{"id":2489,"date":"2021-09-01T06:56:48","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T06:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2489"},"modified":"2021-09-01T07:03:28","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T07:03:28","slug":"carol-ann-duffy-ed-empy-nest-poems-for-families-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2489","title":{"rendered":"Carol Ann Duffy (ed) Empy Nest: Poems for Families – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Empty Nest<\/em> is perhaps a misleading title for Carol Ann Duffy\u2019s wide-ranging little anthology because it suggests a strong emphasis on the sadder side of children\u2019s growing up. The book does of course include poems poignantly expressing parents\u2019 feelings of emptiness after their children\u2019s departure, including the haunting title piece by the editor herself. Looking at flight from the nest from the opposite point of view, it includes others expressing children\u2019s frustration with parents or home, their desire to escape into a wider world, or their nostalgia for what they\u2019ve left behind. Thankfully, though, it also ranges much more widely. Basically, these are, as the subtitle tells us, \u2018Poems for Families\u2019, mainly about parents\u2019 feelings for children and children\u2019s for parents, but including sibling poems, like Liz Lochhead\u2019s charming \u2018Poem For My Sister\u2019. There are a few, like Autolycus\u2019s \u2018Jog on, jog on\u2019 song from The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Robert Frost\u2019s \u2018Nothing Gold Can Stay\u2019 or Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u2018The Snow Man\u2019, that aren\u2019t about the family at all, in themselves or their original contexts. However, these too make a real and apt contribution. Sometimes the mood or impulse they embody relates in an obvious way to the poems around them. Autolycus\u2019s song, for example, by expressing the joy of the open road, relates to young adults happily escaping into a wider world. The immediate stimulus for Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s magnificent \u2018One Art\u2019 may have been the poet\u2019s loss of her lover but it speaks powerfully out of and to loss of many kinds. Hopkins\u2019s meditation on youth and age in \u2018Spring and Fall\u2019 had nothing to do with relations between parents and children in its conception, but the context given by Duffy\u2019s book recolours the way we see it – I found myself thinking of it in terms of how a parent might feel looking at her own child and thinking fearfully of what the future held for her, rather like Lochhead\u2019s speaker looking at her much younger sister.<\/p>\n

One great strength of the selection, in fact, is its sheer variety within a relatively small compass \u2013 just 99 poems, few longer than a page. There are well-established favourites, like D. H. Lawrence\u2019s \u2018Piano\u2019, whose long, emphatically rhymed, almost chanting lines give lush rhythmic embodiment to the poet\u2019s frank surrender to nostalgia for his lost childhood and lost mother. Against that, we might set the two poems from Mary Jean Chan\u2019s recent book Fl\u00eache<\/em>. These portray a gay daughter\u2019s complicated relations with a mother she loves across a gulf of mutually incomprehensible experience and beliefs. Chan\u2019s poems and the poem by Lawrence contrast strongly both in feeling and technique. The emotions expressed in each are made more moving by their being seen together.<\/p>\n

Pretty well all the poems in Duffy\u2019s anthology might be described as technically \u2018mainstream\u2019, and correspondingly accessible, but her selection reminds us what a wide sea of formal possibilities and decisions the term \u2018mainstream\u2019 actually covers, or has covered. The inclusion of nineteenth and early twentieth century poems is important here. The poem by Tennyson, \u2018De Profundis\u2019, shows how much we\u2019ve given up by losing confidence in long, complex grammatical structures. In a single massive sentence, twenty-five lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, it draws a son\u2019s \u201cyoung life \/ Breaking with laughter from the dark\u201d out of the obscure infinity of causes and conditions that have brought it into being, tenderly makes the child\u2019s fusion of his mother\u2019s and father\u2019s genes a metaphor for the love between them, expresses hopes for the child\u2019s own future and his contribution to humanity and finally contemplates his return to the deep from which he\u2019s come. That it\u2019s a single sentence is no mere technical display: there\u2019s something profoundly satisfying about the way its never-broken unfolding both expresses the poem\u2019s fundamental idea of the interrelatedness of all being and suggests the poet\u2019s acceptance that the totality of a life includes its inevitable ending. At the other extreme, W. S. Merwin\u2019s \u2018Separation\u2019 shows how brevity and grammatical simplicity, by concentrating the reader\u2019s attention on the multiple associations of each word and image, can invite us to meditate on complex ripples of suggestion released by the most economical of statements. Here\u2019s the whole poem:<\/p>\n

Your absence has gone through me
\nLike thread through a needle.
\nEverything I do is stitched with its colour.<\/p>\n

Duffy herself is an original, distinctive but very accessible poet and this is a book of accessible poems. A few express feelings in a way that stands free of any specific context. Merwin\u2019s little poem is one example. Grace Nichols\u2019s \u2018Praise Song for my Mother\u2019 is a piece of pure lyricism. Full-hearted in celebrating the sustaining generosity of the mother\u2019s love, it springs a beautiful surprise in the last line when the mother\u2019s culminating generosity appears in letting her child go when she needs to: \u2018Go to your wide futures, you said\u2019. Denise Levertov\u2019s magical \u2018Living\u2019 achieves its power by extreme precision of imagery combined with freedom from application to any specific situation. However, most of the poems are grounded in specific circumstances, telling or implying particular stories, and this both makes them immediately approachable and adds to the cumulative richness of the book as a kind of anthology of lives in related situations.<\/p>\n

One or two very familiar pieces didn\u2019t seem to me to earn their place. The passage from Simon Armitage\u2019s Book of Matches<\/em> beginning \u201cMother, any distance greater than a single span\u201d seemed over-exposed to the point where it was no longer interesting. Inevitably, given the vast store of good or great poems on family relations, I and other readers would have made different choices to some of the ones Duffy has made. However, her selection creates a collection of diverse, complementary responses to family life that creates a rewarding reading experience in itself. It should also lead readers on and out, introducing them to poets they want to follow up independently. This applies both to the various young poets who\u2019ve only published one or two collections and to older or classic and dead writers. I\u2019d previously read and admired Robert Hayden\u2019s brilliant \u2018Those Winter Sundays\u2019, for example, but reading it again absolutely confirmed for me that he\u2019s a major poet that I really must read more extensively.<\/p>\n

This hardback edition is something of a de luxe production, with each generously spaced poem beginning on a fresh page. This makes it easy to reset the mind between poems, taking each to heart on its own terms at the same time as enjoying the sense of variety, of changing pace, tone and feeling as one reads the book through.<\/p>\n

Empy Nest: Poems for Families<\/em> edited by Carol Ann Duffy. Picador. 144pp.; \u00a314.99.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank the Acumen editors Patricia Oxley and Danielle Hope for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 100.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Empty Nest is perhaps a misleading title for Carol Ann Duffy\u2019s wide-ranging little anthology because it suggests a strong emphasis on the sadder side of children\u2019s growing up. The book does of course include poems poignantly expressing parents\u2019 feelings of emptiness after their children\u2019s departure, including the haunting title piece by the editor herself. Looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthologies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2489"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2494,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489\/revisions\/2494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}