Another beautifully produced Candlestick Press pamphlet offering a wide variety of poetry on the theme of home.
The first poem, Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree, offers the ideal, absent home as a personal Eden, yearned for as an escape from the grim realities of city life. Happily, the rest of the collection avoids his maudlin desiring for a never-never land to present us with a series of lively snapshots of home and family life, warts and all.
In Imitiaz Dharker’s This room the home itself appears to be growing apace “breaking out of itself” as bedroom and kitchen physical spring into life to join in the excitement of living. Philip Larkin brings us back down to earth with Home is so Sad. Even he, uncharacteristically perhaps, acknowledges home has potential, “A joyous shot at how things ought to be”, but this hope (characteristically) is immediately punctured as “long fallen wide”.
Tony Harrison, in his poem Long Distance depicts his father’s troubles as a widower and the trials of keeping their relationship going in these trying circumstances. But his attachments affect his behaviour beyond the death of both his parents:
in my new black leather phone-book there’s you’re name
and the disconnected number I still call.
Perhaps he still needs a connection home, even when home is no longer there.
In The Afternoon Sun Cavafy recalls the furnishings of a home he once shared and how
… we separated
for a week only… And then-
that week became forever.
Regret is also the theme of Thomas Hardy’s The Self-Unseeing. Not in his case at the loss of something meaningful and substantial, but sorrow that he did not appreciate the value of his home life at the time, suggesting that maybe we are all too busy to consider with the here and now.
Linda Hogan’s Crossings is not an easy poem (good – every collection needs something to grapple with). It might be partly about where we come from, “the terrain of crossed beginings”, how difficult it can be to leave behind where we started, “Like tides of water, / he wanted to turn back” and the thrill of disappearing into the future:
Dark was the water,
darker still the horses,
and then they were gone.
This home is somewhere you have to get away from.
Grace Nichols’s To My Coral Bones suggests the Caribbean Islands “inside me / Sky-deep / Sea-deep” are the skeltal structure, “my coral bones”, around which she organises her life, which give her the strength to deal with life’s hurricanes. For Mahendra Solanki in Home it is not memory but actively performing familiar rites and ceremonies that ground us: “Its what brings us back to earth, / another ritual, at home.”
Wislawa Szymborska’s Going Home concludes the collection with a witty and moving depiction of home as the ultimate refuge. “Something had gone wrong”, but back home “He exists just as he did inside his mother’s womb / … he has curled up and gone to sleep”. A fitting end to this thought provoking selection.
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John Powell is a member of Town Hall Poets.
Poetry in Trowbridge 