The 100th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the
March 1995 issue: the cover featured a portrait of poet Jenny Bornholdt by Annelies van der Poel. From the first
issue we had a monthly column by Bill Manhire called “The Poetry File”, in
which he would discuss a particular poem: 24 of these columns were reprinted in
his 2000 non-fiction collection Doubtful
Sounds. For some reason Bill couldn’t do a column for this issue, but
Elizabeth Smither stepped in with this radio talk about “The Pebble Population”
from Brian Turner’s first collection, Ladders
of Rain, which was published in 1978 and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
“The Pebble Population”
by Brian Turner
The Auckland poet CK Stead has said that the poet needs to
work on himself, not the poem, and I take this to mean that to write good
poetry a poet needs to attend to his own character which will then affect the
poem in a way that mere considerations of technique cannot. And sometimes, and
perhaps this is a continuation of this idea, unspoken qualities of restraint,
scrupulous observation, scepticism — the things that are said behind and
between the lines — can be as effective as the words themselves.
This has always seemed to me a characteristic of the poetry
of Brian Turner. It is a poetry of restraint but humour, open-mindedness and
rigour, pessimism (sometimes) and warmth. It is certainly poetry that never
fools itself; the opposite of high-flown; though not without passion, it seems
to scorn vagueness.
Brian Turner often chooses subjects that resemble his own
poetic character and in “The Pebble Population” there seems a perfect blending
of poet and subject. It’s also a perfect example of his manner of working.
Listen to it as a very gentle but soundly-researched theory. Each word as it
appears on the page keeps its distance from the neighbouring word, each pebble
is separate.
It begins conversationally and casually. There have always
been pebbles. Presumably they have had a long history. And if you’ve had a long
history, pebble or human, it probably means you’ve been peaceable. Think of
those empires that collapsed by not being like pebbles. If there were wars and
sacrifice for pebbles, and music and revelry, they would surely have different
attitudes to it. Attitudes of not burning themselves out. A bit like Mother
Courage.
Pebbles don’t move about much, a bit like inhabitants of a
sleepy English village who think travelling 20 miles is too far. They have a
philosophy. They must mate because there are so many of them, but it’s outside
our ken. The passion of it isn’t. They suffer like us.
You can see the poem running through all these thoughts and
conclusions and discarding them one at a time. Man simply cannot be a pebble.
Then at the end there is a surprise, an O Henry twist, and pebbles and man fall
off the universe together, almost hand in hand. This is roughly what the poem
is about.
Notice how the humans in the poem appear as inferior: “we
saccharine humans” or “meeker than a brow-beaten son-in-law”. Or if we share
pebble characteristics, ours are of a more diluted kind: we are meek in this
brow-beaten way whereas the pebbles’ meekness has the virtue of stoicism.
As the poem progresses, the pebbles become heroic. This
happens after the word “philosophy”, as though something has hardened in the
pebbles themselves. Suddenly you almost see a Buddhist temple with bare bending
heads. And when the pebbles “grate together” there is a sense of the
strangeness of Eastern music.
But if this flavour is there, Brian Turner always writes from
the viewpoint of Western man. You feel he wishes he didn’t have this Western
romanticism which is always threatening to break out and which needs to be kept
in control if we are to have any proper or useful understanding of nature. How
do pebbles love compared to us? Do they have a better chance of success? It
seems they may, for they take “one hell of a long time to get to know one
another”. You may notice here how the colloquial follows a summit of emotion.
In a lesser poet it might be a purple patch followed by a piece of gruffness.
Sometimes when a poem has cut loose in one place it is necessary to bring it
back to ground again. This is a feature of English itself; emotion followed by
withdrawal, a re-defining, and then it can begin all over again. After this
rather gruff stanza:
You can’t hurry
a pebble.
Pebbles
take one hell
of a long time
to get to know
one another
the lyric bursts out again just like the “unpredictable
madness of river travel” mentioned earlier in the poem, one of two methods of
pebble travel.
As the poem goes towards its end, the pebbles have become
more than pebbles. They have added human qualities, they have the faces we
would have — “stubborn expressionless faces” — if we were pebbles. At this
point the poet seems to have given in, after some resistance, the attempt to
keep his distance. He thinks how awful it is for them to be rained on:
The irony of it,
all this grief
pouring down on them.
It reminds me of the Edith Sitwell poem “Still Falls The
Rain”: “Still falls the rain/ With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is
changed to the hammer beat.” How still and stoical they are in this
“mushrooming century’? — surely a reference not just to the mushroom clouds of
atomic fallout but also to the mushroom speed of this century’s implacable
change and stress.
If this is the case, what can we learn from pebbles? The
instability of the century we live in separates poet and pebble at the end and
a detachment returns. What could we have in common? And here’s the answer: we
can all crack. For all their stillness, silence, inwardness, pebbles can be
cracked and shatter as easily as heads or hearts. Just the blow of another
stone will do it. So they are like us. So the poem that starts on an
observation ends on a similarity, which is sympathy.
Listen to the careful choice of words, the way a stone would
choose them if it spoke, but most of all to the mood — elation, identification
working against the desire for detachment, so by the time the poem ends there has been a small revolution and
something gained. .
The Pebble Population
You would agree,
wouldn’t
you?
that from
the
beginning of time
there have always
been
pebbles.
To be a pebble,
therefore,
is to have
a long,
respectable,
worthy,
peacable
history —
a mother
could
safely
and
proudly
send one off to war —
which,
to state
the
obvious,
is
more
than we saccharine
humans
can claim
for our
goodselves.
A pebble’s music
is
not
plink plink
but
plunk
plonk.
Pebbles
don’t move
too far
from home
of
their own accord,
preferring,
instead,
the
unpredictable
madness
of river
travel
or
the slow
constriction
of
glaciers.
If
pebbles
seem bland
and
stolid
and meeker
than a
brow-beaten
son-in-law
then
they’ve good reason,
don’t you think?
The
pebble philosophy
is
might as well keep
your mouth shut
you’re going to get
hurt anyway —
the classic
‘grin-and-bear-it’
syndrome.
Reluctantly,
pebbles
sometimes shift,
move in the wind,
roll over,
grate
together.
Theirs is a painfully shy
brand
of lovemaking,
almost an unseen cringing.
Oh,
if
this
is love
it must be
the most
agonisingly
passive copulation
of
all.
You can’t hurry
a pebble.
Pebbles
take one hell
of a long
time
to get to know
one another.
When the heavens cry
tears
stream down
their stubborn,
expressionless
faces.
The irony of it,
all
this grief
pouring down on them.
But
how can you be unfair
to
a pebble?
Wrapped
in their
own terrible embrace
theirs is the pity
of silence,
the pitiless cry
out of the
heart
of this mushrooming
century.
Pebbles
won’t talk,
can’t talk:
they just stare
and stare,
but I shall go on
watching
them
in case
someone
or
something
prises open
their
mouths,
ends
their muteness.
Pebbles
are really like humans,
one
crack
and they’re gone.
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