KARL KNIGHTS
Michael is rounding the corner into Seaward Avenue, driving me home. I am seventeen, asking about performance jitters. Any reading I gave then was little more than a collection of stammers, flubs and sweat bullets. Michael pulled in, paused. ‘Well, trust the poem.’
All his working life, Michael has trusted poems, and poems have trusted him, too. From the off, Michael’s poems have steadfastly steered clear of waffle, faff, jargon. A Laskey poem is full of ‘thoughts that pick you up / and exhilarate you like surf’[1], shot through with what Yehuda Amichai once called ‘the full severity of compassion.’[2]
Sitting across from Michael in his front room, looking over my teenage (bad) poems, he taught me more than he knows. It wasn’t the Michael of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival sitting opposite me, or the Smiths Knoll Michael, or any of the many Michael’s I never knew. There was only the Michael of now, looking over a hackneyed poem, weighing up a word or a comma I hadn’t considered. His example seemed to say, poetry can happen here, too, between cups of strong coffee, amidst Co-op scones, a jar of jam at the ready. Poems didn’t have to be stuffy. Lines could tend to apple trees, or ride bikes through town, as alert to a ‘perfectly delicious’[3] aubergine as to the long ‘drizzle of grief’[4].
Michael’s first full collection ended with this line: ‘The poem still growing.’[5] Luckily for us, Laskey poems are still growing, coming to us in as fine a mettle as ever, just shy of thirty-five years after that first book appeared. Robert Frost, a poet as embedded and at ease in New England as Laskey is in Suffolk, once defined poetry as ‘a fresh look and a fresh listen.’[6] Poems chock full of fresh looks and listens are still arriving. At the time of writing, I owe Michael a tenner for a bundle of Garlic Press pamphlets, but I owe more than that. I owe him a poem, a fresh ‘larderful of language’[7], a poem you can trust.
[1] ‘The Washing’, The Tightrope Wedding, P.29
[2] Yehuda Amichai, ‘To the Full Severity of Compassion’, trans. Chana Block & Chana Kronfield, in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Ed. Robert Alster, P. 75
[3] ‘Aubergine’, Weighing the Present, P.54
[4] ‘Mourning’, Thinking of Happiness, P.61
[5] ‘Cloves of Garlic’, Thinking of Happiness, P.64
[6] Robert Frost, November 1925 Letter, quoted in Robert Frost on Writing, Ed. Elaine Barry, P.80
[7] ‘Rereading’, Permission to Breathe, P.35