LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

CATHERINE BYRON (b. 1947) is one of the poets ‘trapped’ as she says ‘in the wrong dream’ (Night Flight to Belfast). A poem shrieks ‘There is no way home’ (There Is No Way Home), and in By Ampney Crucis a husband (presumably the poet’s) leaves his wife and two young daughters in order to ‘move in with your lover.’ It is an inimical world. The poet flirts with Disappearance, goes to hospital to ‘drink down the end’, but wakes to pain and his face, and tells him:

I won’t be around

for either you or cancer

The body comes back to life and life is more important than pain of the soul, for a moment at least. Maternity, breast-feeding (Let-Down) change the focus from love for a man to love for the child. Then other loves follow (Coco de Mer) and poetry goes on, highly personal and yet creating an impersonal universe which any reader can inhabit. This is the Desperado paradox: be so much yourself that nobody else will recognise you. Catherine Byron gives us her innermost experiences (Allowing the Animal) but she is nowhere in sight because confession would be a sin: poetry is an official recording of only signs of the private hidden hell.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)