A Book of Listening
The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. (Walter Benjamin) This reciprocity and its limits, the awareness of an exchange opened by whatever we turn to and the nourishment and necessary correction such exchanges bring, are the ground base of this book. Written in the short, unpunctuated lines Graham has refined and developed through several recent collections, each extensive sentence is opened and slowed to allow for fleeting moments of decision. Many reviewers have praised an attentiveness in Graham’s poems—he is ‘a poet “who notices such things” who has a way of finding those fugitive rays of light’ (Nicholas Murray); he has ‘a concern to capture the quiddity of the loved thing, the essential genius of person and place’ (TLS 2010), and such curiosity and respectful observation is at the heart of A Book of Listening. How do we attend to the thoughts of others, to the works of art we look at, to the spirit of a place we visit, to the presence of dead loved ones and to a world of objects layered with associations? The result is an extended pondering on the powers of imagination; and especially that power as we manifest it in understanding, empathy or compassion. As Spinoza affirms in one of the guiding introductory epigraphs here, ‘There is nothing more useful to human beings than human beings’.
‘Totschweigen’
There are those who can talk any subject to death—
too many to bother to remember the occasions
there are those dead–tired from the talk
of others not listening to how they may be heard
and there is Totschweigen as a German friend said
explaining—‘to silence something to death’
so appropriate—and so timely—having just read
that passage in Jane Austen
‘Did you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?’
‘I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others…’
‘And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence.’
***
Paired Portraits
He is only saying
what she will say
when we move between them
they meet
upon some high–wire
stretched between their eyes
which we may pass across
but cannot halt on—
we must take both in
to see
how each one looks
to see what they can see
and what
alone
would be invisible to us
***
Spinoza’s Place
—Rijnsburg May 2016
A dirt path
once
and now a place to park
where the World Cup
possessed each living room
in afternoons
drowsy from the heat
and in the evening
barbecues would scent
the darkening sky
his cottage
with its garden
from the last century
where a washing-line
could still be pegged out
by a girl in a mob-cap
and hollyhocks
could still climb up
a world from any painting
of the Golden Age
his place
salvaged
where a low ceiling
makes obeisance natural
as you come in
starting you thinking
bent-necked a little
in concentration
towards the back-room
snugly set
for no distraction
where Spinoza
talked
to visitors
like you
the fireplace
tiled
with varied pictures
the window
for a glimpse
of what went on
outside
low-ceiling
panelled walls
and covered floor
to let the sound
sink in—
an acoustic
of its own
waiting
as he
had waited
heard it
as one person
lets another in
and listens
the two of them
pacing their thinking
as we had tried
to pace
each step
in coming here
we took it with us
as we left
replenished—
that acoustic
he had known
and filled to the brim
with listening
Recording: from A Book of Listening
