Lifesaving Poems: Brendan Kennelly’s ‘May the Silence Break’

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
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I called this series of posts Lifesaving Poems because I actually believe there is something redemptive and healing in the art of making, speaking, listening to and reading poems.

This may sound terribly old hat and beyond the pale, but I now feel I have lived long enough and seen enough things to have some kind of confidence, however tentative, in that claim. If you have read the posts in this series you will know how my own experience, especially of illness, has shaped my search for these transformative capabilities.

I have had special cause to reflect on this in the past week, having lost two friends who in their different ways also believed this to be true. At the funeral of one I chose to read another poem of Brendan Kennelly, ‘The Good’, which you can read here, in honour of this.

My first experience of seeing that working out in the life of someone else occurred in an encounter with another of his poems, ‘May the Silence Break’, below.

Several years ago we got the news that a young family friend had been involved in a road traffic accident. She had been hit by a car, which did not stop to attend to her. We found her in a hospital which specialised in head injuries. The doctors, in their frank way, said she would be affected for life by what had happened to her and while we could expect her to live she would need almost constant care.

The doctors encouraged us to speak to her, hearing being the most enduring of the senses. Would you mind if we read to her, we asked. They thought that was a good idea. Almost on a whim I took in Kennelly’s A Time for Voices (Bloodaxe, 1990) to read to her. Partly this was because it was what I was reading at the time, but I also sensed that Kennelly was someone who knew about ‘the war on silence’ and the cost of trying to overcome it.

Plus, I felt I had nothing else to lose.

Over the next two weeks I read the poems to her, after work, as she slept.

Watching her now you would not know what had happened to her. She is married with children;  she has a successful career. It is a miracle. Every time we speak I think back to those vigils by her bedside, watching the apparatus surrounding her help her breathe bleeping softly in the blue glow of the ward, praying for the silence to break.

 

May the Silence Break

 

Because you do not speak

I know the shock

of water encountering a rock.

 

Supremacy of silence is what I hate.

Only gods and graves have a right to that

or one who knows what this is all about.

 

Perhaps you do.

If so, let something break through

the walls of silence surrounding you.

 

Out here among words

your silence is the magnet I am drawn towards.

Men’s mouths, animals eyes and the throats of birds

 

fear this impenetrable thing.

So do I, all day long

and when the night drops like a confirmation

 

of what you are,

controller of every star,

possessor

 

of what the daylight struggled to reveal.

This possession kills

whatever it wills.

 

Nothing I say matters tonight.

Nor should it.

This silence is right

 

because it knows it is.

I shiver in the cocksure ice

and long for the warmth of bewildered eyes.

 

May the silence break

and melt into words that speak

of pain and heartache

 

and the hurt that is hard to bear

in the world out here

where love continues to fight with fear

 

and the war on silence will end in defeat

for every heart permitted to beat

in the air that hearts make sweet.

 

Brendan Kennelly, from A time for Voices

Lifesaving Poems

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

Posted on by Anthony Wilson
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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
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‘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
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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
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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