LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

PETER DALE (1938) writes with naturalness, too. His work is a record of a lifetime. His voice is even, his stories are not unusual, he is only uncommon in his use of the commonplace word for the most private and unutterable experiences. He refuses to be pigeonholed, he claims, but he certainly is a Desperado poet in this very refusal to belong with anybody else. Profoundly sensitive and endearing, his poetry is a diary in many ways. It records, among other things, the birth of his first child:

For nine months

I watched my speck of love

enlarge and grow enormous

in the great lens of your belly

till your sleep was broken

by the burden in your lap.

You wanted me

to watch you giving birth;

you said it was a bond between us

your body labouring.

But I knew my work would take me

two hundred miles away that week.

Unable to help

watching pain cram your loins

I'd stand by

cornered in our cramped room

taking your pulse in the doctor's way

and clear you softly as you choked

for gas, not air.

Your fingers

in their pain clutching my wrist

would gain a hold on me

I could not wrest away in dreams or rows.

The butting head that splits you

bears features I once had.

Initiate

of a secret society now

you murmur parturition rites I cannot know,

the breaking of the waters.

And tonight you rest these miles distant;

your time about my wrist. (The Rites)

Dale’s love is both eager and pouting (Retrospect requires ‘I want my time back’). Vigil peers at the sleep of the woman ‘to catch the drift of your dream’. His tenderness is always obvious. He creates in his poems moments of emotion, short several-stanza plays which the reader enacts at ease. Peter Dale’s universe is homely and he never tries to shock, like most Desperadoes. He is calm and balanced in his certainty that he can turn his experience to good verse, whatever the device used.

Besides the lines that do not want to rhyme, there are also those lines which do rhyme, in a quaint way though. The rhymes seem to defy poetry. Envoy is a perfect example:

Fare well, old love, old innocence.

We hadn't much going for us,

except the inexperience.

The guilt, too, was ingenuous.

It happens to anyone.

We never were synonymous.

But we gave it a good run.

There's nothing more to be said.

It was all a bit homespun.

But now I hear that you are dead,

I look out this dog-eared snap:

you with that tilt of the head.

And after that lifelong gap

I'm thinking again of you.

It's only a bit, a scrap,

but it happens to only a few.

And, though it isn't much now,

it's something you make me do.

I'll leave the picture out.

Words match, such as innocence-inexperience, us-ingenuous-synonymous, anyone-run-homespun, said-dead-head, snap-gap-scrap, you-few-do. The music – not shocking at all – and the direct statements (‘It happens to anyone...’) could easily remind of an older generation of poets, if it were not for the last, unrhyming, inscrutable line: ‘I’ll leave the picture out.’ Peter Dale may well reject all classification, since his half mocking

half-earnest tenderness, his half-desired, half-derided rhymes place him in the group of poets who do not really know what is happening to poetry. Something is changing at the very core of his willingly quiet poems. Language is changing masters. The poet is no longer the master of music but the stripper of music from words. Whenever he finds himself musical, he is utterly embarrassed and does not know what to do with his ideas

—so  he builds a tentative Desperado poem.