Harry Clifton
The Holding Centre
Selected Poems
(Bloodaxe Poems)
The painter Sean Scully, born in Dublin, raised in London, adopted by New York, defines beauty as anything that moves and engages him: beauty, however, is not singularly a question of appearance, and at the very least, ought to be affirmative.
Harry Clifton equally is drawn to that which is moving and engaging, but otherwise, as this collection demonstrates, with poems from 1974 to 2004, it is next to impossible to categorise him. Just when you think you have the measure of Clifton, he surprises you.
Take a poem like MacNeice’s London which, on the surface is a reflection about a time and a place in the foreign country of the past, suffused with nostalgia, a time when MacNeice and his contemporaries, Spender and Thomas, conjured magic across the airwaves, with a diction inspired by Yeats, commuting colour and remoteness.
On another level, MacNeice’s London, is a portal to Clifton’s beloved hall of memories, which he revisits with the palette of a John Betjemen, that enthusiastic willingness to be enchanted and seduced, the voyeur for whom no experience is incapable of stimulating the muse, for Clifton is one curious cat.
MacNeice’s London is also a stage for the compulsion of Clifton the writer to vicariously assume or deduce the consequence of bring isolated in a radio bunker as the Blitz rages overhead: he vividly captures the existential, Camus-like void of the time with a single line: ‘What better place than London, to mirror the lonely self regard of a stateless person?’
If poets are fortunate to have sufficient time to develop their craft, they will admit that, on reflection, poems are, in the deduction of MacNeice, either forced or given. A casual reading of Clifton’s oeuvre, spanning three decades, is that while the menu doesn’t seem to alter much, the poems rarely read as forced. They are as natural in their quotidian endeavour as the sun.
He writes memorably and with an empirical finesse of both love and passion (‘After hours, in a tangle of legs and juices, a world turned upside down, and I feed on the lotus flower of your delicate sex’ from Monsoon Girl) and poems of humanity jostled into shape and form by the acute incisiveness of reportage, with metre (The Zone).
It would be remiss not to mention two poems, Friesian Herds, with an instantly engaging opening quartet, like transmuting a Constable landscape into Braille, and The Poet Sandra Penna, in Old Age, so moving it encouraged me to discover more about the source, another parting gift of Clifton. He can turn the greyest awning into an azure sky.
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Karol Szymanowski
12 Etudes/Masques/4Etudes/Metopes
Cedric Tiberghien
(Hyperion)
To indulge Szymanowski is to engage a world within a world, with much overlapping of ideas and sources, of senses and responses, an aesthetic carnival often with its roots in the artistic milieu with which he is familiar, a composer open to the new and the contemporary, which in part explains his enduring appeal.
It is also true that you cannot listen to Szymanowski without tracing the influence of Wagner, Reger and Scriabin, but there is a peculiarity to the origin of his compositions that is, frankly, all his. Szymanowski had his roots in both the Romanticism of Western literature (the examination of the self in the context of nature) and the Romanticism of Polish literature (visionary power of the artist in response to the loss of national independence).
However, as a stylist he neither favoured the West over the East, but absorbed the tumultuous changes going on around him: he admired Stravinsky’s personal revolution and experimentation as much as Bizet’s deadly passion. But it is the shadow of Beethoven which is longest in the Metopes, an anthropomorphic mise en scene explored by the travails of Ulysses, and which I enjoyed most via the pianism of Cedric Tiberghien.
The meshing of the land and the sea in Homer’s Odyssey is replicated by Szymanowski’s melismatic adornment and arpeggi as if sponsored by warring Gods, coalescing into a moveable feast of sound, and this audible relishing of the plight of Ulysses, who is always between worlds, is manifest in a Ravel-like repetitiveness in Calypso, though the suffocation of the latter is replaced by the hedonistic and sinuous Nausicaa.
The audible relishing of the chameleonic Szymanowski is a picnic with Masques: because he composed habitually at the keyboard, he is accused of often playing hostage to his whims, like a writer bent over a blank page with a hangover in need of a good editor. Yet Sheherazade and Tantris le Bouffon have their moments, though I was more at home with the third movement of Masques, La Seranade de Don Juan, because I am partial to a rondo, adequately deployed here by Szymanowski, as Don Juan is like a dog chasing a tail, his own and others. There are memories of Ravel from which the rondo is drawn. A soundtrack for the night, no less.
There is superb detailed playing from Tiberghien on this Hyperion recording, and extensive and informative notes. Szymanowski is an acquired taste but as dispatched here by Tiberghien and explored by Hyperion, the fervour spills over. The recording opens with 12 Etudes Op 33, memorable for the brevity of each, rather like an abstract painting on a trolley, viewed through a microscope.
