Created from Pain

A comprehensive collection of George Barker’s poems is certainly, as his publishers assure us, not only timely but overdue. Why then should we be obliged to suffer tamely the statement, following a list of contents? – ‘One long poem “The True Confession of George Barker”, which Mr Barker wished to include in this volume, has been omitted at the publishers’ request.’ It is an admission of shameful timidity, for the poem in question comes near to greatness and cannot be regarded as insignificant in an assessment of Barker’s work. Could it have been omitted on the grounds of blasphemy? The magnificent (and blasphemous) ‘Elegy V’ has been included. On grounds of near-obscenity? Several poems included (‘Monologue of the Husband’, for example) are as near to being obscene as anything in the ‘True Confession’. It is the kind of mystery to make a fellow-poet grit his teeth.

The fact that his publisher should feel obliged to make this omission indicates the flamboyant and explosive character of Barker’s poetry. He is a religious poet, recording an agonising private war with God; an erotic poet who records exactly the nightmares as well as the sensual paradise open to a lover. His autobiographical novel The Dead Seagull sheds much light on the causes for his preoccupation with unhappy love. In a sense his greatest poems are created from pain – he begins speaking where another poet would have fallen silent:

Call, call so softly to me over the loud
Oceans between us
That I may hear your spindrift voice beneath
The sea’s hyenas.

And tell me, tell me that you chiding keep
Deep in your breast
My xiphiac transfixions where you sleep
But never rest.

The poem flows as naturally and inevitably as a jet of blood from a sudden wound. The tears and wounds, the demigorgons and glass unicorns of Barker’s poetry become real immediately one realises that his utterance is a record, inspired by pain, of actual spiritual conflict between a vision of love’s innocence and a knowledge of love’s depravity. We both love and destroy what we love. George Barker does not accept it peacefully. That is why hispage 350 publishers feel diffident, and one reason, other than technical brilliance, why he has written great poems in an age of minor poetry.

1958 (178)