IT MAY SOUND LIKE A posthumous arrangement, but you approach Josephine
Dickinson via a gap in the clouds. If you are doing this from the Eden side,
it means taking the A686 through Langwathby and Melmerby, then Fiends Fell
and Hartside Height. If the names get more vertiginous as you go, it is
because the road does the same. Scour the rest of England and you would
struggle to find one that keeps on going upwards for quite so long.
Eventually it gets to Alston, the highest market town in the country.
A good journey on which to talk, you would think, as we head there in her car.
But she and I make it in the utmost silence, because if I tried to say
something, it would shorten the odds on our coming off at a hairpin and
going down the quick way.
The reason is that one morning, 44 years ago, when she was 6, Dickinson awoke
to find her hearing gone, and she has been profoundly deaf since. When she
does converse, it is by reading not only your lips but the rest of your face
and your physical signals, building up a composite picture of you in a way
that people with full hearing don’t get round to.
The extraordinary thing is not so much that she writes poems, which is what
I’m here to ask her about – or thought I was – but that she is a musician as
well; pianist, composer and former teacher. And she took it up only after
the deafness had come. The story gets stranger. She has been a widow for
three years. On the young side to lose a husband, until you learn that there
was a 45-year gap between them, and that he died at 91. Douglas was a sheep
farmer, born and raised in the area and twice widowed when they met. She was
a clever girl from a close, musical family in South London, who got to
Oxford to read classics at St Anne’s.
So many questions. But first the poems. To come into them is to come into the
landscape that she inhabits. It is remote and wild, with no towns of much
size between Newcastle to the east and Carlisle to the west. She writes not
only about this terrain but her life in it. She does so with enough vigour
and lyricism to have had work published in The New Yorker, not a
claim many modern British poets can make. She has also had three collections
out, the latest of which, Silence Fell, is arranged as a modern
shepherd’s calendar.
When she lost her hearing she had had meningitis for 18 months. She had also
had a serious bout of chicken pox. What did she make of it, that morning
when the world suddenly fell silent on her?
“You’d think I would have been frightened,” she says, “but I wasn’t. What
worried me most of all was the thought of having to go to the doctor. Apart
from that I enjoyed the attention I got.”
She explains that she finds it difficult to describe the difference between
how she heard music before and after the deafness, but that now it has more
to do with a sense of texture and reverberation than with pitch and melody.
“I do know that I found speech more difficult than music to cope with after
the deafness. I came to see the written word as a liberation, which was
wonderful. Very exotic and exciting.”
Some who admire her work say that the particular musicality of her
constructions is best appreciated by hearing her read. It sounds implausible
that a piece of writing can actually be enhanced by technically imperfect
diction. But she wrote the stuff and, to take a geological analogy, she
knows where the springs and sources lie. So I ask her to read the poem Scar-berry
Hill, the name of the high ground on to which her cottage looks: Inside
the house is silence. We sit and look Across the room. You shift your elbow,
smoke And tap your pipe by turns . . . There are enormous silences between
groups of words, big enough to make Pinter sound overstacked, as if she is
waiting for the resonance of each to be thoroughly gone before the next
arrives. The effect is like nothing I have heard. The best way to describe
it is to say that it is the aural equivalent of walking through a room with
a partially-sighted woman who sharpens your sense of place by having you
stop and feel the shape of each item as you pass.
The American poet Galway Kin-nell was so impressed by the poems he had read in
collections published by The Rialto and the Northumbria-based Flambard Press
that he passed them to his own publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Hence the new
volume, which contains some poems from the other two volumes.
In his foreword he says: “The reader can enter the poems, delight in them, and
sometimes not be able to find a way out, as if a word were missing where
there could be no word, or a transformation had happened that cannot be
explained.”
W. H. Auden loved this area and became obsessed with the spent lead-mine
workings. There were times when he seemed to be hoisting his imagery in
industrial measures out of such ground. The country remains thick with
working poets, many writing explicitly about their relationship with it.
Dickinson came here with her then boyfriend when she was in her thirties. At
the time she was a heroin addict, having apparently turned to drugs to
alleviate the pain of losing a close friend. She lived in a little cottage a
few fields up from Douglas, and came into contact with him when searching
for some geese that had strayed into his fields.
From her description of their meeting, the old man diagnosed her illness in a
single glance, and offered her food. Soon after, she moved her belongings
with a tractor down to his little house, and started to live with him. He
tended her, she says, with the same care and perception that he extended to
his stock. He no more conformed to the stereotype of his origins than she to
hers. He had loved poetry from childhood, and could quote large chunks from
memory. He had been a businessman and local politician, and might have
become a vet if his parents had been able to afford the studies. His
daughters, older than her, were almost as pleased that he had found her as
he was.
She has no doubt that he saved her life. “My whole body was on fire,” she has
written of her subsequent metha-done withdrawal. “I could not walk, every
light was too bright and every sound too loud. Countless nights passed
without sleep. Yet I never had any desire to take opiates again.”
It was a hard, physical life of a kind she had never known. Not only did she
regard him as literal saviour, but also as her muse. He is as much in the
poems as the land that engendered him. He is there digging, planting,
feeding the lambs in Billy’s Field, getting ill, dying and vanishing. And
then of course reappearing now, in the spring, in the very poems that he had
– like the sheep farmer that he was – helped her to deliver.
SILENCE FELL by Josephine Dickinson Houghton Mifflin, £16.99; 96pp
Buy the book here at the offerprice of £15.29 (free p&p) timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Congratulations on sensitive article on Josephine Dickinson. We know the poet and have heard her read. You are absolutely right about the mesmerizing quality of her diction, which is electrifying in performance.
Peter Whyte, Barnard Castle, UK