Well-Wrought Urns for a Broken World
Clarence Caddel, Broken Words: Poems
Bonfire Books, 84pp, A$22.99, ISBN 9781764219006
reviewed by Bret van den Brink
Broken Words is the second collection by the Australian poet Clarence Caddell. The evocative, multivalent title comes from the poem ‘To My Ex-Fiancée’: ‘I hail the Broken Word, / My saviour sure enough!’ The broken word is a broken promise — and many promises are broken in the collection — but it also suggests Jesus Christ, the Logos or Word, whose body is broken on the cross and in the bread of the Eucharist (this latter breaking also being a reassembling). Though the poem’s outcry is ironic, and while the sense of an ‘unerotic heat’ diffuses itself across the unfulfilled hopes of the collection like a miasma, the collection itself does not sink wholly into despair. There is an intimation, however distant, that a time may come when things may be, if not ideal, at least better. A woman ‘read[s] a little Donne’ in the opening poem ‘Ars Poetica’ — that little being taken from the Songs and Sonnets — but in his later work Donne becomes capable of imploring God to ‘break, blow, burn, and make me new.’ As Donne recreated himself, so the speaker of Caddell’s volume is in the non-linear, fits-and-starts process of recreating himself.
Though the collection is titled Broken Words, one of its striking features is its interest in repairing language — of putting words into metre and rhyme. When Caddell writes ‘Go take a glass and smash the thing to shards / To find it’ in ‘A Motion for Acquittal’, one recalls that the poem is a sonnet and that a sonnet is a well-wrought urn. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the collection is its interest in form, which ranges far beyond the sonnet — here a villanelle, there a poem in terza rima; now a poem in couplets, and now one in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ stanza. For the reader interested in traditional forms, the book provides a hearty repast.
I would concur with A.M. Juster, who suggests that the book ‘often echoes the wit and style of Byron as well as the dour wryness of Larkin.’ Sometimes Caddell uses a light, Augustan touch, reminiscent of Alexander Pope, probably through the mediumship of Byron. When I read the phrase (from ‘Our Anniversary’) ‘Those breasts, I’m certain, no less buoyant,’ my ear answers with Robert Browning: ‘On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, / O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head.’ This may be no more than a coincidental, alliterative conjunction of breasts and buoyancy in close proximity, but, then again, it may be more than that. As the passion of Browning’s Venice in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ is destined to fall into ‘[d]ust and ashes’, so the expired passion of Caddell’s poem — parodically re-enacted in honour of an anniversary — already lies in dust and ashes.
The collection has many high points: the concluding sentences of each stanza in ‘At Your Parents’ both stopped me in my tracks, as did the second half of ‘Failed Seduction’, the sestet of ‘Moving On’, and the concluding line of ‘Home is Not Sad’. There’s a passage from ‘Irreconcilable Differences’ that would not seem out of place in the Collected Poems of Robert Graves:
A Gravesian note recurs, though in a comic (perhaps Byronic) mode, in ‘Diana and Acteon’: ‘O, if he’d been slicker / (So, dying, he imagined), death might have come quicker.’ Though one must be cautious in one’s treatment of them, such moments of mythic resonance are — to my mind — some of the strongest poetically in the collection.
In my estimation, the volume’s ultimate poem is the one in the penultimate position — the titular poem of the collection’s fourth section, ‘How It Is’. This terza rima poem, like the book as a whole, is marked by its honesty to an unvarnished depiction of day-to-day life: crude, pathetic, yet dear. With context (which I shall not spoil here), the concluding line of the poem — ‘When those rods reappear beside the door’ — is grim. While I prefer the second-last to the last poem, I am not disputing the arrangement of the poems. The last poem clearly strikes the chord with which Caddell seeks to leave his readers, a chord foreshadowed by the sonnet ‘A Fresh Start’. In the sonnet, fresh starts exist, but they bring new mistakes; an earlier age may have preceded Eden, but Eden — itself a fresh start — preceded a Fall. But the Fall, while it may be an end is not the end. It is latent with possibilities, such that future generations may come to sing O felix culpa! In the closing poem, ‘I Wonder’, the volume’s broken words culminate with ‘a word as true / As that he [the speaker’s son] read my mind.’
To conclude, I will say something about my personal response to the collection, though this may say more about me than the poems themselves. Reading Broken Words, I feel claustrophobic; its imaginative world feels rather constricted, and I struggle to breath in it. John Hollander tells us that ‘word-play is world-play’ and Broken Words gives us a broken world. In that world, alterity is largely oppressive, except in privileged moments. Even vegetable life becomes an antagonistic force, its trees laughing derisively. The book is not, by and large, composed of the sort of poetry that I prefer — I seek out the beautiful and the sublime, poetry that traverses the seas and forests of this green earth, or that ascends to heaven and plunges into hell. The one who walks through Baudelaire’s Paris passes through a city whose limits veer infernal or celestial (usually the former); Broken Words sometimes, but rarely, approaches the murk and splendour that fill Les Fleurs du mal.
The comparison is somewhat ungenerous on my part: Caddell is not Baudelaire, even as 21st-century Australia is not 19th-century France. If ‘Ars Poetica’ announces Caddell’s Baudelairean aspirations, it is largely another one of Broken Words’s broken words — however, and this may be the volume’s glory, such shattering precedes and enables (though it does not necessitate) the work of new creation. Broken Words participates in this labour, and I await with interest to see what new creation will follow from its author.
Though the collection is titled Broken Words, one of its striking features is its interest in repairing language — of putting words into metre and rhyme. When Caddell writes ‘Go take a glass and smash the thing to shards / To find it’ in ‘A Motion for Acquittal’, one recalls that the poem is a sonnet and that a sonnet is a well-wrought urn. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the collection is its interest in form, which ranges far beyond the sonnet — here a villanelle, there a poem in terza rima; now a poem in couplets, and now one in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ stanza. For the reader interested in traditional forms, the book provides a hearty repast.
I would concur with A.M. Juster, who suggests that the book ‘often echoes the wit and style of Byron as well as the dour wryness of Larkin.’ Sometimes Caddell uses a light, Augustan touch, reminiscent of Alexander Pope, probably through the mediumship of Byron. When I read the phrase (from ‘Our Anniversary’) ‘Those breasts, I’m certain, no less buoyant,’ my ear answers with Robert Browning: ‘On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, / O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head.’ This may be no more than a coincidental, alliterative conjunction of breasts and buoyancy in close proximity, but, then again, it may be more than that. As the passion of Browning’s Venice in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ is destined to fall into ‘[d]ust and ashes’, so the expired passion of Caddell’s poem — parodically re-enacted in honour of an anniversary — already lies in dust and ashes.
The collection has many high points: the concluding sentences of each stanza in ‘At Your Parents’ both stopped me in my tracks, as did the second half of ‘Failed Seduction’, the sestet of ‘Moving On’, and the concluding line of ‘Home is Not Sad’. There’s a passage from ‘Irreconcilable Differences’ that would not seem out of place in the Collected Poems of Robert Graves:
Beware of her who thinks she has the trait
Of sainted selflessness. . . .
She draws
Your blood, and digs her nails into your sores,
And tells you how her breasts have long dried up
And in her incorrupt veins not a drop
Remains unsacrificed!
A Gravesian note recurs, though in a comic (perhaps Byronic) mode, in ‘Diana and Acteon’: ‘O, if he’d been slicker / (So, dying, he imagined), death might have come quicker.’ Though one must be cautious in one’s treatment of them, such moments of mythic resonance are — to my mind — some of the strongest poetically in the collection.
In my estimation, the volume’s ultimate poem is the one in the penultimate position — the titular poem of the collection’s fourth section, ‘How It Is’. This terza rima poem, like the book as a whole, is marked by its honesty to an unvarnished depiction of day-to-day life: crude, pathetic, yet dear. With context (which I shall not spoil here), the concluding line of the poem — ‘When those rods reappear beside the door’ — is grim. While I prefer the second-last to the last poem, I am not disputing the arrangement of the poems. The last poem clearly strikes the chord with which Caddell seeks to leave his readers, a chord foreshadowed by the sonnet ‘A Fresh Start’. In the sonnet, fresh starts exist, but they bring new mistakes; an earlier age may have preceded Eden, but Eden — itself a fresh start — preceded a Fall. But the Fall, while it may be an end is not the end. It is latent with possibilities, such that future generations may come to sing O felix culpa! In the closing poem, ‘I Wonder’, the volume’s broken words culminate with ‘a word as true / As that he [the speaker’s son] read my mind.’
To conclude, I will say something about my personal response to the collection, though this may say more about me than the poems themselves. Reading Broken Words, I feel claustrophobic; its imaginative world feels rather constricted, and I struggle to breath in it. John Hollander tells us that ‘word-play is world-play’ and Broken Words gives us a broken world. In that world, alterity is largely oppressive, except in privileged moments. Even vegetable life becomes an antagonistic force, its trees laughing derisively. The book is not, by and large, composed of the sort of poetry that I prefer — I seek out the beautiful and the sublime, poetry that traverses the seas and forests of this green earth, or that ascends to heaven and plunges into hell. The one who walks through Baudelaire’s Paris passes through a city whose limits veer infernal or celestial (usually the former); Broken Words sometimes, but rarely, approaches the murk and splendour that fill Les Fleurs du mal.
The comparison is somewhat ungenerous on my part: Caddell is not Baudelaire, even as 21st-century Australia is not 19th-century France. If ‘Ars Poetica’ announces Caddell’s Baudelairean aspirations, it is largely another one of Broken Words’s broken words — however, and this may be the volume’s glory, such shattering precedes and enables (though it does not necessitate) the work of new creation. Broken Words participates in this labour, and I await with interest to see what new creation will follow from its author.