Anne Cluysenaar's recent collection, Touching Distances: Diary Poems is a poet's calendar, framed by the Decembers of 2010 and 2012. Each "entry" is headed by a date, sometimes with an additional subtitle. All consist of four unrhymed quatrains. The occasions encompass dreams, memories, visits with friends, anecdotes about the birds and animals on the writer's Usk Valley smallholding, and despatches from the wider world.
Out of 75 poems, 50 record the deep winter months, December, January and February. I've chosen two of my favourite winter poems, January 1 and January 13. Despite the shared season, they convey the lively-minded variety of Cluysenaar's inspirations. Both are from the 2012 segment of the book.
The first poem, January 1, is a tale of two doves that mistake the time of year and enjoy an unseasonal mating. The narrative plays interestingly with verb tense. At first, it's the simple, authoritative past-historic. But stanza two reveals the longer, human perspective, one which underlies all these diary poems. The present is only part of the awareness of past and future which informs the considered life. The compound tense, built by the auxiliary, "have" ("I've"), plus the verb's past participle, "watched", implies compound emotion. Its distancing effect heightens the narrator's ambivalence towards now-irrevocable actions. Further tense-shifts continue the interplay of memories and explication.
Cluysenaar's vivid, tactile diction couples toughness and delicacy: "he had her by the neck", but together "they formed a tremulous mass". The speaker has "fingered" the two eggs "from under her beating wings" because "no skinny squab must starve … " The painful balancing of sympathy and pragmatism suggested here will be familiar to anyone who keeps domestic animals.
Sharp memories of the viable eggs, "holding their heat", and the dove's "hot patch of skin / each side of her breastbone" continue to haunt the poem. Secret, warm-blooded vulnerability is offset by the predicted chill of snowflakes, picking up from the "snowy white" of the birds' foreshadowing feathers in line four. After the destruction of the eggs, the snowfall becomes its longed-for justification. I like the honesty of the admission – and also the way the sparrows and rats are included in the poem's unsentimental eco-system. It's a firmly grounded narrative, but numerous metaphorical and moral resonances are there for the unpicking.
January 13 (Hunting the Higgs) expands the frame to a vast, amoral universe – or universes, even. A playful, excited response to the brain-dazzling discourse of modern particle physics, it predates by six months the discovery at CERN of a particle that behaved as the Higgs boson had been expected to behave. It's fanciful to compare the poem's movements with the massive accelerations of the Large Hadron Collider, but the note-jotting style, splitting and speeding up the syntax, gives the poem a unique interior rhythm, especially in the beginning, hinting at the dance of particles and the lively exchange of hypotheses. The idiom is colloquial and nicely un-literary. The observation that physicists "love a laugh" reminds me of the explanation I once read concerning the origins of the populist Higgs boson tag, "the God Particle". No theological concept implied, it was just an abbreviation of "that god-dammed particle", a phrase apparently favoured by the frustrated Higgs-hunters. The poem is far less irritable, its speaker seemingly comfortable with uncertainty and relativism, the infinite puzzle-box of what can and can't be known, and what is and what isn't (but might have been).
Like 16-line sonnets, these "Diary" poems often seem to incorporate a turn. Here, it hinges on lines 9-10: "Whatever we're made of, it wants to know / how it came to be what it is." (Note, by the way, the contrasted spelling of whatever with "what ever" in line two.) This thought may deliver us to the brink of the biggest question: consciousness, or how "the stuff of stars" became self-aware. But any glimpse of its own reality is as evanescent as "a single life … " If there's a flicker of regret that so much of "what is" eludes our understanding, it's outweighed by a sense of delight in the rich segment we briefly-conscious beings can possess. At the end, those doves come to mind, misled by the season but urgently mating, living only in their simple, hot-blooded present. "And here we are!" The poem's marvelling, half-humorous conclusion underlies the collection's overall philosophy of valuing the passing moment, but letting it go in peace.
January 1
It made me look in the shed, his cooing: too early.
And he had her by the neck, sure enough, a wing
across her back. They formed a tremulous mass
the two of them, snowy white, in the dim shed corner.
But because, of my life, the present is only a part,
I've watched for the eggs, the two she lays one by one,
and fingered them out from under her beating wings.
No skinny squab must starve as winter sets in.
For these, alive in my hand, holding their heat,
there never was hope. Though tempted to put them back,
I know that, soon, there are bound to be flakes of snow.
Better throw them across the yard to the bramble bank.
They'll be food for sparrows and rats. Even so, as I slipped
my hand underneath and felt that hot patch of skin
each side of her breastbone, I heard myself mutter 'Sorry'.
And know how relieved I'll be when the snow does fall.
January 13
Hunting the Higgs
No wonder they love a laugh, the physicists.
What ever they find or don't, it's OK.
Symmetries of the world just remnants
of those which, if perfect, would only have led to
no world at all – anti-matter, matter
would have cancelled each other out. Maybe.
Or maybe not, if the theory is at fault.
And if it is? More exciting still.
Whatever we're made of, it wants to know
how it came to be what it is. In us,
for a while at least, the stuff of stars
gets a glimpse of its own precarious life.
Like a single life, that will soon be gone.
Universes before, maybe, or after
our own, we won't ever get to explore.
They make up what is, though. And here we are!
