Vinegar Hill, by Colm Tóibín, Carcanet, 144 pp., £12.99, ISBN: 978-1800171619
The Poems (1961-2020), by Derek Mahon, The Gallery Press, 532 pp., £19.50, ISBN: 978-1911338048
On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín, Princeton University Press, 210 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978 0691154114
Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978-0374125585
Selected Poems, by Thom Gunn, Faber and Faber, 284 pp., £12.99, ISBN: 978-0571365081
‘Perhaps it’s meditation by another name, but at this stage it’s become a necessity’, said Seamus Heaney about his ‘habit of deep preparation’ for poetry readings. Regardless of their size or significance, he would spend at least two or three hours considering what to read.
It means that each reading attains a sense of its own occasion. You may be speaking the same poems, but they are part of something intended, they aren’t just inclusions in some accidental or incoherent bundle of things. It means you can give out and keep to yourself at the same time.
Heaney alludes here to WB Yeats, who wrote, ‘Even when the poet seems most himself … he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an ideal, something intended, complete.’ This idea was important to Heaney. Elsewhere he defined poetic ‘technique’ as that which effects this transformation, ‘that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form’. If you work your experience into a finished form, you can share it without embarrassment, even if it is very intimate. You can give out while keeping to yourself, seem most yourself while being something else. ‘The truth of it comes home to you,’ said Heaney, ‘when you happen to be served with the untransformed material. I was once present at a small academic gathering when the speaker became emboldened enough to read one of his love poems. He had been giving a paper on love songs and the good reception, not to speak of the presence of his wife in the front row, encouraged him to go that bit further. Anyway, we braced ourselves and out came the first line: “I like you in your underwear …’’ End of story. The poem continued, but we had stopped listening and the whole effort went into keeping a straight face.’
Sharing something personal with an audience, particularly of strangers, often feels weird – wrong even. Poetry readings can have atmospheres a bit like AA meetings: welcoming and supportive, but uncomfortably open, emotional, self-regarding. After all, we turn to poetry more than other forms to express private and heightened feelings, like passion or grief.
Sometimes there’s an uneasy disjunction between intimacy in a poem and exhibitionism in its performance. Despite the form’s traditional inwardness, poets frequently use voice in a way that brings attention to themselves and their words. Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas, in a sonorous vibrato, hammered every hard consonant. Yeats, in a ghostly moan, stretched each stressed vowel to breaking point. In 1840 Alfred Tennyson became one of the first poets recorded, fervently declaiming ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, his voice swelling with admiration for the uselessly unthinking cavalry. According to James Fenton,
Poetry itself begins in those situations where the voice has to be raised: the hawker has to make himself heard above the market hubbub, the knife-grinder has to call the cook out into the street, the storyteller has to address a whole village, the bard must command the admiration of the court.
Nevertheless, some seek the opposite effect. Elizabeth Bishop’s reading voice, which Colm Tóibín has praised, was intentionally unemotive. Thom Gunn’s delivery was similarly measured and understated. Reflecting on a reading Gunn gave at a literary festival in California, Tóibín observed: ‘He maintains a somewhat distant air. He is not in love with his own voice; some of his mind is elsewhere; he will not detain us longer than is necessary. His voice is calm.’
Still, poetic language calls attention. Bishop and Gunn are restrained, unaffected writers as well as readers, but even they make language conspicuously strange. Gunn can begin a poem, ‘The causes are in Time; only their issue / Is bodied in the flesh, the finite powers.’ Bishop begins almost all her poems with a simple statement, but can end a poem,
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Plainness and reserve are more common in fiction than poetry. Consider James Joyce’s ‘style of scrupulous meanness’, as he called it, vividly conveying his home town’s stifling sterility; Ernest Hemingway’s bare, torched diction movingly expressing desolation in the aftermath of a war he believed, as Henry James claimed, had ‘used up words’; John Steinbeck’s direct, unadorned language, a powerful vehicle for his social realism; George Orwell’s transparent, unobtrusive prose, ‘like a window pane’, a fitting correlative to his ideal of open democratic government; or Cormac McCarthy’s sparse, sinewy sentences flatly issuing like the tumbleweed landscapes of his tough American South.
Colm Tóibín’s debut poetry collection, Vinegar Hill, is exceptionally plain and reserved. He has, after all, written over ten novels, and each quite austere in style. In fact, if you only heard his poetry, you might mistake it for prose, even for ordinary speech. He likes this quality in Bishop, who he argues, in his excellent book on her, ‘stole a great deal from the sound of prose, as a painter might steal from photography’. Gunn, himself an admirer of Bishop, appreciated prosaicness in poetry too. ‘A good deal of D.H. Lawrence’s free verse is very close to prose,’ he wrote. ‘I like it for that.’ Gunn developed his own ‘plain style’, as August Kleinzahler called it, ‘unembellished, lucid; in diction and movement the way people might speak’. Both Bishop and Gunn loved George Herbert’s poetry, a model of simple, direct expression. Both are key influences on Vinegar Hill.
Needless to say, these are not the only poets to approximate prose and speech. Some of the later work of Bishop’s close friend Robert Lowell, for example, is in a plainspoken colloquial idiom – a style, he said, ‘almost as easy as prose’. He found it through reading Gustave Flaubert, as well as writing a short story, ‘91 Revere Street’ from Life Studies, the only significant passage of prose in his collections. That piece shaped the third section of the book, consisting of poetry quite close to prose. This became, of course, the distinctive register of confessionalism, one of modern poetry’s dominant modes, characterised by candid, emotional, sometimes shameful disclosure. Tóibín’s poetry, however, with its composure and reticence, is very different. William Wordsworth, who sought to prove ‘the language of prose might yet be adapted to poetry’, offers another famous precedent. But Tóibín’s modesty, restraint and sincerity contrasts with Wordsworth’s grandiosity, effusiveness and pretension. Though Wordsworth conveys his experiences in something like ‘the real language of men’, those experiences sometimes seem unreal in themselves. It’s difficult, for instance, to credit his sonnet celebrating the view from Westminster Bridge, with its rhetorical flourishes and rhapsodic hyperbole:
Earth has not anything to show more fair …
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
Did he really feel with the stink of sewage, I like to imagine, wafting up from the Thames below – that this was the most beautiful sight in the world? Lowell doesn’t keep his feelings to himself, whereas Wordsworth doesn’t keep himself to his feelings. For Tóibín, Bishop and Gunn, however, keeping language ordinary, poetry prosaic, might have something to do with doing just that.
And for Derek Mahon too. In an essay on Mahon’s elegy to his mother, ‘Bangor Requiem’, Tóibín notes that Mahon ‘had found a style that was almost prose, and grafted it onto an attitude towards material where strong emotion is tempered by domestic ordinariness, where nothing is allowed to shine too brightly, where feeling is kept in check or bathed in irony, where pathos is kept to a minimum’. Expressing ‘strong emotion’ even while ‘feeling is kept in check’, Mahon realises Heaney’s aim of giving out while keeping to himself. For Heaney, the poor speaker at the academic gathering modelled ‘the untransformed material’, his poem for his wife still too close to the germinal, raw emotion to successfully communicate it. Mahon, however, whittles emotion into perfect, polished forms. Even poems without fixed metre or rhyme, like ‘Bangor Requiem’, have compactness and sheen, every word firmly pinned into patterns of rhythm and sound. Bishop and Gunn’s poems have this too. All three poets, despite their relaxed, conversational voices, use tight, closed structures, particularly to express deep, private feeling. Most famously, Bishop uses the villanelle and sestina for some of her most candid expressions of loss. Tóibín’s poetry is highly formed as well, with regular stanza and line lengths, and a considered rightness about each word. For these writers, closure in form perhaps relates to a kind of closure in attitude, an inhibition or realism. In constrained structures they write poetry constrained to things, including themselves, as they find them, not as they imagine or desire them to be. ‘There is an overtone,’ says Tóibín of ‘Bangor Requiem’, ‘that is not only modest but also true, or desperate not to say anything that is untrue.’ Here he evokes lines by Philip Larkin, whose use of ordinary language within strict formal parameters is similarly motivated, reflecting a downbeat empiricism.
In ‘Bangor Requiem’, Tóibín writes, Mahon’s ‘insistence on keeping things down to earth … earns him the right to see what might happen if he lifted his gaze’. This could apply to Bishop or Gunn’s handling of many of their poems. Tóibín’s own elegy to his mother, ‘The Nun’, deploys this strategy, slowly moving from its flat, inauspicious opening
My brother asked if nuns
Wore shoes. And so began
A discussion about nuns
to a loftier, more literary register conveying Tóibín’s loss not just of his mother, but his brother too. Unfolding a childhood memory of his mother pretending to call on his house as a nun, fooling his brother, who fails to recognise her beneath her habit, Tóibín builds a sympathetic portrait, suggesting her intelligence and warmth, her winking, playful irreverence, but all through the detached accumulation of details, seemingly without designs on subject or reader. Tóibín’s revelation that ‘my mother and brother / died within a few years of each other’ forms just another part of the dry recital of facts, but this makes it all the more poignant. We realise the simple stating of facts is a way to approach safely the facts – and ultimately the feelings – that really matter. Tóibín is not disavowing the power of poetry to express profound emotion; he’s attesting to it. While his claim, ‘I can do nothing with it’, referring to the memory, is an honest admission, for he’s only straightforwardly relayed it, it’s also a kind of litotes, for he has turned it into a beautiful and moving poem.
When Tóibín writes this of ‘Bangor Requiem’, he might as well be describing ‘The Nun’: ‘The poem does not move out of ordinary domestic space, the space inhabited by the dead woman. Instead, ordinary domestic space takes on the subdued glow of intimacy, as a Dutch interior might in a painting.’ Mahon himself connected his work with Dutch painting in his poem ‘Courtyard in Delft’, which emulates the ‘chaste perfection’ of the titular picture by Pieter de Hooch, in which ‘nothing is random, nothing goes to waste’, recalling as well de Hooch’s contemporary in Delft, Johannes Vermeer. No poet, however, has identified more strongly with Vermeer than Bishop, as Tóibín makes clear. ‘It has been one of my dreams,’ he quotes her as writing in a letter to a critic who had compared her work to Vermeer, ‘that someday someone would think of Vermeer, without my saying it first, so now I think I can die in a fairly peaceful frame of mind.’ Tóibín, when asked in an interview which visual artists had influenced his own work, named Vermeer.
Mahon, Bishop and Tóibín certainly share qualities with Vermeer. His astonishing magic trick is to make us feel his figures – like these poets in their verse – are unreachable but close, withdrawn but inviting us in, and his pictures have a consummate, perhaps unrivalled perfection. There’s also his fastidious eye, shared by Bishop in particular, evident in her use of adjectives. She excels at the adjectival run, not easy to pull off. In one of her best and best-loved poems, ‘The Moose’, for example, there’s the ‘shifty, salty, thin’ fog, a ‘brisk, freckled, elderly’ woman, and the ‘hairy, scratchy, splintery’ woods. There’s a remarkable number of adjectives describing the moose in the concluding bravura set piece of description, but somehow it’s not overdone: ‘towering, antlerless, high … homely … safe … perfectly harmless … big … awful plain … grand, otherworldly … curious’. Nobody, I think, uses colour adjectives more than Bishop. Here are all of them from one slim collection, Questions of Travel:
feeble pink, or blue … green … bright blue … blue, blue-green and olive … satin … silver-gray … purple, yellow, two yellows, pink, rust-red and greenish white … blue-white … pale-green … hell-green … red as a red-hot wire … green … pink … brown … silver … golden … yellow … white … silver … red … white … white … blue … pale-blue … bright-blue … white … gold … gold … bright-green … yellow … bleached white … pink … dead-white, wax-white … red … purple … rainbow-ridden … blood-black … brown … white … milk-white … silver … tinted … pale green … black-and-white stained bright pink … rose-flecked … white … green … grey-green … white … green and gold … yellow … pale-green … silver … white … gray … black … white … white … pewter-colored … tin, lead and silver … green … yellow … white … green … black … dark-brown … white … white … red … red … white … white … red … white … red … black … gray … blue … gray … black-and-gold … dark … black, white, tan, and gray … quartz … rose and amethyst … whitewashed
This is a measure of just how much Bishop wants to share her experience truthfully. It’s easier to be accurate about what you see than your inner life, and the more comprehensively accurate you are – the more exhaustively descriptive – the more honest.
Bishop simultaneously pulls toward and away from deep personal feeling. Both her impulse to express it and her suspicion of it grow out of this concern for truthfulness. She intensely focuses on concrete sensation partly to anchor herself when she feels afraid or mistrustful of where feeling might take her. In many of her poems powerful emotion is kept at a controlled distance. In others it suddenly, forcefully erupts. Take ‘In the Waiting Room’, for example. Bishop recalls when she was seven years old waiting at a dentist for her aunt to finish an appointment. As she peruses a copy of National Geographic, studying with growing horror images of strange, faraway people, her aunt cries in pain from the next room, triggering in the child a bout of vertiginous existential anxiety. Having begun with matter-of-fact description, the poem turns weird, abstract and figurative, reaching for a higher key to capture a complex, emotionally charged state of mind. And yet it still keeps its purchase in the solid world of material fact, with Bishop in the end reminding us – and herself – ‘the waiting room was bright / and too hot’, while ‘Outside / were night and slush and cold’. The bathetic closing stanza, returning to a simpler style, specifies the place, ‘Worcester, Massachusetts’, and time, ‘fifth / of February, 1918’, as if settling for surer truths.
Tóibín’s ‘In the White House’ has a similar tension and movement. It relates how he and other eminent Irish guests outstayed their welcome at a St Patrick’s Day function at the official residence. Tóibín takes in the setting then meets Obama. Next, rather than asking the guests to leave, the staff move in an unpassable wall from one end of the room to the other, herding everyone to the exit. The guests only slowly realise what’s happening. An odd, amusing and richly suggestive image, Tóibín admits it’s ‘tempting, even still, to imagine the line of waiters as a metaphor for something’, then considers what this might be: ‘soft power’, maybe, or ‘how to take a firm stance on foreigners’, or ‘time’s pawlike purposeful intent’. As Tóibín evocatively develops this last suggestion, reworking Bishop’s metaphors for time from ‘The End of March’ and ‘A Short, Slow Life’, the casual, slightly wry tone modulates into brooding lyricism. But not for long. Metaphors open up meaning; Tóibín’s instinct, like Bishop’s, is to pin it down. ‘That is stretching it,’ he finally concedes, then relapses into his characteristic literalism. The last line states the place and time: ‘the White House on St Patrick’s Day 2010’.
Many poets load words with meaning, but Bishop and Tóibín crave exactness. It’s thought that Bishop’s most anthologised poem, ‘One Art’, subtly encodes the loss of her father with a pun on ‘farther’, but I’m not so sure; she was so furious with the critic David Kalstone’s assertion that the word ‘inside’ in ‘In the Waiting Room’ had a double meaning that she called him up (one imagines very drunkenly) to correct and admonish him. Her precise, unambiguous diction paradoxically reflects both her care for accuracy and her need to curtail and exclude. This is also true of her concentrated painterly gaze and conflicted attitude to emotion. Yes, she looks closely at things to get them right, but also to look away from herself, or by looking at one thing, to keep everything else away. And while emotion can deceive or distort, it can also expose. Likewise, her cool, natural poetic voice signals authenticity while holding out against inner extremes.:
Bishop wrote to Anne Stevenson: ‘Although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough for the text-books – please don’t think I dote on it.’ The scare quotes betray an urge to disassociate. When she was eight months old her father died and when she was five her mother was permanently institutionalised. Bishop never wrote a poem about her father and her drafts show that she tried but never succeeded in writing one about her mother. Only ‘One Art’ might, though briefly and obliquely, register these losses, and its ironic tone ‘stoical humour’, as Lowell described it—represses grief.
Mahon and Gunn share this ambivalent self-discipline, holding the self in check even as they honour it. At the age of twenty Mahon attempted suicide, leaping into the Liffey. His biographer suggests frequent references to drowning in his early poetry allude to this. But his only attempt to write about it, ‘The Bender’, was never published. Curiously, Mahon refers to himself in the third person throughout. The incident may have been too painful to write about otherwise, or perhaps he hesitated to self-dramatise. ‘Everything is Going to Be Alright’, probably his most popular poem, is read as a sincere statement of hope, but is in fact, like ‘One Art’, deeply ironic. Its title is a platitude offered in moments of crisis that’s often unhelpful and always untrue. He wrote it when homeless, depressed and struggling with alcoholism. His meticulous fidelity to experience, it would seem, is sometimes in tension with its denial.
Gunn’s 1992 collection, The Man with Night Sweats, memorialises some of the many friends he lost in the AIDS epidemic. It combines unflinching candour with buttoned-up formality. Death had been close since childhood. At fifteen his mother killed herself and he discovered the body. That day he wrote an extraordinary diary entry beginning
She committed suicide by holding a gas-poker to her head, and covering it all with a tartan rug we had. She was lying on the sheepskin rug, dressed in her beautiful long red dressing-gown, and pillows were under her head. Her legs were apart, one shoe half off, and her legs were white and hard and cold, and the hairs seemed out of place growing on them.
Only forty-seven years later did he write a poem about it. ‘I wasn’t able to write about it,’ he confessed in an interview. ‘Finally, I found the way to do it was really obvious: to withdraw the first-person, and to write about it in the third-person. Then it came easy, because it was no longer about myself.’ ‘The Gas-poker’ appeared in his final collection, a few years before his death from an overdose of methamphetamine and heroin at the age of seventy-five. It divulges how he and his brother forced open a barricaded door to find her body, then in distress went outside and paced the lawn, before returning to switch off the gas and phone the police. The stripped-back language and detached tone suggest Gunn’s conflicting desires: to truthfully document, to contain and conceal. In the end, invoking Pan and Syrinx, the gas-poker becomes a sort of backwards flute’, the mother ‘filled up / by its music’. It’s another estranging device, self-consciously literary, mythologising the mother.
In Tóibín’s book on Bishop, one of many astute parallels he draws between her and Gunn is the death of a parent in childhood as a source of ‘reticence’ in the poetry. His own father lost the ability to speak clearly after a brain operation. Tóibín subsequently developed a speech disorder too. Then his father died. Tóibín was twelve. ‘Father & Son’ centres on their relationship. It formally embodies correspondence and connection between them, with two stanzas balancing against each other, one focusing on the father, the other on Tóibín. The father is taken to an isolated site and made to shout as loudly as he can to strengthen his voice, which comes out ‘as pain, a soft howl’. Tóibín introduces himself impersonally as ‘the other one’. Taking his cue from Gunn, he uses the third-person, distancing himself from his grief to move closer to it. He compares losing control of his speech to being locked in a room, ‘banging, but unable to call out’, hearing from the other side ‘pain, a soft howl’. This phrase ends each stanza, emphasising a relationship between pain and speechlessness, and indicating they fundamentally link father and son. There’s a clear debt to ‘In the Waiting Room’, in which Bishop discovers a bond with her aunt in her cry of pain.
Clearly, then, for Tóibín and his influences – Mahon, Bishop and Gunn – a wish to be faithful to the self is at once reflective of, and in tension with, a natural inhibition. They’re wary of insincerity and self-deception. But they’re also guarded, even evasive, especially about their losses and traumas. In more than one sense, they keep to themselves. This conflict between transparency and reserve, sincerity and remoteness, informs their plain, disciplined styles. It animates many of the best poems in Vinegar Hill, pain hovering behind them, withheld but powerfully made felt.
28/10/2025
Michael Shearman teaches English at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School in London.
