LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

JOHN MOLE (b. 1941) is an incredibly affectionate poet. His poetry is sharp and worked with precision, but it hides such a warm core of feeling:

Welcome to the cherry  

So unequivocal,

So full

Of itself, so utterly

Not you, not me, with our same

Questions,

The old stones'

Word game

Of this year

Last year

Next year  

Never...

Of Do you love me

As much as...?

Or Who was

He or she?

Or Do you love me less

Than I love you?

Or Tell me something new.

Haven't I heard this?

Welcome to the cherry,

Its white silence,

Its common sense

Its letting be. (The Cherry Tree)

Two lovers sleep and sigh ‘with what is never now’ (When), they shift ‘between dreams’, and

it is like

When the dead awake

To find it true this time

Despite their lying accidentally

Beside each other and by habit almost

In each other's arms...

Love goes a long way beyond. The candles of half-rhyming words light the way. The poem is both shy and very bold. The key to Mole’s poem is understatement, because he is not like the bold Desperadoes who need to shout on the page to wake themselves into a poem.

Even dreams of a dead father turn into dreams of love more than loss. The poet dreams A Different Dream of a place for fathers. It is getting cold in that dream and they slip into a different, darker dream, in which they find themselves standing ‘beside each other, loving, lost/ And very tired.’ Then he feels caught inside the dream calling ‘Father!’ and running to him again and again,

Across the lawn, beyond my life,

My wife, our children, yes,

For a moment as the two of us

Look once towards the house

Then disappear between the cypresses.

The interesting part of John Mole’s poetry is the double value of the word, the simultaneity of sharpness and vagueness, of precision and dreaminess. His poetic idiom is both clear and encoded. He combines Modernism with whatever came after it, and creates a poetry which belongs nowhere but fits the Desperado age precisely in its huge craving for something else.

The Present is a rhyming little song – all Mole’s poems are words for music, but a very personal music – about one of the first memories of the poet as a child: a rocking horse. The whole poem is a rocking horse, rocking between the child’s and the grown-ups’ worlds, between affection and disaffection. Nothing saddens Mole more than disaffection. Nothing is more like him than the subtle music of these rhymes which sometimes deliberately limp (recess-was, bow-show). His is a poetry of the sad smile and the constant feeling of loneliness, ‘the loneliness/ You still remember’ (The Toy Box).

The pattern of rhymes differs from poem to poem. Wind-Up rhymes b-e, c-d. The rhymes are obvious, just like the feeling of loss which comes out clearly. The short poem is perfect, built on a gradation of emotion that leads to the poet’s own loss of childhood, of time, in fact. A Christmas bird ‘has lost its song’, reminding the literary-minded reader of Yeats’ golden bird in Sailing to Byzantiun and Byzantium. The memory is brought down to earth, rendered common and therefore all the closer and more piercing:

And there it looks down from its branch

With empty throat and beak ajar

While underneath the glittering tree

A child who might have once been me

Winds up his brand new car.

Not About Roses offers an explanation of Mole’s secret:

I have never written

A poem about roses

He has never looked for ‘the easiest word’ (which for love would be rose), or the ‘exact’ rhyme. His words are willfully graceless and weigh the poem down:

Harder than that

To say I love you

With the words still earthed

In a dusty soil

So, what choice does a different poet like Mole have other than to write ‘a loving poem/ Not about roses’? The Desperado need to be different at all costs takes its toll on poetry with John Mole, it makes it much clearer and infinitely sadder.

Grammar is a remarkable tool, too, in the hands of John Mole. Going On (with its multiplicity of meanings, from going ahead to continuing, growing old, and finally going to bed, to sleep, to death). The poem has a longer stanza and a much shorter one. The first stanza is made up of descriptive lines, no predicative verbs, no subject. It is almost unclear if taken alone:

Scotch and water, warm,

Medicinal, two tablets

On a little tray, his Times

Tucked underarm, a dignified

But frail ascent, prolonged

Undressing measured out

By heavy footsteps, coughing

Gently not to worry us, as if

A mere polite reminder, then

The silence of the grave.

The second stanza has a subject and the subject’s memory is the key. The once young son, a father now, hears his own son think. The son sees death coming and is not aware he is pronouncing a sentence on his father, as his father had pronounced one on his in his own young days:

And why must I recall this now

As half-way up the stairs

I hear my grown son calling

Going on, then, Dad?

An early night? Sleep well.

The economy of the poem is perfect and its elliptical first part is balanced by a second stanza which lacks nothing in point of grammar. It does not state anything of the real meaning, though, in spite of its crystal clear words. Like all Desperadoes, Mole traps us in his clarity and then leaves us alone – as any good poet should – to figure out what he will not say (which is what he means). He is the poet of the ‘silence/ that nobody but myself could hear’ (When did you start writing poetry?)

The same as Ruth Fainlight, UA Fanthorpe and a number of others, Mole likes debunking, but even there his irony is dreamy, sad. Grandmother’s Advice is a good example of twisting Red Riding Hood’s story into a loveless loss of the Biblical apple (love). Last Look is more direct, describing the memory of the dying father:

He weighed so little. They carried him out

for a last look at the garden.

It blazed with autumn sunlight.

Gently they put down their burden.

Grief, not flesh, was the heaviness.

He asked to be left there.    

‘Troops, dismiss!'   

A flash of the old order.

Nothing to do but obey.

The family mock salute.

At ease. Stand easy.

Go inside and wait.

So little. They watched from the house

for as long as it took

(which was hardest, they told us)

then carried him back.

Some Desperadoes flirt with disdain, indifference, aloofness. Not Mole. He is the most involved poet one could imagine. His feelings are always at hand and we know he owns them all. Why does a Desperado reader need to hold the poet’s hand, and make sure he is looking at the real thing, that the life in the poem is the poet’s indeed? We did not expect that of Browning or Shelley. Whatever the reason, Mole is sure to gratify that expectation. He offers his own world, his sensibility, his universe. His poems are a real, limpid space, where we feel safe, even though hurt to the core of our feelings.

Self-Portrait in Middle Age finds Mole describing himself after thirty years of happy marriage and love:

To have hitched a ride with fortune,

picked up two bright children,

learned a different language over thirty years.

His images of love are all fulfilling, balanced, like a fire glowing on and warming the reader. The Good Husband is uttered by the wife, this time, reminding of Yeats again, with his Chosen, even though the register is totally different. Yeats was desperately intense and driven crazy by the loss. Mole is calm and ironical. The woman giggles and invents her dreams for her husband’s pleasure to interpret them. They make love and have children who in turn have dreams for the husband to interpret,

explaining their dreams at the family breakfast

which started them giggling over the cornflakes

until he felt sure they'd begun to invent them.

The chain of love goes on. The poet is the dream interpreter. Indeed, this is what John Mole’s poems are: dreams rendered in clear words for the reader to start giggling. This is a brief summary of the mood Mole induces.

0The Mobile Rag is a proof of the poet’s sense for music and contemporary technology all in one. The rhythm and rhymes build an amused image of our world, invaded by computers e-mail and mobile phones, but haunted by the music from past times. The contradiction is reconciled in the poem, by the reader’s smile. Times is lost and loses us in the process, and

Even a poem
takes time to be written, spoken...

The poet is in that time and is lost with it, but then so are we. The communion, in John Mole’s case, is perfect.