These poems move from Northern Germany to the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme, from Poenari Castle, Romania – one of Vlad the Impaler’s homes – to Penang, Malaysia – a crucial entrepôt for British ships on their way to China loaded with opium. They take in a raging Boudica, a pathetic King Arthur, several versions of Dracula, a mournful Romanian spook in exile and a range of mouldy Victorians. In every line they are – as David Scott puts it to Stuart Hall, in a profoundly different context – ‘an effort to think against what I find in myself’.
I started writing them while working as a Development Officer at the National Lottery Heritage Fund. During that time, I criss-crossed the home counties by train visiting historic dockyards, collections of taxidermy, imperilled churches and landscaped estates. Only slowly did I come alive to the stories of power told by these remnants. Only slowly – embarrassingly slowly – did I realise how much my own appreciation, learnt in childhood as a white, middle-class boy, worked to keep that power concealed. My nostalgia was ideological, a form of what Michel Rolph-Trouillot calls ‘false innocence’.
During the centenary commemorations of the First World War, my emerging disturbance came to a centre in the symbol of the poppy – ‘who bridges forgetfulness and memory’, as Zaffar Kunial phrases it. The horror of the First World War is continually gone over under the sign of that flower and yet the wars in which Britain forced opium on China, occupied Hong Kong, and destroyed – under Lord Elgin’s orders – the Summer Palace in Beijing are almost wholly erased from British consciousness. The totems of remembering are always, also, sites of suppression.
I want my poems to bring to light the mesh of desire, forgetfulness and naivety heritage inculcates in subjects – inculcates in me. I also want them to shake off the deadening enticements of memorial sentimentality and its hypocrisy – complacent solemnity on Remembrance Sunday, the consolations of a scone at Chartwell. How does heritage operate in the construction of imperial nostalgia, colluding in its figuration as something innocent? How does imperial nostalgia operate in the construction of personal longing? How is personal longing blended with heritage in ways which conceal power and reproduce whiteness?
This opens onto a wider field. The exploration of memory and forgetting in the context of lived experience, the apocryphal tales of family history and the transhistorical emblems of the social imaginary. I am fascinated by the relationship between memory and repetition: how repetition as quotation (indicated in this selection by italics), as form, and as patterning in language within and across poems mirrors the way in which memories themselves are repetitions; how repetitions are sometimes memories unrecognised as such. The figure of the ghost or the vampire.
And the idea of the past as a place we haunt from the present, in movement and in language, is also central for me. The work of Jay Bernard and Eavan Boland is a huge inspiration in this regard. I am interested in places, archival materials and proper nouns as forms and sites of haunting, both in themselves, and in the spatial and temporal hallucinations that can be brought on by moving between them.
When Black Lives Matter protesters tore down the slaver Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol on 7 June 2020, the reactionary outcry in response made clear how much more establishment heritage has to do with forgetting than remembering. ‘Memory is no good / to triumphant civilizations’, writes Vahni Capildeo in ‘Odyssey Calling’. In these poems, I am trying to stir memory awake.
In Vlad Dracul’s
veins – from whom
great uncle George
claimed our descent –
my blood beat
heavily. Outside,
a new forest
of Ottomans.
I woke. That
weight. Overnight,
on my breastbone,
some force had
made camp. Now,
they were impaled
in the past. I
harboured but
the dullest under-
song – like a weak
pulse – of bloodlust.
*
In New York,
I was the eyeballs
of my great uncle
George, selecting
books to spread
free market seed
in the USSR.
The best the West
could offer. How to fit
freedom in a suitcase?
Smuggle, compel it?
That was his problem
but bombs falling
on the Bucharest
he had owned,
in which my grand-
mother had hid,
were what reflected
in the shine of his eyes.
Je sème à tout vent.
Odours are how
interiors make themselves
known to the world.
My father lost his sense of smell
when, or was it because,
he stepped onto the sea
at Horumersiel-Schellig,
beliebter Ferienort,
which is near Wangerland,
and it was so frozen
nothing could be smelt.
The sea and the sky,
which went on for ever,
hummed like a freezer,
and underneath was a body
of water, alive and populated,
over which the creaking of his steps
extended like shadows of fingers
across the lawn in the park
on a summer’s day.
Long fingers,
much longer than
normal human fingers.
He still carries the Nordsee,
the iceland that it was,
in his nose:
everything remains in place,
as though it is
a plastic version
and has no interior.
He knows a world passes him by,
invisible supplicant,
holding cups of the liquor of itself
(fermented seaweed,
mown grass,
rosewater,
crude oil)
up to the oblivious hood of his nose.
And he loves the shapes of things,
what the mamaliga,
the dyed egg,
the plum brandy implies.
Jason taught me everything I know about history. Once, we were at an Albrecht Dürer exhibition: one drawing was haunted by the lines of another. Jason explained how, not having rubbers, draughtsmen such as Dürer would take a sponge and wipe away, imperfectly, the form they wanted to replace; how a trace remained.
Jason moved on to another part of the exhibition and I walked round to the other side of the case to discover that this wasn’t true. There was simply another drawing on the reverse side of the paper. I can’t remember what either of the drawings were.
I lost myself and found a field
of poppies lanced for gum,
for milky, languid tears: the yield
of soft somniferum,
and standing in the field were two
whom poppies comforted.
It was Maria Logan who
began to speak. She said:
Be mine the balm, whose sov’reign pow’r
Can still the throb of Pain;
The produce of the scentless flow’r,
That strews Hindostan’s plain.
Then Sara Coleridge spoke up,
compelled to talk in turn
about the nullifying cup
that terminates concern.
When poor Mama long restless lies,
She drinks the poppy’s juice;
That liquor soon can close her eyes,
And slumber soon produce:
O then my sweet, my happy boy
Will thank the Poppy-flower
Which brings the sleep to dear Mama
At midnight’s darksome hour.
The poppies stretched out, row on row,
as far as I could see
and both the women turned to go
without noticing me.
There was an outdoor gym
near the pier. We went there.
Did we have an argument?
I can’t remember why
we went. Were we speaking?
I can’t hear anything. All there is
is the gym gear and us
standing there, present but
absent. Two reeds from
the opium-dependent fens.
A hallucination from
Grasmere. I saw sailors
moving around as though
it were a film set. It was
a film set. I put on my frock coat
and turned to go. The ship
was sailing shortly.
UNESCO
hovered in the present like a sunset,
over the future like a UFO.
As I remember, I was a woman
and you were a man. I’d come to say
farewell. I was to leave without delay.
What future did we have? You were the man;
the smokers, Chinese; the drug, Indian.
My home was very, very far away.
I hoped, perhaps, we’d meet again one day.
You looked at me like a historian.
The escalator led out of the past
and into the future. I watched you shrink
as I went down towards security.
Were you crying? Anyway, the jet blast
knocked me back into my seat from the brink
of fancy. Back towards futurity.
*
As I remember, I was Boudica
and you were the Roman Empire. The flame
of my outrage burnt fiercely. Yours, the blame.
I shut my eyes in Little India
to see mist in blue-green East Anglia
rise, the fervour of rebellion claim
London, the legion slaughter us all. Shame
I had to remember I was not her
and could not die in a brilliant display
of oppositional failure. As we stood,
I knocked my cup. Cold tea made a lake.
A sea. I knew Boudica’s future history.
My briefly complicated fury would
abbreviate to something pure and fake.
*
As I remember, I was King Arthur
and you were Avalon, the apple-blessed,
the island I would go to for my rest.
I don’t mean you. I mean the idea
of you. You yourself were getting smaller
on the shore I left behind, heading west,
with my grievous head wound and a heaving chest.
The traffic passed on Lebuh Chulia;
the sun set. I slept until my nation
bid me wake: the stewardess said we’re here,
gently shaking me. I left the cabin,
crossed the border and sat at the station
recalling my last words to Bedivere:
for in me is no trust for to trust in.
*
As I remember, you were King Henry
the Fifth and I was Prince Hal, the younger
you. I lay late in bed. You got up before
the day grew hot. I joined you, eating roti
at a roadside table. I was hungry.
You were full. We stared past each other,
the empty space between us like a mirror
and a time machine. You knew me
not. You were full. I was hollow.
The chef span dough out expertly behind
your head. A crown. For me, just bread and sack.
My roti came. I chewed but couldn’t swallow
without grimacing. Facing, our outlines aligned.
But you’d grown up. And I was at your back.
*
As I remember, I wept as your head
came off, rubbing the tears into my face.
O Essex, you paragon of disgrace.
Too long deferred, our hopes had died. You dead,
they lived again, pale-faced, inverted,
forever virtual. As such, solace
of the hurting kind. I couldn’t displace
your face as I undressed and went to bed.
Sir Francis Drake stepped off the Golden Hind
with a cigarette and a pomme de terre,
saying these are for you, my Virgin Queen;
the worst is still ahead, the best behind,
now faith is the ground of things which are hoped for,
and the evidence of things which are not seen.
*
As I remember, I was Lord Nelson.
Leaving was a battle I’d win but die
winning, thereby coming to underlie
my win. Dying: a myth’s best foundation.
Nothing better than a corpse to build on,
not even a tip-top career. Goodbye.
I turned away, descending peremptorily
into the cask in which the concoction
that would preserve my body sloshed. Brandy,
camphor, myrrh. Before me swam departure.
Doha. London. Duty-free. I cracked a smile,
thinking of the duty I had done my country
and the time I bowled a yorker with a
cannonball at the Battle of the Nile.
*
As I remember, we were not amused.
Where was our bag? The carousel ran on.
We hadn’t time. We had to get to Osborne
House. Bleary in the white light, we confused
the furthest carousel with the pier we used
at Gosport. A little, waiting boat. The setting sun.
Ryde beginning to twinkle on the horizon
as the coastline and the Solent fused
into nighttime. I blinked. I was alone
in Heathrow. Morning. There was no we
to speak of. No bag either, that was clear:
the only thing in baggage reclaim was the drone
of the carousels going round, empty.
Somewhere, the sun was setting. But not here.
*
As I remember, you and I were men.
You came striding down Lorong Love, the brass
buttons twinkling on your blue, naval dress.
We spent the night in an opium den.
Our dreams that night were a strange expansion.
We lay curled together on a tideless
shore, almost afraid of the stars, the stress
of uniform discarded. We kissed. Then,
the Thames disclosed itself in the dawn light;
neither was it the nineteenth century.
We were not lovers, though we had been lent
the memory. We were gentle, polite,
disabused. Longing has its history,
however complicit, in the present.
Odours are how
interiors make themselves
known to the world.
My father lost his sense of smell
when, or was it because –
I know none of this firsthand
but have pieced together what I can
from moments when clues
have offered themselves
discreetly. There –
the smell of fresh laundry.
In this way, I discovered how
my grandfather died,
failing to fix a simple problem
with the radio,
saying – he had not seen the figure
by the window – I’m an idiot.
The words rose quietly heavenward,
a speech scroll, and he fell towards
the surface of the earth, dead to
the passing pageant of fragrances
from his childhood in another country.
Every Easter,
my father takes eggs,
ties string around their shells
and boils them with onion skins
so that the boiled egg emerges
dyed, dressed in wild red
and pale crucifixes.
You take one,
I take the other.
I smash your egg with the nose of mine
and its crown crumples,
releasing the scent.
I had said something.
The Easter Acclamation
in a distant language.
Truly, he is risen,
is the reply. An echo through
a verandah in the hills
above Sibiu. In truth,
he was
never dead.
The day they tore down Colston, we were standing
on Marwick Head staring at the surface of the sea.
If we’d been there several days before,
we’d have seen a pod of killer whales passing.
If we’d been there a century ago, we’d have seen
Lord Kitchener’s ship,
Hampshire,
strike a mine left by a U-boat
and sink with him on board.
Now, we stood by his memorial,
a castlelike tower,
watching thousands of birds fish.
You’re burning, you said, handing me the sun cream.
You remind me of my dad, I replied.
His hairless, at-risk head,
array of hats. Let’s head down for a swim.
A fishing boat, reverie-small.
If we’d been there a thousand years
ago, it would have been a Viking longship. Now,
Viking ruins huddled under mounds around the bays,
ruffled by the cyber-wind of supremacist fantasy
blowing as far as Vinland – North America
before Columbus, who was soon to fall in Richmond,
Baltimore, St Paul and lose his
head in Boston. If you can
keep your head –.
We started down towards the shore.
Over the headland, another site
stood scoured by the wind:
Skara Brae. If we’d been there in 1772,
Joseph Banks, Endeavour’s naturalist,
would have been digging it.
Now, starlings held it.
There were no visitors.
Hwaer cwom mearg? Hwaer cwom mago?
Hwaer cwom maþþumgyfa? Hoarder.
I thought vaguely backwards, Cecil Rhodes
about two hundred yards away,
my old teacher, hungover,
leaning over a page of Anglo
Saxon, the present, active snow
of Marwick Head, the seabird colony,
insistent as a substrate. I tried
to share a morbid reverie – If I should die –
but found this was an accidental Rupert Brooke
quote, so started again. If I die before you –
you reached across
to wipe traces of suncream off my nose –
scatter my ashes off this cliff.
You rolled your eyes.
A fulmar swung close on patrol.
You sound like your mum, you said –
talking of her ashes dissolving
in the waters off
Port Bàn – White Port – Iona,
round the coast from the White Strand of the Monks
where Vikings had massacred many holy men
in the tenth century,
blood pinking the sand.
Some want to burn, when dead. Others,
like my mother’s parents, choose burial,
*
if they’re free to choose. BRITONS
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU.
I looked back at Kitchener’s turret.
The Battle of Jutland.
Early summer, 1916. If I should die
think only this of me. Or, calling from the other side
of grief – Have you news of my boy Jack?
Rudyard Kipling wrote the phrase cut
into the bleached headstones of the nameless dead.
A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR
KNOWN UNTO GOD.
And, for the war memorials,
THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE –
Book of Ecclesiasticus.
So many men, so many sons,
down into the broken
surface of the earth, called to death
by Kitchener. I felt the closeness of the whiteness
of my skin to stone. Some imposition
hard to name. As though I was
already dead, googling Kipling’s If,
tabs open on the constant tearing down
of Colston, rage sending flames into the police
logic of America. Above the doors to Central Court:
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster –
those stooges dressed in suitable attire, entirely
white, a code owed to the apt Victor-
ians – And treat those two imposters just the same.
Stop looking at your phone, you said.
Reminded suddenly of what I was
missing, I stopped.
A neighbourhood of statues
I’d always thought
silent. Now I heard the silence for the whispering
it was. If after if. Not the first
conditional. The third. Soft
fall-down of inheritance. Hateful
baseline of parental love. Yours is the Earth
and everything that’s in it.
If you’d been harbourside in Bristol
as the slave ships docked,
totting up the yearly income,
if you’d been of that place,
of that time,
why of course, my son –
this is how it was –.
We reached the beach and swam.
Our skin shone like seals-
kin. If you can force your head under
the water, foam like milk,
hold in the scream.
*
JOSEPH MINDEN is a poet based in Brighton, UK. His verse fairy tale, Soft Hans, was published by The Koppel Press in 2016 and The Beef Onion: a grounde rent, a pamphlet written with Hugh Foley and Will Harris, came out with The Minutes Press in early 2020. Collaborations with poet and artist Kat Addis, both perceptible and imperceptible, are ongoing. Poems have appeared most recently in Poetry Review, Blackbox Manifold, The Rialto and Stand. He is training to be a secondary school English teacher.