Lion from the Ishtar Gate in ancient Babylon Michael Hamburger has spent most of his life resisting the forces which, in a disastrous century, have dragged humanity and its civilizing energies into crisis after crisis. And his insistent probing quest for an understanding of what it is that determines the place of poetry and the truth of poetry in this world has taken him deep into European culture, as poet, critic and translator. In The Truth of Poetry, for instance, his penetrating 1969 study of major American and European poets over the last hundred years, he writes with unillusory bluntness of the difficulties we face. ‘What survived of the international humanism of the early 20th century’ and its opposition to war he sees as ‘a lost cause before the Second World War began; Spain and Munich had marked its defeat’. And he is pessimistic about the world we now live in, transformed by the consequences of the Cold War and the spectacular growth of the international money market, ‘its incestuous procreation’ and ‘the manic fear’ it breeds (Diary, 54), which has created new forms of destructive exploitation and violence.
Indeed, the two books under review – From a Diary of Non-Events (2002) and Wild and Wounded published this year to mark Hamburger’s 80th birthday – continue to strike deep in demonstrating how exposed our world is to the forces of globalising power and their cynical indifference to the fragility and fate of the planet. Here, as in most of his work, he takes his stand against these forces in defence of organic multiplicity, writing with tender solicitude of the natural products of the Earth, even as he laments the unreturnable losses of a betrayed past.
From a Diary of Non-Events.Anvil Press, London 2002. 60 pages. £7.95. ISBN 0856463434 and Wild and Wounded.Anvil, 2004. 84 pages £7.95. ISBN 085646371X reviews sof 64 November 2004 20 And if ‘poetry tells the truth, ambiguously’, what it has to contend with are ‘the lies which, like charity, begin at home’ (WW, 31) in a world dangerously undermined by the agents of economic power, now engaged at huge cost in a destabilising ‘war on terror’ against the dispossessed.
The poems of Wild and Wounded seem, in contrast to those of either Late or the Diary of NonEvents, less unified, less resilient, more brittle, more mixed; but here too Hamburger bears witness to the underlying issues, the ‘agony beyond words’. He knows, writing in April 2003 of the war in Iraq, that ‘To walk immune here in the rising light, /Our pathways quiet, skyline not blasted black, /Was to be shamed by the sun’s clear shining’ (WW, 44). But From a Diary of Non-Events, like Late, has an altogether subtler, more integrated form and tone. It grows out of a single developing theme – swept through with echoes from the ravaged past and a sense of impending crisis. It is as if, around the images it conjures up of the changing seasons. storm clouds were gathering just beyond the horizon. And the irony of the title lies in the fact that the so-called non-events of the poem are themselves events which stand out against the intrusive and threatening events of the public world beyond them.
Each of its 12 sections – December to November – marks the shifting grounds of continuity and sanity, modulating constantly between hope and despondency, and maintaining an energy that gives momentum to the lovingly-named inventory of garden-life they are defined by the non-events of this Eden-world, ‘Not yours, not mine’, which we are custodians of and have responsibility for, even though it can never now be the kind of garden-world such a poet as Marvell celebrated in his poems. It is too late now for that. We are in a different garden, and ‘the poisons are homing now’ (D, 53). In that sense the poem seems more a lament, a litany of wrongs, listed with bitterness and rage, even as it celebrates the ‘tokens... of cyclic return’ (D, 24) where ‘roses unfold millennial history’ (29) and acknowledge the ‘selfed’ discoveries to be made in every season, there in ‘the stillness that drowns events and non-events’ as they are merged in ‘recollection of a peace’(30). This double sense of gain and loss is there in the images and the rhythms of the verse, registering the intricate textures of reality which bind us to the continuities of daily experience we are surrounded by, as against the forces of hatred and of twisted truth, of ‘power packed in lies’ (53), that threaten our world and turn it dark, attacking the underlying structures that define our values.
All the same, this work, like many of the poems in Wild and Wounded, remains rooted in the humanist principles that affirm the energies of organic growth and renewal in resistance to the enemies of our ‘one flora-bearing Earth’. And however difficult it may be to make our voices heard against these enemies, Hamburger does not doubt we must continue to speak out, in the knowledge that ‘harsher winds.. can cleanse’, and that where ‘the riven sky shines’ (D, 56), the civilizing light will be there, even as the Earth turns, to bring us hope and give us confidence to renew the struggle.
Christopher Hampton is a poet, critic and editor of the Penguin Radical Reader. He was a lecturer at the University of Westminster and the London City Institute and is now retired.
Christopher Hampton reviews From a Diary of Non-Events (Anvil Press, London 2002) and Wild and Wounded (Anvil, 2004) by Michael Hamburger.