Genius at Work: James Brookes on John Greening, Kenny Knight, and Ruth Stone

John Greening, Hunts: Poems 1979-2009, (Greenwich Exchange, 2009). ISBN: 9781906075330. £16.99
Kenny Knight, The Honicknowle Book of the Dead, (Shearsman, April 2009). ISBN: 9781848610170. £8.95.
Ruth Stone, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems, (Bloodaxe, April 2009). ISBN: 9781852248413. £12.00

The first line of Bloodaxe’s blurb for What Loves Comes To quotes Ruth Stone as having once said, “I decided very early on not to write like other people.’ Stone was born in 1915; her longevity and her poetic output are equally remarkable. Yet who these ‘others’ are and in what ways Stone’s writing differs is not so very easy to determine, given we are talking about writing produced over nearly a century of vast change.

If judging a book by its blurb is a sin for reviewers, it’s no less culpable to question why Bloodaxe have felt the need to include a foreword from Sharon Olds, one of Stone’s more flattering pupils. I probably shouldn’t have read it, or read it after the poems. But presumably other readers are expected to read it first, so it becomes part of this review; sadly so, as it seemed a distraction. Olds’ remembrances of Stone wearing “old softened blue jeans and men’s (one beloved man’s) oxford shirts’ hardly inform a reading of the poetry. Rather, Olds seeks to paint a rather romantic picture of “a genius at work — a woman who chopped wood for hearth fires and drew water, in winter, from the river’, a woman whose poetic praxis is that of a former, less-careerist age: “a life of poetry that was communal — not that she sought out readers in the greater world; she did not seem to send poems to magazines, or books to publishers’.

There are poems on the pain and endurance of love and loss, the body and its joys and fragilities, maternity, the aging process, the writing process, almost every other living process. If this list seems reductive, or vulnerable to a contemporary criticism of stock feminist subjects, it shouldn’t be. Stone was not only one of the pioneering poets who secured territories now taken for granted as ‘subjects allowed to, or monopolised by women poets’ (as if these exist), but is deeply affecting in her treatment of these subjects. The recurring preoccupation of her husband’s suicide in 1959 is neither overworked nor exploited. For example, 1991’s Who is the Widow’s Muse? is a fine narrative sequence that manages to be both self-knowing and self-regarding, without irony or worthiness. It confronts self-doubt and the pitfalls of writing about bereavement, as in ‘XXXIV’:

The muse lifts an eyebrow.
“Illuminations, final statements,
nutshells,’ the muse cries …
“blather, blather, blather’.

is a more endearing struggle for the poetic than any amount of cold-weather outdoor labour.

The new poems here prove Stone is still a poet who can be canny and uncomfortable. In ‘Tsunami’, written for the tragedy on Boxing Day 2007, Stone finds “westward the terrified monkeys / the red-faced ones, felt the earth tilt’, whilst “the tiniest spiders’ survive in their mountain-peak forest with “their webs, flung and fastened / like elegant tailored buttonholes.’

I found a major flaw with this edition and it does not lie with Stone’s poetry, but with the editing and presentation of her work. Quite separate from the issue of Olds’ foreword (which is common practice for selected poems: Faber makes a selling point of them) is the structure of the selection. Following the title rather too literally, the edition puts the ‘new’ (the titular What Loves Comes To poems of 2008) before the ‘selected’: a chronological arrangement of poems from 1959’s In an Iridescent Time to 2004’s In the Dark. It may seem a petty point but with my limited familiarity with Stone’s work the structure affected my reading process considerably. Included also are Cheap: New Poems and Ballads (1975) and Second-Hand Coat: New and Selected (1987). Was it necessary to retain these titles with their ‘new and selected’ riders, now so clearly redundant? Extensively using previous selections in a new selection seems a cheat, like buying a repackaged ‘essential very best of’ in the hope of one new rare B-side.

[The Bloodaxe edition is based on the Copper Canyon Press edition, published May 2008 in the US. Ed.]

It is also unusual to feel in a body of work, edited — if at all — with no obvious attention to thematic cohesion, such a lack of variation. Enduring preoccupations are done no favours when they are over-represented. Encountering so many poems on the same topic, separated by so many years and so many pages, creates a sense not of cohesion but of inertia. Progression or even pleasing recursion becomes a somewhat dulling inertia. Perhaps the intention was to retain a sense of the structure of each of the constituent collections, but, if so, I felt that intention failed. What’s much worse is that the method makes the book seem far too big, an incomplete ‘collected poems’, which is a real shame. There is subtlety and brilliance here but the excess prevents me from commending the book, for all the value of its contents; its purpose is to present a selection and as a selection and a presentation it does an important poet a disservice.

From one selected poems to another, then. John Greening’s Hunts revels in its varied strengths, and harnesses them to make one complete animal. The thematic, rather than chronological, arrangement on the most part manages to avoid excesses of shoehorning or straight-jacketing, though the categories of ‘Portraits’ and ‘Pastorals’ are noticeably looser. Perhaps this is because of the coherency of other parts, which include extended, developed projects. The central three ‘Hunts’ — ‘Huntingdonshire Eclogues 1989’; ‘Huntingdonshire Nocturnes 1999’; ‘Huntingdonshire Elegies 2009’ — show Greening to be a poet of rare commitment to the idea of community in an ecological and social, as well as poetical, sense.

Yet it is the section ‘Egypt’ that really shines. Clearly the result of committed fieldwork and dedication to praxis, I found myself presented with multifaceted gems such as ‘Howard Carter at Swaffham’, which reveals the famous archaeologist’s childhood as a gamekeeper’s son amongst the self-entombing aristocracy:

And if his imagination
pierces a tiny hole
in these venerable walls
and holds a candle

through to a room
of wonderful things
but utterly foreign to
a decorously mounted

hunting party with
its fine equipage
its whips and sticks and
stuccoed wooden courtesy —

then what is that to us?

From the transferred interment to the inversion of the gamekeeper’s role of “keeping trespassers / from our noble pile’, it is full of marvellous conceits. The social commentary is acute, and the ironic effects handled as deftly as anything in Armitage or Larkin. But what most impresses is the way Greening brings the tension between obsequious awe and cold indifference into play — and how appropriate is that as a reflection on poetry and its public reception?

Apart from the sheer range of ground that Hunts covers, there is that familiar danger of allusive poetry: dryness. But, forgiving a low pun on the desert terrain of these poems, this is dryness without aridity — rather a glimmering and abrasive humour, polished as with sand. The affectionate handling of the story of ‘Omm Sety’, a sequence dealing with Dorothy Eady, an English woman who believed herself to be an Ancient Egyptian priestess and the mistress of a pharaoh, is nonetheless hilarious. I found the treatment of Isis and Osiris especially enjoyable, as mouthpieces for bawdy and irreverent monologues, not unlike Christopher Logue’s handling of the Olympus mob in his Homer redux War Music.

Hunts is not about reverential approaches but passionate assays, broad and deep searches, in which the elusive quarry is less important than the chase. And there is patience at work here too, an often meticulous craft worthy of painstaking archaeology. Hunts will reward both approaches in a reader — there are treasures here.

Finally then to a single collection, Kenny Knight’s The Honicknowle Book of the Dead, one that manages despite its oddity to be variant without being disparate. As premises go it’s one of the more mad — a fusion of Buddhist thought and local Plymouth suburban life. The poems swim in an abundance of local detail, especially place names — ‘Chatsworth Gardens’, ‘Sherford Crescent’, ‘Coombe Park Lane’ and the brilliantly tautologous ‘Woodland Wood’. The fact that these places are neither particularly exotic nor of any real British renown is a virtue rather than an obstruction. Nor is their repeated appearance dulling; rather, it has the effect of creating a strange familiarity, so the streets become transposed onto and conflated with those in towns I have known and lived in.

Though not quite like a Zen mantra, the steady circling of the same territory induces an altered, heightened perception, magnifying the significance and the humour, which doesn’t seem cheap (even when Ruth Padel makes an appearance at the Dalai Lama’s side). It’s a disconcerting experience to read The Honicknowle Book of the Dead in one go, but certainly worthwhile.

It was also pleasing to see, on the matter of editorial involvement, that the cover photo was taken by Shearsman editor Tony Frazer. As Dr Johnson’s famous review went “nothing odd will do long — Tristram Shandy did not last.’ Of course he was wrong; and there is much more to Kenny Knight’s poetry than his shaggy-dog tales of, Wouldn’t it be funny if the Dalai Lama … — though there is that too.