Review of a not very well-known poet's collection

[sheenaghpugh]

Lately on Facebook the poet Fred d'Aguiar raised the question of politician-poets. He was looking for the early poems of Obama and said he trusted they would be an improvement on "Karadzic and Ho Chi Minh". (Why, I wonder? Though I don't subscribe to Obamamania - too reminiscent of T Blair - I do think the man well-meaning, but plenty of well-meaning folk write duff poems, while some of the greatest poets have been downright unpleasant bastards.)

But what really bugged me was the reference to Ho Chi Minh's poems, which I read as being dismissive – if I got that wrong, sorry Fred. I grew up in the 60s, when Uncle Ho was of course famous for other things like winning the Vietnam war (one of McCain's less tenable assertions was that he "knew how to win a war", when in fact he's only ever been on the losing side of one). But I had, and still have, a little collection of Ho's epigrams, written while he was a prisoner of Chiang-kai Shek in 1942-3, constantly on the move between a series of South China jails. They were published as The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh by Bantam in 1971, introduced and edited by Harrison Salisbury.

They are brief, epigrammatic verses in the classical Chinese style and are a "diary" in the sense that they chart his travels from prison to prison and experiences in them. He emerges from them as a wry, humorous character, keenly observant and with a rather endearing determination to see the best in the people and places he encounters. But also, very decidedly, as a real poet.

Look at the positively Swiftian brevity and understated bitterness of "Wife of a Conscript Deserter" (the families of deserters were punished to discourage others):

One day you went away, not to come back again,
Leaving me alone in our room, with sadness for companion.
The authorities, having pity on my loneliness,
Invited me to live temporarily in the prison.


The irrepressible gaiety of "On the Way to Nanning" is light, but that lightness of touch is harder than it looks, and the historical continuity of the "jade rings", the ancient official and the modern prisoner, give the little poem a new dimension:

The supple rope has been replaced by iron fetters.
At every step they jingle as though I wore jade rings.
In spite of being a prisoner, accused of being a spy,
I move with all the dignity of an ancient government official!

Often the poems trace parallels between his own experience as a prisoner and the everyday life going on all around him. They are very rarely self-obsessed "poor me" poems; he is interested in himself only in the context of more universal experience, again, to me, the mark of a real artist. In these poems, the word "traveller" is euphemistic for prisoner on the move. But the wider sense of traveller, particularly as in "person moving through life", is never far away. The sheer observation in these poems, the choice of detail, the bringing of a scene alive, has always impressed me:

Twilight

Now the wind's edge is sharpened on mountain rocks.
The spear of cold pierces the branches of trees.
The gong from a far-off pagoda hastens
The traveller's steps, and boys are playing flutes
As they drive the buffaloes home across the twilight.

Any interaction between the outside world and the prisoner's tends to carry a huge emotional charge:

Morning Sunshine

The morning sunshine penetrates into the prison
Sweeping away the smoke and burning away the mist.
The breath of life fills the whole universe
And smiles light up the faces of all the prisoners.

A lesser poet, it seems to me, wouldn't have been content to simply describe that and trust his readers to draw their own conclusions; he would have wanted to spell out exactly how the prisoners were feeling, and the emotional impact would have suffered accordingly.

The word "universe" is key to him, for he is adept at finding the universal in his own experience. In his poem about writing a petition for an illiterate fellow-inmate, the opening

Being all in the same boat, we can never refuse
Help to each other

has a Sophoclean ring to it; yes, he is talking of his own circumstances but also of the human condition. I have no idea whether he had read Sophocles; he was a wide reader but his traditions were more Chinese as far as I know. But his poem "Fine Weather", written just after his release, has much the same spirit and dignified cadence as that great speech from Ajax ("The snowy feet of Winter walk away/before ripe Summer"):

Everything evolves, it is the cycle of nature.
After the rainy days, fine weather comes.
In an instant, the whole world shakes off its damp clothes,
Thousand of miles of mountains unfurl their brocade carpet.
Under warm sun and clean wind, the flowers smile,
In the big trees with branches washed clean, the birds make chorus.
Warmth fills the heart of man, and life reawakens.
Bitterness now makes way for happiness:
This is how nature wills it.

That one always chokes me up slightly. But my favourite is another of the "traveller" poems, again with that key word "universe"

Departure before Dawn II

The paleness in the East is turning rosy,
Night's shadows are swept up, and warmth extends
Over the universe, and in the traveller
The poet warms and wakes.


I've had this little collection since 1971; I still read it and it'd go to any desert island with me, along with a very select few others (Louise Glück's The Wild Iris, Edwin Morgan's A Second Life and Mark Doty's Atlantis among others). It isn't just a matter of technical excellence, poems can have that and still not be essential in any way, as these are to me. I don't know what Obama's early poems are like but you know, they'll have to be good to come anywhere near Ho's for me.

Comments

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thank you for introducing me to Ho Chi Minh the poet! I never knew he wrote verse.

Re Obama I would not be optimistic that a man who titled his book "The Audacity of Hope" would be an adept poet. But one never knows.

Also, I thought of your recent articles when I saw this article about war poets on Times Online: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article5090356.ece

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

The translator did a great job, too. It must be really tough capturing not only the literal meaning but the underlying sense of rhythm of a poem from one language to another.

Never Get Into a Land War in Asia

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I think the Vietnam War was essentially unwinnable anyway--when you send a bunch of guys who don't want to be there thousands of miles to get into a war with guys who are there are pretty motivated to stay, you're on a bad wicket. Especially if your soldiers need thousand or hundreds of thousands of dollars of stuff, and your enemies need only a serious desire to kick your ass that outweighs their survival instincts.

One thing is for sure: nobody's lining up to read Bush's early poetic effusions.