Poems for Susan by Arthur L Wood
In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast
In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest
In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove
In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall 1842
There can exist a rather thoughtless inclination to locate the romantic as a particularly feminine concern, and in that, especially, with young women.
If one peers a bit deeper, young men more than hold their own, if not out-do the other gender, in the depth of, the oft times overwhelming, romantic feelings they experience.
Tennyson might have got it wrong with ‘lightly’.
Poems for Susan by Arthur L Wood is a collection of poems whose theme is a meditation on the author’s relationship with the eponymous Susan. It is, also, a primer for Romantic Poetry. And, for the most part, the male lineage of the form.
That said, the Archaic age Greek poet-ess Sappho gets a name check in Poem 49, Forgive the heart that loves; a poem that, fittingly, attempts what so many Romantic poets had a go at, which is to construct Sapphic stanzas in English.
And like that other Sapphic legacy embraced by the Romantics, the work contained in Poems for Susan is confessional. We learn a great deal about how Arthur Wood feels about Susan, and the effect she has upon him, but very little of Susan’s take on things. This does raise the problematic nature of the female ‘muse’ in Romantic poetry. It is rather ambiguous, alternating between the medieval symbol of purity preserved by death that is Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, 1833, and Keats’ medieval representation of sexual danger in La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1819.
The poet here, to his credit, by and large, steers clear these misogynistic tropes. The Susan that emerges in these poems becomes less an idealized figure and more a gateway to maturity and fellow traveller on a path to enlightenment.
Poems for Susan opens with Preface in Seven Parts, a seventy stanza tour-de-force of enclosed rhyme quatrains. This bravura performance serves as an overview of the project; and as an introduction to the author.
Part I of the Preface brought, to my mind, the feel of Dylan Thomas’ paean to lost childhood, Fern Hill, 1945. While sharing the pastoral idiom, in this case it is not nostalgia for the prelapsarian Eden of a child’s endless summer but rather noting the loss of an adolescent’s feckless Arcadia. (This then is Tennyson’s, young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.) That ‘Et tu in Arcadia ego’ moment when the shepherd’s discovery of a tomb puts paid to the heedless partying and dalliances with woodland nymphs.
Right away this work is doing what ‘good’ art does. Besides achieving the magical, and rather slippery quality, of being somehow ‘greater than the sum of its parts’, and establishing a correspondence with the reader’s own experience; it gives rise,also, to novel considerations.
For instance, for this reader, wondering about the circumstances, and the age threshold, that one first experiences the feeling of nostalgia.
Returning to the Preface in Seven Parts, the author moves on in Part’s II and III to relate the existential hell that follows the discovery of the innate hollowness of the merely physical. The following four parts are a story of recovery, apparently brought about by the application of liberal doses of Romantic poetry, and Susan.
The poems that follow the Preface delineate Wood’s feelings for Susan by channelling various poets and poetic formats. Besides the Romantic’s usual suspects; Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats; there are nods to, amongst many others, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Gerald Manley Hopkins, T S Eliot and, especially W B Yeats.
This from Poem 41:
And with the eyes of Blake I see the widening Gyre,
And this, the opening line of W B Yeats’ The Second Coming, 1920:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
This is clever on Wood’s part as, arguably, The Second Coming is the most Blakean of Yeats’ poems.
There are, as well, to be found echoes of Bob Dylan and David Bowie.
While this ‘spot the influence’ does provides a certain amount of entertainment, it can sometimes prove a distraction.
Occasionally interspersed in the lines of these homages there are references to our contemporary world and instances of modern vernacular. They serve as a counterpoint to the general ‘old-fashion’ language employed by the author.
This is sometimes subtle:
No different to the grandest sight of Salisbury Spire
Or crypt where Gormley lately lurks and sometimes swims
Poem 41
(It somewhat helps here to know that the reference to Gormley concerns a statue by that artist of a contemplative standing figure located in a crypt under Winchester Cathedral that occasionally floods to depth of a few inches.)
Or, sometimes slightly jarring:
And like a little churchyard mouse
I prance about a serious sight
And find some meaning in the day
Only to be scorned at night,
Fifteen press-ups every day
Cardio three times a week
Yet I have no time for what they say
For pure infinity I seek.
Poem 67
There is an intensity to these poems that arises from the youthfulness of the author. It brings to mind Dylan Thomas, again, in this line from his prose piece, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, 1950:
…; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars.
In Arthur Wood’s case, rather than merging with the Irish Sea, it would likely be the immersion into Keatsian Water Meadows along the River Itchen.
One gets the sense in this volume that the author has worked through his Romantic poetry indulgences and it will be interesting to see what will emerge next.
A wealth of poets throned above
Gaze upon our fledged love,
They gaze, they nod, and wisely see
How love grows to tranquillity.
Poem 39, Poems for Susan
This ‘older’ reader found a welcome antidote in this collection to the recent craze of ’ Instagram’ poetry. The authors of which would seem to seek to achieve the epigrammatic wit, and profundity, of the likes of Emily Dickinson, E E Cummings, William Carlos Williams, or, even, Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash.
The results of these efforts tend to be anodyne bromides of the sort one finds in self-help manuals and greeting cards.
That they fail, one rather suspects, is due to the authors likely ignorance of the aforementioned writers.
Arthur Wood, on the other hand, knows the work of his forebears in depth and is able use that understanding to transcend that influence.
Poems for Susan is self-published by Wood and, given that, is admirable in its quality. The cover artwork, also by its author, shows a facility for the visual to accompany his obvious one with words.
As of this writing there are still copies of Poems for Susan available to purchase directly from the author for £15.