Content note: this interview discusses grief
“The very act of writing a poem implies that one hopes it will be found valuable, helpful even, by a reader or readers”
Staircase with Handbag
I miss her so much, our friend said, walking
away from us in his kitchen and hers,
looking from behind like someone in pain,
physical pain, as if part of his body
was burning with real fire, some kind of torture.
And that, I think, is what it felt like to him,
a glowing ember which a breeze of feeling
had kindled to intenser agony,
some gist of talk among his trusted friends,
people who loved her too, and miss her with him.
He’s like a living torch. He gives off light
and warmth so that simply being round him
raises us, makes our own spirits larger.
I pray for him, in this atmosphere above
petty hesitation about such things
as what prayer is, and what there is to pray to –
at times like this we know it’s what it is,
a meaningful necessity for people –
I pray that this man’s suffering more often
becomes a gentler ache, scar from the wound,
flaring up indeed with sudden lurches
in the weather of the heart, its feelings,
but softened from its worst intensities
to something almost philosophical,
as I’d like to think I’ve sometimes seen it,
where celebration can so balance out
his loss and her absence and the empty space
she left as to make his many years to come
as she would wish them, watching from the skies
or wherever she may be looking on from –
all round him, as he feels her presence here
in their home, where he can’t bear to even move
her handbag from the stair she left it on –
fruitful, and in spite of the fidelity
to her memory registered in his grief,
open to joy, contented. Happy, even.
The first thing that struck me about ‘Staircase with Handbag’ was the difference in punctuation between the first and second stanzas and the effect of this shift. In the first stanza, the manifestations of the friend’s grief are described with great care, with plenty of pausing through full stops. In the second stanza, the poetic speaker becomes thoughtful. There are no full stops in this stanza until the end – just em dashes and commas, that for me as a reader reflects the rapid and broken train of human thought, which is more fluid. Was this stream of consciousness style in stanza two deliberate?
You are right about the differences between the two verse paragraphs, but I hadn’t set out to make them distinct in the way you point out. In each case my attention was focused on the subject matter, and the style followed from that. The first section is trying to convey as exactly as I can the particular moment of my friend’s saying what he said, and to indicate what led up to it. Then in the last three lines I try to summarise his continuing state, which these words have highlighted, and the effect it has on us, his friends, including me. That first paragraph is mainly about the moment, the actuality and sudden intensity of it. I wanted to help the reader feel that they too had witnessed it, and felt a reaction to it.
The second section withdraws from the moment in the kitchen to meditate on what it is to stand helplessly by, watching a friend suffer. It moves on to contemplate what it is like to live with a major bereavement, which already has a history – it has not just happened – and also has a future, which may be much longer. The title of the poem, meant to suggest a painting of a domestic interior, is explained in the brief return to describing the house, so as to gather up that earlier intensity into the tentatively optimistic finale. It adds a new piece of information, the friend’s not wanting to move that handbag from where ‘she’ left it, as if she might return and expect to find it there. I wouldn’t dispute your phrase, ‘the rapid and broken train of human thought’, but would add that the rapidity coexists with a sense that these thoughts are recurrent, circling, just as the empathy with the friend, and the friend’s own sense of loss, are ongoing, though evolving.
This is a very moving and contemplative poem focused on a friend’s grief and how people can come to terms with the loss of a partner over time. I’d like to hear this read out loud – it is its own form of intimate prayer. Would you mind commenting on whether this was written for a particular person?
Yes, the poem is ‘contemplative’; and I am glad you find it moving. If it isn’t moving for any particular reader, it has failed for them, I should say. Yes, it’s a form of prayer, and as the beginning of the second section implies, when the emotional pressure is strong enough, even those of us who may have doubts about the validity of prayer can be drawn to it. It was written for a particular person, yes, and I would not publish it if he were not at ease about my doing so, but he is. I’d be happy to read the poem aloud. All poems need to be read aloud to be tested, and to attain their full power and resonance. Their full meaning, in fact.
This, for me, is a very gentle poem about healing, about becoming ‘philosophical’, finding contentment and happiness after profound loss. I feel that this poem could help a lot of people. When you were writing the poem was this your intention – to make a poem that could have appeal to wide cross-section of people? The poem is not over-cooked or convoluted.
There is gentleness in the poem, but that might seem merely bland if the anguish which the opening lines bear witness to has not been registered. It’s on the balance between that pain and the ‘philosophical’ reaction to it that the poem depends for its energy and authenticity, if it has them. I am glad you find the poem not ‘over-cooked or convoluted’ – my style is generally plain, just trying to be true to the inspiration, what a painter might call the motif, as well as I can. The very act of writing a poem implies that one hopes it will be found valuable, helpful even, by a reader or readers. The emotions the poem deals with are universal; everyone encounters them, one way or another, sooner or later. So yes, I hope it would appeal to a wide audience. But in the moment of writing, I am entirely occupied with trying to do justice to the matter in hand, which in this case begins with my friend’s outburst and considers not only his distress but my own, wanting to help yet unable to. The relief the poem tries to find from this distress is to anticipate a gradual shift in the balance of my friend’s feelings. It has to be tentative, since nobody can predict exactly another person’s emotional journey through life. Grief has to be acknowledged before it can be softened or transcended, if it ever can be, or even accepted and lived with. That said, I would like the journey through the poem itself to feel to the reader, as it did to me in writing it, like the achievement of a cautious hopefulness.
