SOF welcomes SnowStar members to this, the first issue of the magazine mailed to them, courtesy of SnowStar's directors! We are delighted to extend our growing readership in Canada, as we have recently done in the USA, and hope that SnowStar members and associates will share their experiences, ideas and explorations with the rest of us back in the old country! - Editor SOF 48 / July 2001 taking leave of our senses Blackbird Singing• Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999 by Paul McCartney, ed. Adrian Mitchell (Faber, £14.99) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2001 by Nick Cave (Penguin £9.99) Reviewer DAVID BOULTON Can song lyrics ever make good poetry? Poet Adrian Mitchell thinks the best of them can and do. He cites some of the classic blues, and lyricists like Jerry Leiber and Chuck Berry, whose songs were "fast-moving, threeminute poetic dramas". These were the songs the Beatles loved and sang before they did it themselves. And Mitchell ranks "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "Come Together" and (my own all-time favourite) "Eleanor Rigby" in the same top rank. There's no doubt that the Beatles' songs "changed the world, opened hearts and minds". But does that make these collected lyrics by McCartney great poetry? I'm not as sure as Mitchell is.
The numbers that come to life, that ping the heart as you read them, are those where you just can't prevent yourself singing along. I defy you to read the lovely, radical civil-rights-movement-inspired "Blackbird Singing" or the poignantly humanist "Eleanor Rigby" without the music filling your head. They read wonderfully on the page, sound magically in the inner ear, but it is as words-and-music-together, as songs rather than poems, that they become simply intoxicating.
Mitchell reminds us that William Blake used to sing his "Songs of Innocence and Experience" to a small circle of friends. Perhaps McCartney's (and Lennon's) greatest gift was (like Blake) to make the ordinary extraordinary, the mundane magical:
Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray, And though she feels as if she's in a play She is anyway...
There are longer, newer, post-Beatles poems in this collection, but few if any are half as good as Adrian Mitchell himself at his best, let alone Carol Ann Duffy or Brian Patten. The four-part (quasi-symphonic?) "Standing Stone" reminds me of McCartney's ventures into "classical" oratorio: it's remarkable that he can do it at all, but why produce tolerably good stuff in someone else's culture when you can't help producing the stuff of genius in your own?
If I wanted to make a case for song-lyrics as poetry I'd look to Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello. Or, if I didn't want to show my age, I'd cite some of Nick Cave's work. Cave writes/sings about love and God. Love songs (and how many contemporary chart numbers can you think of which are not love songs?) "all address God," says Cave, "for it is the haunted premise of longing that the true love song inhabits... It is a howl in the void for love and for comfort... It is the cry of one chained to the earth and craving flight, a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earth-bound and the mediocre...
The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up through our wounds".
The inspiration for his own songs, he says, is the Old SOF 48 / July 2001 10 "Me, I'm a soul-catcher for God. Here I come with my butterfly net for words. Here I catch the chrysalis. Here I blow life into bodies, and hurl them fluttering to the stars and the care of Testament and particularly "the series of love songs/poems known as the Psalms... teeming with all the clamorous desperation, longing, exultation, erotic violence and brutality that I could hope for... The love song must be borne into the realm of the irrational, the absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive and the insane, for it is the clamour of love itself, and love is, of course, a form of madness. Whether it is the love of God, or romantic erotic love, these are manifestations of our need to be torn away from the rational, to take leave of our senses".
Is Cave's haunting song "Far From Me" ,a lament for a lost lover or a lost God? Are they the same thing? Is love lost God lost? Is love found God found?
I would talk to you of all manner of things With a smile you would reply Then the sun would leave your pretty face And you'd retreat from the front of your eyes...
You are so far from me Far from me Far from me There is no knowledge but I know it There's nothing to learn from that vacant voice That sails to me across the line From the ridiculous to the sublime...
So far from me Far from me Suspended in your bleak and fishless sea Far from me Far from me "The songs that I have written that deal with past relationships," says Cave, "have become the relationships themselves, heroically mutating with time and mythologising the ordinary events of my life, lifting them from the temporal plane and blasting them way into the stars. As the relationship itself collapses, whimpering with exhaustion, the song breaks free of it and beats its wings heavenward. Such is the singular beauty of songwriting". And such is the beauty of the songs (hymns) which commemorate our lost-but-notquite-lost love affairs with what we call, or once called, God.