Choosing an England by Peter Carpenter
More substantial than the average pamphlet but slighter, at thirty-two poems, than most books, Peter Carpenter’s first publication has an exploratory feel that both intrigues and rewards. This derives partly from the range of tones and styles:
Carpenter can adopt a voice of curious, metaphysical inquiry akin to John Burnside’s, or a subdued, elegiac detachment, or a self-deprecating football-fan persona not too far from Nick Hornby. But most of all it derives from the poems’ humility throughout towards knowledge, towards conclusions. Carpenter’s sensitive, intelligent poems articulate a kind of puzzlement that rings true because of his refusal to underline, to moralise, to seal off meaning.
Approaching the Ground’ is a considered choice of opening poem, its first lilt introducing the sensibility that dominates the book:
From the way they walk
I sense
I’m near it again. I run fingers along iron I rivets: a bridge’s clumsy sides.
There’s a fine rain of memory .. .’
In most of these poems Carpenter registers subtleties of emotion through careful accumulation of visual images; the effect is often that of extended haiku or of those New Wave films in which the camera lingers on or comes back to certain details as if attracted most by what it finds most puzzling.
This gives many the fed of travel poems; the traveller’s curiosity in ‘JFK Drive’ and ‘East Coast Haiku’ sits easily beside the naming of (local) places in ‘Choosing an England’ and ‘Ex’. But each poem seems to have its own peculiar strategy, its own oblique way of looking at the world. ‘From the Darkroom’ is a brilliant enactment in language of Carpenter’s procedure: as the print (like the poem) is developed and ‘details tweezer sharpness from the blur’, the whole suddenly becomes ‘blindingly obvious’.
When the language he uses is finely tuned to his purposes, Carpenter can achieve remarkable results, as in the Heaney-ish ‘Gathering Oysters’ or the excellent ‘A Woman in the Sun’, told in the voice of the painter Edward Hopper’s wife and model Josephine (’Your brush flicked out its tongue’).
The poems that arc played out against an emotional landscape, such as ‘Shadow’, ‘Displacement’, ‘To bits’ and the more conventional ‘No Through Road’, illustrate most clearly the way Carpenter’s precise, economical style nevertheless communicates doubt; in these poems it is as much his ear for dialogue as his sharp eye that helps him create a Pinteresque atmosphere (’Now can we agree / it was never run / that bath ( .. .]?’ - ‘Displacement’).
Some poems I find more puzzling than puzzled, but no less enjoyable for that. ‘Potato Junkers’ and ‘Slow Movement’ weave past and present into a surreal web; till: flow backwards and forwards in time as the narratives are mixed generates a powerful imaginative charge. It is when Carpenter dwells solely on, or ill, the past that he takes most risks; if you stay out in the ‘fine rain of memory’ too long, it sells, you can catch a dose of nostalgia. ‘Heart of the Cerberus’ recognises this danger, focusing on an old picture that ‘confirms instead something / dead inside’: hut other while richly evocative of childhood and f.11l1ily lire, In~l.: their way hack to the present.
‘The !t\HlIUh’. which paints a picture of pre-war life in the Surrey \’ill.lgl’ where ClrpClttl’r \\’.lS horn, also stays firmly in the past, but is quickened by J strong sense ofTitc about to happen’ and the final St;lIlZ3′S note of doubt, ‘I think I hear / cars starting to make progress .. : encapsulates the most attractive characteristic of Carpenter’s poetry, a humility of observation that reminds one of how much early modernist poetry and painting and everything since owes to eastern influences,
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poems defy categorisation; he’s trying to do something new in almost every poem, and when he succeeds the resulrs are
Review by ANDREW JOHNSTON
