Lifesaving Poems: Yves Bonnefoy’s ‘Let a Place be Made’

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
6

I lost two friends this week. They had both been suffering from cancer, and had been told that effective attempts to treat them had come to an end.  In the case of one friend, this happened a week or so before he died; the other had been given six months over a year ago.

But as the saying goes, nothing prepares you for the shock when it happens.

My friend Dave had leukaemia.  Almost identical to my own age, he was diagnosed with the disease some three years after my own treatment for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma had come to an end. He was treated in the same hospital, by the same doctors and nurses.

A fine sportsman, he was also a computer genius and made his living fixing PCs, including the one I am typing this on. He was gentle, patient and dry-witted. Nothing seemed to phase him.

My friend Mary was a lecturer in English literature, which she seemed to carry all of in her head. By some distance she was the best read person I have known, pulling not paraphrases but long and perfectly cadenced quotations -and quotations about quotations- out of the air, on any subject, as if on whim.

Both of them had the great gift of friendship, drawing people to them, feeding them, creating space for conversation and laughter. Exeter is a diminished city to lose them both in the same week.

I first read the poem below as a Poems on the Underground poster, which I subsequently bought. (I  have stuck it to my office door, as a way of undercutting the joke about university tutors never being available to see their students). The only other place I have seen it is in Mary’s kitchen, which seems entirely the point.

I am reading it tonight as I cherish the memories of our final conversations, teasing, light-hearted, monumental now it seems, which circled around my survival and their demise from cancer.  I hold the poem in my hand, like a pebble turned over repeatedly, searching for solace, even as it grows dark.

 

Let a Place be Made

 

Let a place be made for the one who draws near,

the one who is deprived of any home,

 

tempted by the sound of a lamp, by the lit

threshold of a solitary house.

 

And if he is still exhausted, full of anguish,

say again for him the words that heal.

 

What does his heart which once was silence need

if not those words which are both sigh and prayer,

 

like a fire caught sight of in the sudden night,

like the table glimpsed in a poor house?

 

Yves Bonnefoy (trs. Anthony Rudolf), European Poems on the Underground

Lifesaving Poems

More Chelsea Than Sunderland

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
2

‘More Chelsea Than Sunderland’ was prompted by the remark of a doctor of a friend of mine, when asked to comment on his chances of survival from cancer.

It was a serendipitous moment which I must have tucked away for future use, coming upon it in a notebook once my treatment was completed. By then Chelsea had lifted the Premiership title and England had gone out of the World Cup. It seemed interesting to me to link two facets of life, the impact of which were unpredictable and capricious, and yet, like a goal once scored, apparently inevitable.

 

More Chelsea Than Sunderland

for Humphrey Potts

 

Your doctor’s line predicting

your survival

tickled me

 

watching Terry lift the trophy

before the World Cup

debacle

 

inevitable as May following April

thinking I should be happy

                        imagining

 

that champagne moment

 

from Riddance (Worple Press, 2012)

The Quiet Room

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
5

Six years ago today I was told I wasn’t going to die.

Those weren’t the words my consultant used, but that is what I heard her saying.  I have written recently about the mistake that was made by the radiologist whose job it was to discern the effect of the chemotherapy treatment I was receiving for my tumour of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Nine days after being told my tumour was growing when it was in fact shrinking, I sat in The Quiet Room off the day case ward where I was treated, with my wife and mother and father. We were listening to my consultant describe the next steps of my proposed treatment, the first course of which having been deemed a failure.

I wrote The Quiet Room to commemorate that moment, some four years later. I was coming to the end of a long period of counselling, the venue for which was the very same room, on the same sofas. The coincidence that I learned about the prospects of shortened life and how to come to terms with the proposal of having it increased, in the same room, seemed too unreal, and therefore corny, to mention.

It was one of the few moments in my experience of treatment for cancer and its aftermath when friends did not say ‘You’ll get a poem out of that, Anthony’.

So it only seemed right that I did.

 

The Quiet Room

for Louise Page

 

Where Jörn told us what a hickman line was,

what the next steps were, their chances,

and ‘If you’re handed a shit pack of cards

that’s what you have to play with’;

where nine days later there was a knock,

then a suit, then a whisper,

a letter brandished in silence,

my results now wrong in the right way,

how it might have happened, what that meant;

where now I come out of choice,

every week if I could, and for free,

going beyond myself in questions

all in confidence, one drug

I don’t want to be weaned off;

where, from nowhere, I find myself praising

those smokers at the gates,

their banished impromptu coteries

of cleaner, auxiliary and line manager

offering a light in all weathers, especially

the one-legged gent on crutches

sticking two fingers to the traffic.

 

from Riddance  (Worple Press, September 2012)

 

Later this year you will be able to read the full account of this story in Love for Now, a memoir, forthcoming from Impress Books, and in Riddance, forthcoming from Worple Press, both available in September.

Lifesaving Poems: Chris Southgate’s ‘High Fidelity’

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
2

I first heard Chris Southgate’s ‘High Fidelity’ sometime in 2005, when I was lucky enough to be part of a writers’ group with him. Every five weeks or so the poets in the group would meet in my kitchen over coffee and Danish to discuss poems which we were drafting. Each poet would read out their poem and then listen, in silence, while the rest of us made observations, comments and criticisms. Only when the rest of us had finished were authors allowed to respond. The format never changed.

It is practically the most useful thing I have ever done in my life.

The day Chris brought ‘High Fidelity’ was special, because I had the rare impression of hearing perfect art straight off the cuff as it were. When he finished reading my own response went something along the lines of -there is nothing to change, it’s done.

You can find it in his 2006 collection Easing the Gravity Field: Poems of Science and Love (Shoestring Press). I don’t think it has changed much, not that it needed to.

I love everything about this poem, from its calculated yet non-judgemental observations to its relish of language, and, by implication, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. I love its humour -like Chris when you meet him, of the driest and most self-effacing kind, gently poking fun at the enterprise of note taking and writing poetry. I love the twist in the isolated final line, the link it makes to the man at the railway station; I love the community of this, and the silence.

If you do not know Chris’s work, I urge you to get hold of it. Last week he launched his new collection, A Gash in the Darkness. It is full of perfect poems like ‘High Fidelity’: wry, solid,  compassionate, and brimming with mystery. I should add that he is a wonderful reader of his work, really taking time to give his words space to breathe: if you have not heard him, you are in for a treat.

 

High Fidelity

 

The man sits above the tracks

at Bristol Parkway. He drinks tea,

studies the distance.

He notes the numbers of trains.

 

With binocs he picks them out

on the long curve from Scotland,

the hard-driving run from Swindon.

He watches till the grey light fades.

 

He drinks tea and talks to himself

about the rude girls who serve him.

He takes some pills – perhaps the ones

the doctors make him take.

 

I note him down,

after my airport poems,

my studies of Sappho, Bathsheba,

and Sylvia Plath.

 

I ride one of his numbers home

impatient to be undisturbed with a malt

and my rank-ordering of all the available versions

of the Goldberg Variations,

 

BWV988.

 

from Easing the Gravity Field: Poems of Love and Science

Lifesaving Poems

In Praise of PGCE Students

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
Reply

PGCE students are so dedicated. They burn with desire to be amazing. They hand in their work and have beautifully organised files. They collaborate with each other in study groups. They ask each other how they are. They have fabulous stationery.

They make lists, learn the guitar, sip coffee. All of them have scarves.

Some of them care so much it hurts. They want everything they do to be perfect. Sometimes, I tell them, good enough is good enough, that perfect first time is rare. They look at me aghast and go home to feed on soup and study materials.

Some of them live alone and some in community with others -they even have families. It is a miracle, all of this.

Each seems to carry within them a space of determination, iron and wilful, that no government can shake and no assignment feedback can quash. I watch them and believe all will be well.

I know this because I see it in the ache of their greetings, their morning eyes thick with sleep and shining.

Artwork by Kate Hingston