‘the crack that lets the desert in’

There are some volumes of poetry that seem impressive but oddly out-of-kilter when they are published. It’s hard to see where the imagery and ideas come from, powerful as they are. Years later, the poems cohere, come into focus, as if they had been way ahead of their time.

When I first read ’Drysalter’ by Michael Symmons Roberts, I knew these were good poems (though I thought there were too many of them). Concise, resonant, the best of them haunted my mind with a picture of some sort of catastrophe.

‘Slowly, come slowly, o agents of despair,
paint the skies with portents, number my regrets,
rent me a hotel room, lend me one more night,’

‘You have forgotten all you ever knew: books, doctrines,
symphonies; whole cultures are unwritten. That hot breeze

tastes of nothing. Turn round. Drop to all fours. Now run.’

But I had difficulty with them. In part, I was wary as I always am of books that win prizes. Reluctant to be over-impressed, I register that they are to be admired, without feeling that hey have really landed or gone in deep for me. I also thought the poems were too much enamoured with apocalypse. The sense of disaster felt unearned, with a religious undertow that added to my unease.

Perhaps in retrospect I was repressing my memories of 9/11, the Iraq War, the financial crash. Certainly, ten years later the poems read differently. In the wake of Trump’s attempted coup, Covid, the Climate Crisis and Ukraine the poems feel like accurate descriptions of our world. See the lines from ’Signs and Portents’ above, or these from ’Petition’:

‘What do we want (we cursers in cars, queuing
in hope to get out of the city – cases stuffed
with papers purporting to represent money – ‘

It reads like a volume of poems whose time has come. Perhaps it had already come in 2013. A title like ’The End of Civilization as We Know It’ doesn’t seem so far-fetched now,

‘But what if these are mere nerve tics,
without cause or meaning, and the dream
is less a story than a place, less place than state,
an openness through which the wilderness
will pour itself, a foothold, first step to our towns,
our homes, the crack that lets the desert in. ‘