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Sandra Tappenden
A Kind of Kindness: A Consideration of Martin Stannard’s ‘Easter’
This pamphlet was first published in ‘94, (Waldean Press), although I found it two years later, when Martin Stannard read in Exeter as part of ExeLit. We were in a pub; the atmosphere was buzzy, and I loved what I was hearing. I couldn’t afford the cost of a whole book, (no, really I couldn’t ) so I bought `Easter`, 24 wonderful poems on rather risky grey paper. Having realised that I’ve read these poems more times than I’ve probably read any others ever, I asked myself why? The results are as follows:
How do these poems work for me?
I think they move between worlds; slide gracefully (although the language is awkward often, and delightfully, perhaps self-consciously Joe Bloggs-ish) to and fro between the visceral and ephemeral, night and day, inane and magnificent, earth and heaven. They demystify poetry, (although it may not be a conscious demystification, but then no, come on) through simplicity of tone and language, with a craft (-iness) so woven into the poems that you can’t easily pick it apart. Take this extract from
Food (i)
The food of angels makes mortals sick
down to their stomachs. So, on the rare occasions
they’re offered it, they skip it, and go for
the double cheeseburger and regular fries
as usual. The divine angelic food, I can’t remember
the proper name of it, but it’s another of those outlandish things
if you name it, you become it.
Did Stannard really not recall the word for angelic food? Well, it’s unlikely, but anything’s possible. But there seems to be a bit of a game going on here. Angel food can mean anything from discourse to a `talking-to` or dressing down, and angelic food is another way of saying `Eucharist`, but that’s not even half the point. It’s all bound up with this thing of a believable (contradictory, likeable, clumsy) person/a, speaking to me; one who had actually forgotten the word at that point of time in the poem; a person like me fumbling their way through the days and yet still hoping, half-expecting a miracle that would explain the sense in loving, eating, sleeping etc. This is what works for me. This is what gives me hope/faith in poetry.
Wordsworth, (hardly Joe Bloggs-ish in tone to us in this century, agreed,) was keen to rescue language from the Realms of Poesy-on-High and make it work `in the street`, (my take on it, ok) so that the experience of reading or hearing his poetry would be as honest and direct as an actual conversation down at the Pig and Sou’wester, in olde Windemeree towne. And I think there’s a traceable line of movement from the Romantics to poets like Martin Stannard, where the poems chatter and muse and slide around like talking does. I’m thinking in particular about the earlier parts of The Prelude, where Wordsworth manages to make playing a game of cards or talking aloud to himself down a country lane, equal to, in his treatment, those tricky moments of super-awareness with his developing consciousness. There’s not a whole lot of humour though, true. Apart from the bit with the dog. But I digress.
In Stannard’s (let’s say) adopted tone, there’s every potential for haphazardry and sloppiness. But all the poems work their way toward a somewhere, in a wonderfully zig-zag motion, so skilfully that you don’t even realise they are taking you anywhere. And you arrive at the end, with your head full of nuggets and pearls, just as if you’d overheard a fascinating chat on the bus and suddenly it’s your stop… Bloody magic. The Romantic parallel is one of `treatment` then, where things singled out for attention are not value-categorised for our own good according to the poet’s agenda.
All things are equal; happiness, tea bags, sleep, plumbers etc. And this makes the poems incredibly human. Sometimes I think that there is an air of idiocy about the voice speaking these poems, but it isn’t that. It’s a sort of wilful simplicity, or wishful innocence, or childlike defiance of the odds…
Here’s the last bit from ‘All Hope’
….But if there is a divinity lurking in the bushes
he’s very well hidden. I’ve only got to think about being
somewhere and my footprints are all the way up the drive,
but here’s this chap who is supposed to be
in everything and everywhere
and there’s not a speck of cigarette ash where he’s been standing. Or maybe
it’s a girl, not a chap,
but there’s no trace of perfume on the air to suggest
that she has been anywhere near here.
The poem starts big (“The world is a lonely place”) then uses the frustration of waiting for a plumber to turn up as a springboard for examining the idea of God. And it’s all so alarmingly easily done, washing us to and fro between the particular and universal and back in a continuous wave, to spit us out at the end, but not violently, or dismissively, just as a by-product of the poem at work. A bald fact of reading.
Why do I keep reading them?
The preoccupations of these poems are, I have to say, universal. I mean, they are the same ones that always have been and probably always will be. What love is. What we do with it, and what we can do with it. What living might be. What an idea of God has to do with anything, if it does, and if it does, what that might mean. And the sense of gratitude about happiness, which leads to more questions; Why? What is it for? Is gratitude due? If so, to what? The lover? The world? A god? And I love how the poems never stray into anything remotely approaching didacticism. Which is a huge feat, considering.
Easter, I always imagine, is a personal resurrection, without the preachiness. It has all the elements of - hmm, great seems too big and good seems too small – a lasting poetry, I think, because it refuses to teach, and relies rather on a genuine sense of what it is to be human, whether daft, grim, happy, fed-up, or resigned to the facts of one’s own infuriating unlikeliness. All of these, all the time, and relentlessly. So that the sense of recognition is both painful and hilarious. Joe Bloggs/Everyman speaks.
‘Music’ has all the above, monumentally almost, or just mentally;
If an omnipotent being who passeth our understanding is watching while I’m
doing something so personal and intimate I don’t even tell myself about it,
there’s nothing can be done.
and
…Happy music makes me sad, sad music rescues me if I’ve been
dangling by my fingertips from the rope that spans the abyss between Solipsism
and Narcissism.
and
… I wonder if I should care
about as much as others care about, or if my seeming not to care is misleading,
and perhaps I care in a different way.
In fact, I reckon the entire philosophy of Easter is encapsulated in this one extract from the above poem, in the form of a spoof `Know Thyself` multiple-choice questionnaire question:
“If you are offered an orphan puppy very cheap by a stranger one night after the
pubs close, would you
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