Cicely Herbert sees Paul at the National Theatre and a revival of Nathan the Wise at the Hampstead Theatre reviews These are intelligent, wide-ranging and, at times, passionate poems. Above all they are refreshingly serious poems: poems that are not only serious about language and craft but about truth; serious-toned poems but never solemn. Abbs was brought up, it seems, in a strictly religious atmosphere against which he emotionally turned. He was wounded by the oppressiveness of that upbringing so much that his God became an aporia [difficulty, doubt] – a word he actually uses. Nevertheless, he would like to reclaim a clear religious belief for himself and, I feel, that that is what much of his poetry – its subliminal impulse – is about.
Normally, I don’t pay much attention to the ordering into sections of a book of poems. In an age of intellectuals obsessed with technology and taxonomy, I find it tells us little about the poetry that we could not discover by reading the poems in any order. However, in Abbs’ case they seem more significant than usual. So I give them: Child of Pisces, Ancestor Worship, Viva la Vida, Ecce Homo: On Nietzsche’s Madness and Ars Poetica.
Probably the poems on Nietzsche’s madness are the most surprising; but a moment’s reflection shows their relevance. For a child born under the astrological Sign of the Fish, whose faith (Christian) was lost, then the road to nihilism was inevitable. Yet, as one gets more fully into the poems of the various sections, for a poet like Peter Abbs – so drawn for example to Rilke, that most religious of modern European poets – the nihilism he went towards could only be like that of Nietzsche. As that great philosophical religious Teilhard de Chardin said, ‘Nietzsche is one of the very few critics of Christianity worth examining’. Nietzsche was a poet, a visionary of innumerable insights, and a prophet of the way the modern world would go. He is probably the most exhilarating and puzzling mind since the Renaissance. So it is no surprise at all that Abbs was drawn to him and to composing a poetic response to the philosopher: especially as Nietzsche’s loss of faith led to madness: something to which aporia can so easily lead.
The poems oscillate agreeably between the personal and the impersonal. At one moment the poet quoting St Augustine writes, ‘So where does love reside? Not in our times, / Rank with hyperbole and lies. / Not in the pragmatic politics of a loveless age.’ but answers ‘But in the sea-blue glance/Of your eyes, in the claritas of their gaze’. More strongly in ‘The Naming of Love’ he writes of his wife or partner, ‘Praise only what you know’ and goes on to praise her:
I praise your eyes tonight:
Cleansed by tears, they flare like candlelight.
Theirs is the beatitude of all that’s vulnerable – yet utterly precise.
I praise the dark delta of your thighs – older than time It weeps its pleasure. Under my touch the new words come.
In the section called ‘Ancestor Worship’ we are in poetry of a different vein. In poems like ‘Saint Augustine’s Quill’, ‘The Search of Rumi’, ‘After the Burning of Books’, ‘The Genius of Turner’ and another half-dozen poems he is imaginatively ‘ventriloquising for the truth’ through the mouths of others, as Coleridge would have put it. In one or two of the poems in the same section he translates effectively, as with the poem ‘Last Things’ subtitled ‘After Rilke’: a poem based closely upon the most famous of The Duino Elegies. A poem only marred by a typo spelling ‘disdains’ as ‘distains.’ To revert briefly to the fascinating section on Nietzsche’s madness. The German philosopher’s quarrel was not only with Christianity but, it seems to me, with Hellenic civilization:
If on the road you should meet Socrates – And fail to kill him, Then avoid his ironic eyes, His enticing invitations, Teasing aporias… It is not clear how much the poet endorses this Nietzschean view of Socratic thinking, but as the Greek philosophers – principally Plato-Socrates – were the first of the human race to endeavour to prove the existence of God, seeing the concept as inextricably linked with ‘the good’, I cannot see we would be better off killing Socrates. Says Abbs-Nietzsche, ‘if he [Socrates] should pester you, be brave/ And simply dance’. The Dionysian Solution dear to Nietzsche’s heart it would seem.
I could ramble on at greater length about this fascinating and thoughtful collection, but do not wish to spoil the pleasure of the many especial ‘discoveries’ inherent in it. Suffice it for me to recommend it warmly.
William Oxley has published over 20 poetry collections.
His autobiography No Accounting for Paradise (1999) and his New and Selected Poems (2001) are published by Rockingham Press.