Kathryn Southworth reviews The Naming of Things by Nicholas Bielby. Poetry Salzburg (Salzburg 2015). Pbk. 96 pages. £10.50.
Nicholas Bielby is editor of the poetry magazine Pennine Platform and a retired academic. As an educationalist, he is particularly known for his work on literacy and, as a poet, he has three previous collections and numerous prizes to his name. The Naming of Things is a satisfyingly crafted book in which art, nature, belief and death are woven together in a touching narrative of presence and loss. His stance is, as Dick Davis suggests on the back cover, ‘a kind of attentive diffidence’ that avoids neat closures in ideas and form: a ‘modesty’ towards his subjects. He poses the big questions: Does God exist? How should we live? How will we be remembered? Yet in his hands these themes are never abstract. They work through a study of personalities, clothed in an exploration of language and the music and lexis of poetic tradition. They examine the possibilities of syntax itself to shape, reveal and embody reality – or falsehood. Take ‘Remembering Neville’, for instance, one of the many memorial poems in the collection. Bielby tells us that Neville’s own writing was ‘like a bird/ making no sense – if making sense has need/of syntax’. Syntax itself becomes a trope for form in life, as in writing: for the constraints of job and family channelling unbridled feelings. Without it, Neville showed only neo-Platonic ‘flashes’ of the person who might have been. However, wanting to imagine his friend perfected in heaven, ‘God’s juggler, conjuring words’, Bielby acknowledges that ‘”God” may be figurative, “the best we know, and therefore what we owe allegiance to”‘. In the course of the meditation, then, his dead subject continues to challenge our preconceptions: ‘Still teases us to test what words are true’. The title poem of the collection considers the problem of naming God. The wrestler who fought with Jacob in Genesis is evasive, refusing to be named. Does this reflect God’s ineluctable nature or merely our human construction of what is unknown and imagined? Bielby, nevertheless, feels drawn and possessed by it: in the imagination still, I know, there’s something nameless does not let me go.
Another elegy which becomes a test of words and truth is ‘In memoriam: Mabel Ferret’. Here the poet recounts his friend dreaming a poem and how she woke recalling every word but one, a word so perfect there could be no substitute. For the poet that lost word comes to embody the melancholy of ‘and now we’ll never know’. But we know this: what we each live with is our sense of loss. Loss, as Bielby says in ‘I Grow Old…’ becomes an increasingly dominant experience in our lives: ‘Now funerals outnumber weddings’. The legends of our parents’ generation pass away, our parents in their turn and finally our own generation. Death, then, ‘makes us all contemporaries’ and we ‘try to make sense/Of our own stories’, of ‘sins revisited’, lives ‘frittered’. Death requires us to unwind, unpick. So in ‘My Father’s Study’ Bielby dismantles the room his parent made to ‘fit around himself’, but what he is most struck and moved by is finding the roll of soft crepe bandage his father made to go between his knees in bed: ‘It is such little things ambush the heart’. In ‘Yeats and Me’ the poet reviews the postures adopted by W.B. Yeats as he ‘made his will’ and finds them all too grandiose or second-hand compared with the ‘commonplace enough’ legacy of love. This is exemplified in small gestures. For instance, he wants his grandchildren to remember him as they rescue spiders from the bath, because he taught them to respect living things. When he revisits Yeats’s grave stone in ‘Epitaphs’, he proposes as his own the self-deprecating, ‘He never was quite good enough’. So, in the final poem ‘Words for My Burial’, he questions the consolation of both epitaphs and the notion of afterlife but concludes: that the word, if so composed, may, for what it’s worth, catch at some gleam on shared and polished earth above this body, soil or seed, interred. Bielby’s affirmations, tentative as they are, have that powerful gleam. They are more than good enough.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice-Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham.