Anne Beresford’s Collected Poems, covering 40 years of continuous activity and containing in its 350 pages the 351 poems she has chosen from her 13 published volumes, is an achievement that deserves the highest praise. From start to finish, the gravity and depth of these poems, their cumulative exploration of the sources of identity and meaning, are the work of a woman who finds herself living in a difficult world ordered and ruled by forces beyond her control.
Though she deals hardly at all with specific events in that world – its politics, its injustices, its inequalities, the unprecedented upheavals of the last four decades – it is out there somewhere in the dark, even if registered only obliquely through the mythic forms of the poetry.
In these terms, the apparent simplicity of her poems, the ways in which they move – often without punctuation in lines that vary in length from two to eight or nine or more syllables – quickly deepens, takes on a convincing style of its own, a finely crafted logic of form that delineates through its creative hesitancies an intimate speaking voice. Inevitably, in work of this kind, there are poems that do not quite come off – when the pared-down syntax of the poems remains out of focus and does little more than glance at what lies beneath the surface. But again and again this syntactical spareness (and the silences it charts) penetrates the surface with a haunted sense of vulnerability, of threat, of longing, of desire that probes at the roots of feeling.’ It is my tongue not my heart’ she writes in Confession (195) ‘that fails to function/encased in a steel barrier. If only you knew/how thin the steel!’ Such vulnerability is in fact part of Anne Beresford’s strength. For these poems are engaged in a persistent search for signals that reach out for answers to questions the poet finds difficult to resolve as she makes her attempt to get at the enigmatic presences that gesture to the self’s concerns and the oppressive (or releasing) conditions they are determined by. ‘Tell me, my dear, /your secret’, she asks in The Captive (93):
I have talked with the winds and the sea my strength is failing.
I dream of your hands smoothing my hair I dream of your voice soothing my fears.
The poet knows that for herself, as a woman caught in the trap of her life, ‘there is no end to this story’; the questions and the doubts are there still to disturb and to haunt, and won’t go away. Like the woman in her poem In Defence of the Belle Dame Sans Merci (97), it seems ‘she has searched so long/she’s even begun to wonder what it is she searches for/illusions everywhere she turns’.
These poems, that is, move across the boundaries of love and identity into the unknown, and are given their distinctive musical shape and form not by ‘the conscious changes made in her life’, but (in the words of Nadine Gordimer) by the ‘long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative’. And this ‘gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life’, a verbal energy that is constantly surprising, inventive and illuminating – caught between wonder and distress, as in 2 a.m. (349), where Things grow at night shapes change and there is always that area which floats – it leaves a lump of clay unshakeable only a curved moon can shift it.
Words come from the heaving sea clear, blaze as a furnace in the dark and shadows move – fleeting, tentative.
If memory is left it is emptiness the wind howling vengeance.
But against such contradictions, there are always things to celebrate, when:
At last, as you embrace the light the dream of years will wake you to an ancient knowledge in a fountain of stars. (346) This impressive book moves with stoic lucidity and courage through the upheavals and shifting levels of the poet’s quest for understanding; and it is the discoveries she makes in the course of her long journey into (and beyond) the self, which give her poetry its authentic personal voice.
Christopher Hampton was a lecturer for many years at the University ofWestminster and the London City Literary Institute.His Radical Reader was reissued by Spokesman Books in 2006 and his most recent poetry collection Border Crossings appeared from Katabasis in 2005.
Collected Poems 1967-2006 by Anne Beresford, Katabasis (London), 2006, £14.95 pbk, 350 pages, ISBN 0904872424