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WHEAT
AND CHAFF Angels
and Harvesters,
James Harpur (64pp, £8.95, Anvil) |
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James
Harpur's fifth collection patrols the boundaries between the numinous and the
everyday, the spiritual and the banal, the angels and the harvesters of the
title. As before, the poems are set in an unashamedly religious, transfigured
landscape, but do not simply repeat the epiphanies and explorations of his
earlier poems. Earlier
volumes such as Oracle Bones were filled with lengthy monologues from monks and
Middle English churchmen of the past; Harpur's second collection, 'The Monk's
Dream', followed this by including personal fragments tracing memories, such
as those occasioned when parents die. In this new collection, there is again
a more insistent personal note, such as in the two brief school poems,
'Dormitory', where the dominant note is nostalgia, all Radio Caroline and the
'Crimean beds' of boarding. Harpur
still provides plenty of examples of landscape description, here in two
winter landscapes, 'Christmas Snow' and 'The Falcon Carol'. The former seems
the more effective of the two, risking a lot on the falling lilt of
repetition as the narrator scans a myriad of ordinary lives: 'icing knifed on
marzipan / in kitchens dimming into evening'. A celebratory poem, the
panoramic eye here recalls some of Auden's roving 'hawk's eye view' poems of
the 1930s. 'Monte Cassino in Kerry', by contrast, settles on a painting as
symbolic of the long years of a marriage unravelling. Cassino itself is a
relic, but so is the painting, an iconic 'survivor of a world closed off', it
is 'a witness to itself', of wartime horror, but ultimately it becomes 'a
curio / of history', imprinted with memories, death and grief, reflecting the
emotions of the painter, Harpur's father. In
these poems, Harpur is scrabbling around among the ordinary debris of lives,
and the resulting pieces are carefully modulated and elegiac; in the second
section of the book, however, longer poems return to the mystical figures of
the past - Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich - and one gets a sense that he
has been here before. Having said this, also within this section are a number
of poems that seem replete with explorations of conversion experiences and
religious epiphanies. 'The Pram-Pusher's Tale', for instance, is one such, a
long monologue about the experience of 'drowning in radiance' which happens
and then, just as soon, recedes, leaving 'a reservoir of peacefulness', but
also a return to the banal 'pramful of anxieties. A kind of pavement
mysticism is explored here, a new note for Harpur, a long piece not lacking
in momentum and power.
The
best pieces in this book still take place in a more recognisably religious
landscape, however, and the title poem, which recalls for me Roger Wagner's
painting 'The Harvest is the End of the World and the Reapers are Angels',
plays with images of harvesting and angelic visitation. There are powerful
antecedents here to this sort of metaphysical playfulness - Marvell and Donne
- but the poem ends on a genuinely haunting note: Éand then
they went walked into
nothing just left the
world without
ceremony unless it was
the swish of
scythes the swish of
scythes'
© M.C. Caseley 2012 |
