NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Having read James Kirkup's poetry for several years I came to his new collection, THE AUTHENTIC TOUCH, with high expectations. The poems lived up to their potential — high energy poems of great originality and humanity — presented with a wry sense of humour and laughter at the expense of oneself and one's foibles. The poems have passion, difficulty, risk, that sense of pushing beyond the comfortable, of being forged with a genuine pressure.

FOR WHOM DO I WRITE? the opening poem, is a moving questioning of the poet's need to write and the recognition that though no one may be listening, there is always one "who hears what I say":

	Is there no one there?
	I cannot give up calling
	in case there is one —
	just one — who hears what I say,
	and lets me hear its echoes.

	"On your 85th birthday,"

	"all at the Laburnums wish you many of them . . ."
	Many of what?  It's getting past a joke.

	I haven't the wind to blow them all out
	at a single breath.  They seem to take
	a whole lifetime to extinguish.

THE BODY FARM: KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE recounts the story of the

	Farm of the Dead

	Researchers investigate the exact time of death
	and the conditions of dying in each new delivery —
	in bodies discovered by joggers, ramblers, the police:
	men, women and children assaulted, left abandoned in
	a quarry, a cave, a condemned building, a sunny glade
	by robbers, murderers, deviants famished for sex.

	The only such farm in the world —

	And in the end
	our whole world is one great body farm,
	richly productive, territory of all

By contrast ART NOUVEAU shines strongly with the poet's vision of the immediate, the natural, the beautiful, where the imaginative energy has more scope to be at play. Poems as clear and fully realised as CANICULE, DEATH OF THE SUNFLOWERS, HIGH DIVERS IN BARCELONA, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE, stand out with their open uncertainty, their sense that make the poems bend and twist spontaneously.

In GAME, SET AND MATCH, the rhythm of the voice is edgy, always engaged in seeing more, unable to stop itself. The poem carries a feeling of chill as we witness the two players

	struggling
	to hold back the night

	Their white shapes struggle
	in greying air, that chills as
	they lose their shadows;
	racquets beat their flagging wings
	against the declining light.

	Now that I am old,
	I always know what time it is.
	Even when I waken clueless in
	the middle of the winter night
	I can tell, without a watch, what time it is.

	the rain

	through the long tunnels of
	summer's heavy foliage

	The frail little red hand

	Slow-motion summer's
	lightnings languidly flaring,
	flashing lazily,
	reluctantly, with silent
	sulks in caverns of the clouds.

	Night landscapes — stage sets
	lit by dumb electricians,
	unconscious artists
	illuminating shadows,
	actors in spectral dramas.

Yet the heart of the collection lies not with time, ageing or nature but with the emotional landscape of creativity itself. Personal relationships do not intrude in Kirkup's poems. He writes nothing about the intimacy of family bonds, and more about relationships with artists, musicians and the poets that he plainly admires: Murasaki Shikibu, Mallarme and Baudelaire. In MURASAKI SHIKIBU: WAKA, for example, Kirkup uses the Master's form of tanka to express his feelings at the pain of life and his longings for the time when his body will take its leave "in a wisp of idle smoke":

	The year is ending
	and old age approaches with
	the noise of the wind
	that all night long keeps raging
	within my love-ravaged heart.

	no one knows
	quite what to say to the unknown author
	who does not mind not knowing who you are
	as long as you keep listening to him

HOMAGE TO BAUDELAIRE perhaps expresses best how Kirkup has arrived at a collection of such an even tone of quiet resolution and, if not contented, as least calmly philosophical withdrawal. This poem asserts that life is flawed, yet that in such error lies its beauty. The mistake is evidence of the act of making, and so of humanity itself:

	Boredom, yawning gulf
	of fatal insomnias —
	chasm on whose brink
	the abused soul meditates 
	in appalled resignation.

	Vacant looking-glass
	that always reflects the same
	split enigmas of
	appearance-reality —
	solitude's funeral frame.

	bungling too many
	fistfuls of water —

Kirkup's poems are a privilege to experience, their generosity and musicality complementing and complicating the reader's own truths with each and every read. The poems strike a tone of light, deft whimsicality, but within the wit and whimsy, the wisdom and fine irony, is a ruthless commentary on the human condition.