Reviews

After the Goldrush

by Peter Carpenter

Nine Arches Press, 2009

One of the most attractive qualities of this new volume of poetry and prose by Peter Carpenter is the writer’s awareness of the ways in which the self relates to the other. In a recorded conversation with Aodhán McCardle from 2003 Lee Harwood referred to ‘the foolishness of the egotistical voice’:

You’ve got to have that ‘meanwhile back at the ranch’ stuff. It may be a description of, say, a love poem, the two individuals, but meanwhile out in the street people are going about their business to whom the scene in the room is irrelevant or they don’t even know it, and, ah, by bringing in what’s going on outside the room, what’s going on in other parts of the world, makes the thing in the room much more…real, it puts it in perspective, makes it part of a bigger thing rather than being some giant romantic monument.

Threading its way through Peter Carpenter’s new work is a delicate, humorous and moving awareness of exactly what’s going on ‘outside the room’. This range includes the political in ‘Lines for the Trial of Saddam Hussein’ where we are confronted by the striking image of the Iraqi leader rising from his hiding-place:

I was right.
You may nod if you agree.
I have their names, you know.
The ones who set me up then swung the wrecking-ball, who leaked
the faces of my dead sons. And me, when I emerged from my pit—
incisors inspected as if I were a horse come to market. I allow myself
a smile though at some of you. Twitching like cats in your power naps as my official face comes out of nowhere into those
air-conditioned quarters.

Time and again we shift between a ‘now’ and a ‘then’ in these pieces: a past glitters for a moment with ‘those legendary/pre-match antics of Budgie Burridge’ or comes alive again in ‘From the Smokery’: ‘fresh on the enamel plate/a full forty years on’. An uncle who died long ago from a massive heart-attack reappears with his Arthur Askey routine ‘twiddling the shades between thumb and forefinger, dribbling slightly: ‘I’m a-thanking you, I’m a-thanking you, all you lovely people, I’m a-thanking you.’’ One of the most powerful images conveying this feeling of the palimpsest, the one reality lying below the other, is in ‘Bin Men’:

Sometimes you’ll mutter
in your sleep
at their engine rumble
before the closer clatter
and purr of containers
being shaken out and tipped
like Foreman dumped
for the mandatory count
after that right lead from Ali.

The televised fight, the world of semi-sleep, the collection by the council-workers is ‘all gone/like a dream/to landfill sites’ out of which the poet, gull-like, picks the scraps. And it is these scraps which go to make up the fullness of our identity just as we share the space inhabited by ‘An Unidentified Man’, the book’s opening poem, and

find ourselves in his presence.

 

Rating:

Reviewed by Ian Brinton

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