The Black and White Days (Robson Books)
(Publ. in Ambit 145:1996)
It's invidious to scrutinise a new collection by a poet with a well-founded reputation
by mere deference to or comparison with his previous output. This is a well-constructed
book one can journey through at a variety of speeds, all effortless thanks to its
lucidity and fluency, but jolted by an awareness of how contrasting experiences and
moods illuminate each other. The effect of ageing on attitudes and preoccupations
is frequently implicit but never lapses into listless introspection; and there's
much wry humour and easy-going hilarity. Scannell explores this predominant but not
exclusive subject matter, among other means, by reconstructing formative memories,
puzzling over his own apparent contradictions of outlook and fears of encountering
other threatening dimensions of self, looking at contemporary concerns like terrorism
and refugees in a philosophical mode, even by dwelling on the finer details that
age can pause to reconsider: a dog's tail, an ice bucket, shop window junk. Ironic
glances at his own doubts and assumptions add gusto.
I have a suspicion, though, that the energy of some poems, particularly those
depending on narrative or shifts of focus, is dissipated by a too relaxed or periphrastic
exposure that can turn a crucial resolution to anticlimax. His quizzical philosophising,
as in Climacterics or Makers and Creatures, tends to sound like well-crafted chat
rather than wit or wisdom. There are also frequent mannerisms: abstract personified
subjects, clusters of epithets, optional metaphors, aloof aphorisms, materials reappearing
in pellucid guises. Whether all this is concomitant with a facility for mellifluous
rhyming metrics, or that gravity and whimsy are insecure partners, formal dexterity
cannot compensate for lapses of precision, even of tone, leaving only a paradigm
of experience. The penultimate part of Farewell Performance is illustrative. The
old pianist has crawled on in a fairly moving saraband:
Then apprehension melts and pity dies.
We hear the Liszt Sonata in B minor
Flow and ripple through compliant space
To work sly sorcery along the spine
And pierce the heart with that familiar grace
Of truth and love that brook no compromise.
I returned with unmixed pleasure to Lies and Questions in Terza Rima, where tone
and form match a mounting scepticism, also to Fictions, the voices and antics of
lonely, caricature figures that blend comedy and pathos, and to Bath-times, in which
the observation of nakedness becomes an inventively doomed struggle against the vulnerable
sense of ageing,
To face a bare and gaunt old man who stares
With still astonished, briefly youthful eyes.
