Martin Carter’s sweet suite
[Suite of 5 Poems] 1.
Unwritten histories of human hearts
Who knows one day the books will write themselves in magic language soon transforming us to image, symbol and the ultimate silence.
My hand grown weary on a truthful page and stops at last in total resignation. Shall it be told? I seek the quiet answer To this first question which began it all!
2.
For thousands of miles the sky is all the same Just like the sea or time or loneliness.
It was the heart that noticed all of this
When it computed distance into loss.
3.
The sky bends with the earth and earth with space And those who navigate are full of hope:
But the compass that they need is far more kind Than love’s magnetic north pole of desire.
4.
I will always be speaking with you. And if I falter, and if I stop, I will still be speaking with you, in words that are not uttered, are never uttered, never made into the green sky, the earth, the green, green love …
And I was bathing by the sea and there was a gull, a white gull, a white gull, so far, so far …
I saw the weak wing flutter long before it did, and the webbed foot dip, long before it did; and the sudden wave, and the scarlet tinted foam of a sunset burning like fire already god in flames. is how Ian McDonald, joint editor with Vanda Radzik, introduced them:
“Editor’s Note: A handful of poems written by Martin Carter in 1961, have recently come across the Editor’s Desk and a selection of these are here published for the first time in this special edition of Kyk-Over-Al which is dedicated to his memory and his life’s work. Martin has quoted the following lines from Rilke at the beginning of this suite of poems.
This is the marvel of the pay of forces
That they must sense, they move not otherwise
They grow in roots and dwindle in the tree trunk
And in the crown like resurrection rise!
(Rainer Maria Rilke)”
These texts are not dated thematically or formally, except that for the most part, they are formally conventional. They form a group of poems, which would not seem out of place among the poet’s later work. Carter once said he did not like a single poem appearing by itself. He thinks “poems should be surrounded by other poems”, and that was how he released poetry throughout his career – for example, “The Hill of Fire Glows Red” in 1951; “Poems of Shape and Motion”, 1955; and “Jail Me Quickly”, 1962; among others. Yet, there are cases where he did offer a single poem for publication.
McDonald in the same special issue of Kyk-Over-Al published a handwritten copy of “Death of A Comrade”, the first version of this poem under its original title “For A Dead Comrade”. It was sent by Carter to Janet Jagan, editor of Thunder, with a note saying, “If you can find space for this you are free to use it”. Another handwritten manuscript, “Poem of Prison” was sent to A J Seymour offering it for publication in Kyk. Yet Carter explained that when the famous and damning “A Mouth Is Always Muzzled” appeared in a newspaper in 1969, everyone thought he had sent it there. He said, however, that was not true, since he did not like publishing single poems. It was his friend, journalist Ricky Singh, who published the poem.
Poem 5 in the suite is one of Carter’s love poems, such as those found among his early verse, like the “Letters”. It is strengthened by its comparison to the ancient tradition of love poetry with the Petrarchan conceits. The exaggerated claims by the lover comparing his mistress to the most beautiful things of nature; “I searched the world for something beautiful”. But after a second stanza of precious images, Carter’s metaphors are original, rather than conventional as the Petrarchan usually is. Having chosen “the green crown of a tree”, he immerses himself deep into an unruly natural wilderness to capture “this tall green crown” growing wildly outside his window – “law unto itself”. This love has “mighty roots” in a natural world of contending forces in a “war with God”.
Poem 4 is another that relates to this, where the poet addresses someone, as he does in the love poems, and in others using terms of endearment, as in “This Is The Dark Time, My Love”. There he goes off into one of his most forceful verses of resistance where the forces of military occupation contrast with and trample down things of tenderness and natural beauty. In this untitled Poem 4 the poet’s communication is transported into a trance of unutterable awe at the unfathomable expanse of nature into which the seagull flies “so far, so far …” He was to utter similar attempts at empathy in the “Poems of Shape and Motion”. Yet the poet is overcome with a sense of mortality, a state into which the gull slowly descends into consumption – “a sunset burning like fire already gold in flames”.
This poem links to the second in the suite in which “for thousands of miles the sky is all the same”, like other boundless phenomenal forces like the sea or like tine itself. The poem is an expression of shoreless, boundary-less love. There is a oneness between these mighty forces of the universe and humanity – with human emotions like love. Poem 2 is metaphysical as Carter utilises metaphysical conceits through the compass and the navigating of the “magnetic north pole”. Such verses are reminiscent of “I Am No Soldier” in his early poetry. It also compares to a much later one, “Bent”, of the 1980s. In this poem “the sky bends with the earth and the earth with space”. In the later poem, the sky is similarly like a great, overarching dome, but it is empathic with the mortal form of an old woman in the frailness of humanity – “the sky imitates her, bent”.
The “handful of poems” that McDonald said were discovered never made their way into any of Carter’s collections, except for “Death of A Comrade” which appeared under its new title. Some were handwritten first drafts with dates affixed. But the Suite of 5 were definitely grouped and likely written together by Carter who prefaced them with the quotation from Rilke (1875 – 1929), an Austrian and foremost German-language poet of the modern era.
The threads that sew the poems together are diverse, just as the poems are diverse. Their separateness and yet connectedness may recall Carter’s statement on the difference between prose and poetry. ‘Prose begins to continue, but poetry continues to begin.’ This notion of an unending series of new beginnings, continuity and discontinuity is also a characteristic of Mark McWatt in his collections Interiors (1991) and The Language of El Dorado (1994).
The way these poems also connect with other poems found scattered over Carter’s career demonstrates serious preoccupations that run through the decades unbound by the different specific events to which they sometimes refer, while revealing the infinite variety in his imagination. Similar verses and thoughts appear in Poems of Resistance, in “Poems of Shape and Motion”, in Poems of Succession (1977) and Poems of Affinity (1981). This is a good time to revisit them since the just finished month of June reminds us of the poet’s birthday and the startling rebirths found as one continues to begin to understand a poetry that is always beginning something previously unfathomed.