LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

JEAN BLEAKNEY (b. 1956) is a poet of melancholy questions. ‘At the hottest August of the century’ she stands on the beach, under the stars, thinking of history and the beginnings of civilization (By Starlight on Narin Strand). The poet is a botanist and Confessions of a Garden makes it very clear. She is a poet of the earth and seasons, of plants and their poetic tentacles. Even love is a floral matching, with the purity of petals and the solidity of roots (The Physics of a Marriage):

Well matched, they say of us. To me it's clear

that symmetry was just the half of it.

Same wavelength I suppose. Yes darling, we're

the ripple tank experiment that worked

and even though the floor got soaked

the pattern somehow held. We knew it would.

Those corrugations clinched. But oh the debt

to synchronicity and amplitude.

But plants are not the only theme of Jean Bleakney’s extremely delicate poems. She has a cosmogony of her own, which governs both plants and humans. Backspin shows us the poet in ‘Mid-60’s... Nine or ten’, riding home from ‘the Sunday run (Warrenpoint)’ in the back seat of the car, dreaming, and having a moment of epiphany, I should say:

I had a sudden notion of infinity

that filled my head or emptied it.

I can't remember which; can't remember

the notion; what's etched is how

the pleasure of the moment left me goosebumped,

hugging the memory of it... something like

the rainbow embarkation point of love

—you can't get under it, you can't dissect it,

you just accept it as the bridge from rain to sun ...

all of which makes me think:

I don't sit in the back seat

half enough these days.

The feeling of infinity, of endlessness, is what the poet experiences every moment in her garden (reminding emphatically of Voltaire’s Candide) – which is also her profession – and which she transfers to paper very aptly. She writes meditative poems about the universe and builds a sentimental philosophy of life.

Sometimes love is an open-ended hope (Dangerous Driving, Why?, On Going without Saying) on which the poet happens too late, or at the wrong moment. Philosophizing does not help, then, real life is needed, and the unrhymed lines become very intense, like a child’s wish:

We'll stand there, basking in irony 

—shortsighted-you and stargazer-me.

We'll talk about more than the weather;

and maybe, so lit, I'll remember

what it was I wanted to say,

something relating to constancy ...

But just for now, here I sit,

stoically inarticulate.

‘Basking in irony’, the poet is the ‘stargazer’ who complains of being ‘inarticulate’, forgetting that she is doing it at a moment of perfect articulation, at the end of a splendid poem.