If the title of Arnold Rattenbury's seventh collection of poems initially strikes an odd jarring note, it does turn out to have some sort of teasing relevance to the spirit of the book. It refers to an episode from David Copperfield, cited as epigraph to Section III, about a kite made by Mr. Dick, 'covered with manuscript, very closely and laboriously written' which, 'when it flies high,... takes the facts a long way'. And like Mr. Dick, Rattenbury flies his kites of words high to take their chance as to 'where they may come down'.
The range of these poems is, however, more interactive than the title suggests, their tone resilient, sharp, quirky, buoyant, geared through the book’s three sections (each with its epigraph from a Dickens novel) to Looking, Listening and Reading. Nor do the poems, in taking flight, lose touch with the ground – rooted as many of them are in the physical details of the Welsh landscapes Rattenbury is so intimate with, celebrating the space and sweep of Wales, where:
Still the mountains remain, and the weather’s mist, which parts now to boast of later scars: quarries and cemeteries not single stones but sixties on sixties, slates filled up with chiselled evidence...
And though ‘quarries no longer breathe /and bleed with men’ since ‘profit has gone /elsewhere to satisfy its greed’ (60), still it is ‘as if the earth were being mown by light, old knowledge stooked and ricked /in the old way, everything else unknown, /fresh-sculptured, an artefact’. For this ‘is real and so can cope /with the charges: Utopianism and Hope’ (27).
Indeed, in delineating his sense of the historical record, Rattenbury speaks for the indispensable memory of what has happened and of what remains unchanged beyond the changes he observes. Surviving the defeat, for example, of all that the dissident Friggers fought for, their colourful banners now ‘rolled in cupboards’, still (as he puts it) ‘sometimes we march... at Greenham or Treekeep’, where ‘people arise’ (70), remembering the past, celebrating the living, in poems ‘exemplary of change, /pricking me on to the immense things’ (77).
And Rattenbury is nowhere more involved in the process of bringing back light to the darkened and damaged universe we live in than in his 27-poem sequence of Mozart Pieces, where, in response to the creative dissent of Mozart’s genius, he listens to the music and reacts to the ways in which it survives (and thrives on) an alienating world, making ‘life out of life at last, and the birth /of a golden Paradise on earth’ (48). For though the blunt facts of the real world refute such transformations and all we can do is ‘keep close to the earth as possible’, with Mozart’s music ‘soon, /soon, the magic will come’, (47), as it does repeatedly, bringing us as close as we shall ever get to the intangible pleasures of paradise.
This in fact is what the sequence offers us – an affirmation of the Mozartian achievement, as in The Andantino, K 449; surely among Mozart’s most delicate and searching slow movements. For here, as elsewhere, ‘The mind stretches, wonders may never cease...’ This may be no answer to the fundamental injustices and inequities of our world, but Mozart’s rejection of despair is for Rattenbury too a beginning.
Utopias? No – for that’s imagined, while this latter-time light that sweeps an underclass of things is fact undreamed of. (13) And it is his obstinate belief in the continuity of creative delight that keeps the poet’s word-kites flying high.
Mr. Dick's Kite by Arnold Rattenbury. Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2005. 81 pages. £9.50. ISBN 1904886132.