Review of David McCooey's 'The Book of Falling'

 

Three reasons why you should read David McCooey’s poetry.

(This review originally appeared in The Brazen Head, September 2023)

David McCooey, The Book of Falling. Perth, Western Australia, Upswell Publishing, 2023.  109 pages. $24.99 (AUS)

The Book of Falling is David McCooey’s fifth collection of poems, and if nothing else, gives the lie to the invidious myth that people who work on academic writing programs can’t write.

1) He’s very good at what he does. His poetry evokes Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti:

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, 

Every well-chosen word in its place, and each word doing the necessary work. In the first four lines of the collection, a sense of vague but threatening menace is swiftly evoked:

The unseen night creatures -scaled and feathered 

for their occult ceremonies-rasp and call outside

in the dark beyond the half dark that

surrounds this marbled, half lit house

(Questions of Travel)  

 

This deft verbal economy is a feature of the wide variety of poems that appear in The Book of Falling and plays against often surprising content. The first three poems are conventional poetic monologues as though the poet were setting out his stall and proving his ability. At the same time the subjects are anything but conventional. Elizabeth Bishop packs to travel; Sylvia Plath looks at her life on her 80th Birthday; Marilyn Munroe divines the future and amongst other things,  ‘…see[s] who will be forgotten first/ Queen Elizabeth, Molly Bloom, or me.’ 

These are followed by word play, short sequences about family, a group of satires and elegies, poems about urban life, as well as ‘Three Photo Poems.’ The latter a new genre to me: three sequences which juxtapose very short texts (one of the sequences is made up of ‘found poems’) and photographs.  

The juxtaposition of pictures, either of the mundane, as in the sequence about bathrooms, or the family photographs which on closer inspection look anything but mundane, with short pieces of text, lead to the second reason you should read the book.

2) Variety. 

On a first reading you can never tell what’s going to be on the next page. This is a defining characteristic of the other two books of McCooey’s poetry I have read and unusual in single author collections where formal and thematic similarities tend to be on almost every page. The variety here is held together by a unified view of the world, a laconic wit, which takes pleasure in the commonplace while recognising how strange it is. 

Rain Poem.

And as if someone uttered the trigger word

rain begins without ceremony.

But it’s not ‘driving rain’;

it’s just sitting outside

engine idling over the neighbourhood.

The poem could stop there, but it turns into something more than a pun and a neatly turned image.

It doesn’t give a damn

And then, like a poem ending

you look out the window 

and the rain has stopped.

The birds have returned and the wind 

has begun its invisible cover-up job. 

Many of the poems present  the everyday and familiar but altering the point of view just enough to destabilise the way you’re used to looking at the world. Freud’s Uncanny perhaps, without the baggage attached to that word.

When was the last time you thought about how strange bathrooms are? ‘Bathroom Abstraction #3’ begins: ‘Windowless bathrooms are the cave of modernity’.

What you encounter as reader is an intelligence moving through time, and recording the variety of experience, taking interest and pleasure in the world . And above all wanting to share it with the reader. There are numerous single author collections where the reader is left feeling his or her presence is not required. Or perhaps only required as an anonymous cheerleader who proved their devotion by buying the book.

 

If a poem can be a space for thinking through and in language, McCooey’s poems invite readers to look without telling them what to think. A short example:

Australia

Dropping my son at school.

It is ‘Art Day’;

students are to dress up 

as their favourite artist. 

I see a kid dressed in white.

He has sunscreen on his nose,

And carries a cricket bat.

Both bemused and amusing, but open to different ways of being read. The traditional art community criticism of Australian attitudes towards ‘the arts’ in a sports mad country; a criticism of the arts community’s failure to penetrate the education system even on a school day ostensibly devoted to ‘Art’; or a wry celebration of the artistry of Australian cricketers, who can flog a rock like ball a long distance with enough balletic grace to suggest cricket is indeed an art form. The poem holds all these possibilities (and others) open for the reader.

And finally. This may be a heretical comment: poetry is a highly sophisticated form of entertainment. It provides unique pleasures. Reading book reviews, it can seem that enjoying poetry is a subversive activity. The reviewer usually makes great claims for its importance, significance, ground-breaking genre-bending, appropriate ideological stance on the burning issues of the day but rarely admits to having enjoyed reading the book under review.  

3) McCooey’s books are skilfully written, varied, thought provoking, and above all enjoyable.  You should read them. 

Culhwch and Olwen.

 

I have loved this story since I first read the Jones and Jones translation many decades ago. Now I'm working my way slowly through this magnificent edition, which has the text in Middle Welsh but the introduction, notes and glossary in English. (The same two scholars produced an all Welsh edition but despite the ongoing effort I still can't read Modern Welsh.)

The story begins as a folk tale which wouldn't be out of place in the Grimm's world, and then the hero gets on his horse to ride to Arthur's court.  You can almost sense the anonymous genius who put this together realising here was an opportunity to show off, and the prose shift gears. (Marked for me by the sudden increase in the number of words I have to look up).

I particularly like this description of Culhwch's dogs, gambolling around him:

And before him, two white breasted brindled greyhounds

each with a gold collar from shoulder to ear

And the one that was on the right would be on the left

And the one on the left would be on the right

Like two sea swallows frolicking about him.

After this, the porter scene which is another favourite. 

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

 

Memory, narrative and identity. 

 

Are your memories like the panel of a cartoon, that’s been torn from the rest of the strip? A scene from a film where the credits have gone missing? Vague images glimpsed from the wrong angle, a collection of shade and colour and movement? What happens to them when you try to put them into words and tell them to someone who wasn’t involved? 

 

Beyond the obvious idea that writing memory is always a work of reconstruction, there is the lurking problem that although the event can be described in words, the writer is on the outside looking in. Whatever emotion that incident evoked at the time, or no matter how important it seems in retrospect, it slips away or is distorted in the attempt to write it. 

 

Freud claimed that some of his patients could not ‘narrate themselves into coherence’. And what is a memoire, if not a retrospective rearrangement of events to produce a coherent character who shares a name with the narrator? 

 

But the key term is ‘narrate’. We all have memories. But putting them into words, even for the most eloquent, is never straight forward.

 

The English poet and critic, Jeremy Hooker suffered a stroke in July 1999, and kept a journal of his experience, first in hospital then when recuperating, until his return to work in January 2001.

 

As the book progresses  the entries integrate record, observation and memory and gently develop into a memoire of his early years. The awareness of the problems of writing memory make this book far more interesting than a well-written memoire would be on its own. 

 

The book begins with short entries which record the world of the hospital, his return home, and his adjustments to a body that was no longer to be taken for granted. The entries record encounters with friends, old and new which provoke reflection, and Hooker, refusing to sentimentalise, is candid about himself and his life. However the book turns on his unexpected desire to write about his past. 

 

‘Since lying in hospital I have thought that I would like to write something-call it a memoire or autobiographical sketch-about my childhood…. I doubt I could do it formally since it would confront me with problems of public persona & literary occasion-problems in my own mind about my ‘rights’ as an author.  

What I might do , though, is give way to the impulse when it occurs and use this journal space , in which I feel most free as a writer, to sketch a memory or an impression. (P.93. November 10.)

 

For a writer who had refused the ‘confessional’ and ‘autobiographical’ in his own poetry the desire was not straight forward. How to avoid what he had called ‘the sludge of nostalgia?’ More significantly,  if a memory is a first person narrative, the writing of it becomes tangled in problems of subjectivity. In a previous essay, Hooker had reflected on ‘the lyric I’ and written ‘quite simply, I might look at a tree or any living thing and know its reality would always be beyond my words’. The past may be factual. But in narrating it, it becomes a thing, to be described, ‘to be always beyond words.’  

 

In the same essay he wrote:

 

…’One problem with Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as originating in emotion recollected in tranquillity is it’s tacit assumption of a stable ego in the act of recollection’. Against this he juxtaposes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘ If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!-then, I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me.’

 

Comparing such disparate figures as Keats, and David Jones, he wrote: ‘Each involves self or soul as more process than fixed identity, as something one works with and realises in the making’.    

A memoir is not just a straight forward account of past events. It is the construction of one possible version of a life, a fixing of identity in retrospect. In Hooker’s case, an activity qualified by a critical awareness:

 

‘It seems to me that a lot of ‘inner experience’, offered as the subject of poetry, isn’t interesting. For a start it tends to be conventional, with more sameness (but less common depth) than its advocates are prepared to allow. The individual is a bourgeois concept , a commercial asset in a society given to buying and selling ‘lifestyle’ products. The person by contrast turns away from convention and instead of idolizing the psychological, as though it were a precious private property, is sensitive to the unique and relational aspects of human being.’ (p. 81. October 24)

 

He is therefore, wary. If our past is something we narrate into coherence, then what is a genuine memory? How much of our idea of our past is constructed around  stories other people have told us, or photographs we have seen. How do we know our memory isn’t a story we have told ourself so often we now accept it as something that ‘really did happen’.  In retrospect do we freight incidents and people with a significance they didn’t have at the time? 

 

One of his memories is off sitting in a car, waiting for his father, and sketching what he could see outside the window. The image becomes a symbol of what he’s not trying to achieve.

Often the memoire seems to the writer, looking out at a world that is ‘over there’, as if the world was a painting without people. Or that what mattered was his or her reflection in the glass. ‘But what I want to see is the life  out there, not my face reflected in the glass, or an empty landscape, but the quickness and the plenitude in this common place.’ 

 

 

As with Hooker’s other Journals, his reading and reflection are contained in the diary. During the period covered in Diary of a Stroke, he was also working on Imagining Wales and these two books complement each other. Imagining Wales is the publicly endorsed critical approach, Diary of A Stroke  contains a personal response to these writers that is no less interesting. For readers of his critical work, the journal references provide a perspective on these authors: these writers give him a way of orientating himself, or navigating his way through the experience. It is a model of literate critical reading in the best sense, of taking what can be learnt from books and folding them into his life.  

 

Hooker’s long engagement with the work of John Cowper Powys, David Jones and Richard Jeffreys, provide threads through the journal. Two of those writers  provide unusual models  for anyone writing about his or her past. In his Autobiography Powys carefully manufactured a version of himself. It’s an astonishing performance but he left his biographers the task of untangling the fact from fiction. Jefferies’s Story of my Heart is an autobiography mostly lacking in the kind of dated events one might expect. Hooker’s approach is less programmatic, more conventional but no less interesting

 

If you take into account class, geography and time, most childhoods, barring traumatic events, are similar. Like it or not, we are cliches. What makes Diary of a Stroke more than just an eloquent record of memory and recovery is Hooker’s reluctance to simply record his past. There’s an honest tension between the desire to write about memory; the critical sense that self-revelation is usually not that interesting to a third party, and an awareness of the technical difficulties of writing about the past that elevates the book above the merely self-referential and provides a stranger with much to think about.