Already a subscriber? Log in
Some of the early poems are allusions to children’s games and rhymes:
What’s Hope?
Skipping rope.
What’s Charity?
Salty, peppery.
What’s Faith?
Edinburgh, Leith,
Portobello, Musselburgh,
And Dalkeith.
Others, of all periods, recall some incident, some intrusion of the mischievous into the writer’s life. One late poem concerns the theft of a handbag containing a poem, another the oblong on the wall where a stolen painting once hung. Readers of Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), will recognise in the poem ‘Intermittence’, dated 1956, the overbearing presence of the ‘Typing Ghost’ which tormented the heroine as it had the author and turned them both into novelists.
In the poems of her years in literary London, some quatrains remember the then inescapable voice of Eliot. One also senses Stevie Smith as a presence, and possibly Edwin Muir. But the voice is always idiosyncratic, various and pure. The longest of the poems is the early ‘Ballad of the Fanfarlo’, concerning Baudelaire’s Samuel Cramer, written in the manner of a Scottish ballad, though wildly decadent:
Samuel Cramer lay on his loose bones,
Stared out of the window where there was
The new moon like a pair of surgical forceps
With the old moon in her jaws —
which does a serious mischief to Coleridge.
The finest poems are brief, and include the strange ‘On the Lack of Sleep’. Some later work is in a beautifully controlled, sometimes Audenesque, conversational style. ‘Created and Abandoned’ is an instance: ‘People of my dreams, cut off in mid-life, gone to what grave? Did something not happen to you after my waking?’ She means not only people of her dreams but characters of lost or broken novels, each a species, not to be ruthlessly cut off. In ‘The Nativity’, another Cramer poem, there occurs an important angelic dialogue:
A Virtue said to a Power, ‘What ceases
When a man dies? And he replied, ‘A species
Infinitely precious to God, being all
There is of his kind. He’s irreplaceable.
Spark is not afraid to be wise, grave on occasion, as well as, sometimes on the same occasion, mischievous.
Also in Book Reviews
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in