Keith Waldrop and Sarah Cave: A review

Of And, Keith Waldrop, Guillemot Press, 2018, £6.00

like fragile clay, Sarah Cave, Guillemot Press, 2018, £9.00

The arc of Keith Waldrop’s poetic career is a movement from verbosity to minimalism, a paring away of the extraneous. His early work tends to follow the logic of prose, of sentence and paragraph, but his mature poetry removes this scaffolding to let the silence out. However, while the method has evolved, many of Waldrop’s central concerns have remained constant, especially how ‘the spaces between things/all but make up for the intervening/entities (The Space of Half an Hour, 1983).

In that same book, Waldrop wrote

Many years ago

I wanted to write about

prayer, but was hindered by centuries of

practice – also my religion

got in the way. Am I finally ready?

And now, 35 years later, it seems he is, as prayer is at the core of this tiny recent book from Guillemot. These prayers are offered to ‘gods one need not/believe in’, an idea that, to me at least, summons up that New England Transcendentalist tradition with which Waldrop seems to have so much in common, as when Emerson wrote ‘We have no experience of a creator, and therefore we know of none’.

A little later, Waldrop writes

those who believe in God have

no reason to pray

And so these poems are prayers to an unacknowledged god who has no need of them, an exercise in perception with the inward looking eye of the ‘god in ruins’. What Waldrop seems most to believe in is the act of writing, the word isolated for emphasis:

I decline my soul in

writing

old eyes now in my

cold age

just where lights are

going out

thinking

of going

The word ‘decline’ here acts, I think, as fulcrum for multiple puns around ideas of refusing, leaning in (as opposed to ‘incline’) and conjugating, as one would a verb. Of And has the feeling of something ending, of being both coda and codicil. If so, it is a fittingly quite, voluminously quiet, closure to a remarkable poetic career.

Religion is also in the mix in Sarah Cave’s like fragile clay, with the title apparently deriving from a letter of St Paul in which the human body is described as a fragile clay vessel containing the divine light or grace, and Job’s ‘What then of those who live in houses of clay, who are founded on dust? They are crushed as easily as the moth’.

Cave’s exploration of our fragile clay is constructed in a framework of Tove Jannson’s Moominvalley stores, a body of work that I am almost entirely ignorant of. This is, I think something of a disadvantage when reading the book, as the distraction of working out who’s who served as a distraction from Cave’s undoubted qualities as a writer. There are four main figures at play, a family consisting of Moominpapa and Moominmamma and their son Moomin along with Snorkmaiden, Moominpapa’s lover.

The poems circle around this affair and the sense of grief and loss it brings to the protagonists. At the core of the book, Snorkmaiden is conflated with the Virgin Mother of the Christian mythos in a poem called ‘Moominvalley Annunciation’, presumably an offshoot of the Annunciation poems she worked on with Rupert Loydell:

Heavily pregnant, Snorkmaiden

fills her basket with the tide’s

clutter. She sees the world

endlessly rocking through

the keyhole of a pebble

or transparent sea glass.

Elsewhere in the book, Cave uses typography and the full resources of the page to create interesting tensions, but the Moomins keep getting in the way, and the most successful poem in the book, for me, is ‘Moomin visits the Rauschenberg Exhibition at the Tate Modern’, where they appear only in the title and where Cave’s ekphrastic instincts are allowed free rein in a set of chant-like theme and variations:

found

in a painted

wooden post-box

dirt and mould

dirt and mould, thorns,

thorns and snail shells

imprints

transfers

in a wood box

It’s worth reading like fragile clay for this poem alone.