|
Literary Review
Reasons for returning
|
The Universal Home Doctor takes us on a dark journey, one that challenges the boundaries of existence in very physical terms, says TISHANI DOSHI.
|
SIMON ARMITAGE, by his own admission, tries to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books. A prolific writer, Armitage has been involved in films, radio, theatre and song writing. His latest collection of poems, The Universal Home Doctor, has been published along with Travelling Songs, a collection of lyrics and verses written over a number of years, some commissioned to commemorate public events and others being part of larger projects. While Travelling Songs is primarily a collection of witty, musical, sensual poems, The Universal Home Doctor takes us on a darker journey, one that challenges the boundaries of existence in very physical terms — those of the body, of language and of country. Here, Armitage traverses the familiar as well as the alien, calls into question the idea of home, and more specifically, what it means to be English.
The entire book reads as an expedition set against the universal background of the body, using language for setting up tents of memory, possibility, layers. There is an absence of nostalgia, or nostalgia, when it is presented, is in the form of a boy from the school yard who left town, went on to be twenty years dead with a gunshot hole in the roof of his mouth in Western Australia, leaving no room really for mawkishness. The remarkable feature of Armitage's poetry, is of course, his ability to be uncomfortably sinister, dry and sharp, yet one sees quite clearly that he has made space for softness in these new poems and the ones that linger are the ones that attempt to move the soft centres in our own bodies.
Take for instance, the poem from which the title of the book is drawn. In "Birthday," Armitage writes:
This is the room
where I found you one night,
bent double, pouring over
the Universal Home Doctor
that bible of death, atlas of ill-health
hand-drawn, colour-coded diagrams of pain,
chromosomal abnormalities explained,
progesterone secretion,
cervical incompetence...
Susan, for God's sake.
The area which Armitage explores best in his enquiry into the body politic is the disparity between mind and body. The poem "All for One" plays on this tug with the mind taking the reins, the mind standing at the door with his coat on saying, "Sod it," going to the pub, to nightclubs, the body following meekly behind. And the next morning, being morose over paracetamol and toast, saying, "Can't we be close?" It ends with this image — "From a distance it must look a strange sight:/ two men of identical shape, at odds/ at first, then joined by an outstretched arm, one/ leading the other back to his own home." And this is the other point, that there is always a journey back home, whether one is being led home by one's own mind, or by external forces, one reaches there and asks the same questions, asks the eternal questions, like, what if?
These tensions are constantly being echoed throughout the book. Armitage presents himself as the back man — the man last in line in the expedition group, vulnerable to attack, the man hauled down and ripped apart. The tension between the mundane and the need for the miraculous. "I sense it mostly in the day-to-day:/ not handling some rare gem or art object/ but flicking hot fat over a bubbling egg... " So the wanderings are not merely physical but also in the mind — one is not "crossing the great ocean by pedalo but moseying forward in the middle lane hanging wallpaper flush to the plumb-line"; one is not "crowing over Arctic adventure, not kneeling empty-handed, open-mouthed at the altar, but in the barber's chair or tattoo parlour, in a sleepy trance, catching in the mirror the startled face of some scissor-hand, some needle-finger."
This idea of inter-changeability, mutability, the need to inhabit more than one reality, our fascination for the other, our reasons for travelling in other words, are the impetus for these poems. Armitage is armed as always with colourful characters — circus people, a tree cutter and his pint-size mate, people undergoing nerve conduction studies, a night-watchman reflecting on the life of a stranger, a miller dunking his head in his day's work, a deep-sea diver, an astronaut. In the poem, "The English," he writes, "They are a gentleman farmer, living/ on reduced means, a cricketer's widow/ sowing a kitchen garden with sweet peas,/ a lighthouse-keeper counting aeroplanes." Somehow this question of identity is bundled up with the knowledge that in order to arrive at any answers, the long path home must be travelled. Every man must go home at last, peel the bedspread from his bed and catch this impression in his cotton sheet, "a new expression buried in the pillow case besides his wife," and stand a "lifelong minute on the ocean-floor of outer space, lean-limbed, ashen-faced."
So why then do we travel if when we get there we find we knew the answers all along? Couldn't we have known them without moving from our places, from Huddersfield perhaps, where Armitage hails from? Don't all wanderings have to rest at some point? Where are these resting places? In the world and in language, where are the spaces where we stop to find ourselves? The pauses, the breaths, the gaps in the air. How does language, how does the body, how does geography, work as the metronome in our lives, guiding us forward on our proverbial travels?
Armitage leaves us with lingering doubts about our ideas of home and identity, the pressing need to confront the disparities of our physical existence and the darkness that threatens to follow us on all our travels:
From the window I watch
Anubis, upright in black gloves
Making a sweep of the earth
Under the nameless tree,
Pushing through shrubs,
Checking the bin for bones or meat
Then leaving with a backward glance, in his own time,
Crossing the lawn and closing the gate.
The Universal Home Doctor, Simon Armitage, Faber and Faber, 2002.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
