Sunday 31 May 2009

Recital: an almanac, by John Siddique

Title: Recital: an alamanac
Author: John Siddique

Paperback: 80 pages

Publisher: Salt Publishing (31 Mar 2009)

ISBN-10: 1844715140

ISBN-13: 978-1844715145

Hebden Bridge could be a dangerous place to live if you're a poet. The presiding spirits of Hughes and Plath still inhabit the air like glaciers carving out the sheer valley sides; over the moors in Haworth (my own birthplace) the Bronte sisters are still packing them in to the Parsonage and the tea shops of Main Street; and to the south, across the M62, is Marsden and the Colne Valley, home of Simon Armitage. It's fair to say, then, that this part of West Yorkshire has its share of representative bards.

John Siddique is what we locals would call an 'offcumden', a stranger, who came to Hebden Bridge 20 years ago, fell in love with the place and chose to live there. The fact that he is not native to this place perhaps gives him a sense of perspective that distances him from the usual sub-Hughesian poets that seem to congregate around these parts. So there are no drystone walls, menacing hawks or sheep with muddy backsides, thankfully, in his latest collection from Salt Publishing. Recital: an almanac is a fresh and individual collection, and Siddique is a highly empathetic poet with both a local and international perspective taking in his family, neighbours, even the missing teenager Lindsay Rimer on one hand and New York, the 7/7 bombings and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on the other. Siddique is not an urban poet though he is certainly urbane. He also knows a thing or two about the landscape and has learned just enough from Hughes (and Robert Graves) about the importance of nature and myth.

As the title suggests, Recital: an almanac is the journal (and journey) of a poet over the space of a year, it deals with the cycles of nature, the 'big themes' - loss and longing, sex, death, politics and religion - as well as the mundane and the quotidian; it is inflected with clear-eyed intelligence and self-depecating humour. Overall, though, Siddique's is a poetry of affirmation in an ever-changing, uncertain and possibly unknowable universe.

The collection begins, quite literally at the beginning:
and so this a beginning (I seem
to know no other way, except the again and again)
racked up on top of every other beginning
all the way back to conception.

The again and again, a movement away
from confidence in the certainties,
to a confidence in beginning again
in the unknowing fog of the day which presents
itself, racking itself on top of every other day.
I use my fingertips feeling into it,
I have done this before and am confident
that the only thing I know
is that is as different as the last.

- 'Begin' (p.3)
and so this is a beginning... (cf. Pound's 'And then went down to the ship' in 'Canto 1') - we are thrown in media res into the world of contingencies, uncertainties, and eternal recurrence (the word 'beginning' appears 3 times just in this short poem). This instability, however, is mitigated by the poet's own understanding and acceptance of a world of flux. There's no use fighting the fluidity of time: where there are beginnings there are ends, but every end is a point, or at least the possibility, of renewal and change. Everything flows, Heraclitus says, go with the flow Siddique seems to affirm. In many a poet's hands a sentiment like this could seem trite, but Siddique does not go through the world with an uncritical or unreflective eye and, in particular, his experience of loss shows that to accept life's vissicitudes is a hard fought battle.

This desire for constant renewal lies in childhood and a deep sense of loss. Siddique was born into a tense Catholic-Islamic household that ended in separation. This tension is excellently brought to life in 'Unintended Loyalty': 'They sleep with the bodily intention / of keeping distance...' The reference to his father's 'penis limp on his thigh' and his mother's 'openness pulled / between her legs' is unflinching and brave, pointing not only to the emotional and erotic gap in his parent's relationship but also how that very configuration informs Siddique's own identity: his being-in-the-world at, what is in fact, a point of rupture. This sense of loss, particularly with respect to his father, is explored in a number of poems with great candour:
His large presence when I am a small boy.
The man of now wanting his father's love.
The gaps between his returns, when I am full
of other stories so that I don't need him.

- Red Line (He Loves Me) (p.18)
This is raw and powerful stuff and informs Siddique's
raison d'etre as a writer. Poetry, storytelling and myth is the only way to fill in the gaps, make the absent present, turn void into plenitude, make an end into a new beginning. This is poetry as medicine, the healer's art, a noble and ancient tradition, though I do think this impulse strains at times and the rhetorical will-to-affirm sometimes overwhelms the music of the poetry. I find this strain most visible in the final poem 'The Death of Death', an acknowledgement of art's limits to fully heal the emotional rift. Siddique is wise enough to know that this is a necessary limit, for if it did succeed it would mean the end of memory and desire and thus end of language itself: 'If the moment could / be written down, it would mean the end / of books'. The poem - like much of the collection - is a replay of Freud's fort/da game whereby the actual physical absence of the mother (or father) becomes symbolically managed by the child through the virtual presence of symbols (i.e. language). Siddique certainly acknowledges the eternal struggle of art's presence/absence, 'This is* what I ask of each book, / it is why each writer fails. We can but try.' So it is the 'trying' (i.e. unfulfilled and unquenchable desire) that is the impulse which keeps us going. But this conclusion is somewhat mitigated in the next line: 'One day, one of us will find a way... we will become immortal as libraries of true moments, / then both god and death will be conquered.' Although I can see the irony here that 'true moment' will only emerge after our own demise, I find the conquering of 'death' and 'god' somewhat willful; the need for resolution is just too strong here. Siddique's best poems are the ones that either leave the struggle open or transmutes desire into a faith into something outside oneself, something more permanent: 'The earth / won't forget or let me sleep until I give her my weight.' This is the strength of myth and where the strongest influence of someone like Robert Grave (e.g. White Goddess) or even shades of Peter Redgrove can be be felt. It manifests in, what I believe to be Siddique's strongest poems and which constitutes the collection's backbone: 13 moon poems which concatenate the lunar (and female) cycles with the arboreal, from birch to yew, ash to elder. This series, sprinkled liberally throughout the book ideally reflect Siddique's preoccupations with time, death and renewal, beginnings and endings. This is pitch perfect is a poem like 'Yew Moon' with its image of Russian dolls:
The first life passed like a dream and then smoke.
The second life was all about you.
The third life begins, we are Russian dolls
to ourselves, sloughing off our larger versions,
becoming more contained, and capable
of containing less.

- Yew Moon (p.53)

As you may gather, Siddique's poetry is clear, concise and has an immediacy that will appeal to many. I do feel that sometimes the anecdotal tone can appear a little flat on the page and long for a little more linguistic adventurousness (but I put this down to my own poetic peccadilloes - so sue me!). Still, there are some terrific, memorable lines. Take these from 'Birch Moon':
Something names itself and gives meaning
under the duvet of last year's expectation.
Fifteen togs of keeping your eye on the ball.
Gas fires of ideas writing themselves.

- Birch Moon (p. 5)
Recital is a thoughtful and often thought-provoking collection, intelligent, clear, inquiring, humorous, some will say inspirational and - dare I say it? - 'life-affirming' (there, I said it!). It's a work that demands to be read as a whole - please don't take my word for it, go out and buy it.

Hebden Bridge and the surrounding area may be a place littered with mills of cliché and the curlew cry of dead metaphors but it is also where John Siddique lives and is a more refreshed and refreshing place for that.

> Buy Recital: an almanac from Salt Publishing

*note to Salt editor: there is a typo here!

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