Lifesaving Poems: Marin Sorescu's 'With Only One Life'

I came across this poem yesterday in my notebook of Lifesaving Poems, the project I began more than two years ago to celebrate my recovery from non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

The idea was simple. I wanted to have in one place a copy of one poem of every poet I had ever loved. It did not matter to me whether the poem or the poet was well-known. I wanted to celebrate life by writing out by hand poems I knew I had encountered and wanted not to forget. My notebook is not a big one, but it still took much longer to finish than I had anticipated.

I am so pleased I chose this one, by the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu. It reminded me of one of the first poetry readings I ever went to, a 24-hour sponsored 'poethon' at the ICA to raise funds for the then decrepit Moniack Mhor writing centre in Scotland.

The idea was that each participating poet had to recite from memory ten minutes of their poetry to qualify for sponsorship by friends and family, in the usual manner. (If you write in I will tell you who cheated by whipping out copies of their books).

Sorescu, whose English was non-existent, was accompanied by Alan Jenkins offering a line-by-line translation 'for those of us whose Romanian [was] a bit rusty'. As I remember, it was the highlight of the evening, poem after wry poem delivered in declamatory Romanian, each line pursued by its after-echo in impeccable English.

It could be rose-tinted spectacles, but I clearly remember the audience falling around laughing at the final line of 'With Only One Life'. Reading it again yesterday was to reconnect with the poem's underlying seriousness, almost in spite of its utterly clear translation and plain-speaking tone.

On a day which marks for me the anniversary of a particularly unpleasant milestone in my journey towards diagnosis of cancer, the implied warning of the poem rings truer than ever.

 

 

 

With Only One Life

 

Hold with both hands

The tray of every day

And pass in turn

Along this counter.

 

There is enough sun

For everybody.

There is enough sky,

And there is moon enough.

 

The earth gives off the smell

Of luck, of happiness, of glory,

Which tickles your nostrils

Temptingly.

 

So don’t be miserly,

Live after your own heart.

The prices are derisory.

 

For instance, with only one life

You can acquire

The most beautiful woman,

Plus a biscuit.

 

 

Marin Sorescu

trs. Joana Russell-Gebbett with D.J. Enright

from The Biggest Egg in the World (Bloodaxe, 1987)

 

Lifesaving Poems

 

Lifesaving Poems: Jackie Kay's 'Dusting the Phone'

One of the things I love about my job is that I get to co-construct projects with other people. One of the most enjoyable of these has been the Poetry Matters Seminar Series, which finished last week in Leicester with a marvellous reading with Jackie Kay.

As anyone who has heard Jackie read will know, she is the most generous of performers, taking time to explicate Scottish words and personal references in the poems which seemed to float in the charged atmosphere like fire.

The poem below is from my Lifesaving Poems series, and can be found in Other Lovers and Darling.  I first read it in a magazine. What struck me then and still strikes me now nearly twenty years later is the way the poem's title promises action but in fact describes very little actual 'dusting'.

I think it is a great example of the way the title of a poem can set up an expectation in the imagination of the reader, then explore the gap between what is promised and what is 'happening', which is the poem's real subject. In this sense the poem itself turns into a kind of 'hoax' while asserting itself as the voice of one 'trapped' between gratification and desire.

Reading it again I am struck by the poem's gentle and very subtle humour, the self-mocking dressing up and 'silver service' polishing; the playful absurdity of: 'In which case, who would ring to tell me? Nobody knows.' These are hints that the speaker is perhaps secretly relishing the pull and push tension of not being able 'to move', that not knowing what will happen when the phone once more fails to ring is perhaps the best place to be of all. 

 

 

 

Dusting the Phone

 

 

I am spending my time imagining the worst that could happen.

I know this is not a good idea, and that being in love, I could be

spending my time going over the best that has been happening.

 

The phone rings heralding some disaster. Sirens.

Or it doesn’t ring which also means disaster. Sirens.

In which case, who would ring me to tell? Nobody knows.

 

The future is a long gloved hand. An empty cup.

A marriage. A full house. One night per week

in stranger’s white sheets. Forget tomorrow,

 

You say, don’t mention love. I try. It doesn’t work.

I assault the postman for a letter. I look for flowers.

I go over and over our times together, re-read them.

 

This very second I am waiting on the phone.

Silver service. I polish it. I dress for it.

I’ll give it extra in return for your call.

 

Infuriatingly, it sends me hoaxes, wrong numbers;

or worse, calls from boring people. Your voice

disappears into my lonely cotton sheets.

 

I am trapped in it. I can’t move. I want you.

All the time. This is awful – only a photo.

Come on, damn you, ring me. Or else. What?

 

I don’t know what.

 

 

 

Jackie Kay, from Other Lovers (Bloodaxe, 1993)

Lifesaving Poems

 

Laura Barton on music to fall in love to -from The Guardian

Four years ago, I heard about a man who said that falling in love should feel like listening to Northern Sky by Nick Drake. I've never met the gentleman in question, but it's possibly for the best; I'd probably fall in love with him. You can dissect music to fall in love to, just as you can untangle the human heart into an inventory of valves and veins and ventricles, but it will not really sum up the magic therein. If I were to place Northern Sky on the surgeon's slab and under the scalpel, I might be able to tell you it's because of the viola soaked into the organ and celeste, that the great surging sound it gives mirrors precisely how your stomach seems to billow and flip when you fall in love.

I could tell you, too, that it is something to do with the tone of surprise in Drake's voice. Because falling in love is a very surprising feeling. You hear so much about it in songs, books and films that you think you know how it will feel and smell and sound; you expect it will taste like chicken. You know that love is a battlefield, the drug, the law, a many-splendoured thing; you know that love comes in colours.

And just as it is simple, and somehow appealing, to confuse lust or infatuation with love, so it is easy to mistake any old syrup-steeped ballad for music that encapsulates the feeling of being in love. That is what keeps Celine Dion or Bryan Adams at No 1 for weeks without end. That is what once made me think Westlife's World of Our Own actually summed up the contents of my heart, and in fact, to my eternal shame, caused me to buy it on cassette single. That is what made me fall for a song that rhymed "honey" with "funny". When you want to be in love, you are vulnerable to such warbling. But this is surely music for crushes; synthetic creations padded out with the musical equivalents of sugar and fat and bright, blazing E-numbers.

When I was young, I used to lie in bed on Sunday night listening to Gary Davies' late-night radio show just to hear all those highly charged hearts criss-crossing the isle like electricity cables, the weary commuters on the A40, the adulterers, the long-distance lorry drivers sending lonely messages home, and I thought love must sound like Sophie B Hawkins.

But when I first fell in love it sounded like Van Morrison's Sweet Thing. It was something to do with those "heart strings that play soft and low" (to borrow the words from another Morrison song), and something to do with that line about jumping hedges, but mostly it was to do with the fact there is a dampness, a lushness that emerges throughout the course of the song, from the "clear clean water to quench my thirst" to the "bluer ocean" to the "gardens all misty wet with rain", because the first time I fell in love it descended like a deluge.

The best love songs, I think, feel like springtime. "All that juice and all that joy," as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, the feeling that you will "never grow so old again", as Morrison sang it; that feeling of someone seeing the world afresh, with a newfound "sense of wonder". Which brings us back to Northern Sky. Like Sweet Thing, you feel a crisp and icy newness melting beneath an emerging warmth and brightness. It's a muddling of the senses that allows perspective to stretch from the "sweet breezes in the top of a tree" to the "emotion in the palm of your hand". Drake balls up all the surprise and recognition and joy of being in love to deliver one great magical suckerpunch. I'll put my scalpel down now.

via guardian.co.uk

When I began to recover from my treatment for non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma this article was the first thing I remember reading in a newspaper that was not sports related.

It reminded me of living and falling in love; it made me want to live in the moment again, for as long as possible.

Best of all it sent me straight back to the records. For a long while they became the only things that mattered in the long road back to health.

Poetry Matters

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A Few Odds and Sods

By this time in January, 2006 I was fairly certain that something was very wrong with my health. Like a lot of people I knew I had felt exhausted the previous Christmas. I can still see the look of concern on my colleagues' faces when I turned up to an end of term meeting looking grey. Christmas came and went, as it does, and I seemed to turn a corner.

Then on New Year's Day I woke up with a tearing pain in my right side. I thought, after a night celebrating with friends, that I may have kicked the covers off during the night, and slept in a draft. Sympathy that morning was in fairly short supply.

The pain did not lessen. I spent most of that eveing in the A & E department of the local hospital, where tests on my kidneys (our original suspicion) revealed absolutely nothing. I was sent home with some high-dose painkillers.

But the pain only grew worse. My GP ordered me to pack a bag a bag of 'a few odds and sods' and sent me back to the hospital for more tests. I spent a very interesting night and a day in the Emergency Medical Unit largely not being seen by anyone due to my non-urgent symptoms.

Sent home again with even stronger pain killers I began to feel like I was wading through concrete even in the most basic of tasks. My GP looked at me with increasing puzzlement. We bagan to discuss the possibility of getting an ultrasound scan done on my side. He put me down on the urgent list and told me it would take six weeks.

This week in January in 2006 I made the decision to book a private scan, the results of which changed my life.

 

In September of this year you will be able to read the full account of these days in two books, Riddance (Worple Press), a book of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a prose memoir.

Here, from Riddance, is where my experience of cancer began, with my GP's instruction to get packing.

 

A Few Odds and Sods

 

was all he said I’d need:

‘It’s only overnight.’

 

I hated the midnight obs,

the moaning and tossing of men

 

who didn’t know where they were,

offering to buy everyone drinks.

 

Just dozing off at six

a trolley appeared with tea.

 

I told them my birth-date

and got seen last.

 

The scan on my balls was fun:

‘Just like a pair of lychees.’

 

They booked in a day for more tests.

Then came the visitors and the grapes.

 

from Riddance (Worple Press, 2012)

In memory of Jorn Cann

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I was deeply saddened to hear ten days ago of the death of Jorn Cann, the ward doctor in the haematology unit where I was treated for lymphoma. He was a rare human being, and even rarer doctor: charming and objectionable, foul-mouthed yet compassionate. Nobody who met him -you usually heard him approaching before you actually saw him- will forget him. He was proof that Arsenal fans can have a sense of humour, and live testament to the hope of a cure for everyone he treated. The world is a smaller and much quieter place without him today.

 

Blood

in memory of Jörn Cann

 

 

The nurse announces the canula.

One Sharp scratch and you’re there,

 

vial after ochre vial,

unstoppable.

 

Cousin to tawny port

your sheen’s a glossy russet.

 

You do not gush, you seep,

but would soak

 

the world

if you could.

 

You’re not much to look at:

but, spun, you separate –

 

lymph, plasma

and marrow, the very core

 

of us, telling everything.

Famously salty

 

to the taste, you seem stable as mercury.

If only.

 

from Riddance (Worple, 2012)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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