Harry Chambers

Ann Drysdale was born near Manchester and brought up in London. For many years she raised her three children alone whilst running a small farm on the North York Moors and writing a long-running weekly column for Yorkshire Post Newspapers. She produced as well a highly acclaimed series of funny and moving bucolic memoirs: Faint Heart Never Kissed a Pig, Sows’ Ears and Silk Purses and Pearls Before Swine, followed more recently by A Pig in a Passage. For the last fifteen years she has lived halfway up a mountain in the South Wales Valleys. The Poet and Peasant epithet is a piece of self-description she once used on her home-made notepaper.

Following the death from cancer of her husband Philip in 2000, she wrote two books of interspersed prose and poetry that chronicle his deterioration and demise: Three-three, Two-two, Five-six  (2007) and Discussing Wittgenstein (2009). Professor Raymond Tallis, a leading gerontologist, called the first volume “a masterpiece” that should be compulsory reading for every trainee doctor and nurse. Of the second one, Helena Nelson wrote “it is not about death at all really, it is about life”. Ann Drysdale chose a Punch cartoon by Bud Handelsman for its front cover and, as an epigraph, the following translated phrases “opportunistically cherry-picked from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein”:

            Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness
            but come down to the green valleys of silliness…
            If people did not sometimes do silly things,
            nothing intelligent would ever get done…

As the founder-publisher of Peterloo Poets who brought out the first four volumes of Ann Drysdale’s poetry, The Turn of the Cucumber (1995), Gay Science (1999), Backwork (2002) and Between Dryden and Duffy: Another Collection (2005), I would like to highlight one or two aspects of the uniqueness of her poetic achievement.

The title poem of her third collection Backwork gives us her own modest take on the matter by means of a sustained metaphorical conceit employing mining terms. It opens with the declaration:

            One would prefer, on reflection, not to be at the cutting edge

and concludes:

            But up ahead, at the place where it all happens,
            In the occasional hush between snapping of snap tins,
            You may hear the sound of a soft, dedicated scraping.

            Is it a rat, colonising a worked-out seam?
            No. Me. Working close to my chest with a bastard file. 

A footnote tells us that a Bastard file is one with a medium degree of coarseness. It seems to me that, in eschewing the avant-garde in favour of “a soft, dedicated scraping”, Ann is signalling her sympathetic alignment with formalism in the Parnassian mode. Indeed, her oeuvre includes several translations/versions of poems by Theophile Gautier, best known perhaps for his credo poem “L’Art”

Tout passe. — L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité,
  Le buste
Survit à la cité,

Et la médaille austère
Que trouve un laboureur
  Sous terre
Révèle un empereur…

Sculpte, lime, cisèle ; 
  Que ton rêve flottant
Se scelle
Dans le bloc résistant!

Also scattered through Ann Drysdale’s volumes are poems — testimony to her education in the Classics —  that are versions/translations of Martial and Catullus that have varying degrees of coarseness. Towards the end of Backwork is a tongue-in-cheek Devil’s Advocate of a poem entitled “Against Rhyming”:

            …Rhyming and chiming isn’t strong enough
            To carry messages of any weight
            And real involvement in the here and now
            Demands the rawness of the naked state
            Of language…

It ends:

            Who in their right mind would contrive a sonnet
            If anything worthwhile depended on it?

Well, Ann Drysdale, for one, and “Against Rhyming” is, of course, a sonnet. It brings to my mind two lines by W.H. Auden (“Doggerel by a Senior Citizen” ):

            I cannot settle which is worse,
            The Anti-novel or Free Verse.

There are many other sonnets in Ann’s four collections. Her Garden of Eden poem “New Fruit”, the final poem in Backwork (“In the last knockings of the evening sun/ Eve drinks Calvados”) is a perfect example of the form and won second prize (she was robbed!) in the 2001 National Poetry Competition. Elsewhere, I’d recommend “Nuns, Skating” (written in a Christmas card with the picture Winter at the Convent by Margaret Loxton) which is not unworthy of Milton, and:

            For Larry — The Sonnet I Promised

            i.m. L.K. McElroy
             
            Sad is too small a word; it will not do.
            It cannot carry what is in my heart.
            I want to say the right goodbye to you;
            The tricky bit is knowing where to start.
            Grief is too big somehow, and not your style;
            You couldn’t do with that pretentious shit,
            Always preferring what would make you smile.
            You wouldn’t wear it if it didn’t fit.
            It’s out there somewhere in the sudden dark —
            The slick one-liner that will say it all —
            And when I find it I will bring it back
            And spray it scarlet on a public wall.
            Poetry sucks. This is real McCoy:
            I’m gonna miss you, Mr. McElroy.

Both these sonnets are to be found in Between Dryden and Duffy: Another Collection.

In Ann’s first collection The Turn of the Cucumber there is a sequence poem “The Seven Ages of the She-poet” which illustrates two veins that run throughout her poetry: lightly-worn learning and a sense of humour. The opening section (‘Christening’) depicts the word-fairy offering the newborn poet her choice of the available voices of the aether:

            “…What do you fancy, dearie? I am able
            To grant you any voice you care to choose”
            But she herself had one eye on the table
            And two-thirds of the other on the booze.

            “Auden and Eliot are standard choices,
            Though for a girl they might be rather deep.
            You could have either one of Wordsworth’s voices —
            I personally recommend the sheep.

            Swinburne and Pope are both a tad pedantic
            And Shelley nowadays a touch effete
            But if you see yourself as a romantic,
            Then Lizzie Barrett might be up your street.

            You might prefer Du Bellay’s subtle ton, or
            I do a lovely line in La Fontaine?
            The streetwise cynicism of Villon, or
            The deliquescent music of Verlaine…”

Another sequence poem, a satiric take on the courtship of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, is to be found in Ann’s second volume, Gay Science, whose title derives from a rendering of “gai saber”, the Provençal name for the art of poetry. “The Suitors” kicks off with a nod towards one of Henry Reed’s best-known poems and deploys dogs as the suitors of the bitch Penelope to great comic effect.

            To-day we have sniffing of parts. Yesterday
            We had increased awareness. And tomorrow —
            If we are not extremely vigilant —
            We shall have misalliance. The lurcher is in heat.
            Outside, the visitors, eager to oblige.
               And to-day we have sniffing of parts.

There follow eight sections in different verse forms, each devoted to a different breed of dog-suitor. The opening of “Sniffer, the Questing Beast” will serve to illustrate the quality of the poetry:

            Behold, the beast the neighbours roar at
             Semper quaerens quod devorat
            Prising up the lids of bins,
            Making off with empty tins,
            Crusts and crumbs of pies and pasties,
            Dirty nappies, ladies’ nasties,
            Skins and bones and shucks and shells —
            Anything that drips or smells
            He’ll take away and either eat
            Or lick and leave along the street,
            Transferring things that they had hidden
            From private bin to public midden
            Exposing thus their secret mess
            In all its rank unloveliness.
            They rate him non persona grata
            And stone him, like a Christian martyr.

W.H. Auden also wrote in “Doggerel by a Senior Citizen”: 

            Dare any call Permissiveness
            An educational success?
            Saner those classrooms which I sat in,
            Compelled to study Greek and Latin.

An opinion with which Ann Drysdale would surely concur.

Auden also wrote: “I suggest that without some undertone of the comic,/genuine serious verse cannot be written today”.

Let us therefore move seamlessly backwards from a lurcher in heat to “The Ram’s Skull” in Ann’s first volume The Turn of the Cucumber. It deserves quoting in its entirety.

            There it sits on the table.
            An exercise in metaphor.
            Eyeholes vacant;
            Overstated horns akimbo.
            Ridiculous in death.
            The tutor speaks:
            “Forget reality. See shapes. See thoughts.
            See half-formed visions of a greater consciousness.
            Just look and see and, having seen, say.”

            They look. I look. We look,
            And one by one they speak,
            Saying they see landscapes, caverns and waterfalls,
            Great rocks and oceans and the homes of eagles.

            Now comes my turn: “Ann, tell us what you see.”
            I see a ram’s skull; heft it at arm’s length,
            Ponder in pantomime,
            Then to the word-befuddled class declare
            “Alas, poor Herdwick!” — and they roar
            Till all that carefully constructed metaphor
            Falls like a clown’s trousers round the tutor’s feet.

            I feel myself dismissed — his tight lips telegraph:
             “Trust you to settle for a cheap and easy laugh...”
            Later, alone, I beg to contradict,
            Such laughs are easy but they don’t come cheap.

            Who wants to be a poet anyway?
            Sometimes I hate poets. Hate them for not knowing
            The ram beneath the skull.

            A Swaledale tup.
            He’d have got bonny gimmers, this old chap —
            For old he was; some of his teeth are gone.
            See how the horns curl round and round again
            Finishing in the comic little lift
            Left over from his lambhood. Close and tight
            They sat upon his cheeks, trapping his head
            Till someone cut a slice from each of them
            To ease the workings of his mighty jaw.
            Somebody did a nifty hacksaw job;
            Somebody else sweated to hold him still,
            Digging their fingers into the greasy elf-locks,
            Pinning his ear back with a grubby thumb.

            Somebody cared. He’d not have lived so long
            Without a good master. All of seven-shear.
            Keen, too. See in one horn the drilled hole
            Where they close-coupled him to a companion.
            Ramshackled, lest they tupped the ewes too soon.

            Seven times a fleece fell, damp and rank-smelling,
            Stained with the old musk, bedewed on the skin side
            With his essential oils. Oh, the rare stink of him
            In the height of the season.

            And once, on a latefrost morning, he was new.
            Licked into life by an old blackfaced ewe.
            Perhaps a child fed him and knew the touch
            Of whiskery lips, the thrust of his blunt head.

            How could they look at a ram’s skull and not see
            That once that skull would have been small enough
            To fit roundly, slick as a cricket ball,
            Into the cupped palm of a shepherd’s hand.

Oh, the stink of the real! Ann’s imaginary gardens have real toads (and dogs and sheep) in them. Hers is a poetry in which imagination is fed on lived experience. For a long time she has lived as an outsider in South Wales. “South Wales, Singing” from Gay Science opens “Should you be seeking the sound of South Wales/It will save time to exclude false promises” and modulates to:

                                         … The voice of Wales
            Sounds like torn plastic caught in old barbed wire:
            Black, tethered tongues erratically flapping.
            The sound of Wales is that of sad hands, clapping.

A long sequence from Between Dryden and Duffy, titled “A Landscape in Waiting” shows how Ann has immersed herself in the landscape, poetry and art of the region and it chronicles her participation in a regeneration scheme about which she has mixed feelings:

            It was places like this that created my feeling for nature;
            It was deep in long grass that my singular selfhood was found
            And all that I am I can trace to the time that I wasted
            In childhood, in secret, in dangerous play on rough ground.

            For the wildness and wilderness has to exist for a reason
            And it would be foolish to keep the invaders at bay
            For the cohorts are marching towards me to take it and keep it
            And now, to ensure it survives, I must give it away.

The sequence includes a poem about “Looking again at the scene L.S. Lowry painted — Bargoed 1965” and a poem “For Idris Davies”:

            Oh, can you see the Rhymney now
            From where your face is hid?
            And can you see the things we’ve done
            To mend the things we did?

            There’s otters on the river now
            Where pools are clear and deep
            And ten yards up from Gilfach bridge
            I saw a salmon leap.

            Soon lucky folk will walk to work
            Through seasons’ changing faces
            And valley boys will court and spark
            In green secluded places.

            Where once there grew a common greed
            For iron and for coal
            We recognise a deeper need
            In matters of the soul.

            We are trying, Idris, trying
            To help the dream along:
            A people fit for poetry;
            A river fit for song.
              
            (Deleted stanzas…)

            But the factories at Britannia
            Are still disgorging foam
            And Valley boys don’t think it’s cool
            To take their litter home,

            So silver poison now and then
            Goes floating up above
            And underfoot the seeds and skins
            Betray the fruits of love.

In Discussing Wittgenstein Ann reproduces her script for her husband Philip’s funeral where she herself led proceedings. The script ends: “Catullus wrote in Latin because he was in Rome, so he did what Rome did. Philip was an Englishman abroad and delighted in observing the proprieties. We’ll sing him out with Cwm Rhondda to celebrate his living and dying in Wales. So, from both of us — may your life be as relevant as his; may your death be as good. And, failing that, may you live forever!” In the final prose section of that book, Ann remembers how one of Philip’s friends “complimented me quietly on having done for Philip what Berowne, in Love’s Labours Lost, had deemed impossible — to move wild laughter in the throat of death.” I am reminded here of the W.H. Auden poem The Cave of Making, in Memory of Louis Macniece, in which he states:

            Even a limerick
            ought to be something a man of
            honour, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad,
            could read without contempt.

Ann wrote many poems about her time caring for Philip — notably the sequences “A Spell in Hospital” in Gay Science and “Scattering His Ashes” in Between Dryden and Duffy. None of them were limericks but many of them have the ability to make a reader laugh and cry at the same time. See particularly “Awaiting the Return of the Italian Surgeon” from Gay Science and, from the same volume, “Bacchanal”, which I end my piece by quoting in its entirety:
                         
                        Sing, sing the staphylococcus 
                        Lewd entertainer at the court of Bacchus
             
            He’s a hunchbacked dwarf with a lumpy shape
            That mocks the model of the sacred grape.
            He follows his master at a limping trot
            Disseminating the ignoble rot.
            He sticks to the rosy fingers of the dawn
            When she touches her lips in a decorous yawn.
            He rides on the eagle to the prize it’s found
            And he licks round the edges of Prometheus’ wound.
            He nests in the nostrils of the Queen of Troy
            And he lurks round the anus of the altar-boy.
             
                          Sing, sing the staphylococcus 
                          Lewd entertainer at the court of Bacchus
             
            But you, my love, may safely doze;
            You can scratch your arse, you can pick your nose
            You’ll be safe, my darling, whatever you do —
            There’s a poet in the corner so he won’t get you.