Photo credit: Brychan Rhydderch Davies | Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I hope there are fleeting readerly moments at the end of, and between, lines throughout the volume where the stomach jumps or the mind reaches for something that doesn’t quite materialise around the racing bend of the line, or materialises in an uncannily different form.”
Selves
Tour de France, 1948; Stage 13, Cannes−Briançon, 15 July; Tour de France, 1949; Stage 16,
Cannes−Briançon, 18 July
Before you glimpsed him on the Var, you thought you smelled the camphor of his muscle rub, the menthol of the oil that was his second skin against the cold − a lungful line of heat that streamed away behind him like a fox’s scent. As the road tore down, you saw him in his turtle tuck, ordained him in the lash of sleet as marker for your line so that he seemed yourself, flung forward by the tour car’s lights. You passed him in the dark as second self; then on the Izoard consigned him to the past as scapegoat, portion of your own despair cast out.
This poem comes from your terrific collection, Viva Bartali! Do you want to tell us a bit about Bartali and why you found him such a huge inspiration for this book?
I’m writing this as news comes in of the result of the latest stage of the 2023 Tour de France (‘Jasper Philipsen secured his fourth stage win of the Tour as he produced another powerful sprint to claim victory on stage 11 in Moulins’).
I was never really a fan of cycling; now I’m a committed road cyclist and a mad fan of the sport (and an anorak when it comes to its history). I’d never heard of Gino Bartali (1914-2000; accent on the first syllable of the surname), two-time winner of that ‘race for madmen’, the Tour de France (1938, 1948), before casually reading a BBC online article during a lunch break a decade ago. Here was a grumpy, pious, courageous, elite athlete with a trademark boxer’s conk and a penchant for Nazionale cigarettes and red wine (during races) whose story seized me utterly and immediately. Son of the Tuscan soil, he became a global superstar in the edgy atmosphere of Mussolini’s Italy (whose political ideology he loathed). Beginning seriously around 1935, he climbed, sprinted and descended like a god in Giros and Tours. What emerged after his death was an extraordinary story: in 1943-44, as part of a complex resistance network, he had helped save the lives of hundreds of Italian Jews by acting as a courier of forged identity documents which he curled tight into scrolls and hid in the tubes of his bike as he careered through Italian Fascist and Nazi German roadblocks, pretending to be on the latest epic training run. The agon between him and the campionissimo (‘champion of champions’) Fausto Coppi, who started out as Bartali’s green and gangly acolyte before maturing into the contemporary cool ying (think sky-blue Bianchi racing jersey, shades and slicked-back hair) to Bartali’s Catholic yang was nothing short of Homeric. It divided a nation. I read everything I could get my hands on by and about Bartali and devoured the lyrical, often visionary, Italian sports journalism of the 1940s and ’50s. I was completing another poetry collection at the time, but vowed I’d write a biography-in-verse of the man who would be honoured by Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre) as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in 2013.
This particular poem, from near the end of the collection, describes a descent during which Bartali seems to follow another by sight and scent. What are the poem’s dynamics?
It’s meant as a layered piece, both psychological and supernatural. On one view, the rider in front of Bartali is merely an absent ‘marker’, imagined by Bartali to help him keep a safe and efficient line during the 50 kilometer-per-hour descent. At the same time, the rider out in front is Bartali himself, flung forward as a shadow by the lights of the tour car behind him (and therefore a kind of ‘legacy’ self, cast into the future – his posthumous fame, say). At the same time, on passing that ambiguous figure at the end of the poem, Bartali consigns something to the past: personal tragedies and disappointments (all summoned in the volume), his younger self, and all those he’s ever passed (‘dropped’ in race parlance). Inescapably, it’s also a poem about Bartali’s brother Giulio, a talented cyclist himself, who slammed into a Fiat and was killed early in Bartali’s career, and who haunts Bartali in at least two other poems in the volume. And it’s certainly a poem about Bartali’s rivalry with Coppi, since readers will I hope recall that earlier in the volume, a paranoid Bartali smells Coppi’s presence, picking up on the heady wintergreen liniment that Coppi basted himself with against the cold.
This poem uses couplets very elegantly with many thoughtful uses of linebreaks to create tension or surprise. Could you talk about why you chose the couplet?
Couplets – which I used for the previous Seren collection, Docklands (2019) – give me a structure that I can then question, tease, flex and ironise. Line-endings, and the fall into a fresh couplet, are where a lot of the heavy lifting, the racing, is done in this volume – a space where conceptual descents, dead-ends and climbs occur. It’s in such white spaces that these poems are won or lost, I think. I hope there are fleeting readerly moments at the end of, and between, lines throughout the volume where the stomach jumps or the mind reaches for something that doesn’t quite materialise around the racing bend of the line, or materialises in an uncannily different form. And the couplets in this particular poem suit the subject of fractured, second selves.
