The temporal parameters are suggested by the word ‘Visions’ in the title of the book, bringing to mind as it does, William Blake, the great visionary London poet, and also indicating a certain level of ambition in the whole undertaking. Blake is invoked in more than one poem, along with Dr Johnson, Charles Lamb and Coleridge, Swinburne, Rossetti and Oscar Wilde; all encountered metaphorically in the places in which they lived or worked. More recent ‘ghosts’ – MacDiarmid, Silkin – met in the flesh, crop up in poems dealing with specific phases of the author’s life.
This is, then, the London of the Coffee House and the writers’ pub. Oxley sees himself and the city very much in terms of his literary predecessors; a city of words, ‘pavements/ strewn with the print of ages.’ Many of the poems have an energy and verve that has something of the eighteenth century or even of Shakespeare in it.
Which must, incidentally, be taken as the justification for the occasional linguistic throw-back – ‘whore’, ‘old dame’, ‘baggage’ – which are otherwise likely to make the contemporary reader wince (it has to be said that in this London, women are confined to walk-on parts).
Many of the poems appear consciously to take on literary precedents; View from a Bridge for instance, says to Wordsworth, ‘Yes, I too have felt ecstatic looking down at the Thames!’ and gives us the moment in language of unabashed simplicity and directness.
Thy Vanity, meanwhile, has something both of Pound’s imagism and the gnomic terseness of the Songs of Innocence.
Afew seem to struggle with the sheer weight of historical fact that lies round every corner (The Towers of London, Bridges); and the pressure this puts on what might be the author’s more natural mode of writing (‘I can’t research my poems like the new breed do’). Atelling stanza in Parliament Hill suggests a kind of desire or anxiety that will be familiar to many, especially those committed to a large project, when he describes himself as, a poet at ease ... but wanting something to surface like the past, or the hidden Fleet’s watery source to seep into my time-choked line today and keep me in poetry awhile.
Sometimes, however, ‘the past’ just floods in and moves the poem along effortlessly to its conclusion; usually when Oxley is drawing on his own personal history. 17 Wigmore St, which describes the moment when his direction changed from accountancy, ‘poring over black figures/ in long-columned books’, to writing:
I found a pamphlet of an unknown poet. Read it.
And the grip of calculation loosed forever being one example. Others; My Solicitor, ‘already an anachronism at thirty-four’ and The Drama School, ‘A bead in a dark-blue ocean, the moon/ was always there when we rehearsed ...’ And Evenings in North London exemplifies an attractively immediate personal vision (as opposed to the grander overarching ‘Vision’) which surfaces regularly throughout this collection: ... the vulnerable elderly houses crumbled sedately; half-embarrassed in day-time by their losses, at night they seemed less distressed.
Mary Michaels lives in London.Her most recent poetry collection The Shape of the Rock was published by Sea Cow, London in 2003. My Life in Film, a collection of her prose fictions has just been published byThe Other Press.
William Oxley, London Visions, bluechrome publishing (Bristol). 2004. 98 pages. £6.99. ISBN: 1904781217