Indian summer

Why is it that most of my poems are set in winter? I have been told on a number of occasions that my poems are far from cheerful, and maybe the weather that enters them is a metaphor for a particular chill mood. When I do write about summer, it is usually from the perspective of a wintery present, recalling the heat of the past. Maybe that reflects my change of homeland; when I was growing up, summer felt as if it would last forever, days and days of baking heat, and the shift into September and autumn was discernable with that first catch of frost in the air. As an adult, I have lived through summers of rain in this country of ‘temperate’ climate. This year has been no exception; a July and August marred by grey skies. But today, although there is a slight autumnal breeze, it is proper Indian Summer, one last brief foray into holiday brightness before autumn descends.

I am reminded of this, the final poem in my most recent collection. It’s an odd poem which went through numerous drafts, and was rejected by every magazine I sent it to, but for some reason I still like it (at one stage I was even going to call my collection ‘Decorum’, which came from a reference in the penultimate line). My fondness for the poem probably stems from the fact that I remember the context in which it was written very clearly. It was almost exactly four years ago, September 2007. I wrote the first draft while sitting on the steps outside the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. It was lunchtime, and I was taking a break from a workshop I was running in the museum based around their Howard Hodgkin exhibition. Hodgkin often gives his works titles that suggest a time of year, a type of weather. It was one of those fine September days when summer makes a brief comeback, and you wish you could hold off winter for as long as possible. I was reminded of autumn 2005 when I lived in Cambridge, and we went from shirtsleeves to down-filled coats in the course of a day; winter arrived and stayed. But the first month I was there it was glorious, and I still think of the city in the glow of that late summer light. A stern, serious place letting its hair down. And adding to that, those Hodgkin paintings of discovery and passion (some set in India), those hot, fast colours confined in formal frames. How appropriate then to remember that Indian Summer is also a metaphor for a late flowering, or a flaring of something which has been lying dormant.

Indian Summer in the Old City

Sun finds my face, so long in shadow,
drapes me in gold.

Brick softens to flesh, columns that framed our serious lives
are light enough to carry.

Pale boys shed their blacks, flowers
still in bloom.

How could it ever end?

No monument to mark those autumn nights,
pink flowers glowing in the dark core of me.

Stone retains its decorum, cold
under my hand. It will last.

The slow burn

Since my last post, I have already failed the task of writing a poem a day, and we are only a week into this month. What I have managed to produce is one draft and two fragments. Pitiful. So instead of attempting to write a poem, or posting any of my meagre efforts so far, I’ve decided to analyse why I’ve been unable to do so.

Poems for me are, for the most part, slow burning. I tend to examine things from every angle, to consider all possibilities. It doesn’t necessarily mean I arrive at firm conclusions. Some poems end up tailing off, chasing tangents, starting off on one idea and ending on something completely different. But that’s the beauty of poems. They do not have to prove an argument. They don’t have to be logical. Their meanings are not fixed.

A lot of the poems I like operate in that manner. They are mysterious and strange. I don’t necessarily understand what they mean, although I like to think I can draw certain conclusions, even if those conclusions come from a very personal interpretation. Meaning comes in layers, like a dance of the seven veils, only sometimes the final veil stays on.

A good analogy in painting would be Howard Hodgkin, whose work I’ve loved for many years for the same reason. Hodgkin says of his work, ‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.’ This suggests abstraction, but never pure abstraction, because you always catch a glimpse of a form or gesture or figure, but one which is fleeting, impossible to pin down. Sometimes the title is the only hint to what we’re really seeing.

The way Hodgkin paints is like the way I write poems. He creates a gradual build-up of successive layers and glazes of paint, which allows for corrections and second thoughts (kind of like a palimpsest of all your drafts of a poem viewed simultaneously). He works slowly, and sometimes doesn’t even begin to mark the canvas, until the subject has been with him, in his head, for many months.

So if I come out of April with one finished poem, which might very well incorporate the little daubs I’ve made already, and whatever is still to come, I’ll be perfectly happy. In the meantime, my tribute to Hodgkin, which originally appeared in Poetry Review, and will soon appear again in the new book.

Mud

after Howard Hodgkin

I see the scuffs and knots and bruises:
what a body takes.

The sea at night, tarmac road –
an obliteration, a mistake.

The Japanese master contemplates
the landscape from his mountain –

I clear the mud from my window,
wait for a revelation:

the antiseptic tinge of boredom,
silt of the airless room.

Now it’s quiet, the memory
of Spring behind us. Nights drawing in,

the tide is out, so when I walk
the edge of the shore my feet stick fast.

What a body needs:
the green warmth, someone to hold.