C.E.J. Simons reviews Sophie Hannah’s Pessimism for Beginners

Judging a poet’s work against the standard of ‘light verse’ shields it from the criticism applied to ‘verse’ without adjectives.  In making Sophie Hannah’s Pessimism for Beginners their Choice book for Winter 2007, the Poetry Book Society’s selectors have exposed a comparison based on unequal criteria.  But even within the bounds of ‘light verse’, this volume cannot compete.  Reviewers have compared Hannah’s verse to that of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Wendy Cope.  The poems in Pessimism for Beginners exhibit none of Carroll’s or Lear’s surreal flair and linguistic ingenuity; nor do they show the subtlety of Cope or Dorothy Parker.  The book’s most readable poems—and there are half a dozen or so—abandon the schoolroom metrics and blunt insults that make up the rest of the volume.  These efforts demonstrate that Hannah is capable of a higher level of writing, and should be judged on this level.  But Hannah should not ask for such a judgment based on this book; its theme, voice, argument and language repeatedly fail to win over the close reader.

For almost ten years I have cautiously defended Hannah’s poetry on the grounds that she is on the edge of a stylistic breakthrough, the coalescing of a mature mode.  Evidence of this maturity appeared in First of the Last Chances (2003).  That volume includes poems that are pithy rather than light.  In contrast, Pessimism for Beginners is a step backwards.  Most of the poems in the book are variations on a single point of view—the jilted female lover—but lack the range to hold the reader’s interest.  It is difficult to understand, in fact, why the volume’s forty poems have been divided into three untitled sections; the subject-matter of all three sections is the same.

Whether these poems are addressed to one man in particular (if so, God help him) or several former lovers, the reader never acquires a sense of character—either of Hannah’s female persona, or the poem’s recipient(s).  All remain caricatures.  The final couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet ‘The Cutting Dead’ concludes typically for the volume:

Eureka: you’re a man-sized whingeing brat.
Not even love like mine could live through that.

Such a couplet might elicit whoops during an informal reading, but it trivializes Hannah’s technical skills by substituting a thudding insult for a concise turn of idea.  By the end of the poem, the reader’s sympathies have shifted to the accused for putting up with such belaboured attacks.  In poetry, as in politics, an excess of single-minded conviction arouses suspicion.

This transfer of sympathy does not appear to be deliberate.  Yet it occurs in almost identical tones throughout the volume, in ‘Peace Offering’, ‘Anyone Can Draw a Line’, and, most painfully, in ‘Rubbish at Adultery’, which literally ends with, ‘You stupid, stupid git.’  Compare these poems to Stevie Smith’s ‘No Respect’, which ends, ‘You have a light mind/ And a coward’s soul.’  Smith’s short poem explains concretely why the speaker has arrived at her conclusion; in contrast, Hannah’s ‘Anyone Can Draw a Line’, offers only assertions such as, ‘You are not brave.  You are not sound’ as reasons to dislike her partner.  The reader might accept de facto condemnation in one poem, but not in thirty.

Beyond theme, voice remains another consistent baffle in Hannah’s poetry.  A poet can master form and language and never develop a unique voice that marks their poetry as their own.  Hannah has the opposite problem: her voice is singular, ever-present, and overpowering.  It developed early and has not changed significantly since her first book.  Its wounded sharpness in Pessimism for Beginners masks a writer’s egotism in the guise of a victim.  Even in ‘Don’t Say I Said’, one of the volume’s better poems, this egotism becomes unreadable in lines like, ‘Tell him that I’ve got three new books/ Coming out soon….’  This is not the self-effacing Hannah of ‘The Cancellation’ in First of the Last Chances.  The human failings articulated by Hannah’s voice are usually not her own failings; in the few poems in which they are (‘Pessimism for Beginners’, ‘Exorcise’, and ‘My Ideal Man’), their articulation does not reveal genuine vulnerability.

Which leads to the third major problem throughout these poems: Hannah’s ability to find closure for any situation, any emotional state.  Hannah finds closure where it should not be sought.  At her best, she could start to sound like Dorothy Parker or Stevie Smith, if she could make the leap into uncertainty and open-endedness.  Instead, each poem receives its lid and label.  ‘The Onus’ ends with the all-too-common opt-out from meaning: a crossword-puzzle definition of the poem’s title.  Many of the poems conclude in their first stanzas; subsequent stanzas offer variation, but no progression.  For almost a quarter of the poems in the volume (‘Deferred Gratification’, ‘How I Feel Now’, ‘Exorcise’, ‘Friday 13th February 2004’, ‘Send’, ‘White Feathers’, ‘Don’t Say I Said’, and ‘Anyone Can Draw a Line’) the reader could rearrange the stanzas in any order and make no difference to the poem’s gestalt effect.

Stylistically, Hannah defends her overt use of rhyme and meter as deliberate.  However, there is a difference between ‘overtness’ and ‘strictness’ in poetic form.  Strictness of form does not require forced language.  The finest lines of Pope, Swift and Yeats follow the rhythms of natural speech; they do not sound ‘overtly’ formal.  By adhering to fixed and metrical forms without carefully choosing her words, Hannah allows the detritus of centuries of poetic language to seep into what should be canny, contemporary verse.  The third stanza of ‘The Onus’ begins:

Praise you deserve, that I would love to give,
I will withhold, but neither will I rail
Against your house rules or the way you live…

The punch of ‘house rules’—an evocative modern phrase—dissipates in the flab of the first two lines, written in English that was outmoded a century ago.

Similarly, Hannah employs unnecessary repetition to fill her meter.  This habit produces dilute lines that retard a poem’s progression.  In ‘How I Feel Now’, Hannah writes of a relationship: ‘And if I need to I will wreck the lot// Vandalise, batter, desecrate and maul/ And stand and weep, watching the tower fall.’  This exhausted image summons only a picture of Hannah thumbing through a thesaurus.  In a similar vein, the poem’s last stanza begins, ‘Bedridden, under rubble, trapped in snow—/ I will not care.  I won’t desire to know.’  There is a world of difference between the expression ‘I don’t want to know,’ and ‘I won’t desire to know’; one is heard everywhere, the other is not.

More jarringly, Hannah scatters her poems with inexplicable imagery.  These images, chosen for the sake of perfect rhyme and meter, bob to the surface in poems that otherwise lack any context.  Freedom from context does not automatically create universal feeling.  In ‘Imaginary Friend’, for example, the poem’s dominant image is one of ‘Airless, abandoned things in jars// that cry and crave the light of day’.  This is a serviceable image, but it falters when Hannah suggests that she is one of these ‘things’, ‘free/ to pop [her] lid and walk away…’, and that when her keeper climbs

down to where you left me, stored—
you’ll find that I got past the guard.

What’s in the jars?  Why are they guarded?  A poem ostensibly about an imaginary friend suggests scenes from The X-Files.  The careful reader begins to suspect that these poems are not the products of hard thought and hard choices.  The lack of context and character development throughout the volume is especially puzzling given that Hannah publishes novels as well as poetry.

Plentiful evidence in Pessimism for Beginners suggests that Hannah aspires to more than light verse.  Her parodies of Milton and Herbert are burlesques rather than true parodies; they hang inconsequential subjects on the skeletons of two famous poems, to highlight the petty tribulations of daily life.  Nevertheless, choosing to open with Milton pleads a connection to the English canon, while at the same time forestalling criticism with a wink that says all that follows is just for fun.  Compare these two poems to the parodies of Wordsworth and Eliot in Wendy Cope’s Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.  Cope’s poems demonstrate a genuine grasp of the poets she parodies; Hannah’s are skin-deep and forgettable.  Cope’s nursery rhyme in Eliot’s high style illuminates the distance between art and life under particular conditions.  Hannah’s burlesques, in contrast, bring their humour to bear on nothing substantial; they are poems written to generate safe, middle-class titters.

Furthermore, if Hannah were only interested in writing light verse, Pessimism for Beginners would not contain poems such as ‘Letterland’, ‘Fifteen per cent of goodbye…’ and ‘Something and Nothing’.  These poems strive to deliver more than foregone conclusions.  Similarly, several strong poems near the end of the book—‘Nothing to Hide’, ‘The Barring Arm’ and ‘Homewrecker’—employ a measured, world-weary voice that surprises the reader after what has come before.  ‘The Barring Arm’ includes the stanza:

It isn’t true to say we do no harm
to one another.  Silence raises pain
higher than words.  It is the barring arm.
Nothing will happen overnight but rain.

The book’s closing poem, a commission by O2 to write a text message in fewer than 160 characters, shows what Hannah can accomplish when she restrains her voice:

Blank spaces count as characters.  It’s true.
I wasn’t sure.  And then I thought of you.

Stern editing may have brought other poems in Pessimism for Beginners up to this level.  Reading Hannah for almost a decade has made it clear that she has difficulty separating her best lines from her worst, and ending her poems before they slip into pedantry.  ‘Mary Questions the Health Visitor’ is crippled by its last stanza; how could any writer or editor think that the line ‘I’m phoning Gina Ford’ makes a stronger conclusion than ‘how soon will the son of God/ Start sleeping through the night?’  ‘Silly Mummy’ should end after its first three stanzas, and ‘Let’s Put the Past in Front of Us’, after two.

I continue to read Sophie Hannah in the hope that one of her future volumes will crystallize into brilliance, and no longer need to hide behind the epithet ‘light verse’.  Pessimism for Beginners leaves me feeling like the speaker of one of the book’s most succinct poems, ‘Something for Nothing’, which begins:

If you had known how little
you would have had to give
to drum into this brittle
hope the desire to live…

There are poems to like in this volume, and more to hope for.  The greeting-card singsongs of ‘Deferred Gratification’, ‘The Way It Has to Be’, and the volume’s title poem must give way to the more self-effacing lyrics of ‘Something and Nothing’, ‘Nothing to Hide’, and ‘The Barring Arm’.  Tellingly, the volume’s best poems include all those not in fixed or stanzaic form.  In order to develop, a poet must not only shed their ego, but must with each new poem do what is most challenging for their own abilities.  Sophie Hannah has amused herself with the pat stanza and the full-length put-down for too long.  She can do better.

Sophie Hannah, Pessimism for Beginners  Carcanet, £8.95.

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The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.