The Shakespeare Code

by

Trixie the Cat

THE TRIXIE REVIEW

For Eddie Linden the world is like Humpty Dumpty.

It’s had a great fall.

The task of his poetry is to try to put it together again – just like his hero-uncle, James Glackin, in An Irish Birthright, who…

Faced with hunger, want and poverty ….’

…..went on….

putting together

the broken pieces, building anew around

the family shell…’

Sometimes the pieces of the shell are too rotten to handle. Eddie hates in particular…

people with well-fed faces

drinking red wine

being very Intellectual

And Nice…

…the hangers-on and name-droppers of the literary world with their ‘hidden faces’ and with ‘a smile too difficult/To make out’ who  will…. 

strip him [a poet] down

mentally, and

leave him naked to the world’.

In Hampstead by Night, Eddie finds Hampstead, where…

 Queers and heteros nest at night’

… and where….

Middle class ladies [hope] for parties and men with big pricks’ 

….as selfishly disfunctional, in its way, as the old Gorbals in City of Razors where, on a Saturday night, you could end up in the Royal Hospital….

wi’ a sword’ in your stomach…

Eddie, the editor of the poetry magazine Aquarius for the last forty years, even hates poets at times…

Cunts that think

They’re geniuses…

In Editor Eddie warns any aspiring poet that…

There’s nae money in this

Game, but literary parties

Where every cunt cuts each

Other up…

He advises that…

This is not the trade

For you, Jimmy, if a wis you

I’d go back to the pit. Why?

Because you meet real people….

These ‘real people’ are the bits of Humpty’s shell that Eddie truly values and they are not just the working-class people Eddie left behind in Scotland.

They are people with hearts and imaginations, like Eddie’s mentor, the poet Elizabeth Smart, without whom…

…there could be nothing. Gone

is the love that overwhelmed

the presence of everything.

The books that covered the house,

and your spirit, and your warmth,

radiated everything…

Eddie, however, is able to ‘summon up’ the dead Smart by focusing on the stone bear that she kept in her garden…

The Bear that saw it all…’

In the same way, in A Table of Fruit,  Eddie ‘summons up’ the saintly Catholic priest,  Father Michael Hollings, by focusing on his preparation for the Mass:

Your table contains everything.

You and everyone share Christ.

Faith and prayer are part of the day…’

But the two parts of the shell that Eddie finds impossible to join are his Chrisitian faith as a child and his doubts as a man….

He detests  the kitsch of Catholic ‘art’ with its ‘plastic ornaments’ and its ‘halo of electric bulbs’. He wants to trample the ‘Madonna of clay’ to make her as ‘real’ as she was when he was young, when she radiated….

…with the warmth of the sun,

Its rays penetrating

With a spiritual tranquility

That imprisoned me in affection.

And the birds were whistling in the distance

As we sipped our tea

And said: Ave Maria

Ave Maria…’

In Landscape Eddie describes how he is….

searching for a cord to link

The present with the past…

….but he fails more often than he succeeds.

He doubts if a meeting with his lover of twenty years ago, Philippe Jamet, would be successful because….

So much water has flowed

Down the Seine

That would have washed away

So much of the youth

You had in London …

And though Eddie succeeds in ‘summoning up’ a vision of a beautiful ‘Mary Magdalen’ he once saw in Cambridge (with a ‘thin body and small waist’ which was all he ‘wanted to possess’) contact is not made now because contact was not made then…

…..a shadow hovering in our midst

Prevented a possible communion’.

Sometimes, though, Eddie is able to find that ‘cord’, as in the poem The Little Flower which begins the collection.

It describes how a very young boy feels the need to touch and feel a flower that ‘moves and bends with the wind’.

It is just one of ‘all the lovely things around him’ but he is so young that this is a ‘strange discovery’ which he cannot understand…

But the boy registers the moment in his unconscious.

Eddie prophesies that years later…

He will remember

And these will be his thoughts

When dreams return

In manhood

Then he will find

The little flower

And know…’

This link, through dreams, of the present with the past, of the unconscious with the conscious, is a beautiful description of how poetry is made…

It is also a great poem in itself.

© Trixie the Cat. September, 2011.

Eddie

To contact the publisher, Hearing Eye, to purchase the volume, see immediately below..

To learn more about Eddie Linden, click here.