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Songs of “inexplicable splendour”
Perspectives
Book Songs of “inexplicable splendour”
Two For Joy: Scenes From Married Life Dannie Abse. Hutchinson/ Random House, 2010. Pp 67. £15·00. ISBN-978-0-091-93117-9.
676
On the one occasion, some years ago, when I was fortunate enough to visit Dannie and Joan Abse at their home in Golders Green, London, there were magpies in the back garden. Joan was quick to point them out and relay the folk saying about them: “One for sorrow, two for joy.” Certainly that day the saying was made manifest in the joy that prevailed in the Abses’ home. When I first heard the title of this new volume of Dannie’s poetry, the memory of that day and their joy came back vividly but poignantly, given my acute awareness now of Dannie’s solitude and sorrow. Joan Abse, art historian and writer as well as beloved wife of Dannie, was killed one night in 2005, when another car crashed into theirs as the Abses were returning from a poetry reading in Wales to their home in Cardiff. Dannie Abse, physician and well-known poet, survived and began a long period of deep mourning, which he has recorded in his prose work The Presence (2007), named Wales Book of the Year 2008. The presence he invokes is, of course, Joan’s, and his work is both memoir and memorial. In the companion volume Two For Joy: Scenes From Married Life, published 3 years later, Dannie offers 50 poems, most of them written since Joan’s death, in which he captures the joys and occasional squabbles of their long marriage, as well as the mystery of Joan’s enduring presence, still powerfully with him despite her death. The volume’s dedication to Joan is followed immediately by a haunting epigraph from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno: “Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria” (“There is no greater sorrow / Than to be mindful of the happy time / In misery.”) In the volume’s opening poem, Joan and Dannie’s
“First Meeting” sounds fully as wondrous as Francesca and Paolo’s: “Simply, when you came near me you trembled as aspen leaves do and I, like Simon Magus, thought I would levitate.”
From that magical beginning, the poems progress through the memorable moments of courtship and marriage, through the arrival of anniversaries, babies, and grandchildren, to an account of the fatal accident, Joan’s funeral, and Dannie’s grief. In “Proposal”, Dannie entices Joan to join her life with his in quest for “an eagle’s feather”. In the next poem, the beautiful and lush “Epithalamion”, he sings celebration of their marriage day: “for today I took to my human bed / flower and bird and wind and world, / and all the living and all the dead.”
“Two For Joy gives enduring testimony to the power of transient and magical human love.” “First Baby”, “Sons”, “Anniversary”, “New Granddaughter”, and “A Marriage” relay more of the happy times but are commingled with poems such as “In My Fashion”, “Yesterday’s Tiff”, and “A Scene from Married Life”, which give glimpses of the passing conflicts and quarrels that almost inevitably must occur in any long marriage. The realistic texture that results deepens rather than diminishes the magical quality of the Abses’ love story. Although a man of deep feeling, Dannie is not a sentimental poet. In “A Night Out”, “The Cure”, and “White Balloon”, he reaffirms both his irreligious nature and his Jewishness —“Auschwitz made me / more of a Jew than Moses did”—and celebrates the white balloon of Happiness that leads him and his Gentile wife to their
bedchamber and to dreams, as the white balloon becomes “the moon above Masada”. Against the backdrop of “the human obscenity” that was Auschwitz, in memorable and mundane moments, the radiance of the everyday shines forth in these poems. In “With Compliments”, for example, the gift of “robust / red, radiantly alive upstanding gladioli / from The Corner Flower Stall” seems far more desirable than the Soutine painting of gladioli that Joan admires and that would cost a small fortune Dannie does not have. The transience of the vibrant living flowers makes them far more precious than the unchanging flowers of the painting. Yet too soon these radiant gladioli are followed by the final poems: “Lachrymae”, with its account of the fatal accident and Joan’s funeral, “After the Memorial”, “Portrait of an Old Poet”, and “The Presence”. The image of “Hampstead’s rush-dark pond / where a lone swan sings / without a sound” haunts the last part of this volume. It is the few rather than the many who receive the grace of such enduring love as Dannie and Joan Abse enjoyed. Although the price paid by the survivor is high, as Dannie’s experience and writing bear witness, the memories and “absent presence” that remain may seem to many readers well worth the price. This volume closes with “Postscript”, in which the poet recalls the “inexplicable splendour” that makes a man sing, even in face of loss and grief that seem too great to bear. The “inexplicable splendour” of the lone swan’s song prevails. Two For Joy gives enduring testimony to the power of transient and magical human love.
Anne Hudson Jones [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 August 28, 2010
Book Songs of “inexplicable splendour”
Two For Joy: Scenes From Married Life Dannie Abse. Hutchinson/ Random House, 2010. Pp 67. £15·00. ISBN-978-0-091-93117-9.
676
On the one occasion, some years ago, when I was fortunate enough to visit Dannie and Joan Abse at their home in Golders Green, London, there were magpies in the back garden. Joan was quick to point them out and relay the folk saying about them: “One for sorrow, two for joy.” Certainly that day the saying was made manifest in the joy that prevailed in the Abses’ home. When I first heard the title of this new volume of Dannie’s poetry, the memory of that day and their joy came back vividly but poignantly, given my acute awareness now of Dannie’s solitude and sorrow. Joan Abse, art historian and writer as well as beloved wife of Dannie, was killed one night in 2005, when another car crashed into theirs as the Abses were returning from a poetry reading in Wales to their home in Cardiff. Dannie Abse, physician and well-known poet, survived and began a long period of deep mourning, which he has recorded in his prose work The Presence (2007), named Wales Book of the Year 2008. The presence he invokes is, of course, Joan’s, and his work is both memoir and memorial. In the companion volume Two For Joy: Scenes From Married Life, published 3 years later, Dannie offers 50 poems, most of them written since Joan’s death, in which he captures the joys and occasional squabbles of their long marriage, as well as the mystery of Joan’s enduring presence, still powerfully with him despite her death. The volume’s dedication to Joan is followed immediately by a haunting epigraph from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno: “Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria” (“There is no greater sorrow / Than to be mindful of the happy time / In misery.”) In the volume’s opening poem, Joan and Dannie’s
“First Meeting” sounds fully as wondrous as Francesca and Paolo’s: “Simply, when you came near me you trembled as aspen leaves do and I, like Simon Magus, thought I would levitate.”
From that magical beginning, the poems progress through the memorable moments of courtship and marriage, through the arrival of anniversaries, babies, and grandchildren, to an account of the fatal accident, Joan’s funeral, and Dannie’s grief. In “Proposal”, Dannie entices Joan to join her life with his in quest for “an eagle’s feather”. In the next poem, the beautiful and lush “Epithalamion”, he sings celebration of their marriage day: “for today I took to my human bed / flower and bird and wind and world, / and all the living and all the dead.”
“Two For Joy gives enduring testimony to the power of transient and magical human love.” “First Baby”, “Sons”, “Anniversary”, “New Granddaughter”, and “A Marriage” relay more of the happy times but are commingled with poems such as “In My Fashion”, “Yesterday’s Tiff”, and “A Scene from Married Life”, which give glimpses of the passing conflicts and quarrels that almost inevitably must occur in any long marriage. The realistic texture that results deepens rather than diminishes the magical quality of the Abses’ love story. Although a man of deep feeling, Dannie is not a sentimental poet. In “A Night Out”, “The Cure”, and “White Balloon”, he reaffirms both his irreligious nature and his Jewishness —“Auschwitz made me / more of a Jew than Moses did”—and celebrates the white balloon of Happiness that leads him and his Gentile wife to their
bedchamber and to dreams, as the white balloon becomes “the moon above Masada”. Against the backdrop of “the human obscenity” that was Auschwitz, in memorable and mundane moments, the radiance of the everyday shines forth in these poems. In “With Compliments”, for example, the gift of “robust / red, radiantly alive upstanding gladioli / from The Corner Flower Stall” seems far more desirable than the Soutine painting of gladioli that Joan admires and that would cost a small fortune Dannie does not have. The transience of the vibrant living flowers makes them far more precious than the unchanging flowers of the painting. Yet too soon these radiant gladioli are followed by the final poems: “Lachrymae”, with its account of the fatal accident and Joan’s funeral, “After the Memorial”, “Portrait of an Old Poet”, and “The Presence”. The image of “Hampstead’s rush-dark pond / where a lone swan sings / without a sound” haunts the last part of this volume. It is the few rather than the many who receive the grace of such enduring love as Dannie and Joan Abse enjoyed. Although the price paid by the survivor is high, as Dannie’s experience and writing bear witness, the memories and “absent presence” that remain may seem to many readers well worth the price. This volume closes with “Postscript”, in which the poet recalls the “inexplicable splendour” that makes a man sing, even in face of loss and grief that seem too great to bear. The “inexplicable splendour” of the lone swan’s song prevails. Two For Joy gives enduring testimony to the power of transient and magical human love.
Anne Hudson Jones [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 August 28, 2010