Jo Shapcott's 'Gherkin Music': "Joining the Game of Brilliance"

Gherkin photos © Minouche Wojciechowski



London is a city of contrasts. This is the ultimate cliché; I don't think I've ever come across a city which someone wants to sell to tourists and which isn't called "a city of contrasts" at some point. I have found, though, that London's contrasts can be particularly beautiful or savage.

I was on my way home tonight and had just got on the bus at Sloane Square when a friend texted to ask if I wanted to meet up for dinner. Poised to text back "no, I'm on my way home," I realised that I had nothing much to do at home and didn't particularly want a night in, so instead I hopped off the bus and headed on foot towards Kensington to meet her. I walked up Sloane Street, where the shop windows are like art galleries to me - some of the lovely displays suggested that horses and bags are in this year (I could definitely live with that.) And on through Knightsbridge and up towards the Royal Albert Hall. Near the Victoria and Albert, I ended up buying a hot chocolate for a man who was homeless and ill - he had a cancerous lesion which he'd wrapped plastic bags around. I think part of me closed off in self-defense when I saw that, not really able to confront the fact that I'd just been window shopping in Chelsea amongst people with far more money than they need, and that I was wearing a warm coat and off to have a restaurant dinner before heading home to a flat which is at least tolerably warm - while this man was quite possibly in the process of dying on the street.

This is where London's contrasts are savage, and they are often to do with the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, one of the outstanding failures of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. I will never forget the day when I found myself on a particularly threatening housing estate in Brixton in the afternoon, and then in the evening I went to a millionaire's house in Holborn for an art exhibition. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the exhibition, but the contrast gave me a kind of moral headache. "They will certainly build houses and have occupancy...they will not build and someone else have occupancy; they will not plant and someone else do the eating" (Isaiah 65:21, 22, New World Translation) - this is how the world was actually intended to be.

London's contrasts can also be magnificent and fascinating. I went to St Katharine's Docks one night recently with friends and we were dumbstruck (though conflicted) at the sight of the Tower of London with the Shard rising jagged and space-age behind it. I cannot possibly imagine how the Tudors would have reacted to this. It was one of the most science-fiction things I've ever seen.

I thought of such contrasts when I read one of the new Poems on the Underground - the new set are all London poems, as it is the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. I've loved 'Stations' by Connie Bensley, as well as pieces by Wordsworth and Yeats. This poem, though, really made my day when I saw it on the District line - I imagine I wore a big stupid smile on my face as I read it.


GHERKIN MUSIC (Jo Shapcott)


This poem does a number of things rather wonderfully. The Gherkin is an icon because of its distinctive shape; the first line asks us to "walk the spiral", and then the poem takes a shape and does just that. I'm not a big fan of shape poems, but this one is not obtrusive - it feels very organic and intuitive, a part of the words. The line breaks resemble a staircase (probably a spiral staircase) but they also evoke the shapes of the glass panes which make up the Gherkin, "where flat planes are curves" and "fragments of poems." Although your eye must read down the page to experience the poem, the words and the shape somehow make you feel as though you are ascending - this is wonderfully done and not something I've not often experienced in poetry. The poem itself becomes a "game/of brilliance".

I was also struck by the fusing of the secular and the spiritual in this poem. The building is described in terms which make it into something like a cathedral - "names fall like glory/into the lightwells" - but it is well known that this building is yet another temple to commerce. Shapcott also calls it "St Mary Axe" - the Gherkin's official name is actually 30 St Mary Axe, the name of the street. But again, this term would naturally bring to mind a place of worship. The City of London is, of course, densely populated both with skyscrapers and immensely rich corporations, and with a depth of history which includes many churches and other old buildings. All of this comes together in just a few lines, in a poem which should be providing a moment of transcendence for many Tube travellers this year.

Anthony Wilson's Riddance: Useful Poems About Illness

Riddance, Anthony Wilson (2012, Worple Press)


Poetry of health and sickness is not an area which I have yet explored much. Recently I have been reading Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability, which revolves in part around her experience of cancer. It is an area which holds a lot of possibilities for close exploration of the links between mind and body, between the individual and society...but I think it's something I naturally shy away from, a little.

In my teens and early twenties in particular, a number of friends and family members died of cancer. While I also  have a lot of happy memories from this time in my life, there frequently seems to be something grey and bleak hovering about, and I definitely have some blanks in my memories which are not where I would have expected them to be. These years of sickness and death amongst those we loved culminated in my father's diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, more than ten years ago now. This was a great shock and felt like a bad continuation of a pattern that was becoming set in stone. Thankfully, after some months of radiotherapy, he was declared completely clear of the illness, which has not returned.

It was partly because of the experiences of those around me that I turned to Anthony Wilson's collection Riddance with so much interest. The poems revolve around his own experience of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which time-wise seems to have followed a similar trajectory to my father's - around the start of the calendar year and into autumn.

Sharon Olds, winner of the 2012 T S Eliot Prize, was recently quoted as saying "I want a poem to be useful", and this came back to me as I read the poems in Riddance. This is a collection which could genuinely be useful to those confronted with serious illness - either those who are ill, or those who care about them. I have realised that when someone you loves becomes sick, it is very difficult - but very important - to think first about what would be most useful and helpful to them, not to you. The first words that spring to mind could be useful to you but might be not at all useful to the sufferer. A poem such as 'What Not to Say' confronts this: "I couldn't care which website you visited/explaining it really clearly./And you could try not calling me brave./Invite me to dinner. Offer me water."

As I read Riddance, I felt as though I was walking through rooms in a house. (I believe that I came across a similar metaphor in another review of the collection, though I can't now remember where.) Some of the rooms have good lighting; some are dark; some invite you to stay, and some are less inviting. They are not necessarily chronological, though they all connect in some way to the central theme - even the poems which conclude the book and seem unrelated to the theme of illness and recovery. Anthony Wilson says in his introduction that these "are an attempt to recover and celebrate all that seems most essential and affirming about the act of living." Among these, I particularly liked 'We Introverts' (well, I would): "We protect the silence at our core/with perfectly improvised chatter/and long to be home."

The shifting perspectives of the various poems particularly interested me. We get a sense of how Anthony related to his illness: as personalities to be addressed ('Tumour', 'Wart'), as something which connects him in a variety of ways to the (forwards and backwards) passage of time ('The Other Life', 'November'), and so on. I found the play of perspectives particularly subtle in this poem.


MAN IN A FLEECE (Anthony Wilson)


I disappear into grey folds,
its soft creases of flesh
which match my own.

I turn up the collar
and shuffle to the shops
for milk, the paper I will not read.

Next to you in the queue
I could be anyone,
someone fit, a jogger.

I stroke my second skin.
It catches the light in beads
which ripple up then down my arms.


The fact that an observer is likely to think that the narrator is healthy - or to not think about it at all - is both sad and hopeful. I know from experience that it can be too easy to perceive someone who is seriously ill purely in terms of their illness, almost as though they were the illness. In this poem, the speaker seems to escape and to be trapped, at one and the same time. The "beads/which ripple up then down my arm" made me think of both dewdrops, and tears; hope, and sadness.

I also found the long poem 'All Lives, All Dances, All is Loud' very moving - this was written for Anthony's friend Lucy Mason, who died of lung cancer. This poem confronts ideas of the narrative of a person's life - including illness, and more than illness - in a very personal and touching way.

Riddance is fine poetry on its own merits, and I think it also fills a need both emotionally and practically, in the difficult area of poetry about illness.

Anthony Wilson is a poet and writing tutor, and a lecturer at the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter. He has held writing residencies at The Times Educational Supplement, The Poetry Trust, Tate Britain and The Poetry Society. He is co-editor of The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, 1998) and editor of Creativity in Primary Education (Learning Matters, 2005). Worple Press has published two previous collections: NOWHERE BETTER THAN THIS and FULL STRETCH: POEMS 1996-2006.

His website can be found here: http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/

The Worple Press website can be found here: http://www.worplepress.com/


Poem © Anthony Wilson, 2012. Author photo by Chris Parker. Used by permission.