Dark shape of a man against the drifts of white

The pale watching lights on concrete walls

The crump of boots in the untrodden snow

The short scream of an owl in the hidden wood.

No lights show in the sky, but the steady throb

Of a heavy heaving plane in the opaque air;

The dogs begin to bark; a light goes out.

copyright Simon Banks 2012

I think this poem was influenced by images of the Second World War, of prisoner of war camps and concentration camps, but also perhaps by postwar spy thrillers, especially Le Carre. Still, it could be about something completely different! It’s not set in the tropics, anyway.

The world is disenchanted

We have walked in the dark places

And found no ghosts or elves

No dragons roam the forests

The real fearsome beasts

Of the forest we have shot

And made a diagram of their bodily systems.

But now the sabre-toothed beasts from the forest myths

The giant wings, the parallel cunning people

With their invisible cities and hidden spells

Are coursing through the streets of the flooded city.

Come with me to the sea.

We know the source of its power, waves and tides

There’s not a grain of sand disturbed

By the last thrash of the wave

I cannot analyse;

I can tell when a star will disappear.

Hunting elusive messengers in your mind

You may find useful this neat chart

We can identify

The electromagnetic impulses for love or hate

We’ve come a long way, you and I

Perhaps it is too late

To search back for some thing we have forgotten.

I’ve gone to the shop

With my card in my hand

I’ve bought these fine clothes

So you’ll understand

What a fine, what a sensitive person I am.

Now the wind has blown sharp

And the clothes are all lost

Neither fashion nor pattern

Survive, not the cost

And yellow and blue lie where they were tossed.

The cavern is dark

And the water drips slow

Where are the clothes,

The things that I know?

It is time now to go.

Half down a long smooth corridor I turned to check

Who I was supposed to be meeting, what I should plead

As the purpose of my visit, length of stay,

And my destination. But there was no-one to ask.

So I just carried on

Hoping someone would tell me, or I’d find a clue

In the codes on my documentation

Or the false heel of a shoe

Anyway, they let me in

Stamping my passport with “indefinite stay”

And then I wandered round the streets making notes

And taking photos to elucidate

What I should do and who I was.

Finally I’ve come to a door

That looks familiar, and the signs on it, though damaged,

Could be a reference to shining shores

Where travellers in the past have managed

To find a boat, to watch the moving oars.

This poem was influenced by actually climbing to a watershed and down the other side in Torridon in the North-west of the Scottish Highlands, with elements from the ascent of Black Sail pass in the English Lake District.

WATERSHED

Did you see, there where the cloud broke

Between the high grey ridges an angled cleft

Roughly in line with the uneven river

Which might be a pass? A great bird soared over it

Now nothing shows but cloud and the warning of rain.

The broken impatient river carved the way

We leave the many-angled rocks behind

And the last twisted tree, the last glimpse of a roof;

And the hidden ravens call in the grey mist.

With cunning and husbanded strength

We drag from the circle of sweat to the circle of icy wind

Recovering from a slip is hard

Recovering from the task impossible.

There is never a point where you can say “that’s it”

No throne or light or monument

Only the slope is inconsistent

The shattered smoothing rocks lie in no order

There is no river

These barren pools are the only water

And then the ghost of a trickle

A few thin fingers feeling

Trying to come together, the hiss and sparkle:

We have passed the watershed

We have seen the birth

Of a new river.

Somewhere there is a new land

But it is hidden and the mist rolls in.

There is no warning

No sign, no new music

Just the realisation and the standing still

The dropping, blocking hills

The unknown, long suspected

Alien valley ahead

But half-familiar, like a dream

The hidden end

You feel you ought to remember.

The descent from the murderous heights

To the soft valley is always more dangerous

Than the struggling up:

The sight of meadows and bushes can lead like a mirage

To the eggshell-crushing fall

And the way to the low glittering lake

May be many miles round.

But at least the first task of the explorer

Seems to have been fulfilled

To show what he wanted to explore

Was there at all.

America is found

Mars glows dully but more clear

In the dark waters, something moves after all

Down the strange valley our suspected

Alive waters fall.

Waddling unevenly on the ground

A heavy, blunt, ungainly thing

By gawky gait and thick flesh bound

It flaps and struggles to take wing

Once up, a bolt of power and grace

Twisting and gliding in the skies

It revels in its secret race

It will be earthbound when it dies

A shattered, greyish, burst old bag

Much smaller than it seemed in flight

Lies on the road, a filthy rag,

And rat and beetle wait for night.

I could post them on my blogspot blog (http://sibathehat.blogspot.com), which is meant for pretty well everything that isn’t poetry, but after all, books are literature and I mean to review mainly fiction – so here goes here.

AND ANOTHER THING by EOIN COLFER

This is a continuation of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” humorous science fiction series. Adams had left this series apparently finished and gone on to other projects, but it seems there was some discussion of a further book in the series, perhaps because the previous one had such a depressing ending. It didn’t happen because Adams died suddenly. Penguin Books got Colfer, whom I had not heard of (he’s written a successful children’s SF series) to take up the torch.

I took a while to be persuaded.  Colfer had succesfully imitated Adams’ style, but the frenetic logically counter-logical anarchic fantasy humour seemed to be lacking or laboured. Then, around the arrival of Zaphod Beeblebrox at Asgard, it took off. Weird things happened in line with a ridiculous logic and there were pieces of vivid and hilarious description. Attitudes to religion and particularly cults were revealingly lampooned (I am religious, but I have no problem with this kind of fun: of course there’s much deceit and vanity in religion, but since that’s true of everything else too, it seems no reason to reject the whole idea).

Still the jokes weren’t quite as madly inspired and I doubt if any will develop a life of their own on a level with the meaning of life being 42 or God’s message to his creation being “We apologise for the inconvenience”. In some ways, though, it was better because more serious. Satire needs deep seriousness and passionate anger, and Adams seemed to me to lack these. His passages of jokey tragedy seem a bit like toying with misery. In this territory, the gold standard is Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut saw horror mixed in with irony; Adams liked writing about it. Colfer’s book is a bit more like  a novel in that it has somewhat more human depth and sympathy.

So it was worthwhile. OK, it wasn’t Adams, but as I felt the Hitchhiker series went one book too far anyway, the last one being rather thin, I felt no inclination to denounce the false prophet.

THE STATE COUNSELLOR by BORIS AKUNIN

Akunin (his real name is something very long,  scrabble-hand-like and Georgian) has made a mark over here with clever, literate crime novels, but this is the first one I’ve read. It is very well written and thoughtful, a perceptive picture of Tsarist Russia about twenty years before the Revolution. Good and bad men struggle to keep the ship of state afloat against revolutionaries whose motivation is mostly very understandable. The senior detective Erast Fandorin and a revolutionary cell leader engage in a murderous dance while a shadowy third figure manipulates them. Fandorin and his foe have a lot in common, but they never share words.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did guess the identity of the third figure some way before it was revealed, but that shows I got deeply into the book. If  it has a weakness, it’s that Fandorin is an oddly shadowy figure, giving very few clues to his emotions, his political or religious beliefs if any (in a book that has plenty of politics) or even why he becomes attached to a revolutionary girl.

I shall read more Akunin.

At Cambridge I studied History and in the third year we had to specialise a bit, selecting one topic for a detailed study. I chose “Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution”. I’ve remained fascinated by the Civil War and Commonwealth (= Republic) period ever since. I found most sympathy with the more radical people on the Parliamentary side and this poem reflects their experience.

A “forlorn hope” was a military term for a small cavalry detachment – but it’s also, of course, a hope with very little chance of success.

The “Good Old Cause” was the name used by Parliamentary supporters for their cause and it extended well beyond the Civil War. Examples are “Where’s your Good Old Cause now?” (person in the crowd to Major-General Harrison – “regicide” – when he was being taken to be executed after the rstoration of the monarchy. Harrison: “Why, here it is,” (touching his heart) “and I go to seal it with my blood.”  Sidney, aristocratic Whig about to be executed for his part in the Rye House plot against Charles II some twenty years later: “That Good Old Cause, in which I was from my youth brought up…”.

I’ve mixed three political ideas in the first verse: the common Parliamentary one that the King was not outside or standing over the law, but subject to it;  the more radical one that the people should be sovereign; and the radical idea held by the Levellers that the English people were a subject people since their conquest by the Normans in 1066 and the Civil War had been a war of liberation. “The Norman yoke” was a phrase commonly used to express this idea.

After the King’s defeat in the war and the taming of Parliament by Cromwell, senior miltary officers (Cromwell the foremost) were widely seen as “the new lords” or “grandees”, though they did strive to limit their own power and find some kind of new political system. “For what, then, did we fight and die?” echoes the Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborowe responding to Cromwell’s defence of a social hierarchy of nobles, gentry and yeomen – “If this be true, then for what did we contend?”.

The last verse reflects bitter disappointment after the Restoration and yet (history justified) hope that all would not be lost in the end.

FORLORN HOPE

Stand firm behind the Good Old Cause

The King is subject to the Laws

The People are the true sovereign

Though they were robbed, to great lords’ gain

The fight is won, the Norman yoke

Is in the dust, the crown is broke

But now the new lords stand on high

For what, then, did we fight and die?

The Cause is down, the free are sheep

The Spirit does not die but sleep

Those who are blind will one day see

And those in chains will soon be free.

The leaning tower pisser is abroad

So is not here. The bugs are all in bed

Recording everything the Inspector said

The bet had strings, but we have one accord

If I can pirouette around the fire

My foil-flash clothes may glint like real gold

Though I am spotted, I am not yet old

Perhaps the fiddle is the ultimate lyre

But if the clothes reflect the dying light

And if the flames have fallen into charred

Parodic branches, there is one more card:

The glow is in the dark, the dark is bright.

Bearing no flag. The rain came earlier this year

The old brook flowed for the first time anyone remembers

Except the old widow who died on the way to see it.

I did not mention to you the dream

I had last night for fear it might disturb you

And anyway, you seem rather distracted

And the child has that cough again.

Last night the sky was deep dark blue and amber

When the calls of the geese migrating made me stand still

Today we have painted the sign on the grey of the wall

And row to the ship that waits without action or call.

Copyright Simon Banks 2012

Just to say here: this is a story told in the first person singular, but the “I” is not me.