Selected Poems by Eddie Linden Hearing Eye (London 2011), 52 pages. £7.50.
Eddie Linden’s poems are distinguished by a directness derived from simplicity of conception. This might even amount to an art that can seem artless.
Certainly, the poet never dresses the nakedness of his art with anything that could be called artful or knowing. He is the very opposite of knowing; and this is his greatest attribute. What registers on the white page is a transparency to the world of immediate experience undergone by a sensitive, observant, and passionate spirit.
Eddie Linden is not his reputation, which is extensive, nor his opinion of himself, which would be sure to be a modest one. He is a poet in whose work as a whole we can single out a decent number of poems no discerning critic would wish to change.
These are, as in A.E. Housman’s formulation, ‘secretions’ of a creative urge, which deliver perfect form without any great concession to the school books of prosody. This is what helps to make Eddie Linden’s poems so free from literary cant or paper cherry blossom. Every word, in his best poems, carries a substantial weight. This can be both heard and understood in his public recitals. His written work is a million miles from a creative writing class or a writers’ circle. In each case, it is the residue of an eruption, which makes the word ‘secretion’ seem a little tame.
Because of this, in a long life (he is 76), we do not have a great number of poems to consider. There are 37 in A Thorn in the Flesh. 17 of these appeared in City of Razors (Jay Landesman, 1980). The other 20 have not been printed in book-form before. And we have 15 from City of Razors not included in A Thorn in the Flesh. So a certain amount of editing and rejigging has been going on, but to no very great moment. We have 52 poems in all. As this editing and re-jigging may indicate, the quality varies considerably.
The best poems were clearly forged under extreme emotional pressure. They were formed, it would seem, as much in the unconscious as the conscious mind.
For when this poet attempts to put a poem together, without such extreme emotional pressure, the results are demonstrably less effective.
The question whether his good poetry is worth bothering with can be easily answered by the word yes.
We do not often get genuine nuggets of poetry placed in our hands, but we do with this book. The simplicity of conception I mentioned is not to be construed as naivety or lack of depth. Such simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve in the arts. It is akin to the simplicity of being struck by the arrows of adult love. But with Eddie Linden this is the love of God, of man, and of individual persons.
That this love also embraces a wide and thorough grasp of life in the ecclesiastical and political arenas is simply one more credit to this wholly exceptional man.
This beautifully presented book has a fine foreword by James Campbell of The Times Literary Supplement and a superb front cover portrait of the poet by Gerald Mangan. I would name Eddie Linden’s best poems as: ‘City of Razors’, ‘The Miner’, ‘Peace’, ‘The Slum’, ‘Hampstead by Night’, ‘A Sunday in Cambridge’, ‘Where Lovers Never Meet’, ‘Editor’, ‘The Man in the Black Suit’, ‘Night Time in a City’, ‘For a Dublin Artist’, ‘For Philippe Jamet’, ‘To Archbishop Roberts’, and ‘Breaking Bread’ (which is set in Greece). The most surprising of his poems is ‘Peace’ and it deserves to be read in full:
Peace
Let us walk among the trees and think of days long far away.
Let us walk among the trees and play the games we played when young Let us walk among the trees and think of things we often thought.
Let us walk among the trees and look for things that must be true.
Let us walk among the trees and find the answer to our pain.
Let us walk among the trees and find the peace we long to have.
The subtle repetitions and variations in the first two lines of each stanza are remarkable.
Sebastian Barker is a former editor of the London Magazine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest poetry collection is The Erotics of God (Smokestack 2005). His biography Who Is Eddie Linden? was published by Jay Landesman in 1979.