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| A Tooting Idyll |
| Val Warner |
| Carcanet, 1998 |
Review by Christopher North  |
| I think I picked this up at the 2000 Aldeburgh festival on the second-hand book-stall. I was moved to buy it because my son Barnaby had recently bought his first flat in Tooting Bec the locus of most of the opening sequence. My entry into the emotional sphere of the book was also enhanced by exposure to the millennium 'Photographic Atlas ' of London which Barnaby had acquired. This gives the reader a God-like overview of the vast complication of the metropolis - and there was Barnaby's Foulser road - the gardens , a red car parked outside - and there too Huron Road of the poem two streets away. The cover of the book deliciously evocative - and a book to place in the shelf marked 'Contemporary Literature: London' along with 'Lights Out For the Territory', various other Iain Sinclair works, Aidan Dunn, Emma Tennant's Hughes memoir, Peter Ackroyd's entire oeuvre and of course good old TSE. 'The Wasteland' indeed is a river flowing through the two extensive sequences that form this collection or at least the 'Wasteland' of the 'Game of Chess' and the House Agents clerk passage. But this poet has mixed in endless other references to her reading - Le Grand Meaulne, Larkin, Kafka, Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare etc - but always recognizably. Actually I think here lies a basic problem. The two sequences comprise first person voices; monologues from characters operating within a narrative and here the negative capability of the poet falls down. Most of her chosen personalities simply wouldn't have at their disposal either the lexicon or knowledge of the canon that they pour forth. Individual passages work very well and there is always sufficient information in the constituent poems to enable the reader to follow the narrative - provided s/he is extremely attentive and is prepared to spend time teasing it out. The back cover blurb gives the basic scenario - but this really should have been offered by the poet - at the very least by heading the sequences with the relevant dates: Part 1 Huron Road 1939' would have placed me in the poem immediately, for example. I cannot see the percentage in being mysterious and difficult here, in fact it demonstrates a kind of arrogance. Where the constituent poems work, they work well - but too often I simply lost patience and went on to the next entanglement - hoping to find more obvious clues as to what was going on. But it was delightfu to have so recently stayed four days two streets away from the main 'mise en scene' . The garden at Foulser Road was curiously fascinating - perhaps because one looked down on it and did not participate. I watched the antics of a grey squirrel eating the swelling buds of daffodils at one point losing balance and falling backwards - and the mad overgrowth of leylandii in the next door house - and the pigeon loft in the next and so on. The Tooting garden in the Warner's first sequence is full of roses. They start off as specimen but gradually degenerate to dog. There is the frequent appearance of a bird-bath as well --and these features just about adhere the reader to the narrative - though I have to say I largely lost my way in the middle section of the Tooting sequence. For clarity the second sequence is better as some of the characters sketched are clear and there is plenty of reference to the central drive of the narrative. The policemen is particularly well drawn. I have the feeling that this piece was meant to be a novel - but the poet decided to make it a poetry sequence because she was using real personalities and this would have been more difficult to handle employing the accessible, un-obfuscated exactness of prose. As no-one reads poetry anyway she was probably right. At the End of the Road Look down old Huron Road, straight as a die, Toward a Tooting ultimate green peace, Pocket hanky of common...summer's lease. Rose bricks patchworked in paving slabs have dyed Dusk, deeper rosé-rinsed by madder walls. Against their one-time home, Kate's bird-bath hauled - dumb womb. Things fall apart...the frosty years. Visiting Lara - new friend - brings me here. I saw the Startrite ad set in this street - two fifties' kids putting their best shod feet forward along life's Road...Grown Fred and Kate, through woods that could converge, too dark, too late - Freudian more than Dantesque, old cold war? A Heaver board points heavenward, next door For Sale. The Heaver who built on Elms farm - here - was shot down...Dorking, by bro-in-law. So Kate: 'We're not Victorians, bearing arms...' |
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To read too many books is harmful. Mao Tse Tung |
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