Eyes Upon Some Inner Thing

Folk Tunes, by Alan Gould; Salt, 2009, 80 pages, $24.95.

Folk Tunes is one of the most enjoyable and intellectually engaging new volumes of verse I have read in recent years. It is Alan Gould’s most accomplished to date. Here we find the poet moving freely between light and serious verse and blurring the line between them, as the light carries the burden of the serious and the serious is relieved of its weight by its very sense of proportion and perspective. Whether serious or light, the poems in this volume are always consummately crafted, suggestive by turns of the structures of Gothic cathedrals on the one hand, and the sturdy yet delicate, perfectly designed skeletons of birds on the other—in both cases, the structures allow the poems to soar and cause the reader to “lift up heart, eyes”.

Folk Tunes opens with a poem titled “She Sings Him”. It is concerned with the complex problem of selfhood: the way we are perceived by others, the way we perceive ourselves, and the way we imagine our own becoming what we are and what we will be. Self-deprecation is coupled by a healthy sense of self-morale and is seen to be an essential component of it, as the problem of anxiety and uncertainty (about others, about the world and about the self) provide the opportunity for the formation of one’s identity, and the acquisition of self-possession. Complemented by the final poem in the book (“He Sings Her”), it introduces and is representative of the major concerns of the work as a whole. Let’s look at how it establishes these concerns, before seeing how they are pursued in other poems.

The back cover of the volume carries a photo of the poet, looking rather intent and earnest, reading from an earlier volume of his poetry. The photo confirms the reader’s suspicion that the poet is the “him” being sung in the first poem: “The head of silver curls I love / once said he wished to be”. From the perspective of the ageing poet’s lover, the poem presents, stanza by stanza, the poet’s quest for identity at different stages in life, up to the age of “silver curls” in the here-and-now. As a child or teenager he had wished to be “a sharpish first lieutenant in / the British infantry”. Later, he wished to paint, and so “fashioned self and further self” on canvas since his lover “voiced no complaint”. From would-be-lieutenant to would-be-painter, he next seeks his true self in dogmatic communism—“Dismantle all the bourgeois states!”—but his dreams become more nuanced and less certain when, finally, he hits the workforce as a teacher and then a book reviewer, jobs which serve to support the true self and true vocation he pursues as a writer who goes on a lonely expedition “among the fjords and glaciers for / the Poem he might own”—which is both the literary poem and, one imagines, the “Poem” of meaning and purpose that animates a life.

The poet recognises, however, that the idea he has of himself as a writer is potentially as unstable as those that preceded it, for it was fashioned in an age now being effaced by “this post-mod wind”. The wish of the lover singing the poem is that her beloved may, “despite this ego wind”, devise “outcomes in the mind” and “income for the mind”, bringing home the very real need of the writer to sustain a livelihood, which, after all, has been part of the problem each of these other imagined and real selves (lieutenant, painter, communist, teacher, reviewer), “self and further self”, sought to solve.

The anxiety caused by the post-mod wind is evoked a number of times in the collection, as we can see in the titles of two poems, “Bad Faith in the Last Age of Poetry” and “Mulberries and the Death of the Literary Novel”. The latter poem is again concerned, in part at least, with the problem of making “ends meet”, as the poet-novelist confronts the rumoured demise of one half of his vocation: “And now I’m being told the novel’s dead again”. The former poem finds the speaker lamenting his own bad faith (“It is my own, not your disgrace, / that finds me here”), as he tries to respond to the rumoured demise of the other half of his vocation in the so-called “last age of poetry”. The problem the speaker of “She Sings Him” must solve, then, is a very real one. The “post-mod wind”, the demise of the literary novel, and “the last age of poetry”, provide the occasion for and the context in which his self-possession will be tested. How will the poet respond? The stakes are high, for the challenge he faces is to align himself “truly with his presence” so that he may reach “his vanishing point / entire in acquiescence”—accepting of death, in other words, because he has fully embraced life.

How, then, to fully embrace life? As he has done so often in his poetry, so in Folk Tunes Gould seeks to confront this problem by exploring and learning from the example of others who, in various and enriching ways, have achieved self-possession—“the psychological aspect of completeness”, as Gould has described it to me, where “nerve, physical confidence and good cheer, the province of morale”, are co-ordinated in mutual harmony. This is, after all, the achieved self the poet seeks in “She Sings Him”. In past collections, Gould has found examples of this in tree loppers, roof painters, house demolishers, acrobats, and a woman who removes a tapeworm from her bottom with pliers, to name a few. Here he finds still more—in history, in contemporary events, in social activism and in art. “On the Cavalier Poets”, for example, reveals the spaciousness of Gould’s imagination, as he celebrates men whose politics he rejects but whose “tightrope walk across despair” he cannot help but admire, from a time “when daily holiness / went smiling, easy, debonair”. The sense here is that the Cavalier poets balanced the serious questions of God, state and a hopeless cause with ease, charm and wit—qualities Gould admires and seeks to emulate through his own verse. Varying the theme, the sonnet “Environmental Incident” stands in admiration of a “wheelchair woman’s son” who, at a protest, places himself between a tree and the “monstrous swinging claw” of a Caterpillar scoring the ground—in this case, moral and physical courage is celebrated.

In a related mode—though in a different tone—“The Quick of It” celebrates two violinists “trancing up their sorcery” at a folk festival. These women are contrasted with and liberate the speaker from the world of “yellow trucks on demo sites”, “economic rationalists” and whales hunted for “banquets in the south”. Given the book’s title, we are justified in seeing an analogy between these folk performances and the poems. In both cases, for Gould, art offers an alternative, imaginatively spacious and physically entrancing, to violence and to greed:

Cameras whirr remotely as

they close with Saturn’s moons,

while economic rationalists

are churning new tycoons.

But here are girls in jeans who toss

us curlicues of sound,

their eyes upon some inner thing,

some musical unzippering,

some chaos-theory patterning

that’s lost as it is found.

“The Juggler and My Mother”, meanwhile, relates the self-possession of the speaker’s mother, exemplified in her art of chopping vegetables, to the art of a “brazen juggler”—

Yet my unlikely mother rears

upon this scene, and why? Because

though she’s been dead for fourteen years,

the fine intentness of her chores

hits the nonchalant discipline

where she and juggler share a pause

at the point before applause

where art’s deliberate and herein.

—while “Suburban” celebrates the speaker’s neighbours; tenants who, like the speaker, are workforce castaways:

But to these neighbours I would trust our planet

against the bovver systems forced upon it,

the ravening for result that must efface

another’s ampler notion of the place.

In these and other examples (Mother Teresa, Margaret Hassan, and a dying child are among those celebrated in the book) some art or artfulness in living is contrasted with a countervailing and darker force: time and death, in the case of the poet’s mother; despair, in the case of the Cavalier poets; the bovver systems, in the case of the artfully unemployed hippies in “Suburban”; and bovver systems again (those of whale hunters, economic rationalists and “yellow trucks”), in both “The Quick of It” and “Environmental Incident”.

While the collection is full of excellent treatments of the recurring theme I’ve attempted to explore here, “Ticketty-boo” and “A Complement for Pelagius” strike me as the highlights. In the second part of “A Complement for Pelagius”, the poet celebrates Christ, “the man with character”, lifting the woman caught in adultery clear of the accusations and potential stones of her accusers. Here the poet celebrates the co-ordination in Christ of steady nerve, timing and wit. It is a remarkable and memorable poem. Other poems, including “Iris” and “Questions in Early Summer” and “Endless Insufficiency” enlarge upon the religious/agnostic preoccupations that are implicit in “A Complement for Pelagius”. For Gould, the question is always one of individual freedom and self-possession, and this, too, extends to a consideration of gene pools in “Endless Insufficiency”.

And so to “Ticketty-boo”, where self-possession is set against and finds its fulfilment in the context of war, as an army major escorts an army chaplain through the battlefield, armed only with a brolly!

                         Whereon the major shook

his brolly out, and arm-in-arm they strolled

into the worst intentions of the world

where luck lay riddled that had turned to smile,

where hope lay small that ran to intercede.

And they were fine, and rather fine indeed.

It emerges, then, that war and violence, which make their presence felt often in this collection, are simply the apotheosis of the “bovver systems” (of man) and the supreme occasions of death, explored in the other poems. The image of soldier and chaplain, on the other hand, running through a battlefield under a brolly, is representative of the self-possession of all those individuals Gould celebrates: the Cavalier poets, his mother, Christ, Mother Teresa, the boy staring down a swinging claw, the violinists, and so on. We might even regard his poems as brollies under which the poet takes cover in the midst of the “post-mod wind”. As “folk tunes”, they are as deliberately anomalous in this context as a brolly must have been under shell fire during the Battle of Arnhem. They are also as defiant and, in their defiance, as life-affirming. Under their cover, Gould’s response to the various forces affronting his vocation is “fine, and rather fine indeed”.

Stephen McInerney lectures in English at Campion College in Sydney. His poetry appears in 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know. He reviewed Alan Gould’s novel The Lake Woman in the May issue. Several of the poems in Folk Tunes first appeared in Quadrant.