BOOK REVIEW
Voice Mail
by Duncan Forbes (1960)
Enitharmon Press

An Old Radleian, formerly Head of English at Cheltenham College under Richard Morgan, and for the academic year 1995/6 an English master at Radley under the same, Duncan Forbes, poet and schoolmaster (currently Head of English at Wycombe Abbey) has a number of connections with Radley. Unlike the Poet Laureate whose advertised opinions about Radley are, perhaps of political necessity, less than favourable, Duncan Forbes's views are more ambivalent. In 'Fair Copy', subtitled '(On being asked for two poems in manuscript to be exhibited in the new library of his old school.)', he teases us thus:
Which of my voices should I choose
To represent me and my views?

The comparison with Andrew Motion is germane and one the poet makes himself in his latest collection, Voice Mail, in the unambiguously titled "Why Can't I be Poet Laureate?"
I'm practically unpatriotic
I prefer the bizarre and neurotic
I can't ma'am and smarm
Kowtow and salaam
I prefer my obeisance erotic

That said, being Poet Laureate does guarantee "praise and attention" and Voice Mail I'd suggest demands and deserves both in considerable measure.

There are a good number of comic poems in the collection. The now familiar and oft-quoted homage to T.S. Eliot's Old Possum, 'Downing Street Cat' (I promise you no grand promises, I promise you no sleaze,/ I am a lovely family man and desperate to please), 'Euroland', a banal Federal anthem "by massed choirs in whatever accent seems appropriate", and 'Wild West' (Man with a mandate/ Land of the free/ I gotta date/ with destiny) on Bush's foreign policy, are deadly accurate satirical darts thrown in the eyes of the political classes. A number of poems satirise the way we live now; 'Equal Opportunism' 'Job Description', 'Arrivals', and 'No Time Wasters Please' engage in some witty wordplay to do so:
Where bigotry's obligatory, it's certain to reject
The sexist or sectarian of either sex or sect
from'Equal Opportunism';

Miguel(Chigwell)
District/Central
Seeks oriental
Genital rental
from 'No Time Wasters Please'.

The spirit of Betjeman is very much alive not least in 'The Shade of John Betjeman revisits Bletchley, Bucks" where he desires the same fate to befall Milton Keynes as he had earlier, and famously, wished to befall Slough ('Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough'),
Come back, Polaris submarines
And redirect your war machines,
O Milton's God at Milton Keynes
And smash the place to smithereens

There's a very good Larkinesque grump in 'Wine and Cheese':
Spare me, oh spare me
The kitschery,the bitchery,
The putschery, the butchery
The hatchet-job obituary....
...In the arty-fart party
Of karati literati

which calls to mind Larkin's 'Vers de Societe' (My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours....)
Bloodsucker' is simply a very funny poem:
Baring my buttocks, I've been bitten to buggery
My midriff is measled by midge or mosquito....
.. Jumping on the bandwagon of my underpants,
It must have hurrahed in my hairier area....
(It even pricked my pecker for its prandial peccadiloes)

while 'After the Sermon" imagines the rather gloomily serious poet Geoffrey Hill being upstaged by Postman Pat at the Cheltenham Festival.

There's real wit and dexterity of thought and expression in all of these and equally so in some of the more serious poems such as 'Origin of the Species" which has a Blakean sense of paradox at its heart:
Who divined the seen unseeing
To bemuse the human being?...
..What engendered spume and spark
In the ampoule of the dark?

A considerable number of the poems in the collection describe incidents and scenes from Duncan Forbes's many travels. There are poems about two Asian elephants in Melbourne zoo ('Zoological Gardens'); the self-explanatory 'Hong Kong Island' and 'Niagara'; poems set on Mediterranean islands, especially Crete and Ithaca, many of which (re)consider their underlying mythologies, and poems set on the Pacific coast of America: 'San Francisco Bay' is particularly memorable:
On the foreshore at Sausolito
a suntanned fisherman,
balding with hairy back,
is reeling in a catch.

The curved antenna of his rod and line
has drawn a crowd who gasp
when what breaks the surface is a ray:
sad cartoon eyes and Moomin mouth,
its underbelly moon-white as a sail.

And as a colleague cuts the barb
free from the suffocating pout,
the twitchy aerial of tail
overarcs its back and writhes.

The fisherman uplifts it by the gills
for all to see and photograph.
then lobs it back and with a splash
the belly-flopping ray
has undulated out of sight again
into the thought of San Francisco Bay.

Closer to home there are a number of poems set in Northumberland whose lyricism and thoughtfulness are arresting. Consider this from 'Anno Domini'
Beyond both Alnmouth and the Aln,
Above a boat-filled estuary,
A cross stands on a mound or dune

Like a cathedral drowned in sand,
A small hill for a Calvary
Up which a figure in the sun
Climbs to the top, then kneels in prayer,
As if she were illusory,
A pilgrim from an earlier age
Or apparition on a screen,
Dressed in the habit of a nun

or the closing stanza of 'Brinkburn Priory'
Two girls are playing in the garden
With a remnant of a fraying rope,
Moles have undermined the lawn,
Rosebay willowherb in sunlight
Seeds along the riverbank;
The water, noisy as a torrent,
Carves its channel out of sight.
Beech trees dominate the valley
Witnessing a prehistoric
Resurrection into leaf

There's a graceful ease of expression here, a quiet sureness of touch, that deserves a far wider audience than Duncan Forbes's poems have hitherto enjoyed.

There's relatively little that is particularly personal or familial; 'Day at the Dewhursts' is a childhood memory of time spent on a dairy farm in Devon; "Momento" remembers Auntie B (We loved her stories and her childish laughter) but the poem that stands out and which will, I think, attract a good deal of attention is 'Father', a death-bed elegy.
The skeleton in its shroud
and the skin on the head so cold..
..under two paintings of yours

stirs memories of a man who was "a handsome sporting hero" at Oxford, a doctor in the West Africa Corps, a consultant and physician "in your prime' and, to his son, a conjurer, eccentric don, paterfamilias and combatant in argument (antler-locking rebuttals/ of youth by adulthood): now
He who endowed me with life
looks like Breughel's Aveugle
with his mouth half open to laugh

It is a honest a poem as you will read and deftly conveys sentiment without sentimentality.

Diverse and wide-ranging in style and content, the poems collected here none the less share the urge of 'Father' to speak directly to the reader. Thus there is a profoundly humane and humanist concern throughout the collection purposefully confirmed in the closing poems. 'Fair Copy' and 'A poem written in blood". The former concludes:
Long live life as long as art
Can liberate the human heart

and the collection closes, with the observation that a poem ('written in blood') can:
console
atone
and entertain
the soul
in pain
and make us
whole

In short: poetry matters.
Mark Moore, Head of English

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