Heart work

In this long sequence written with warmth and candour and seamlessly blending lyricism and narration, he sets out to confront the question, ‘What is it full of/the heart?’ Beginning in the Second World War, the sequence advances in diverse and unforeseen directions as it attempts to provide answers. Similarity and difference, the feared and the familiar, change shape. Historical and public events turn out not to be intrusions on private life but the element in which it is lived. Heart work is part memoir, part a quiet and often humorous account of the ‘growth of a poet’s mind’, part anguished contemplation of the struggle to sustain and celebrate sympathetic affection, but always a love poem. It builds, as an oratorio builds, through motif and counterpoint, through dramatic changes of pace and tone, to its surprising finale.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation Winter 2007; Selectors’ Comment:
Desmond Graham’s ‘Heart work’, a single poem in eight ‘books’, is an audacious answer to the question that opens Book One: ‘What is it full of/ the heart?’ In unpunctuated verse paragraphs of fluid, flexible short lines, mostly two or three stresses each – or a couple of heartbeats – Graham builds up, glancingly but urgently, the story of a lifetime’s attachments, from wartime childhood, through early adventures abroad, in Germany especially, marriage, fatherhood (not necessarily in that order), and an affair, onto a newly rewarding sense of freedom and fulfilment. Oblique narration, wry or lyrical, is punctuated by epiphanic moments in the poems’ movement forwards and back in time; different English and European landscapes, the poet’s persona as teacher and writer (deeply involved at one point with an unnamed ‘Poet at War’ who must surely be Keith Douglas, whose ‘Life’ Graham wrote and whose ‘Letters’ he edited) public events and private circumstance, are woven into a pattern that is as much musical as chronological. For although Graham at one point admits he ‘never found out/or why from so early/ my mind could weigh up the price/ adept as a bookmaker/ never a punter/ and my heart/ trying to make up for it/ by paying out/ over the odds,’ ‘Heart work’ is far from a straightforward weighing up, or any sort of accounting for a twentieth-century life. It is, rather, a set of vivid, engaging, life-affirming, colloquial and visionary variations: on the heart as metaphorical seat of the affections, its unpredictable swervings and mysterious purposes; on the actual heart ‘so hard at work/ so literal inside me;’ finally (and memorably) on the vulnerability of both: ‘how can you love/ so dangerously/ without choice?’