Peter McDonald reviews Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid by Simon Armitage

Every now and again, critics wonder what has become of public poetry.  In the very crudest of senses, poetry in Britain actually doesn’t have a public to speak of, so writing poetry that sets out to exercise a ‘public’ voice is the kind of futility that may never pay artistic dividends.  And yet, good poetry that has a sense of public engagement can and does get written, the many, many failures in that mode notwithstanding.  It seems to be in the nature of this kind of writing to be hit-or-miss, and some poets are strikingly uneven in their performances; but Simon Armitage has a surer sense of pitch than most, and his new volume, Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid is a very good collection, containing poems of real – and I think quite important – public resonance.

It’s probably the dullest of truisms to say that Armitage writes well, with formal accomplishment and clarity.  But this is no mean – or indeed common – achievement in British poetry today, and in fact it forms the sine qua non for verse that can address its contemporary world with subtlety, force, and authority.  The new book shows Armitage at his best: here is a poet with a fine ear, who can control both rhythm and sound unobtrusively but exactly, and with a firm sense of the power of rhyme.  To say this is also to say that Armitage, like any good poet, goes with the flow of formal energy in English poetry: he is ‘traditional’, if you like, even perhaps ‘mainstream’ – though he also knows that poetry is the kind of stream in which, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus quipped, you cannot stand in the same water twice.  In poetry, what you inherit, you also change: but the inheritance is real, and has to be earned.

The new Armitage is a very grown-up volume, thoughtful, deeply-informed, able to be in two minds about things without fudging or faking responses, and capable, therefore, of speaking intelligently to an intelligent readership.  Little of this is, or should be, at all comfortable.  The book opens with a deliberately flat poem, ‘Hand-Washing Technique – Government Guidelines’ which gives a six-point list of how to wash your hands of something, where the initial simplicity (‘1. Palm to palm’) gets more complicated (‘4. Backs of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked’) and, as it becomes more elaborate, feels more desperate (‘6. Rotational rubbing, backwards and forwards with clasped fingers of right hand in left palm and vice versa’).  The poem carries the dedication ‘i.m. Dr David Kelly’,  Occupying a prominent position in the volume, in many ways this poem sets the tone for what is to come:  it knows the strength in keeping clear of the explicitly ‘political’ (imagine what would happen to the poem if Tony Blair were to be compared directly here with Lady Macbeth), and also keys in, powerfully, with our modern receptiveness to instruction in times of public danger, our willingness to put up with (as it were) six-point plans for everything from handwashing to surviving the War on Terror.  And in that context, the muted ‘i.m.’ (in memoriam, to the memory of) perhaps starts to bite: washed away to two letters of abbreviation, the memory is already yesterday’s news, something which many politicians besides Blair want us to move on from.  Armitage’s poem subtly but definitely refuses to move on, and lodges awkwardly in the memory, so that the book begins with a difficulty, a public embarrassment that refuses to go away.

The public life is more than just what we call ‘politics’, and Armitage’s poetry is keenly aware of this.  At the centre of the new book, a series of five poems, each with the title ‘Sympathy’, approaches specific incidents, of the kind that come and go quickly through the pages of the press, by way of a six line description, followed by twenty-one lines of monologue from a protagonist.  These are all amongst the best poems Armitage has written yet, where tight form and absolute, seemingly unforced fluency are in step.  In one, the voice of a hit-and-run driver’s victim describes his punishment, after ‘’e walked.  No jail.  ‘E strolls out of court scot free’):

Instead, ’es put on some kind of parole. A joke,
’cept there’s this one condition: twenny-four seven
’e carries that wallet.  It’s brown and it’s leather
and opens out, gatefold-like, like a birthday card,
with two little windows inside for family snaps. 
So whenever ’e shells out we’re right in ’is face;
on one side a photo of me, me ’air tied up
in a bun, thick mascara, bit of lippy on,
laid in t’coffin, dead as a statue, clock cold;
in t’other mi unborn babe in a tight ball,

sonogram scan, black and white, twenny-eight weeks old.

Like the other four poems, this does something with, and something to, our instincts for ‘Sympathy’.  The driver’s punishment is to be a kind of enforced sympathy – ‘sympathy’, literally suffering along with someone else – while our engagement as readers is partly with the victim whose dead voice we hear, but partly, too, with the perpetrator of the crime, for the poem presents us with exactly the pictures he must bear (in both senses) for the rest of his life.   All five poems make our sense of sympathy more complicated, more messy, and possibly more hurtful (hurting, that is, and also hurt); as poems, they are marvellously clear, and marvellously complicated and complicating.

This is the fractured and cluttered personal space in which, as Armitage knows, our sense of the broader public life is born.  If sympathy, for example, is helplessly complicated and contradictory in its operations in and on our own lives, it cannot be simplified into a buzz-word for politicians to brandish.  Things are always, these poems prove, more complicated than they appear, but also than we really want them to be.  In a version of part of Homer’s Odyssey, Armitage covers the brutal (but exciting) episode of Odysseus’s escape from the Cyclops.  The account is spirited and gory, true in that to its original, but it follows its hero past the point of apparent victory, and gives him second thoughts:

         And if we’d have known
the chain of events we’d set in place, the cruelty
and agony that stretched ahead, year after year,
the horror and terror and sadness and loss still to come – who knows,
perhaps we’d have chosen to die right there, in the black cave,
out of sight of heaven and without sound.

These are bleak words, tempered by more than just Homer’s text, and they reveal Armitage’s ability to match his poetic voice to the sound of contemporary regret and uncertainty.  In our case, it’s hard to keep Iraq far from the mind, with Saddam perhaps as the Cyclops, and the world we have created in his place one of ‘horror and terror and sadness and loss’.  Armitage insists on none of this, and he doesn’t have to;  moreover, the poetry lets his voice carry beyond the specificities we bring to it.

Any poet has to face the challenge of language’s debasement, and real poets do something about that debasement:  in this sense, all good poetry is a public act.  Armitage knows how to absorb the decay of meaning in much of what constitutes actual public speech (in the media, and then in our private mimicking of the kinds of thing the media tells us we are saying) by applying the special pressures and ironies only possible in poems.  ‘The Six Comeuppances’, in which a speaker progresses from urban sophisticate to escapist, to drop-out ‘penning neat one-liners and platitudes’, and finally to being a monkey (‘I pick and eat my fleas,/sleep in a bald tyre swung from an old beam’) ends with italicized warnings:

For every learning curve, a plateau phase.
For every dish of the day, a sell-by date.
A backlash to every latest craze.
A riptide to every seventh wave.
For every moment of truth, an afterthought.
For every miracle cure, an antidote.

This is poetry as pure style, perhaps:  it is also, however, poetry engaging directly, in the very medium of its language, with the time in which it is written.  Style, as Armitage proves here, is engagement, not retreat.

Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid is not without its comparatively weak poems:  I could do without some of Armitage’s lengthier pieces, such as ‘You’re Beautiful’ (a submerged homage to James Blunt?), which deals too freely and loosely with the ‘Men are from Mars Women are from Venus’ cliché, or ‘Poem on His Birthday’, which succumbs to a slight laziness, and presumes too much on a reader’s sympathy for someone turning forty.  But there is much – very much – to counterbalance all this.  I doubt, for example, if a more beautiful, or fully achieved poem than the closing piece, ‘The Final Straw’ will be published this year, with its initial view of  ‘Corn, like the tide coming in’, and its description of harvesting, ‘spiralling home/ over undulations of common land/ till nothing remained but a hub of stalks/ where the spirit of life was said to lurk’.  In a three-line vignette, ‘childless couples’ are ‘invited to pocket the seed/ the women to plait dolls from the last sheaf’.  So far, so good – and so touching, so tempting for a sympathetic reading, which would perhaps prefer to leave things there.  But something happens:

But a Spix’s macaw flapped from the blade,
that singular bird of the new world, one
of a kind.  A rare sight.  And a sign, being
tail feathers tapering out of view, being

blueness lost in the sun, being gone.

Surprise is hard to carry off in poetry; so often, it is represented only by willed epiphany, an insistence on meaning where none can really be declared.  But here, Armitage goes on from the ‘sign’ to its loss, managing to be elegiac without either self-regard or sentimentality.  It is a triumph, though a sobering one.  It is also, in its way, like so much else in this excellent book, a truly public form of words.

Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid, Faber, £12.99, ISBN 0-571-23325-2

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.