Poem of the week: Squawks and Speech by Ian Gregson
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/21/squawks-and-speech-ian-gregson-poem-of-the-week Version 0 of 1. This week's poem, Squawks and Speech by Ian Gregson, is a vivid and disconcerting narrative from his 2008 collection, How We Met, and appears in the first of three sections, entitled Sideways at the War. As the neighbouring poems attest, war is defined in the widest metaphorical sense of social fracture and fragmentation. War includes the city's chaos, the loss of human connection and the dislocated individual consciousness. The protagonist, Peter, seems to have died suddenly at home. We're told few details about him, but enough to piece together a basic outline. We know he's affluent and sophisticated enough to own a futon and an exotic bird. The map left open on the table suggests he might have been anticipating a journey. When the poem begins, he has already been dead, or possibly comatose, for some time, and as it continues, the extent of his isolation becomes clear. The only witness, apart from the narrator, is Peter's parrot. The syllabic structure of the stanzas (7, 12, 9, 7, 5) conveys a narrative movement of fits and starts and circles – an endless, unresolvable movement which is also that of the bird. Absence of communication is ironised by the fact that the bird can speak, ie she has picked up a small, human vocabulary, which she uses as though to communicate with other voices (sounds from a downstairs TV, the blackbird outside on the telegraph wire) and to call her owner (Come Back Peter). The mimicked words mean nothing to the bird, or rather, their human meaning is lost in a repertoire of nuanced squawks. Her "Come Back Peter" may be copied from the children's game, or perhaps picked up from someone who was once intimate with Peter: it hints at lively interactions long since abandoned. The "spread map," showing the island of Anglesey, sharpens the pathos of Peter's immobility and the bird's busy helplessness. In a moment of painful comedy, in which communication systems overlap incomprehensibly, she perches on the map, "squawks and waddles into the sea …" The parrot's perspective is laced into the narrative from stanza four. Without human language, she still knows hunger and anguish – "the cold withering of habitat." She perceives that the man has "changed from upright to flat" and that "the door's beak opens" to issue newspapers and letters. The parrot reads Peter's human world in parrot. While her alienation from her natural habitat is evoked, the poem finds an unexpected similarity between her situation and that of Peter. His corpse, which resembles, for the parrot, a fallen tree, is also outside "the endless cycle of decay and growth". The perspective seems to shift slightly but mysteriously in stanza eight. The room itself, caging voices and words which never find response or meaning, is compared to a mind, which might almost be Peter's mind, as if he were trying to put himself back together. Again, the stasis of the "stuck interior" and repetitive echo contrasts with a widening arc of movement. From the earlier flow of city traffic to the seasonal change and "tilting" in the penultimate stanza, wave-like motion surrounds the islanded man (whose name, of course, derives from "rock"). A cat, which comes and goes on its own inscrutable business, is the last uncomprehending witness, disturbed by the glare of Peter's eyes, but no more able to find a language of communication than the weather – those "gusts" at the end of the poem which deceptively "cry their one syllable/ of a cross baby". "Squawks and Speech" seems at times surreal because of the speed of juxtaposition. Its images are so organised that external things, like the buses and roads, seem part of the interior setting. As the key simile, "a room like a mind," suggests, the narrative is not only concerned with fractured external connections, but those inherent to perception. How do we complete the jigsaw of self-knowledge when there are so many dead echoes, so many voices which name us without knowing who we are? The image of Peter's eyes, wide open and lit from without, brings a frisson of the uncanny to a poem that has never settled comfortably for a single tone, but has succeeded in juggling pathos and comedy, lyricism and narrative, in its constantly broken and remade syllabic web. Squawks and Speech Only the parrot observeshis body beside the futon where he tumbled. Hello, she calls, and again Hello – a voice on a cut-off phone – and Come Back Peter, calls as though to the voicesand music from downstairs of the lonely TV, or blackbird near the window where words extend themselves through the wire under its solo. She perches on the spread mapon the table, squawks, and waddles into the sea off Anglesey, her Come Back Peter as though she's searching for where he might be really. Her hunger surprises her,the cold withering of habitat that started when Peter changed from upright to flat – a tree in the rainforest that echoes briefly, thunders across silent milesthen joins the endless cycle of decay and growth. But Peter stays the same, as rush hours pass him by both ways, and buses circle around him. Most days the door's beak opensand emits, not cries, but letters and newspapers that sprawl in heaps like speech that tumbles from a mouth onto the ground unheard and lies there – echolalia from outsiderepeating his name as though trying to recall Peter, who he is, and how he fits into the network of roads – he's a missing piece, lost in a room like a mindwith a memory that over and over returns, a phrase that recurs and calls his name in a tone that's not his own – a stuck interior where the clock is sweeping througha single season though pollen now is mingling with the dust on its face, and sunlight edges across Peter's brow. The year is tilting and Peter's eyes are openso the cat returning squints and mews at his lit irises, while, buffeting the casement, gusts cry their one syllable of a cross baby. |