Edward Baugh speaks on Passages

 

LAUNCH OF WESLEY GIBBINGS’ PASSAGES

(The Observer Board Room, 31 May 2019)

 

Prof. Edward Baugh reviews 'Passages'

The title of the book is Passages.  Since that isn’t the title of a particular poem in the collection, we try to guess where it is taking us, for the word may have various meanings.  As we read, we find that most of the poems deal, in different ways, with comings and goings, sometimes between one person and another, grappling with the idea that these relationships are never fixed or conclusive.  The situation is one of moving towards, of passing, of passing by, of moving away, of inconclusiveness, of ending, of endlessness.

 

So, in “Shadows,” “the shadows born one day ago / are hunting lights, / the forms that put them there / long gone / behind a spaceless sky.”  In “That Time Has Come,” the persona tells us that the “time has come,” presumably to arrange for departure:  “We have waited long enough / The tide has turned / The ship is in.”  He will put his house in order, rearranging the books of poetry on his bookshelves.  “The time has truly come / For old diaries with blank, unturned pages / City streets with tired feet / To flee the frame.”  In “In the End,” “the streets are bare / we greet each other / with knowing, lonely / eyes // And we say goodbye.  Goodbye. / Goodbye.”  The poems make us think; they tease thought.

 

Here is “The House:”

 

              It was a house

              Of many absences

 

              Dust settled on her bed

 

              Outside, the green of mountains blue

              Inside, the shadowy dim of things we knew

 

              I met you here

 

              This empty house

 

              Echoes spliced between silence and quiet

              Nothing etched with nothingness

 

The first poem in the book is titled simply “The Poem,” and it may be read as a prelude, speaking to and for each poem, prefiguring the mind-frame and drift of the collection.  The poem, in its way a love poem, shies away from making any great claim for itself, from conclusiveness, from elation.  In the process, it advances the necessity of moving on, of leaving, of being left:   “I would prefer that you hold / the page to your heart / upside down / and read it once / and put it away,” “and walk away, / slowly, as if on forbidden ground.”  “Just hold the damn poem / in your hand / and read word by word / and just throw it away / and leave it there.” The idea of passage, of passing is being engaged:   “How good it would be / if you read it aloud / so the words sail away / to never / return.”  The line break after “never” in “sail away / to never / return” prompts a double meaning.  The words will sail away, never to return, but also, the words will sail away to “never,” a place, a condition.

“Every Morning (for Mom)” is a plain-speaking, arresting elegy, which begins: “There was no justice / in her leaving / in the middle of the / Poui’s short hello”, and ends, “This morning / I wait for you again / I hope / You too wait for me”.

 

In “The Poem,” also, idea is realized in one or two arresting images.  We should “Swallow [the] poem like a pill. / Like the one that ends / a headache on a plane / or speeding minibus / or riverboat.”  Again: “Drink from it like sweet coconuts / in the island sun. / Then burp politely / and walk away […].”  “Exit” ends with “the sound of the ocean’s / Muffled drums / That fade away / In the dying light.”  In “Once it was,” “the insomniac terrier / In the neighbour’s yard / Howled as if the moon / Had landed there.”  In “The Shore of Dying Dreams,” “Near the empty conch shell / where the groping waves cannot reach, / there’s an old shoe. / Sole lost to uneven pavements […].”  Maybe the reader will wish for more such evocative, meaning-pointing imagery.  Conversely, one might feel that the easy, vaguely poetic “dream” could have been a bit more sparingly used.  Similarly, there might have been some pruning of the little rhetorical redundancies.

 

The scene-setting images of small island, beach, waves, sea, ocean locate the collection, and provide a frame and grounding for the dominant themes.  This frame and grounding, for universal ideas, is Caribbean.  In the middle of the collection we come to a few poems that are set in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean.  They shift focus from the personal and inter-personal, to the social, the public, the historical, the people, thereby widening the interest of the book.  “River Story” seems to be set in the Guyanese interior and to address ethnic interface in a manner that suggests the surrealism of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris.  In “Bartica Dreams” we are still in Guyana, in the town of Bartica, at the confluence of the Mazaruni, Cuyuni and Essequibo rivers, gateway to the interior and to the gold and diamond mining areas.  The poem is a response to the Bartica Massacre of 2008, when a gang of criminal gunmen entered the town by boat, murdered twelve citizens and wounded several others.

 

The terror of guns is also central to “Red House Fears” and “Of Haiti And Other Wars.”   The Red House is the popular name of the Parliament building in Port of Spain.  In July 1990 a group of insurgents stormed the building and took captive the Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet, holding them hostage there for six days until the uprising was quelled.  The insurgents killed seven persons, including Mervyn Teague, an employee of the Government Broadcasting Unit and colleague of our poet, who writes: “angry, bursting bullets and angry tears . Mervyn loved it here […].”  Again,

                            

angry, crying bullets, rage and fury –

                             have they died?

                             have we died and, rising

                             with the sound of trumpets,

                             are left with Paradise unfolding?

                             I think not.      

 

 

“Of Haiti And Other Wars” evokes the complex spirit of Haiti’s history of struggle, resistance, loss, oppression and deprivation.  It begins:

                             Dark soldier at attention near the sea

                             A tear, like sudden blood,

                             Down sweat and flesh and the teeth of strangers

                             Through bullets and barrels of loaded guns

 

As the book moves toward its close, there is an upswing in tone and point of view.  There is a clutch of love poems, mostly lyrically affirmative, poems such as “At Night’s End,” “Young Lady,” “Tall and Slim and Wonderful,” and “Love’s Revelations.”

I quote:

 

                             There you are, young lady.

                             March, indeed, brings laughter –

                             brings sunny, Maracas kinds of days;

                             glimmering, tumbling waves

                             on little, noisy islands.

                                                          (“Young Lady”)

Or:

 

                             Because at night’s end

                             When your eyes betray

                             Your dreams

                             And your tiny hands reach like

                             Butterflies for the sky

                             I see the sleep rise

                             With mine

                             Above the groans and strains

                             Of waking earth

                                                          (“At Night’s End”)

Or:       

 

                             Listen to me, lady.

                             He does indeed love you

                             in the way the bee finds the bursting flower

                             in the early dew.

                             And like that time

                             before the evening fell

                             like a ripened mango and, startled,

                             he held you close

                                                          (“This Morning”)     

 

The love poems transition into poems about ageing, looking back on the past, dying, departure:

 

                             On the sands of the seas

                             We stand seeing the sunset

                             Melt before our eyes

                             And cry good-bye

                             To our years

                             Of leaping for golden clouds

                                                          (“A Story”)

 

                             … we both now know

                             each day goes faster than the last

                             a clock ticking on the wall

                             like a leaking toilet

                             in the night

                                                          (“Because We Know”)

 

In “When We Die” the speaker, now ageing, recalls himself as

 

                             I who once walked in the hot, melting asphalt

                             Cooled only by crushed pomeracs and dried dog shit

                             And fumbled sno-cones

                             And the old man’s crumpled sweaty frame

                             Awake from drunken, midday sleep

 

But eventually, departure is release, a going forward and upward.  “Come See Me Fly” ends: “Let’s leave / This weary, dying place / Let’s fly away / Let’s live / Let’s just fly and live.”  To end is to ascend; “passages,” again.

 

 

Edward Baugh