The title poem of Andrew Motion’s new collection refers to a painting by the
Camden Town Group artist Spencer Gore. It begins with a bald statement of
understanding – “I know what it means / to choose the cinder path”, but what
follows gives away nothing of any such meaning:
You might say death
but I prefer taking
pains with the world.
The signpost ahead
which bears no inscription.
That elm tree withstanding
the terrible heat
of its oily green flame.
A signpost and an elm tree are enough to give Motion the materials for some
haunting lines; both are there in the painting, but the poem doesn’t rely on
this in order to make the images felt. Motion’s initial canvassing of
possible significance for the whole thing – “death” first, but then “the
world” – is put somewhere behind these images, without necessarily imposing
on them, or setting them terms. The initial “I know what it means . . .”
becomes in the process less knowing, and more poetically fruitful. Gore’s
blank signpost here is neither frustrating nor disappointing, and Motion
keeps himself out of the foreground.
For all that, The Cinder Path as a whole is much preoccupied by disappointment
and death, as well as by the first person. Some of the best writing here is
in the book’s closing suite of elegies for the poet’s father. There is a
sense in which disappointment has always been Motion’s most fertile theme,
and melancholy and anticlimax have served him well, especially in his best
early poetry. Of course, there is a certain disappointment and frustration
for poets in the fact that the theme is already presided over by Philip
Larkin, and certainly it is Larkin’s shade that moves most often in Motion’s
elegiac vistas. Not just the title of Larkin’s “Home is so Sad”, but also
its final inventory (“Look at the pictures and the cutlery. / The music in
the piano stool. That vase”) consists of perfectly pitched statements of a
particular kind of disappointment, and living with disappointment, which
much of Motion’s England has inherited from this forebear. But in poetry,
the pitch has been difficult to sustain; and the line between disappointment
and bathos – which Larkin could walk with astonishing confidence – has
proved something of a tightrope for Motion.
The finest poems in The Cinder Path are those in which Motion takes his own
advice as given in “The Benefit of the Doubt”: “I remember the stranger a
thing, / the less need to say as much”. The poem is itself a good example of
such reticence, with its arresting notion of “The peregrine and the skylark
/ locked in a double suicide-dive”, and “the abandoned shafts / which took
them underground”. Reticence and a lack of presumption are natural partners,
and can work well together, as at the close of “A Goodnight Kiss”, where
“kiss-kiss is the sound of her black sandals / making peace with the earth
then taking leave of it”. Best of all, arguably, is the poem “Diagnosis”,
where long summer daylight over Scapa Flow brings together unsleeping gulls
and an insomniac speaker, who must “keep watching waves / slosh to and fro
over the dead ships”, but who is actually seeing more than might be
apparent:
they cannot see you as I do, alive
in your illness and walking on the water,
but disappearing whenever the light shifts
and the sea beneath reveals itself again.
There is an achieved equilibrium in this ending, between vision and privacy,
which proves the virtue of reticence in Motion’s poetic disposition.
Whatever sorrows the poem contains, the very accomplishment in that
containment is a satisfaction, not a disappointment.
This is Motion at his best, but it is not the whole story; far too often, the
poems betray on the poet’s part a need, if not always an ability, to explain
himself. “The Sin” packs this into six lines:
In the same moment I bent to the amazing
adder snoozing on the sandy path ahead,
the landowner was shouting from the sun.
What are you doing? I would have explained,
but one obvious reason had already gone
and there was no other. Sir, not trespassing.
The first three lines are arresting, even though they seem clumsily
allegorical: “amazing” doesn’t exactly challenge Milton on his home turf,
but the situation is at least presented clearly and without fuss. What is
much more characteristic of Motion is the second triplet, where a voice is
caught between undeserved guilt and apology. The thing – the “amazing” thing
– that might have explained and excused all has gone, and the voice is left
unable to account for itself, but still protesting its innocence. True, this
is a lot to cram into a short poem, and “The Sin”, though probably not a
stand-alone success, is revealing even so, as a miniature fable of
frustration and self-awareness – as well as the baffled sense of absence and
lack that conditions the modern English elegiac mode within which Motion so
often works. When he says that he isn’t trespassing, Motion is in that
respect at least being honest, for all of this is indeed ground over which
he, in common with a number of others, has proprietary rights.
The trouble is that the elegiac field is narrower and less rich than Motion
instinctively supposes. The proof of this is in the thinness and frequent
inadequacy of the poems’ diction. Now and again, the verse feels numbly
passive in its alertness to words: “A Dutch Interior” cannot recover from
the drawl of its opening line (“The dogs are a serious bore”), while “The
Grave of Rupert Brooke” lazily reports how a walking trip in Greece “was
quite literally // almost the end of us”. Elsewhere, Motion allows in
quantities of lifeless contemporary poetic diction, as when “A Garden in
Japan” has “sparrows at dusk / debating the meaning / of a fragile economy”,
and considers how “Slow carp might stir / the long lily roots / with their
silk kimonos”. “Debating”, like “might”, belongs to the stiffened whimsy of
poetry functioning on half power. It is a lack of the poet’s necessary
wariness of words that produces this kind of writing; but some of the work
in The Cinder Path seems very casual in this regard, as though Motion’s
principal sense of his relation to language was merely one of entitlement.
Back at Rupert Brooke’s grave, Motion remembers ants with “hands” (“Could
those balls of dirt passing between / some of their many hands really be the
last // remains of the poet?”); and having not only drunk from the Castelian
spring in Delphi, but bedded there, experiences an epiphany. “I felt the
gigantic mass // of the earth turning beneath me, solid / but ghostly”,
Motion writes; yet it is only the turn of the line that gives “ghostly” any
weight, and what follows is equally lacking in definiteness:
my attention lifted . . . into space expanding
for ever, darkness beyond darkness,
while I shrank back into mere atoms,
on tenterhooks for the voice of prophecy
to break the hush and speak to me by name
saying that my life counted for something,
or that I would be back home soon,
or at least that I would sleep safe tonight . . .
Obviously, there is a veneer of irony here, as Motion remembers his teenage
self, but it is no more than a veneer; the language of this epiphanic moment
is undistinctive, and ends in real bathos. Seldom has the language of high
inspiration pitched its sights so low.
Curiously, Motion is most afflicted by such bathos when voicing moments from
the lives of others and, in this volume, when putting into verse words
originally written by others. A number of poems are “found”, and here Motion
too frequently loses control over line and rhythm, with a special weakness
in his handling of line-breaks. A routine clumsiness in enjambment becomes
crashing bathos in “The youngest Fellow at King’s, / Cambridge” (“Geology”),
or a cross-stanza pratfall in “the main line from London // to
Maidstone” (“Cecilia Tennyson”). Versifying a letter of William Cowper,
Motion divides the prose into long, rhythmically unemphatic lines, and the
subject matter which the poem seizes on is itself the story of a let-down –
or rather, something which never actually gets up at all, in Cowper’s
account of a failed hot-air balloon launch. As slightly too often, Motion’s
chosen details have an allegorical feel. The poem ends, “The process, I
believe, depends for its success upon niceties / as make it very
precarious”. But the precariousness of Motion’s writing is sometimes
obvious, while its particular niceties are not always sufficiently deft to
save it from a fall.
Although it is all (in a loose sense) elegiac in character, The Cinder Path
ends with elegies proper, and here Motion retains his real gift for poignant
candour, which has given him much of his best poetry. “Passing On”, a poem
about the day and hour of a death, transforms mere bathos in the situation
(the poet and his brother watch at their father’s hospital bedside, are told
nothing much will happen for a while, nip out for a drink, and miss the
moment of death) into affecting pathos. The pervasive sadness is, again like
a multitude of modern poems about loss, derived from Larkin’s melancholy
fixed stare, but without his edge of exasperated terror. All those isolated
objects – “the broken metal window-catch that meant no fresh air; / your
toothbrush standing to attention in its plastic mug” – to which, indeed,
Motion devotes another entire poem (“The Wish List”), have to do duty for a
meaning which is simply absent from this recounted grief, as its blank
signposts. But there can be no doubting that these poems are distinguished
in their kind, and The Cinder Path, whatever its other weaknesses, is good
at being sad.
Andrew Motion
THE CINDER PATH
58pp. Faber. £12.99.
978 0 571 24492 8
Peter McDonald is Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the
English Language at Christ Church, Oxford. His fourth volume of poetry, The
House of Clay, was published in 2007.
