Cusp
by Robin Robertson (Swithering, Picador)

The child’s skip
still there in the walk,
a woman’s poise in her slow
examination
of the brightly coloured globe, this
toy of the world.
Is there anything
more heartbreaking than hope?

Ghost of a garden
Sometimes I discover I have gone downstairs,
crossed the grass and found myself
in here: the toolshed,
caught in a lash of brambles, bindweed
and tall ivied trees like pipecleaners. It looks out,
vacantly, on a garden run to seed:
the lost tennis court, grown-over benches,
a sunken barbecue snagged with blown roses.
The courtyard walls are full of holes the swallows
try to sew, in and out of them like open doors.
In the corner of the shed my father is weeping
and I cannot help him because he is dead.

These two poems by Robin Robertson both describe moments in which the past meets the future in the present; what is to come has not yet obliterated what used to be and both are visible.

In Cusp, a girl is on the brink of womanhood at the point where the joy of a skip is still in her walk, but the more measured movements of a woman who considers her actions are beginning to manifest. A child will skip without thinking about it; but a young woman would judge the way she might appear before considering any such action. Growing self-awareness increases self-consciousness.

The child-that-is-about-to-be-woman examines the “toy of the world”. It may be a toy but it also represents the real world into which the girl is about to step; the world is waiting for her but it will be up to her how she travels through it, and it will not be a game.

At the point where one stage of our lives draws to a close and we are about to enter the next stage, there is always room for the hope of great things, before reality demonstrates its ability to curtail and redirect the course of our effort. Most of us can remember the hopes we had in our youth for our journey into adulthood; the career successes, triumphs of discovery, the happy marriage(s), monetary gains and marvellous friends. Did we fulfil them? Disappointment and failure (as well as success) are part of our evolutionary process because we evolve through our experiences, and there, in part, lies the heartbreak of observing the girl on the threshold of her adult life. She will develop and mature, that is certain, but to do so we know that she must also suffer.

None of us can be protected from suffering – unless we are unconscious – it is how we grow from it that defines the success with which we have absorbed the lessons, in the hope that we do not have to repeat them.

The second poem is haunted by the spirit of a dead father – as poignant in his death as the young girl is on the threshold of her adult life. The poet describes sometimes finding himself in the toolshed, having made the journey unconsciously. He paints a vivid picture of the neglected garden that surrounds the shed, where brambles, roses and bindweed reclaim the ground. Every weed describes the absence of the keeper of the garden, just as the overgrown tennis court and barbecue are all that remain of the life that was enjoyed outdoors. But now even the toolshed is obsolete.

It may be the need to feel proximity to his father’s spirit that draws the poet to the shed, for there he is, weeping, perhaps because it was he who once tended the garden. The dead man’s distress could well be a manifestation of the poet’s feelings of guilt at not maintaining his father’s efforts. The lost life of the ghost father is reflected in the ghost of the garden; neither now exists as they once did, and yet both are present at the juncture where the future is going to continue without them.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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