believe that the tides have returned us to the beach
where still they wait; and the uncontainable joy of being reunited and home
again. This, for me, is the way in which the spaces between the lines are
filled in, and the links between the poems established, and between the book
and the man.
Finally,
there are references in the book to a life squandered and words wasted; but
this latter is not true of McNamara as poet, for it is through his words that
we follow where he leads, even into the abyss that he appears to enable us to
re-visit by reading him. More accurately, perhaps, but also more magically,
what we share is the reading itself, the poem holding up a lens through which
we individually interpret it; but at a greater depth the world is coloured the
same, the stars shining in the same way for each of us. For McNamara, or so it
seems, the line is dead when he wishes to dial the stars, and at rock bottom,
with the walls of a chasm or a room looming over him, there may be just a black
hole where the sky should be. For the reader of these poems, and for the poet, the
lines of which they are composed are alive with depth of feeling, and burnished
from the gold in them, and the necklaces of words catch the sun. Even at the
most wretched of times, in roofless derelict buildings, there must have been
that star, if not celestial then aspirational; and Mike, one religiously hopes,
will always follow it.
09/02/2020
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