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An English Objectivist: Elaine Randell

Steven Waling

From this end of the telescope, the Poetry Wars of the 1970s might seem to be a minor argument between a bunch of hippies and a bunch of squares. However, it has meant that a substantial body of British poetry has been consigned to a kind of wilderness of fugitive publication and small press obscurity. Some, no doubt, relish their outsider status and live up to it; but others, I feel, are neglected simply by association.

Elaine Randell seems like one of those poets. Though written in a style that could only be called “English Objectivist”, she’s neither forbiddingly difficult nor an easy poet. I first read her poems when in the late 80’s I came across copies of the Poetry Review edited by Eric Mottram in the ‘70’s. Though I was just dipping my toes into the turbulent pools of the British Poetry Revival at the time, her poems seemed to me to be so self-contained and discrete that she stood out from the rest as a voice of compassion and clear-eyed objectivity among the at times bewildering wildness of British and American experimentalism.

The poem that stood out for me at the time was Diary of a Working Man. Its arresting first lines have the resonant strangeness of WS Graham or Basil Bunting:

His arm is a brace
of pigeons.
Shouting across the yard
the figure darts forward
slumps back, drops.

But it’s not always the memorability of her lines that grab the attention: it’s their attentiveness. By that, I mean the way that the poems focus themselves on the object of their concern without any attempt to drag the writer into the picture. Many contemporary poems seem to be not about the subject, but about the writer’s feelings about the subject, or about the writer’s clever and witty way of drawing our attention to the subject. In Randell’s poems the writer is often absent, or only a part of the landscape; or seemingly so, because, of course, to take up a position of discretion is still to take up a position.

This is at once a political and an apolitical poetry. The poems that come from her work as a social worker, such as Hard to Place, Watching Women With Children, Along the Landings and the title sequence of her latest collection, Faulty Mothering, never take up moral stances or comment on the issues involved. Like the seemingly detached poems of Charles Reznikoff, there is a documentary element to these poems: the voices of the people she is writing about are allowed to speak for themselves, not as part of an agenda or as exempla of human foibles, but as people.

Thus, for instance, we have a verse from Watching Women With Children:

“Hello Mum, I’m home.”
He ran into the house.
“Yes, I can see that” she said leaning
away as he tried to kiss her.
“You haven’t a cold have you, we don’t want
anything spreading.”
He ran out into the garden as far
as the lawn would allow. 

This minor incident in a family’s life may or may not reveal a great deal about the emotional relationship between a mother and her son. The poem doesn’t say, instead allowing the reader to come to their own conclusion.

A lesser poet would have made capital of such an incident, would have us feeling compassion for the boy, or the mother, wherever her sympathies lay. But just as a social worker may sometimes have to put aside feelings of revulsion or anger to see the situation clearly and act in the best interests of the people concerned, so we are asked to read without knowing the rights and wrongs of these lives.

I’m aware of making too much of the social work connection, though it’s one made by the poet herself. No doubt William Carlos Williams made much poetry out of his life as a doctor; and Reznikoff used legal depositions as source material for his groundbreaking Testimony sequence. Elaine Randell is not so direct as to use found material in such a way; her dramatic monologues seem rather more deliberately shaped than Reznikoff’s. But neither are they as obviously staged as some of Carol Anne Duffy’s early monologues, like the one about the thief stealing the snowman:

“I never asked for much just that they kept the
wood basket topped with kindling. Then I could do
the washing on the boiler see. I had three sons
and a husband that only saw as far as their fishing line.
O n the 11^th November I went round the house picking
up the dirty washing, went to the Rayburn – no
kindling. They only have to do one thing, I thought,
get kindling and they can’t even do that for me.”

(Faulty Mothering VI)

The edge of desperation and anger in this woman’s voice makes you wonder what happened next; and why the specificity of the date? Something has happened, and I for one am left feeling terribly uneasy. But the poet doesn’t let us off the hook. She leaves the story open, a case yet to be solved.

Another side to Randell’s poetry is revealed in her sequences of songs. There is a strong musical tonality in all her work: a music inhering not simply to the rhythms but also to the words themselves. These are lyrics in the musical sense, but their surface simplicity hide a lot of hidden rocks for those who look a little deeper. Occasionally, she will provide us with two tunes running concurrently:

A late bird across the    And above on the
darkening sky sky    high road
as if    leading down
it were    to the valley
shaking me    where the courting couples
those thistles so    touch and swoon 

(Bitten by it we touch and swoon)

This exploration of the possibilities of lyric continues throughout Elaine Randell’s work; in the latest collection, she continues to explore the inspiration of others’ writing begun in Songs for the Sleepless, an exploration of Elizabeth Smart. In the three sets of Songs in Faulty Mothering she explores the inspiration of various quotes from novels; these lead on to meditative lyrics which explore the in-between feelings, momentary enlightenment, the quotidian.

These are beautiful collections to have and to return to. They are, like all Shearsman books, beautifully made. It’s good too to have what practically amounts to a Collected Poems of this important poet, who should be more widely known in all sectors of the poetry world.

 

Steven Waling’s latest publications are Calling Myself on the Phone (Smith/Doorstop) and Travelator (Salt). His writes the blog Brando’s Hat.