Rose
He did not back away
when the first glowing someone in his life
encompassed him
in welcoming arms
She told him to stop twitching
whenever she enfolded him –
I’m here, she said,
in case you haven’t noticed
Foresight
He knew misfortune was on its way
whenever his mother said
You have to laugh
Exposé
When his mother complained
about the cost of carrots
he heard unleashed despair
Missing
His father called them his urchins,
the sparrows who came to the yard each morning
for the breadcrumbs he scattered
He longs to see sparrows again,
those bustling, chirruping little birds
possessed of the obstinate power
of the songless
Humorous
If, when he’s dying,
he’s nothing left to say
he’ll feel bereft
Conversing
He wants to meet Anton Chekhov
and drink champagne with him
in Odesa
They’ll stay happily silent
until they toast the Widow Clicquot
with the last of the bottle
Night
He clutches the pillow before he sleeps,
wanting warmth
He’ll wake in the morning, he knows,
embracing someone once embraceable
There’s no end to their number now,
the ones he cares to fondle
before he vanishes
The multifaceted English writer Paul Bailey, born in south London in 1937, published his first poetry collection, Inheritance, with CB Editions in 2019. Joie de Vivre followed in 2022.. This week’s poem sequence represents my loosely structured selection from a batch of short poems that are still work-in-progress. Bailey’s plan for the new collection (as yet untitled) is to have the poems “act as introductions to prose passages that will be a little bit longer”. As he has written: “I share Isaac Babel’s lifelong ambition to write with simplicity, brevity and precision.”
While the third-person narration ducks egocentricity and makes for a pleasantly detached tone of voice, these poems are essentially autobiographical. Like the first of the group, Rose, they may focus on a significant figure from the writer’s past, but whether or not the narrator (“he”) places himself at the centre of the picture, or allots himself only a walk-on part, all the poems contribute to a shy self-portrait. We meet Bailey in the present, drily contemplating mortality. And we see him watching, listening, questioning (and smiling) during his uneasy early years when, like the protagonist of his 1990 memoir An Immaculate Mistake, he was “growing up gay in a family who believed he was ‘not natural’ because he bought his mother flowers.”
The encounter with Rose in the first poem suggests both affection and wariness. Bailey explains that she “was a lovely overweight Irishwoman who ran the local Youth Club in Battersea … She died of cancer at about the age of 40.” Her demonstrativeness must have contrasted with the family customs he knew best, and, despite his wariness and “twitching”, she is remembered as “the first glowing someone in his life”. Rose is surely among those who are remembered in the final poem, Night, one of the “once embraceable” of whom “there’s no end to their number now”.
Following the tiny, revealingly contradictory character studies of the writer’s mother in Foresight and Exposé, the subject of Missing is ostensibly the father. But the title Missing goes a particularly long way (though all the one-word titles have a treasure-able elasticity) and the second verse focuses on the narrator. It is “he” rather than the father, I think, who has noticed the decline of the urban sparrow population in recent years, and “longs to see the sparrows again”. And then the birds flock back and take over in the last line, with its deliciously abrasive observation: “those bustling, chirruping little birds / possessed of the obstinate power / of the songless”. It’s left to the reader’s imagination whom to include among the loudly songless – bad writers, bad politicians? The scope is wide. And so the title, Missing, stretches ever further.
The importance of translating experience into language is movingly, wittily encapsulated in Humorous, where the dying person is the one will “feel bereft” if rendered wordless. On the other hand, the “joke” in the poem Conversing is that there is no conversation when the champagne-loving doctor and writer, Anton Chekhov, and his admirer, the writer Paul Bailey, get together over a bottle of superior fizz. Odesa was a city Chekhov visited and enjoyed, as the Literary Museum there testifies. Although the pair speak only to toast Madame Cliquot “with the last of the bottle”, Bailey reminds us of the power of language to re-wind history, and enliven fantasy. The light of an imagined ideal falls with special pathos on a currently beleaguered city, as on the meeting of minds in perfect communion without language.
Bailey’s melancholy in some of these is always offset by his imagination and wit, and by his understated formal skill. In sparingly punctuated lines and telling silences, he is master of English sentence rhythms, and refreshingly plain-spoken as he takes stock of the people gathered in his memory.
On 25 December, a day when families of all faiths and none sit down together, and when even among the non-family oriented celebrants, memories tend to waken, Bailey’s generous Breadcrumbs are a non-scriptural reminder of the love that is at the centre of the Christmas story. To all Poem of the week readers, I wish you an especially peaceful and hopeful day.
