Two Interpretations From Central Park
By Graeme Merry
Visions and Voices Publications
Reviewed by Peter Salisbury
It will probably not be very long before the death of poetry is announced, in the same way as the death of the novel was proclaimed 40 years ago.
When that happens, pick up again this little book of Graeme Merry's poems, and turn to his "The Whirling Dervish", the first appropriate continuation written in this century to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", which remains unfinished because a "person from Porlock" knocked at Coleridge's door at the wrong time. Graeme, certainly without intending to, has provided a very possible continuation and finish of Coleridge's poem, in the same incantatory trance-like rhythm, which is a superb proof of indifference of poetic themes to mere time.
In late capitalist society, reality is officially defined in economic rationalist terms, in an official vocabulary which is a malicious and degenerate caricature of Adam Smith.
Poets necessarily reject this vocabulary, and reach out for another. Graeme's formal rejection, in extremely radical terms, of capitalism can be found in "Pyrox Purgatorio", about factory work:
I have nothing but skin to discard
Take it off
And feel the steel that ribs this world
The poem "Two Interpretations", which provides the book with its title, draws on Christian mysticism for its imagery (which is not the same as meaning.) But it is a very urban and social mysticism.
Graeme sees angels, yes, but on trams. Thomas Kempis and Sylvia Plath drop their names with equal aplomb in the same poem; talk about God is immediately countered, in poetic dialogue, with suggestions that a girl might do God's job better.
These poems consistently mix religious and sexual themes — not always successfully. They are very far from Puritan, with the kind of religious celebration of sex that preceded compulsory celibacy for the Catholic clergy, which one finds in the Old Testament "Song of Solomon".
Parts of "Mimi and Me" work brilliantly in an extremely original love-poem, which draws from the first chapter of John's gospel a transcendence of the limits of traditional declamation, which might have been embarrassing if Graeme did not ensure that it is also very funny:
Post-cards of you
Threw me back
To the moment
When in a necessary case
Mona Lisa's smile
Is turned
Off
At a time when politics and society are reverting to the norms of the Menzies' era, without effective challenge from an intellectually moribund left, it may seem that a "Christian" poetry is part of a general movement backwards. Not so. Graeme Merry's poetry is not a genteel reconciliation with society, like James McAuley's or other vitation to an alternative reality, in which capitalist work has been abolished.
He uses mystical language consciously, as the words and rhythms of repressed desire which looks to and has experienced a real and material end to repression. It is the language of a (post-)Freudian or a Marxist (religion is "the hope of a hopeless world").
There is a rumour that, in the second year of the Kennett government, all poetry textbooks will be removed from the schools, because there are no jobs for poets listed at the CES. I cannot tell you, therefore, that the future will find the poems in this slim booklet embedded in official or even semi-official anthologies. They should make it, though a much greater honour, to the underground samizdats which will be circulated furtively and secretly, among the resistance to the New Right, fighting to bring the imagination to power.