These poems, which all took a long time to write, continue a thread of development, seeking to weave together personal experience with impersonal knowledge. I tend to speak to the rational mind of the reader. As if to reinforce this, these poems begin with a statement, but once the rational credentials are established and the reader's confidence gained, the poems move into other domains. We start with the fourth poem I ever wrote, dating from 1984.

Archeology

Each day we trample down the present.
Overgrown, it lies forgotten until one day we excavate,
Destroying as we interpret.

So some sites should be left untouched, preserved for later,
For we can only look back once, and we are always moving
Though loving and regret to the morning after.

The past settles, despite it all, becomes compacted
As kitchen scraps adulterate love's scattered petals,
But not all decays, some memories remain, fragmented.

Alone again we recompose their pieces
And surround ourselves with our lives' prized possessions,
Too tired to find fresh blooms to fill the vases.

In this early poem there's loose rhyme and though there's an obvious interest in metaphor there's little obscurity — the whole poem's an extended metaphor where memories are compared to an archeological dig. Parts of archeological sites are indeed left untouched. The romantic ending's not entirely satisfactory.

Some of these traits recur in Misreading the Signs seven years later. Here though, the earlier clarity has gone, sacrificed so that more themes and techniques can be woven in. More ideas come directly from the main character. A single extended metaphor has been replaced by the play of binaries: the spatial and linear, the painted and written, the sign and the meaning. The first stanza's about finding one's way around a city, and how that differs from experiences in villages or undergrounds. The second's about navigating around a painting. The impersonal "we" of Archeology re-appears here in the second stanza, continuing the theme of finding one's way. This impersonal voice becomes "I" by the time the romantic end arrives.

Misreading the Signs

Cities aren't grown villages or underground maps
that lose their colours in the night —
direction matters, not each crooked street.
At night there's no sun to lead you
but satellite dishes all point in one direction.
Rivers help too, giving cities plots to remember,
illustrated by pavement artists: imitators and begging realists.

In these cloistered Amsterdam canals you can't see
the sun's reflection unless, like Vincent, you set
your easel up on bridges, blocking the way. Even he,
when painting a whore, had to show if she was blonde,
if her nails were varnished. Words are too significant,
too few, unable to describe without pointing or denying,
their meaning flicked like abacus beads as we scan.

Sheltering from the rain, I'm led round canvasses.
Psychologists, tracking eyeballs, have confirmed our
predestined route from faces to vanishing points and groins.
Suddenly in front of Woman with a Water Jug, loss depth-charges
the past to the surface. Causality becomes pattern, a loss
of narrative where viewpoints fail to accumulate — Vermeer's
yellow moment expands to fill a postcard, calendar or jigsaw.

I tail the gallery tour through windowless rooms
to the exit and the ice-cream vans, the lowlands where Descartes
and Spinoza fled, their faith but thin disguise.
Looking about, still lost, I see a roadsign saying
it's not quarter past six so instead I walk straight
back into the city that I'll learn to love. It's no longer raining,
just dripping from the trees. It's not too late.

Evolution (1995) again combines science and the personal, the latter gradually taking over to reveal the former as metaphor. The personal aspect takes two forms: the development of the relationship between parents, and the child's development. Though the first stanza is a reasonable enough theory of how wings developed, it could also be a description of an Oxbridge undergraduate — one of the parents, perhaps. The second stanza continues the story of the individuals into the third stanza which has elements from evolution and ontology. These threads are held together through to the end, where the girl, like an evolving insect, is seeking isolation while her parents explore the past, fossil hunting.

Evolution

The first insects flapped stubby, wasteful appendages.
Starved of attention they took to water, became boatmen,
trained every day, blue with cold, each mark rewarded,
returning to the banks with ready wings.

The dinosaur's dunce's hat slipped forward, became a beak.
Tarred and feathered, he was pushed off the college wall.
In that cartoon moment before looking down, avoiding your bold gaze,
he flew. We talked. The rest is history — accumulated detail, not science.

Besides, the eye's evolution is impossible. It must have known
what it wanted, budding from the brain, filling with liquid, saving,
like rockpools, the last high tide, re-opening a fortnight before birth,
the two of us anxious, at the hospital three days early, turned away.

The way synapses change when we learn is an adaption
of the body's healing process, as if ignorance were once a wound.
Even now, there's much we still don't know. Fossil evidence is rare,
the change too quick from lover to parent, baby to schoolgirl.

We dream about the lost flesh, wear smooth what little faith we have,
rediscovering how each step ahead's a broken fall, learning as we go,
buying keep-fit videos, having lost the walking reflex in the first month.
But had we been wrong back then, we wouldn't be together now.

Our daughter's already bored by Punch and Judy, our yearly honeymoons.
She's shy of baring her flat chest on the beach,
she'd rather watch TV while we explore beneath the cliffs, read in the sun.
At evenings her bedroom door's so often shut.

In All we leave behind from 1997 there is again an initial statement followed (rather sooner than usual) by a more personal viewpoint. Compared with previous poems the contrasts are less sharply defined — the personal details less private (no 'I'), the public knowledge more allusive, with a greater contribution from literary theory. The contrasts are between Life and Art, Process and Product. There are more directorial hints to the reader, more 'narrative' to compensate for the more Symbolic nature of the knowledge.

All we leave behind

Foetal gills become the middle ear and larynx.
Old oceans sing to themselves of how all continents were one,
salty sweat our disguise as we lie reading on this private beach.
We've paid so we'll stay, but we won't come again.

It's too hot for Ravel's water; the shattered sun's tinsel imitation
of twelve-tone hangs from the presumed horizon:
backdrop for children building crocodiles,
puzzled by rich fathers' sudden buffoonery.

Beyond them lie uncharted depths, by-ways taken
by eels returning to the Sargasso, ex-pat Muslims to Mecca, and
Spock to Vulcan, as we go ever further to get away from it all,
painting the waves of the colourless green sea blue.

Where will it end, this rhythm and resonance?
Refractions in the bay; reflecting cliffs where waves'
slow ebbing feigns indifference, a change of mind,
before lunging, leaving their pasts behind.

But here on the beach land hesitates into ochre,
rubs against itself for consolation. A wave laps,
then suddenly another supersedes, then a pause.
Froth whispers no memories of prevailing winds.

Persistence pays. The blaring music's carried off,
leaving nappies, newspapers, empty Ambre Solaire.
Tonight there will be dance, tomorrow the carnival.
If we could just listen. If there were pure silence

between here and then. If there were solid rock
and not just rippled sand beneath our feet as we wade deeper
while the moon reclaims its tides, the wind turns
against the waves and the land loses its heat to the sea, leaving,

on the deserted beach, nothing but a
neatly folded pile of pentameters.

In the third from the last stanza there's a lull as Arnold's aspiration fades, Yeats' dancer is yet to dance and Bakhtin's carnival is still to come. There's a longing for silence and certainty. Though waves (a wind effect on the surface) and tides (a more predictable, deeper effect) are compared, no moral is drawn. The poem begins by emerging from the sea and ends by returning to it - less a drowning than a rebirth: purification, the pentameters abandoned rather than standing as a monument.

It would be hard to go further along this trail without losing the contrast between impersonal knowledge and life altogether. Keeping them apart makes for easy analogies, but when the persona is the poet there's no need for the poems to contain two viewpoints — the impersonal "we" and personal "we" can fuse right from the start as they do in this final poem.

© Tim Love (all poems)
The three final poems are from Poetry Nottingham, Other Poetry and Smith's Knoll respectively.