‘For all the amiable good humour of the voice of these poems, they never stray far from the things that really matter in modern life,’ Bernard O’Donoghue wrote of John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems. ‘The domain of the imagined is always at the service of the world we know, to cast light on it.’ The poems in National Theatre go further, navigating present-day strains and pleasures even as events — driven by national politics and global weathers — alter and define their range.
Other writers — Derek Mahon, Martin Amis — are subjects of notable elegies. ‘Domestic’ poems dramatize, with tact, joy and sadness, the evolving relations between child and parent. All through, art’s place in human days is valued as ‘life swims / into the fortress of a formal device’.
We are very pleased to feature three poems from National Theatre here on East of The North.
National Theatre is published by The Gallery Press and is available to purchase on their website:
Sarcococca confusa, or Sweet Box
Heading back from the flooded footpath to where I’d parked,
between The Old Vicarage and The Green Man —
we’d dropped in for lunch and stayed for a drink —
I was stopped by a smell I placed first as azalea, then jasmine.
But in February? And where? — there was, by the road, just privet,
a potted bay and, back a bit, a prickly holly
out of which, and now we have stepped back and see it,
there peeps an inch or two of slimmer stem, and clustered buds, tiny, creamy
and this feeling — the fragrance a sensation — and the discovery of the feeling’s source
not so much what we search for as, once we trust it can be ours,
what we search with, high and low,
every so often knowing its renewable source, the thing itself.
I am holding it in front of us now, the stem and flower, ready again to drive off
and, for having found it, good to go.
The Fire Officer
The alarm going off and you putting on your coat
and with your book and computer
in your weekend bag already
but stopping at the door to tell me,
‘you are not supposed to take anything’ ,
as I move from the front-desk computer
to Accounts, to the server room,
formerly the reviews and editorial room,
looking for that other book to take, the unopened one.
Then it stopped, the alarm, before we’d even got into the lift
(the lift something else we were not supposed to take)
and we walked back to our desks
and books and correspondence, the silence
echoing through the empty building
as if on an ordinary December afternoon
we had indeed died and gone to heaven
while rain poured down outside on the white statues of Cross Street.
One Place
I’d met him for years at the school gate,
tall, shambling, fair-haired, but had no name
to put to his face when I saw him on a park bench,
standing up as I approached, enjoying his own
Tuesday ‘hiatus’. I asked what he did
that allowed him such afternoons. He was not the kind
who declares ‘I prefer not to be defined by work’,
explaining how a survey matches a contract’s black and white
to, say, an overgrown, culverted quarter acre.
I knew the place he meant. Rights of way, ancient lights —
another term I knew, from a poem. After years in one place
he’d made contacts, was freelance, his wife
full-time, a head, the youngest gone to high school,
explaining these afternoons, and why I had not seen him
at the primary of late. He has time now, he says,
when he reviews the jobs he gets, to factor in
all sorts: how a nearby bridge brings together, in iron
and rust, a view of a river, the name of a local warden,
a golf course and the main road to the airport.
And he misses nothing about his old institution,
its tense recoveries, its suddenly changed relations:
there, to ask a question was to get only a reputation
for asking questions. He never gives a second thought,
he says, to missing out on the current boom,
the city looming, a metal forest,
fortunes gambled on each dead cert development . . .
Now, for houses, he says, like yours or mine, he looks longer
at things others would confess they have not seen,
even as the world is more and more like an altered
photo of itself. There are drones for my line of work,
he says, edging his foot on and off the footpath,
drawing a sort of line in the earth as he does so,
a plot under his foot that he points to,
a yellow-green example he scrubs
from the park’s larger brown and green and grey,
as the gusty little and large of spring rain
reminds him — it is too late for me to ask his name —
to say goodbye, he must collect his daughter
as I must mine, so we walk into the familiar gloom,
lights coming on in the houses at the perimeter.
