Lifelines by Duncan Forbes

28 Jan 2010

LIFELINES
Duncan Forbes
Enitharmon Press Paperback, pp126;
£10.99; ISBN 978-1-904634-65-2

Phil Sidney

‘Duncan Forbes writes civilised poetry in a civilised way,’ writes one Jim Burns in the blurb of Lifelines, a career-wide selection of Duncan Forbes’ poetry. The phrase is depressing in itself (it’s tempting to ask for Burns’ definition of ‘uncivilised poetry’), but even more so because it restricts the book’s appeal to certain types of reader. ‘Ah!’ they cry, ‘at last some civilised poetry! Let us read it around the tea-table, the better to augment our witty badinage.’ For Burns (and Enitharmon Press, who place his words prominently), it’s in Forbes’ interest to be advertised as a social poet, sophisticated, conservative and safe.

I dwell on this at such length because it cuts to the heart of Lifelines, in both its successes and failures. While Forbes does cast himself in the role of a certain type of (gulp) ‘civilised’ poet—his devotion to metre and rhyme and name-checks of Brooke and Larkin back up his self-characterisation as an ‘anachronistic English gent’ (‘Decent Citizen’)—his best poetry rejects civilisation. In Lifelines’ best poems, Forbes voices discontent and disconnection, observant of but seldom involved in his surroundings. The collection resounds with ‘if’ and ‘as if’, filling with lack the gaps between people, and between the wished-for and the actual: ‘I would have held your hand if such a séance / Could have redeemed ourselves and life together’ (‘On Such A Night’). The speaker of these poems is keen-eyed, noting ‘the gasping metal of a fish’ or ‘the instant of a shooting star’, but this view is only achieved by always standing slightly off, buttoned up in a peculiarly English loneliness. In ‘Uley House’, a lovely description of a bucolic idyll ends with:

It’s country life as Country Life would have it
And I’m so passive or dispassionate
I hear a desiccated holly leaf
Detach itself and fall through leaves to earth.

In the same poem the speaker hears ‘The creaking wingbeats of a wood pigeon / Applaud its exit from a copper beech’, and throughout the collection Forbes leaves Nature to applaud itself while he, as narrator, remains aloof . It is at this deep, personal level that Forbes is at his best, the ‘civilised’ poet whose poems paradoxically enact the shunning of civilisation.

Conversely, it is when Forbes turns his attention outwards that his poetry goes sharply downhill. Whenever he becomes concerned with audience or society, the lyric ache of his best work becomes a glib inanity that’s by turns unfunny and unintentionally funny. The depth with which he explores isolation is replaced by an infuriating lack of engagement with his subject-matter. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two to four-line squibs scattered throughout Lifelines, most of which make a smug, specious point and then leave it on the carpet, as a cat would a dead vole. Here, in its entirety, is ‘Theory’:

In our Greco-Roman youth
We believed in love and truth.
In post-modernist decline
Signifier questions sign.

One can almost hear Forbes’ ‘Aha!’ and the sage nods of his dinner-guests; no matter that the poem makes no sense whatsoever (not least because Forbes appears not to know what he’s talking about). Likewise, ‘Flower Show’ (‘Would rose bushes exhibit if they could / Our sexual organs in a vase of blood?’) gives the reader nothing but the image of a cock in a vase.

Indeed, the poems in which Forbes deals with genitalia or defecation represent Lifelines’ nadir: ‘Tanga’, a poem disapprobating overtight swimwear, is narrowly pipped to worst place by ‘Fifth Column’, a disastrous poem in which Forbes lists synonyms for his wedding tackle to no discernible purpose, while ‘Cat Pepper War’ threatens a neighbour’s cat with violence for fouling the Forbesian flowerbed. These poems never really rise beyond common-room sniggering; it’s no coincidence that these poems are also the showiest, most alliterative and heavily rhymed—Forbes brandishing his wang in form as in content.

It’s frustrating to watch these swings between melancholy and knowing witlessness, particularly when they occur in the space between two poems. ‘Zoological Gardens’, in which Forbes describes with delicacy and sympathy how two elephants are mocked by a watching crowd ‘As if instinctual desires writ large / Are both inhuman and preposterous’, is immediately followed by ‘Target’, a wry and demi-successful account of being shat on by a pigeon. Forbes himself divides his poems into ‘the quizzical aimed to perplex’ and ‘the puerile obsessed with sex’ (‘Fair Copy’), but it’s a shame that a poet who can conjure a couplet as heartbreaking as ‘Tonight began more years ago / Than I could ever let you know’ (‘Vision Mixer’) chooses to lump it in with poems that are heartbreaking for very different reasons . In all Forbes’ explorations of loneliness, there’s nothing as lonely as his attempts to be social.