Modesty blazes through a poet’s output
Nameless Country
Carcanet, £12.99
Reviewed by Mark Glanville
BORN INTO a GlaswegianJewish family in 1937, A C Jacobs stated in a letter that, “my real language is ScotsYiddish”. He also claimed to have started out writing in Yiddish, though no such work survives. Nonetheless, the typically fractured character of the diaspora
Jew informs his poetic persona:
So always a dark past surrounds me/ With its figures broken across strange tongues/ And places unreconciled…
What kept him here… that cannot keep me here?
In Israel, where he spent several years, Jacobs’s muse is least inspired, the country’s certain identity at odds with a poet who thrived on insecurity. He castigates an Israeli teacher for his complacency towards someone,
Split at the foot of several cultures/And approved by none.’
English was the language Jacobs chose to write in, that of a people certain of its identity and the greatness of its language and literature, and he would be measured against the writers within that tradition.
Was fear of failure in this enterprise the reason for his apparently publishing so little in his lifetime? At his death in 1994, he was judged not to have been prolific, then 200 unknown poems, twice as many as had been published while he lived, were turned up.
Their discovery triggered the Collected Poems, which appeared in 1996 and revealed not the “tiny poet in whom some of the threads of a vast condition of exile continued to quiver”, but an important addition to the canon of late-twentieth-century English poetry.
Jacobs’s poetry is far too good to be pigeonholed in the way he himself did so self-deprecatingly.
Its themes often and inevitably reflect the fragmented identity of which he was so conscious, but his best poetry achieves a universality that Grandmother,
Who could not know the dignities/ Racked in her drab body
In Mosaic, a lyrical description of the process of making the object of the title, he is concerned,
Lest our flaws cry out/In the terrible gaps of speech.
Elsewhere, Jacobs accuses Christ of arranging the scenes of the future, With a single meaning. There was no/ Gap a poet leaves.
Certainty was Jacobs’s enemy, both as man and poet. In poetry, he realised himself,
Something may penetrate,/ Something inaudible otherwise/ May be heard Mark Glanville is a freelance writer and singer.