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In this episode, Dr. Paul Monk features a selection of poems from his recent anthology, Love on the Road of Life. This collection is dedicated to his lifelong companion, Claudia Alvarez, and celebrates their deep, 20-year relationship lived largely across continents. Paul credits Claudia with having been the catalyst for him embracing his identity as "a writer and a poet".
Key discussion points include:
The Poetic Vocation: Monk shares the preface to his anthology, framing the work as a story of their relationship and a "thank-you note" to Claudia for convincing him to abandon being a businessman and step into his authentic self as a writer and a poet.
Literary Context: The discussion opens with a quote from William Waters on the lyric address, setting the stage for poetry as "intimate conversation".
The Frodo Moniker: Poems reflect on his childhood, shaped by Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which led Claudia to affectionately dub him "Frodo Baggins".
Childhood Influences: Early work recalls pivotal moments, including receiving a biography of Stalin on his 12th birthday and his "reckless" 1975 manifesto for self-actualisation upon dropping out of law school.
Volcanic Texts and Mortality: Philosophical poems draw on the ruined library of Philodemus of Gadara beneath Vesuvius to question the endurance of his own work and contemplate mortality.
The Alma Mahler Pitch: Reciting "Our Ringstrasse moment," Monk recounts Claudia's bold declaration that she is "Alma Mahler" and that he is destined for greatness, likening their struggle to a Mahler tragedy that finds its way to companionship.
Existential Therapy: Poems like "Shrovetide" and "Finding the Clearing" are "tributes to what we've accomplished," reflecting the emotional and psychological difficulties of building intimacy and overcoming their "mutually tortured gaze".
Geological Metaphor: Using travel as a catalyst for verse, poems employ complex metaphors, such as linking their distance and union to the tectonic collision of continents (Silurian) and the Panama Canal linking oceans.
Victory of Love over Pain: The anthology includes poems written during his metastatic melanoma diagnosis, with "The Secret Key" suggesting his defiance of poor prognoses was due to Claudia's love.
The Poetic End: The poem "Percy Bysshe Shelley" serves as a tribute and a declaration of his identity as a Romantic poet, celebrating the living of a "poetic life".
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
Dr. Paul Monk on Poetry (Part 3): ‘Love On The Road Of Life’, for Claudia
Recorded in Melbourne, 14 November 2025
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:38)
Welcome to Bloom, a podcast about anything and everything. I'm fortunate to be joined today by my dear friend, Dr. Paul Monk. Building on our latest recording of poetry, today's episode will feature a selection of poems from Paul's anthology, Love on the Road of Life.
This work is dedicated to Paul's friend, Claudia Alvarez, with whom Paul has shared a deep and rich relationship for the past 20 years, while living on opposite sides of the world. As he has said in more than one podcast, Paul credits Claudia with having opened the door to him becoming a writer and a poet. Paul, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:39 - 1:16:34)
Thanks, Nick. It's great to be back, and this is a special occasion. Claudia, as I think I've remarked, as you say, in more than one instance, said to me many years ago, in a context I'll never forget, that I am, or ‘You are’, she said to me, ‘a writer and a poet’, and should embrace that, while there's still time. You only live once.
We had been living together at that point, but she decided ultimately she needed to return to her home country, Venezuela. I was grief-stricken when she left, but I understood that she needed to, and I came to terms with that. Over the years since then, I've written her a lot of poetry.
I'll share 30 of the poems this afternoon that I've written for her during that time. But I'd like to start by actually sharing the brief Preface I've written to this collection [of 100 poems], which directly addresses her, but it's worth sharing because it opens up the context in which the poems were written and the spirit in which they'll be recited.
Let me, however, launch into that with a brief quote from William Waters, whose book Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address, published in 2003, I just happened to have read for the first time before Claudia arrived in Australia. And it's one of a handful of books about poetry that have had a profound influence on me. On the page one of that book, he wrote:
To whom does a poem speak? Do poems really communicate with those they address? Is reading poems like overhearing, like intimate conversation, like performing a script?
That, it seems to me, is the context in which not only have I written poetry since then, but the spirit in which I address Claudia in this Preface to the poems I selected from the ones I've written for her, and as an introduction to the poems that I'll share this afternoon.
The Preface reads as follows:
Claudia, Claudia, I am writing this in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections in Venezuela, in which Nicolas Maduro, roundly defeated, nonetheless, like so many of our neo-authoritarians in the 2020s, simply denied defeat and is clinging to office by force and fraud. This book is the story, in poetry, of our own vote on life since 2004, at least as seen through the eyes and recorded by the pen - or at least the typing fingers - of your writer and poet.
The poems, of course, are no more than a set of snapshots. They're not by any means all of the poems that knowing you has inspired me to compose over 20 years. They do, however, arranged in this form, seem to me to offer a striking overview of how we have come to know each other, overcome the usual difficulties of two people building intimacy and trust, and then explored the world, both intellectually and culturally, in each other's company.
This book is for you, though for the time being it will lodge in my domestic archive. It is part of a project in which, as I enter my late 60s, in indifferent health, plagued by half a dozen ailments, I am going through all my old papers and putting my archived life in order. There will be books of poetry, like this one, books of essays, selected letters, academic papers, and designs for film drama, as well as a three-volume memoir, if I can find the time to write it.
But you, and therefore this book, hold a special place in my life. To you, as much as to anyone, I feel I owe a debt of love and gratitude for having been a catalyst inducing me at long last, before it was too late, to embrace being a writer and a poet, rather than a businessman who did some writing on the side and lacked belief in himself as a poet. That was now close to twenty years ago. In that time I have authored a dozen books and hundreds of poems. Well done, you!
As you know, one of those books was the highly personal and idiosyncratic attempt at a novel, Darkness Over Love: A Complete Fiction, in which, starting with a cathartic outpouring of memory and fable, I slowly invented us as Fenimore Monaghan and Margarita Henderson y Mendoza, two free spirits who travel the world and form a rarefied bond.
You have urged me in recent years, ‘Why don't we go back and finish this story?’ What a use of a first-person plural! I don't know whether I will be able to do that now, but as I remarked to you some time ago, it has become clear to me that that entire undertaking was a massive psychodynamic exercise in which, after your departure in 2007, I sought to reframe my whole sense of who I am. You responded at the time, ‘I know’.
It was some years later that all these poems were written. I think of them as the fruit of my reframed thinking. This book is a thank-you note for your love and your example. The first few of these poems, though not the first in the book, were written in 2016, when I was on my way, via Israel and Malta, to visit you in Venezuela for the first time, ‘In Jerusalem, last week.’ Then, when I was with you in Caracas, ‘No water on Avila, Hugo’. Then in Brazil with David Speakman, ‘The pact we've formed’, ‘Time and Naipi’s hair’, and ‘São Paulo on foot.’ Those five remain, I think, even now, among my best poems. A victory of love over pain.
But it was after we travelled via Boston, Washington and Rome to Marrakesh, in 2019, that my poetry took over my psyche and I began to write as if I truly was a poet. I'll never forget our misadventure, on landing in Marrakesh, to discover that the authorities there would not allow you into the country. I had to get you on a midnight flight back to Madrid and book you into the Only You Atocha, where we had stayed on a visit to Spain together. You were so composed.
My fieldwork in Morocco over the following week was a rich experience and may yet bear fruit, if I can persuade a big Hollywood studio to produce my drama for television or live streaming, The Falcon of Spain.
Visiting Tangier was a seminal experience. What a history that city has had! But it was as I flew back from Morocco, via Frankfurt, that I felt the sense of a flood of poetry arising in me as if a dam was about to burst. That was the turning point, I believe.
Most of the poems in this book were written after that experience but the flood began with a massive series of nosebleeds just as I arrived in Singapore. I have always been tempted to interpret them as the physical manifestation of what was happening in my psyche, but they were so serious that I had to concentrate on stanching the flow of blood before I could embrace the flow of poetry.
When I did, on my return to Australia, I harvested the fruit of the years. I found myself able to write poems looking back all the way to my early childhood. The magazines and books that had shaped my imagination and had me long to travel and learn about the outside world. It's striking that I had not done this before then.
It was you, in 2004, who, listening to my tales of early reading, dubbed me ‘Frodo Baggins’. It was you who insisted, in many conversations between then and 2019, that I am a writer and poet. And so it is to you that this first outpouring of poetry is dedicated.
It's true, of course, that I had written poems before you entered my life, most notably my sonnets which were being prepared for publication even as you flew into Melbourne [in May 2004] to do the JFK seminar. But looking back, I now think of them as the final phase of my poetic apprenticeship. You called me on to aspire to more, to vary my repertoire, to read modern poets. You gave me Neruda's first book of poems. In other words, there is a history behind the present book which goes back many years. A history in which you have been a key figure.
The fourfold division of this book is an attempt to show how the whole story played out. Scenes from my life before you arrived, though written under your influence and with you in mind; your arrival in my world and your desire to share my life; our travels abroad, or a few moments from them; and reflections on what it all means.
We have, you know, trod together, even if only lightly, on every continent except Antarctica.
Africa, very lightly, since we boarded in the airport at Casablanca, then arrived in Marrakesh, only for you to be turned away. But wherever we have flown and strolled, the experience has been intense. Think of Toledo and Cordoba, of Boston and Washington, Paris and Rome, of Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, Venice, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Panama.
There are poems here, of course, reflecting on how difficult it proved for us to live an intimate life, simply to be able to give expression to those difficulties and to argue, even so, that we came through them thinking, learning, growing slowly closer, over the course of two decades, seems to me to have been a significant achievement. Where so many lovers fail to find a way, we created a way and have become loving companions on the road of life.
Poetry that is any good should trigger daisy chains of collateral memories and meanings in the reader's mind, by association and synaesthesia, all the more so in poetry read by a person for whom the poems were written and whom they address. I hope that will be so for you in these pages. It will, I should imagine, be especially so in certain cases, notably in parts two and three. And of course, there are far more shared memories between us than I have come close to expressing.
You will see that the final three poems in part four reflect on: Noelia's passing away, ‘Fermi's paradox’ (with the idea that, however empty the cosmos may be, you and I are not alone); and ‘This book is Chauvet Cave’, which is itself an invitation to read the poems as paintings from the deep past by mysterious artistic hands open to interpretation. I well remember reading Jean Klotz's book on Chauvet Cave and feeling inspired by it to write this poem.
I think this selection and presentation are better and more personalised than those in The Three Graces, in 2022. And I've decided to include a set of photographs from our travels in this special archival edition. As things stand, the book will lodge only here in my archive, but I hope in due course to be able to print and bind a copy for you and give it to you in person in the same half-Morocco [black and gold buckram, actually] form. May that be so. May it be in an open and creative future.
The first poem I'll read is called ‘Beyond the Borders’. It's about the Shire in Tolkien. The reason I'm starting with ‘Beyond the Borders’ is because it's about hobbits and the Shire in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And very early in our relationship, when I was sharing with Claudia my enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings, which she had never read, she dubbed me ‘Frodo Baggins’, which was very touching. She still calls me ‘Frodo’. So this is about how I acquired that interest in The Lord of the Rings and in exploring the world of Middle-earth, as it were.
Beyond the Borders
I think my path was laid when I was ten,
When I first heard ‘The Shadow of the Past’,
Which awed my ears with things beyond my ken,
And, from that time, has held my child-mind fast,
Recurring ever in my dreams again.
Beyond the River bordering the Shire,
There called the Wild, outside its homely edges;
The lure of mountains high and ever higher
And Elvish books that made me solemn pledges
Of knowing the tale of Middle-earth entire.
Frodo looked at maps, and so did I,
fascinated by their empty spaces;
For Shire maps intrigued the curious eye,
Displaying mostly white in foreign places,
Provoking a young hobbit's mind to pry.
But ventures out beyond were long delayed;
The interim spent in questioning Dwarves and Elves,
Or other strangers who had haply strayed
Within the Shire's bounds - to salve themselves
Against the Dark that on white spaces preyed.
Those refugees told many a direful tale,
That Frodo pondered, at his Bag End hearth.
They spoke of things to make a hero quail,
Of lengthening shadows over Middle-earth,
And fears that soon, at last, the West would fail.
Little of this, of course, had reached the ears
Of ordinary hobbits in the Shire,
Much less the Ring, a sum of Gandalf's fears,
Or Frodo's need to find the Mount of Fire.
But these things shaped my mind in after years.
The second poem I'll read is ‘Uncanny Gift’, which also takes me back to my childhood, which, in the poem, I'm, as it were, sharing with Claudia. And that is that I had asked my parents to give me a copy for my 12th birthday of Isaac Deutsch's biography of Stalin, which they did. And it's a reflection on, you know, looking back at that, it seems frankly strange that a little boy would ask for that book and that his parents would give it to him. But it, like The Lord of the Rings, for a very different reason, really shaped my young mind.
Uncanny gift
How does a boy of eleven years,
Not yet out of elementary school,
Still in short trousers,
With voice unbroken, chin unbearded,
Find himself irresistibly drawn
To books like Deutscher's Stalin?
Yet I was, and look back now, in wonder,
At the very copy gifted at my own
Request, no less, by young parents.
Yes, signed over, in all innocence,
This dark weight: ‘Happy birthday,
Love from Mummy and Daddy.’
From Mummy and Daddy, with love,
On a famous Trotskyist rendering
Of that tyrant's monstrous life.
What possessed the boy to ask;
His parents to so lightly give
A gift of this portentous nature?
It wasn't a whim on the child's part,
That's clear, since he - my junior self -
Had autonomously reached out already
And bought himself the life of Mao,
And Werth's De Gaulle into the bargain,
And Moses Finley on the ancient Greeks.
That was uncanny enough in a child,
One has to say, pondering such purchases now.
But the giving, with love, of Stalin?
That quite takes an old man's breath away.
That's why I've always kept that battered book,
Long superseded, in awe and wry wonderment.
You may have noticed, dear listener, by now, that the poems are of approximately the same length. In fact, they're of exactly the same length. Each poem is 30 lines, though stanza lengths vary. This is a form, as it were, that I invented in the first poems that I wrote, as mentioned in the Preface, and decided to stick with, so that there'd be kind of symmetry in the set of poems I was writing.
The next one is called ‘My Private 4th of July’. So we catapult from when I was 12 and reading Stalin to when I was 18, had left school, started Law School, and then dropped out of Law School, writing myself a manifesto, which has shaped my life ever since.
My private 4th of July
July the 4th, it's true, is claimed by others:
A feast day of a well-known public kind.
I honour it with our American brothers.
On liberty, we're - mostly - still aligned.
But privately, in fact, I celebrate
A rebellion that was mine and mine alone.
And which occurred, by chance, on that same date,
When I quit Law and struck out on my own.
Upon a sombre Winter's afternoon,
While brooding over some unfinished paper
That had to be submitted pretty soon,
I decided I'd have done with that whole caper.
What the paper was, I can't recall,
Only that a mood took hold of me
That made my basic legal studies pall:
A cocktail of ennui and anomie.
Who was I that they'd urged to study Law?
Where, in fact, did I most long to go?
Restlessly, I hungered to do more,
And so, I started dreaming, like Rimbaud.
I'm out of here, I recklessly decided
There are other things I badly need to know.
Abruptly, I then vowed that I'd be guided
By an improvised, inspired manifesto.
I'll read and think and travel around the world.
I'll learn to love and plumb my true desire.
I'll study, only once my flag’s unfurled,
Then master things that truly light my fire.
With that, I left the paper where it lay
And set the course I've held until this day.
You may have noticed as we go that while each poem, being 30 lines, you know, takes approximately the same amount of time, the stanza lengths differ. The metre tends to be uniform, tends to be pentameters. The rhyme patterns vary, and sometimes there's explicit rhymes, sometimes there's mixed rhymes, slanting rhyme. And this is me simply being free and inventive. I stick to 30 lines not because I have to, but because it suited me to do so.
It's just a decision I made.
The next poem is called ‘Book Bindings’. It's about how I decided, years ago now, to get a number of old books that I'd inherited from my parents or grandparents, or a great aunt in one case, rebound to preserve them. They were up to 100 years old by then, and they were literally falling apart. So I had them rebound in [black and gold ] buckram with fresh embossed titles, with a reader’s ribbon and a stitched spine, and I'm very pleased with them now. They'll last a good while now, unless somebody carelessly disposes of them, after I'm gone. The poem is just a reflection on what these books mean to me and what having them rebound signified to me.
Book bindings
I took possession of some fraying family books
And, on a loving whim, rebound them in new covers:
Dark blue for the history tales of childhood,
Vividly remembered in all my waking dreams
for the pictures of venturers and heroes
Like Little Marco, previously evoked.
But long before him, henge-builders and hunters,
Boadicea and the Roman legions at war,
Alfred and the settlement of Angleterre,
William called the Bastard and the Conquest,
And on and on, as far as Nightingale –
All graced together now with a golden ribbon,
Movable between prose tales and drawn dreams.
Just as, in the tawny covered volume
Which lay, a lifetime since, within my father's hands.
The many coloured maps in that old book,
when I was still a child enthralled my roving eyes.
Now a scarlet ribbon, red with history's blood,
Moves, from the dissolution of the Roman Empire,
as the venerable title still proclaims,
down to the present time which meant,
through each edition, up to my father's schooling,
the era of the Great War and then of Hitler's rise.
But in burgundy rest the finely printed works
of Shakespeare, dated 1910, and signed
Robert Fitzgerald, Springhurst, a century ago.
While, in a stately black, with golden reader's guide,
sits the poetry of Tennyson and, written just inside:
Springhurst, again, and the words ‘Presented to
Katie Fitzgerald and the date: 21-3-11.
The next poem is called ‘How to Use Our Tongues’ and I think I have recited this for Nick in an earlier recording some years ago, but it draws on a wonderful passage in the Odyssey in which Odysseus himself has arrived back but in disguise and the undercurrent in the poem is a reflection on the very nature of poetry and how Western poetry has developed over millennia.
How to use our tongues
There is a passage in the Odyssey
In which the beauties of Icmalius' chair
Are brought before our eyes
Almost so that we, in wonderment,
Like its fabled footrest,
Find ourselves mortised in the frame,
Draped with a heavy fleece
And listening, as Penelope
Instructs her house help, Eurynome,
To seat the guest for story.
Imagine that fine Icmalian craft
And conjure, in your mind, the scene in which
Penelope, in her own voice, declares
I wish our guest to tell his story whole
And patiently to hear me out as well,
As I'll be full of questions point by point.
I want him, seated in our polished chair
To tell me of his travels in good time
For this stranger, who has come into our halls,
May know somewhat of Odysseus himself.
All poetry is such Icmalian chair:
its music mortised into practised frames;
Mellifluous rhyme and artful assonance
Cast over it, like Homer's softened fleece.
Through aeons, both these crafts have been refined,
Since earlier than Gilgamesh or Ur;
And they have fitly shaped the conversation
From Pindar's odes to Martial's epigrams
Of all that we call prosody or verse
And taught us better how to use our tongues.
The next poem is called ‘Reading Orlando’. Orlando is a novel by Virginia Woolf and, for the first time, here, really I'm more directly addressing Claudia, because I think she has many of the characteristics, less of Virginia Woolf than of Vita Sackville-West, who was actually Virginia's lover and who was a remarkable character and writer herself. Orlando was a tribute by Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West. The poem goes as follows:
Reading Orlando
When, at last, I chose to read Orlando,
You were a constant presence in its pages,
Garbed in Marousha's trousers, for example;
Arriving, at our ghostly assignations,
Alone, but cloaked and booted like a man.
Marousha, you'll recall, was very striking
Orlando's eye was swiftly captivated,
His youthful amour instantly aroused
By the really quite extraordinary allure
Which issued from her whole seductive person.
But that's not half the reason that I found
Your charismatic presence in the book.
It's how and why the novel was conceived
and dedicated ‘To V. Sackville-West’ –
An epistle to the gender-bending other.
And, more again, for both these women grew
In households centred on a father's library;
The Sackville one at Knole, that Vita knew,
Virginia's the hoard of Leslie Stephen
To which, by her account, he gave her access.
Each in girlhood greedily devoured
All these worlds of letters could divulge
And so acquired a longing for distinction:
To find a place among the mostly male
Authors of the prized, mysterious classics
You breathed with me, as I read every page,
Like Wolf and Sackville-West, we too conspire
To revel in a liberated age,
To engender novel narratives, inspire
All those observing us upon life's stage.
The next poem is called ‘Philodemus and I’. Philodemus of Gadara was a Greek philosopher, who settled in Herculaneum, beneath Mount Vesuvius, and practised philosophy; writing and teaching. When Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, he was long dead, but his library was still there in that villa, and it was buried under ash and pumice. Iin the 18th century, archaeologists began to unearth Herculaneum, and they found this remarkable library.
The problem was that all of his books - hundreds and hundreds of them - had been, as it were, fossilised by the ash and the pumice. But, as it happens, now, using 21st century techniques, specialists and archaeologists are trying to discern what's in those scrolls, without destroying them. That's a fascinating story in itself, but the poem is more a reflection on the very fact that he had this splendid collection. He was a first-rate thinker and his books were buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. What does that mean for us all?
Philodemus and I
There's a library that was found at Herculaneum.
It belonged once to a sage called Philodemus
Of Gadara, but he was no Gadarene swine
And, when I think of all his books, I think of mine
Because of his interests
He was a philosopher of Epicurean leanings
Epicurean, that is, in the uncaricatured sense
of serious atomism and its many implications
Though more in terms of ethics than of physics:
the science of mens sana.
He studied for a while in Alexandria
Where he made friends, then moved to Sicily
But his atomism, there, caused some offence
And so he settled on the bay of Naples -
Beneath Vesuvius.
There, in a splendid Roman villa,
His collection of the works of Epicurus
and learned treatises regarding all the schools
Of classic Grecian thought, in countless scrolls,
Long outlasted him.
Until the famed Vesuvius erupted,
And all his books were buried deep in pumice;
But, in our time, much has been recovered.
Its learned range and quality are striking
As with my collection.
What most arrests my scholarly attention
Is that these ancient books were found at all,
Not lost like many others in Rome's fall
For centuries after the eruption.
Weil mine endure?
There's a sister poem to that called ‘Volcanic texts’, which takes that last line and reflects on it a bit further:
Volcanic texts
‘Will my books endure?’ I've come to wonder,
In thinking of the scrolls of Philodemus
Recovered, so the scholars have informed us,
From the ruins of Herculaneum
His many hundred damaged papyri.
Clearly, what I mean is, books can vanish
As have all the books of Epicurus,
All the works of great Democritus
And the scholarchs of the Epicurean Garden.
Even of the famed Apollodorus.
But let's allow a subtler view of things,
Reflecting on the scrolls that were recovered.
The way that the less damaged inner parts
Of his and of his sources treatises
Have been retrieved, to our enlightenment.
Isn't that what all interpretation,
All close reading, all true comprehension;
What we call hermeneutics, aims to do
With any book, in whole or treasured part?
Don't texts, if they endure, require such art?
So it would be with any work of mine:
It might remain on silent library shelves
Unread, neglected, dust begrimed, forgotten;
And, if so, would be like the pumiced scrolls
Long immured, at Herculaneum
But, should a curious soul, by any chance,
Stumble on an archived tome of mine
Its inner core and endings would require
Quite as careful hermeneutic treatment
As the long forgotten works of Philodemus.
The ninth poem - and we're now in Part Two of the four parts of Love on the Road of Life - is about the moment in which Claudia pitched to me, if not proposed to me, saying she wanted to share my life. It's a treasured moment. It's called ‘Our Ringstrasse moment’. The background to this, although the poem is largely self-explanatory, is that she declared herself to be Alma Mahler. For those unaware of who Alma Mahler was, she was a beautiful young woman in Vienna, at the turn of the 20th century, 125 years ago, and she rather fancied being married to Gustav Mahler, who was, or appeared to be a romantic figure, because he was the director of the Vienna Opera and a great composer.
So she did what a beautiful young woman does and she got her man. They married, and then she discovered that, though he was a great composer, he actually wasn't particularly romantic. He loved her, in his own way, but he was very immersed [in his own work] and really expected her to be a kind of Hausfrau, which she wasn't happy with. So she ended up having a variety of lovers and she left him and married Franz Werfel, a novelist and then left him and married - now I'm going to forget his name - oh Walter Gropius, of the Bauhaus School an architect.
So, when Claudia says she's Alma Mahler, I on the spot I was both impressed and bemused, thinking ‘So, who am I? Am I Gustav, am I Walter, am I Franz, or someone else in your sublime beguine? The poems about that:
Our Ringstrasse moment
That was quite a pitch you put to me
Walking north in sunlight, years ago
It's graven, still, upon my memory
In words at once so colourful and bold
That even now they win my wonderment:
‘There's something that I have to say to you
And that is this’, you suddenly announced:
That I am Alma Mahler and I know
A genius when I see one. You are set
To do things of which I want to be a part.
Or words to that effect, without a stammer:
Fully formed and confident as if
You’d meditated long upon the thought,
As we strolled, so freely, through that southern spring
Our own Ringstrasse and surrounding streets
‘Alma!’ I almost burst out with a laugh.
‘Are you for real? As in Tom Lehrer's song?
Am I then Mahler, Gropius or Werfel?
Or someone else, in your sublime beguine?
Alma? Ah! You took my breath away!
We've had, since then, of course our replica
Of Alma's life with Mahler, in Vienna:
Two girls and many compositions, right?
A love that struggled long to find its way,
Then rose, at last above their tragic fate.
For you've been less the Alma of Vienna
Than the muse I'd long for - more than for a wife:
My anima, my soul the gift of life,
Who, since she would or could not simply stay
Has raised me up to dream and fly away.
The tenth poem is called ‘The taste for books’. One of the great things that Claudia and I quickly found we had in common is a passion for reading and ideas. I need to say, one of the things that I found most appealing about her is she's very intelligent and articulate even though English was her second language, so this poem it draws again on Virginia Woolf and Orlando but it's very much about the idea of being well read, being highly literate, being immersed in the world of books and ideas.
The taste for books
You and I succumbed, from early childhood,
To the affliction that the droll Virginia Woolf
So mordantly suggests must have infected
The colourful Orlando, in his cradle,
Wafted out of Greece and Italy
In the floating spoor of asphodel,
The bane of knightly vigour and ambition
Of pedigree and masterful volition,
Enfeebling hand and eye and noble tongue,
Sapping vital instincts in the young.
The love of literature is a disease,
Slyly quoth that wolf in writer's clothing,
Which, of its fatal nature, substitutes
A phantom for reality, such that
The likes of the young baronet Orlando
Lose any sense of their inheritance
And so neglect their pleasures and their duties,
Besotted by the squiggles on a page
That the lordship and the fortune they've been gifted
Dissolve among their books into a mist.
Yet it has been quite otherwise with us
Who, lacking lordship of Orlando's kind
And granted strong immunities from birth
To those conceits that addle noble brains,
Absorbed into our blood the potent spoor
And turned the fateful germ of asphodel,
Which so depletes the force of feudal houses
Into the stuff of our transcendent dreams
Of well-informed and boldly free opinions –
A greater wealth than manors or dominions.
The 11th poem is ‘Proust's Way’. For those who are unfamiliar with Marcel Proust, perhaps even the name, he was a French author, who died at the age of 50 [51, to be precise – in November 1922], after a long lung disease. The great achievement of his life - to be strictly accurate the only achievement of his life, really - was that he wrote an immensely long novel [of some] 4,000 pages called In Search of Lost Time, sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past.
Claudia, as this poem remarks, knew of Proust and knew of the novel rather better than I did when she and I first met. It was only well after she left that I myself, when seriously ill, read In Search of Lost Time and found it thoroughly beautiful and stimulating. So this poem is a reflection on that background:
Proust’s way
You, my love, and no one else,
Unless, perhaps, it was Roger Shattuck,
A year or so before you first arrived,
Introduced me to the world of Proust.
You used to claim, to my bewilderment,
‘ I am Odette de Crecy’ - with a smile.
But, strange as it now seems, all the while
I thought you said ‘Odette the Crazy’.
You, my love, and no one else
Not Shattuck, much less de Botton,
Must have been, therefore, the very first
To murmur Proustian nothings in my presence.
You, however, did become Odette –
Hence some poems I wrote you, years ago,
About lost time and feeling I was Swann,
Conversing with Marcel, beside the Seine.
You were long gone, when I actually read
The whole six volumes of the masterwork
While ill and all but corked, like Proust,
Dwelling on remembrance of things past
You, if no one else, will understand
How passages from each volume now inform
The Proustian reworkings of my life
The autopoiesis I'm embarked upon.
When, in Swann's Way, Proust wrote of floating flowers
Or, in the pages of Within a Budding Grove
Compared bewildered love with lack of causal science,
Or when, in Sodom and Gomorrah, he described
The Luxor obelisk as pink nougat, the Moon a bitten orange,
He wrote for me and you and no one else.
Poem 12 is called ‘My Apricot’. Again, it's fairly self-explanatory, but it's a bit of a favourite of mine for sentimental reasons. I think, as these poems have gone, they've become more and more intimate poems, directly addressing Claudia, as distinct from sharing with her tales from my past. This one's a very intimate one.
My Apricot
We've come quite a distance, haven't we,
Since you left a note for me,
Which I've always kept and always will,
That commences ‘Dearest Frodo’ –
Un nom d'amour that's tacitly explained
Of course, within these lyric pages,
And which concludes ‘A Kiss, Your APRICOT’?
That, all on its own, is testimony
To the freshness of the love you bore me then.
It's moved me every which way ever since.
But down the lapse of time and from afar
You've indicated that, by invitation,
You gave a talk, at an Opus Dei villa
On the highest and most abstract of all themes:
Thinking and Being, in a cocktail lounge.
Ah! That's my wondrous muse!
My first thoughts were of Heidegger,
But then the Bec-de-Gaz came back to mind:
Simone de Beauvoir's colourful account
Of Sartre, Aron and herself discussing
Phenomenology in that Parisian bar.
And, here, an apricot came into the picture.
‘You see’, young Raymond Aron said to Sartre,
Indicating, Beauvoir claimed, in Prime of Life,
An apricot cocktail sitting on the table,
‘If you are a phenomenologist,
You can make philosophy of actual things like this.’
Sartre turned pale with emotion, Beauvoir wrote,
‘For here was just the thing he'd longed to do!’
And here we are, beloved APRICOT,
With just such work now being done by YOU!
The thirteenth poem is called ‘Festival of promise’. Again, this is this is addressing Claudia, quite directly and it's about our shared vision, well after we'd actually separated, as to what life was really about, what we’d shared, what we could do together:
Festival of promise
You are so supremely full of life –
It's evident in all you do and say –
While I incline to fatalistic gloom,
Defying odds, to die another day.
But given that we both love Zarathustra,
Let's reflect, in passing, on his claim
That each of us should seek the kind of death
That's less an accident than choice and aim.
This doctrine still sounds strange, the prophet said:
That one die neither early nor too late,
But seek instead to hallow what one's lived for,
Rather than accept some random fate.
A festival of promise to survivors
Is how he'd have us think of our demise:
An artful end, a dignified conclusion,
Consistent with one's life in other's eyes.
The doctrine's quite astringent, let's agree.
Zarathustra scornfully allows:
The passive and superfluous recoil
From the kind of death free spirits should espouse.
All too many live and all too long!
Would that storms would shake them from the tree!
A ripe and timely death is for the strong –
The self-possessed, the purposeful and free.
Give all you have, in homage to the Earth,
Bestow on it the honey of your soul;
Throw yourself towards your chosen end
And go down with the sun fulfilled and whole.
I think that almost all of this rings true –
But stumble over what it means for you.
The 14th poem is called ‘Shrovetide’. This and the following poem are about the emotional difficulties, the interpersonal struggle, that we had to really build a partnership, particularly from a distance. But I think they're strong poems. They're both tributes to what we've accomplished, not angry accusations or despair:
Shrove Tide
How did your emotional tenacity
Ride out the chronic unhappiness
Of living with my sexless gloom?
That's years ago, of course, another life;
But tears and anger came back then –
For you felt trapped: an unloved wife.
‘We're just like two old people’, you declared
Once, mournfully, ‘Who've lost interest
In one another.’ To which I simply gloomed.
I knew not how to love, or rather,
To desire with love and innocence;
Having been too often burned.
While you, starved, you thought alone,
Of mother love, hungered so intensely
For unalloyed, demonstrative affection.
What tangled psychic knots
Bound our being then, withholding us
From both simplicity and joy.
Still, most knots have been loosed or cut,
By years of existential therapy, in which,
I suffered keenly your remembered pain.
Could I rewind the closely ravelled rope,
Gathering in the past for better binding,
I'd gently spare you all those inner chafings.
I'd weep for both our knotted pasts
And, letting fall the hair of grief,
Baptise our psyches in the purest love.
But we've been shriven by the passing years.
Your vivacity won out, and my pure thought
Has salved our psyches, dissolving all our fears.
Poem 15
Finding the clearing
I couldn't give you happiness,
But only abstract thought
And so our ancient married life
Quite quickly turned out fraught.
Yet you'll agree, in hindsight now,
that each of us was caught
At unawares, by complexes,
Which neither could unravel:
Moods and fears and traumas past
That bound us up and dimly cast
Our fates on roads to travel
Whose course nor ends could be foreseen
Iin any determinate time or fashion;
So that faring them or finding them
Baffled foresight, imposing indeterminacy.
Yet each of us held to subtle things
To which we were inclined to cling,
As lodestones of our fumbled intimacy:
Memories of bright sayings past;
Moments that shone or ached;
Perceptions of profounder possibilities;
Glimpsed through the prisms or lenses
That mediated our mutually tortured gaze,
Out of the thickets of love long lacked;
For what each of us somehow still conceived
Might yet arise along the shadowed roads,
Might yet break out into a bright clearing,
Might, after all, enfold our psyche's fates
In the very dance of awakened being
That we now so improbably enjoy.
The next poem, the 16th, is called ‘Extra floral nectars’. It returns to the theme of the nature of intimacy and uses a particular metaphor about flowers and ants to point to what I found most attractive about Claudia and what had me persevere in the relationship and write poetry for her and grow to love her authentically:
Extra floral nectars
There was a century since a botanist
whose work has been neglected and forgotten
who corresponded quite extensively
with the master naturalist Charles Darwin
on what to make of extra floral nectars
but their views were diametrically opposed.
Now why would I, my extra floral love,
Given our extensive correspondence,
Raise this subject here, in poetry,
Dig up Federico Delpino,
As if he held a lure for you or me;
As if his memory promised pollination?
Well, Delpino, don't you know advanced a theory,
Neatly published in a monograph,
About the lure of myrmecophilous plants,
Three thousand species being listed,
Which use their honeyed extra floral nectars
To entice, addict and subjugate the ants.
Ants, of course, are drawn to floral nectars,
Since nothing attracts insects more than sugar;
But many other subtle chemicals
Within these nectars, such as alkaloids,
Manipulate the guileless myrmeces,
And render them the servants of the plants.
Your extra floral nectar, sweetest love,
Like the decoctions of acacia plants,
Those master myrmecophilous ant seducers,
Drew me to you, but your alkaloids,
Your subtler charms, are what addict me
To generating verse as your Delpino.
The 17th poem is called ‘The secret key’ - a reflection on the impact that Claudia had on me when I was seriously ill with melanoma and particularly metastatic melanoma. That she was so loving, so concerned, so in touch, even though living on the other side of the world, I believe made a difference to my surviving the disease and recovering.
The secret key
Life takes its toll and wounds appear
Where most we’re worn;
And, if the toll’s severe,
Rents are torn or tumours born,
Or wrought within the fabric of our being.
So it's been with me for many years,
And so, as you well know, the good physicians
Have excised from my plagued body, many times,
The feral cells that bid to overwhelm me;
Or have fed me wondrous chemistries instead.
All this, no doubt, has saved me from demise,
Allowing me to write my recent books,
Permitting me to travel far and wide
At intervals between or grappling with
Lamenesses and months of sheer exhaustion.
But pneuma may have been the secret key
That's opened up the door to a longer life
And had my surgeons wonder at the ways
I've long defied their worst prognostications;
Despite the odds in population data.
Quite why this has been so, it isn't clear,
Which leads to Hippocratic conversations,
Such as those with my good doctor, in Brazil,
Of how he'd love a bottle or to clone
My immune defiance of the said disease
Yet, could they reproduce the biochemistry
That’s held the line in limb and lymph and groin,
I doubt they'd find the subtleties they sought;
For they, perhaps, derive from pneuma's arts:
Whose wondrous workings YOU have catalysed.
We're now in Part Three of the book and we begin with a poem called ‘Lord Byron's travels’. Claudia and I had begun to travel quite widely ourselves, by then [2017 or 2018], and I took the opportunity to read Lord Byron's very famous and very long poem ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’, which is about his travels in Europe. We’d travelled far more widely than Lord Byron, but he wrote well and so it [his long poem] gave me the opportunity for a poem of my own, for Claudia.
Lord Byron’s travels
Lord Byron's travels took him far afield,
Though not as far as I have been with you.
But, more important, we still have the yield
Of what Childe Harold saw and gave its due:
From Lisbon East - in cantos one and two.
His countless observations sparkle still,
Attributed to fictive Harold's eyes.
His learning and imagination fill
The mutest landscapes with such rich surmise
That hidden meanings constantly arise.
Thus stanza 39, in Canto Two
Hails lover's leap, where Sappho took her leave
On Cape Leucadia, as Byron knew,
And he, a poet, still saw fit to grieve
In gliding past the Lesbian's ancient grave.
The later, longer Cantos, Three and Four,
Take Byron down the full length of the Rhine,
Past relics of the tyrannies of yore,
Through Switzerland, then to the Palatine;
With Venetian interludes - and Florentine.
At one point, as he skirted Rhenish towers,
The traveller paused to praise the deep blue eyes
Of peasant girls, who brought him lily flowers.
He called their simple world a paradise –
In all except the absence of his lass.
Quite late, in Canto Four he came to Rome
(As we shall, now - two centuries since his time).
He hailed the mighty ruin as Europe's home,
Lamented its prolonged decay in rhyme –
And so completed his Romantic climb.
The next poem, the 19th is ‘Margaret Island Budapest’. This was written at a time when Claudia was still living with me in Australia, but I was abroad on my way to run a seminar for the CIA in Washington, and she wasn't with me. I passed through Rome and Budapest on that journey, briefly, in each case; and I wrote this poem about the heart of Budapest and the beautiful island refuge and haven for writers, in the middle of the Danube, between Buda and Pest.
Margaret Island, Budapest
You should have been with me in Budapest –
My journal makes it clear I'd wished you were –
To walk with me, across the Széchenyi Bridge,
To gaze from Castle Hill across the Danube,
Stroll along Andrassy Avenue
And enter, in some awe, St Stephen's Square.
But I was passing through en route to Washington,
To run some workshops for the CIA;
And so as I explored the ancient city,
(Well, not so ancient, just a thousand years)
And breathed among its monuments and beauties,
I vowed I'd bring you back with me one day.
The Danubian Grand Hotel, on Margaret Island,
The geographic heart, they say, of Europe,
I noted as the perfect place to stay
‘With Claudia, as a writer and a poet’ –
In the charming old Franciscan convent there
Long since a house for writers and their muses.
Did you know that all the Isle is filled with roses:
Two hundred kinds, in odoriferous gardens,
Beautifully kept, among plain groves?
And that the convent's founding abbess, Margaret,
Is celebrated annually, on her birthday,
With holy mass, held in the open air?
Conscious of the picture Lukács painted
Of the city, as it was when in its prime,
And Frigyesi's book on Bartók's Budapest,
I sat beside the Danube lost in time –
As poets and historians will do –
Absorbing what I long to share with you.
The 20th poem is titled ‘Pantheon’. Claudia and I finally did get to visit Rome, and I wrote a handful of poems for her about the experience, which was very special. The Pantheon, as many of you, presumably, will know, is a very old, very well-preserved building, in the heart of Rome, which is a temple to all the planetary gods.
The original design and expense were by Marcus Agrippa, the great general and military backer of Augustus. Then, some two centuries later, the Emperor Hadrian had it refurbished. But he still left it ascribed to Marcus Agrippa, which was generous of Hadrian, who had quite an ego himself. I guess he must have felt that he had built many other things and so he didn't need to take away Agrippa's name from the Pantheon. This is a reflection on my visiting it with Claudia
Pantheon
We reached the fabled Pantheon at dusk,
Meandering down from the Borghese Gardens,
Where we'd lingered on the Pincio,
Discoursing on the Villa of Lucullus,
As the sun declined above the Vatican.
We made our way past Trinita dei Monti
And through the crowds, upon the Spanish Steps,
With passing thoughts of dying Keats and Shelley,
we cast our coins into the Trevi Fountain
Then came, at last to the Sanctissimum.
Remember Nietzsche's mad man sagely asking,
When hauled out from a church for having chanted
His requiem for the eternal God:
‘What are these buildings, now, if not the tombs
And sepulchres of what we thought divine?
In just that spirit, surely Hadrian,
The Empire's ruler, at its apogee,
Reconceived what M. Agrippa built;
Bequeathing us a truly stunning shrine
To all the seven planetary gods.
But, as with other monuments that day,
What most impressed itself upon my mind
Was less the awesome structure, in itself,
Than your naively beautiful response
To all the layered meanings of that space.
And how, in Catholic pews, beneath the dome
That Michelangelo himself described
As the work of nothing less than angels,
We sat by candlelight and spoke in earnest
Of all our deepest thoughts and future plans.
The 21st poem is titled ‘Being in Rome’. Of all the poems I wrote for Claudia, about spending time with her in Rome, this is probably what you might call the most existential and, although it spells this out internally, it's worth remarking, before reciting it, that one of the high priority places I took her to was the Baths of Caracalla, which I'd been to quite a number of times, while she'd never been there.
I was confident that she would find it awe-inspiring and she really did. I took a photo of her -which is what actually inspired the poem later - just gazing up at these soaring arches and these ruinous immense walls of brick, which have stood for 1,800 years, in a bathing complex which could accommodate in its prime 1,500 bathers simultaneously. That, when you think of any contemporary bathing establishment, is simply mind-boggling. And the Baths not only had these hot, tepid and frigid pools, but they had running tracks and glades where people could sit and talk under trees, they had meeting rooms they had massage parlours. They were a place where you could spend entire days. The ruins of this is what we visited. It was a wonderful thing to be able to share with her.
Being in Rome
If they document our lives at any point,
That day in Rome will surely have to feature,
Although, in fact, the ‘they’ don't do such things –
Neglectful both of being and of time.
Will even we agree on what took place
Between Testaccio and the Arch of Constantine?
Here's my take, beloved, for the record:
After croissants, at the Café Barberini,
We set, off past the ruined gates of Paul;
I gestured at the mass of Aurelian's Wall
And spoke of where the Gothic camps had been
But led you on across the Aventine.
How much did I relate of that Hill's tale,
Conscious of our evanescent parsing?
I mentioned Roman mansions, I recall,
And their looting, on the city's fall,
My mind aflame with histories that I knew.
But what do all such histories mean to you?
Beyond that one of seven fabled Hills,
We came, as we had purposed, to the Baths;
And there, as I had hoped, your awe awoke.
For there the soaring arches that remain,
The hints and hollowed haunts of ancient marbles
Sighed ‘ROME!’ to you, with all that that implies.
I've written of the Baths of Caracalla
And been immersed in their imagined glories.
I've dreamed, for years, of concerts in their gardens;
Of Shelley's sojourn there and other stories;
But your gratitude and shining, chestnut hair
Have quite transformed my sense of being there.
The 22nd poem is titled ‘In Jerusalem, last week’ and in fact, although it sits more than halfway through the book, it was the first thirty liner, the first poem in this set, that I wrote. It was written after I'd been in Jerusalem. I was on my way, via Malta and Munich and Lisbon to Caracas, to visit Venezuela, in 2016, for the first time. It really just captures an experience I had, walking around in Jerusalem, and it clearly addresses Claudia, who I was on my way to visit, in Venezuela.
In Jerusalem, last week
In Jerusalem last week,
Meandering in the German Colony,
I crossed Masaryk Street –
Named for a defenestrated Czech
Of liberal democratic disposition,
Murdered by communist thugs
Three years after ‘liberation’,
If one can call it that
From the Holocaust and Nazi rule.
Does that defenestration ring a bell,
In Caracas at this time?
Would you say that that quiet
Naming of a street in,
Of all places, the German Colony;
In of, all places in our time,
Jerusalem of the knives and scissors,
Rings a bell for all democrats?
I felt so, passing by in peace,
And, then, I chanced upon
A simple, flowered balcony
Above the Hebrew road
That slivers, river-like
Through the German Colony;
And felt, at once, a curled up
Intimacy and partnership with you:
There was a nook for two minds
Breathing liberty and high aims;
A retreat for warmth and love –
In Jerusalem last week –
But we are now in Caracas.
The next poem ‘No Water on Avila, Hugo’, which is the 23rd poem, was written not in Caracas, when I was there with Claudia, but a few days later, when I'd flown on to Brazil. But it's about an experience we shared in Caracas, where Mount Avila is a public park in the heart of the city, which had been nationalised by Hugo Chavez and, in consequence, like all too many things that get nationalised, it had run down. Due to the mismanagement of the economy, one of the things that had given way was the water supply in the public park.
There was no bottled water. It had proven difficult to import given it, the way the economy gummed up and, so in, you know, in a public park you couldn't get water. I took that up as a diatribe or an indictment of Hugo Chavez, in his pretences to be a liberator and a good manager of a country that had everything it needed to be prosperous and had been relatively democratic.
No water on Avila, Hugo
‘Chavez vive!’ cry your posters in the streets
And from the sides of buildings daubed
By artful Cuban propagandists, where
Your vulgar signature is scrawled;
Your narrow eyes peer unblinkingly
Down upon the criminal scene
Of rank impunity and shameless agitprop,
Lengthening queues and smart bachaqueros,
Bartering in nearly worthless bolivares
For the country you've made insolvent.
There is no water on Avila, Hugo!
Sign off on that, high upon the sides
Of futures, looming beyond your ken.
Boast of this Bolivarian achievement,
You paragon of demotic braggadocio!
Neither bottled nor running water -
In a nationalised park overlooking
The very mausoleum of your stolen hero;
Overlooking Chacao, where your crony
Aristobulo took his gated mansion.
No water on Avila, you stupid bungler!
Brownouts and breakdowns on all sides,
Shortages of medicine, soap and oil;
And now a loony-tune bus driver
Calls out ‘Chavez vive!’, as he runs
Venezuela over a social precipice.
This, you blockhead, is ‘revolution’?
This is the price of Bolivarian socialism!
But your lot are clueless about prices:
Of water, oil, foodstuffs, justice, anything!
The next poem the 24th is called ‘The pact we've formed’. I spent a week with Claudia, in Venezuela, then I flew to Brazil. I was on my way to the International Cancer Conference with my surgeon and I began in Rio. I'd never been to Brazil before and I went from Rio with the surgeon, David Speakman, to Brasilia, to Iguazu Falls and to São Paulo. This poem was inspired by two things: the magnificence of Rio de Janeiro and the conversations I'd had with Claudia, in Caracas and Valencia, about our relationship – after, by then 12 years.
The pact we’ve formed
Six years ago, in Kirchner's Buenos Aires,
You turned to me and said, in a quiet tone:
‘Look carefully, at all you see around,
Since this, as cities go, in all the Cone,
Is the finest and the grandest that you'll see.
It's all downhill in quality from here!’
But how, in saying such a scathing thing,
Could you have failed to take into account
Great Rio, with its beach and circling hills?
For once one's breathed the air of Ipanema
And heard Brazilian music in the streets,
I have to say, one takes a different view.
I drove in from Jobim, by private cab
And revelled in a pulsing sense of place.
Confessing to imprisonment in English,
I told my man, in halting Spanish phrases,
That all the world finds Rio fascinating;
As much, in truth, as any city known.
He answered me, in swishing Portuguese,
With warmth that showed he'd plainly understood
The root and sense of all I tried to say.
He pointed, then, to Corcovado Hill,
Upon which stands the giant sculptured form
Of Cristo the Redeemer, as he's called.
But it was not the sculpted, looming Christ
That made me feel redeemed on Rio's strand.
It was, instead, Atlantic Avenue:
The beauteous sweep of Copacabana Beach;
Its contrast with the grimness of Caracas –
And the pact we've formed for bravely thinking big.
The next poem 25 is called ‘São Paulo on foot’. I went to São Paulo for the cancer conference with David and we took a city tour. We had many conversations and strolled, looking at street art and so forth. It was a memorable time and, at one point, on my own, I took a long walk and this is quite a modernist poem this one, but I trust nevertheless fully coherent. It's just my reflections as I walked São Paulo on foot.
Sao Paulo on foot
Avenida Paulista was once a country road
Cut along a high ridge, looking toward
The hill where sainted Anchieta and his Jesuits,
Centuries before, built São Paulo
To evangelise the ill-fated Guaranis.
Who would guess, from present evidence,
That it had then become
The boulevard of the coffee barons,
When Jardim, east of their height,
Was still a Botanical Garden?
Who would guess now, among the
Serried towers of glass and steel,
That they are so new in provenance;
That this overwhelming conurbation
Is the construction of two lifetimes?
Yet, down Avenida Paulista, yesterday,
I took my way, past all the towers,
Wide-eyed and photographically conscious,
Like a Guarani with a camera;
Blessing myself in the names
Of all my most tutelary deities;
Casting my vision like a net
Over all that was redolent,
Coloured, vibrant as sea creatures,
Or scarred with social meaning,
With signatures of opulence or inequity,
From Consolação to the Casa das Rosas,
Capturing, in that net, the myriad tokens
Of shimmering, arcane thought worlds
displayed on newsstands in Portuguese –
With you dancing in all my senses.
The 26th poem is called ‘Time and Naipi’s hair’. I think I mentioned a few minutes ago that David Speakman and I visited, among other places, Iguazu Falls, which is a spectacular and beautifully maintained nature reserve. The falls themselves are every bit as spectacular as Niagara Falls. After reading a little of their history and the mythology surrounding, them I wrote the following poem which clearly again addresses Claudia.
Time and Naipi’s hair
There can be no finer metaphor
Of the flow of time tumbling
Over the cataracts of all that is –
Of all that is the case, let's say –
Than the majestic falls of Iguazu,
Where three far borders meet.
Above the falls, I briefly stayed,
Ensconced in a bubble of luxury:
The Belmond Hotel das Cataratas,
Giving me the freedom to contemplate
The rich purity of the metaphor;
Breathing the air of time's flow.
The stones there remember Pangaea:
She who was the supercontinent
For aeons, until the Great Dying,
When Eurasia and Gondwana split,
Furrowing the lands in new ways,
Sundering life's archaic past.
Such time has lapsed in these waters;
A lush confluence of Eden and geology,
Where the Old World's mythology,
Swallowed by the devil's throat,
Mingles with the Caiapangue legend
Of Taroba's love for Naipi, long ago.
The river god, M’boi, was owed
Annual sacrifice of a lovely girl.
Taroba defied that and was shaped
Into a tree watered by Naipi's hair –
A tale that might have flowed from Ovid
But is now ours, my love, to share.
The 27th poem has us in Geneva.
At the Restaurant Casanova
We were seated in the Restaurant Casanova
With a panoramic view across the Lake;
And so, at intervals, as we conversed,
Could gaze upon Mont Blanc's iconic heights
With all their fabled pasts of poetries,
With all their connotations of prestige:
From Wordsworth's meditations to the climbs
By Mallaby, rehearsing Everest.
But we were there to scale our own Mont Blanc
And both envisaged Himalayan exploits.
That's what's always made our love enticing:
Your bold insistence that we both think big,
Not regarding merely basic things –
Like money, or a villa in Provence –
But heights requiring real imagination,
Like political reform in Venezuela,
Or the composition of a classic book.
It was because we spoke of things like these
And the implications of the Panama Papers
That Mont Blanc itself remained a mise-en-scene.
But afterwards, returning to our lodgings,
You quite astonished me when, in our cab,
You sang ‘If You're Going to San Francisco’ –
Having asked, quite whimsically, that it be played;
And sang it with your wanted innocence,
So that all the conversation we had had
Was wafted off to when young Scott McKenzie
Had imagined, back in 1967,
That promiscuous sex and wreaths of flowers
Would bring about the fall of earthly powers.
Poem 28 is called ‘Agreement over piña coladas’. It captures a little occasion where Claudia and I were in Panama together. We found this rooftop bar where they sold the cheapest the largest and the most delicious piña coladas either of us had ever tasted. We were looking across the water to the business centre of the city and reflecting on two things: the nature of our relationship and how in a sense we were like the two Americas that were linked by the Panama Canal, the two oceans that were linked by the Panama Canal. We used these as metaphors for saying that we were reaching to each other across the world and it was a very special relationship.
Agreement over piña coladas
No one else, I bet, has sat in Panama,
As we just did, my beauty;
Well-seated, at Tantalo's rooftop bar,
Sipping the most generous of piña coladas,
Conscious of the history of the Isthmus,
Freshly reminded of its geological,
Or more precisely, its tectonic past;
Conscious of its twofold global function:
Linking continents, linking oceans
And feeling all this in our fingertips;
Conscious of our being there as Dasein
Drinking in all this as our experience,
In animated talk and loving glances,
Bringing all our past into those hours;
Projecting it into our pondered futures.
Didn't we concur, at Tantalo's;
Didn't we design a fresh agreement:
Looking from the old, colonial world
Across to all the towers of the modern;
Didn't we acclaim the tectonic movement
Which drifting over mantle, underwater,
Over the wide Earth, brought us here?
Didn't we acclaim the very Isthmus
As our own bridge, our vibrant metaphor
Knowing the place of bridges in our lives,
Knowing the poetics of our crossings,
Ever since we bridged the Rio Tajo,
Fording it from opposite directions?
We’d dreamed, but there we drank,
Tantalised by all that lies beyond.
Poem 29, the second last, is called ‘Archaic Earth’. It's related, in a way, to ‘Agreement over piña coladas’, because it's a takes a geological metaphor and uses it to sketch let's call it a heroic vision, a dream vision of how Claudia made me feel and the nature of our relationship: how I wanted to be inside that relationship.
Archaic Earth
In the prehistory of our present intimacy,
Casting about for how to leap the void
Open at my feet by your flight,
I conceived our love as all of life on Earth
And fancied I was some Silurian Nureyev.
Of course, I couldn't dance! I was a cripple,
In almost every sense and, not least, sexually.
Dance with my flat feet and shattered heart?
Nureyev? My antinomy! My shadow!
But Silurian? Ah! That's the secret clue!
You'd come to me from another continent,
Challenged me to see my own anew;
Then changed your mind. So up and off you flew.
But our continental shelves, our inner worlds,
Had collided like two vast tectonic plates.
That is where Silurian leapt to mind,
Out of Deep Time and all that is the case.
And Nureyev, my counter-self, my avatar,
My lithe persona, fleeing from the Bolshoi,
Danced across the Panthalassic Ocean.
He danced me back four hundred million years –
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring upon Gondwana,
When life was just emerging first on land
And our two present continents were fused
And you were Life and I was not confused.
There you pointed to the mystic scene
And took my hippocampus to its shores ;
Where sea gods called out, ‘Dance for all the world!
Dance, emergent one, for all you’re worth,
On nascent limbs on the archaic Earth.’
I'm going to conclude with a 30th poem called ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’. I identify quite strongly with Shelley, for a couple of reasons. He was a passionate poet, a romantic poet. He was a poet who wrote in English. He died young, which is something I can't achieve. But he wanted to see political reform. He kept the company of Byron. He lived a colourful life. He wrote fiercely in defence of poetry and imagination. He wrote Prometheus Unbound and almost set the theme for the dream of industrial civilisation: that it could really set humanity free. So this poem is a tribute to Shelley and it's I think a fitting end to this particular recitation, because it's me in a sense celebrating being a poet and addressing that celebration to Claudia.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley died when he was half my age
And left behind a monument of verse.
He perished reckless, as he'd lived
Heedless of rede or storm warning;
But passionate he was in prosody.
Sprung of the Sussex squirearchy,
He learned his Latin and was gifted Greek
From childhood, at fabled Field Place.
Fabled, I write, since it was Tudor,
Save for its belated Georgian wing.
It harboured many mysteries and attics,
As well as arbored gardens full of life,
Where boisterous Bysshe adventured;
Returning thence with wild imaginings
Confabulated for the ever-eager ears
Of his young adoring sisters;
As, in like manner, he affected Alchemy,
Plunged his febrile brain among strange books
And annotated them with horned sprites.
He was fey and broke with his stayed father –
Not least on account of a brutal schooling
That instilled in him a turbulent character:
At once a leveller and violent in disdain
Of all that might advise, accost or thwart him.
His liberty he loved and roamed abroad.
Described, in his most memorable verses,
Are the fall of Ozymandias, King of Kings
And Prometheus Unbound, defiant hero.
He revelled in Caracalla's ruined Baths.
Then, tempting fate at thirty, died at sea.
Well, so that's thirty of a hundred poems. I've enjoyed reciting them. I look forward to Claudia's response to them, but I hope that you, listener, whoever you are, have found them stirring. Each will probably appreciate different poems but it's wonderful to be able to write poetry, to be able to share poetry. The manifesto I wrote for myself, half a century ago, was that I wanted to be a poet, I wanted to be able to inject poetry into my life, to live a poetic life. Claudia, of course, urged me to fully embrace that. That's the origin of this book and of this recital.