(This review first appeared in Poetry Wales 25.1 (1989) pp. 58-59.)
The second edition of Dannie Abse's Collected Poems follows twelve years after the first. Give or take a handful of poems, allow for some regrouping of poems, and it consists of the contents of that earlier volume together with those from Way Out in the Centre (1981) and Ask the Bloody Horse (1986). There is one new poem, "Carnal Knowledge".
"Song for Pythagoras", which closes the book, is the best gloss on its title:
White coat and purple coat
a sleeve from both he sews.
That white is always stained by blood,
that purple by the rose.
And phantom rose and blood most real
compose a hybrid style;
white coat and purple coat
few men can reconcile.
White coat and purple coat
can each be worn in turn
but in the white a man will freeze
and in the purple burn.
From quite early on this book worries away at the problem of identity. The semi-doggerel couplets of "The Trial" satirise society's unease at a man who, convinced that his given face didn't represent his inner self, did away with it. In "Duality" the poet declares that he has two faces and that both of them are "masks". He calls on Christ to take away one of them "and leave me all / lest four tears from two eyes fall": lest, that is, he comes in for double the suffering that uncomplicated sensibilities have to endure. It's debatable, however, whether a split or fragmented identity is necessarily a bad thing for a poet to have. It may on the contrary be the making of him or her, the condition, for example, of a negative capability that enables its possessor to construct from the jostling bubbles of a natural pluralism a number of different personae. "A Faithful Wife" demonstrates that Abse can write splendidly in persona. He is, of course, a novelist and a playwright as well as a poet, and to both of these callings the ability of the shape-changer is essential. By the time of writing of the poem "Funland" and the play Pythagoras based on it (to which the "Song" quoted above is a lyrical coda), he had come up with a formula for expressing a divided identity which he obviously felt illuminated his own creative situation. "White Coat, Purple Coat" implies a series of contraries: intellect and feeling, reason and imagination, ice and fire – to go no further; in Abse's case these might be thought to come together in the vocations of doctor and poet, man of science and man of art.
In the long poem "Funland", white-coated scientists and black-garbed priests, specialists in body and soul respectively, "confer and dally", apparently finding no difficulty in getting along with each other. The unidentified narrator (seemingly a patient in this asylum-world, world-asylum) sees an "old smelly magician" clad in a "mothy purple cloak" rise up from the ground in a coffin to wave his wand and cause scientists and priests to cavort in the sky. It is, however, a dream or a vision. No more substantial than the outsider-magician is the outsider-poet. He, wearer of a purple coat made of plastic, is a windy phoney whom the inmates fail to recognise for what he is. This comic treatment implies that Abse's tolerance for prestidigitators and vatic rhetoricians is strictly limited. It's to the point to note that in "A Seashell for Vernon Watkins" (the most critical elegy – if that is what it is – I've ever read) Watkins is described as "unreal, unearthed" and a "relentless romantic" who "big-talked / how the dead resume the silence of God". Abse, then, refuses the gaudy, unblemished purple of the sonorous word-magician. His are the poems of a sceptic whose rationalism makes him doubt all religions and their trappings (saints, miracles, superstitions), leaving him with nothing to set against the gross reality of death but a struggling humanism. When, in the early "The Second Coming", Christ pokes his head through the earth's crust, it's promptly lopped off by a harvesting machine. Less truculently cavalier is the fairly recent villanelle "The Abandoned", which begins:
Dear God in the end you had to go.
Dismissing you, your absence made us sane.
We keep the wine and bread for show.
The first line is packed with ambiguities that seem to suggest that losses and gains in this matter might cancel one another out. "Dear", the letter-writer's mode of address, conveys both the expense and value of having a God, while the remainder of the line simultaneously manages to mean that God withdrew of his own volition and that man got rid of him. The poem's tone vacillates between the sardonic and the wistful.
An urban poet (but not often an urbane one), Dannie Abse is notable for his lack of interest in nature and landscape. He's happy to confess his ignorance of the names of wild flowers and is constitutionally incapable of writing about animals (thank goodness – there are enough poets doing it; see the delightful "Florida"). His positives are human ones – in the fine "The Smile was" the identical expressions on the faces of women who have just given birth; in "Smile Please" the image of marriage – agreeably free from any Larkinesque patina of vulgarity. Such poems as these represent mature Abse at his most "purple"; and with few exceptions his celebratory poems succeed in avoiding the trap of sentimentality and in keeping their lyrical feet on the earth. Firm and sane though these pieces are, however, they are for me outweighed by those that face away from the light. For it's plain that this writer is a death-haunted man. What the white coat of reason seems above all to require of Dannie Abse, Jew and doctor, is a freezing gaze, an unremitting gaze, not only into death's face but also into its stripped innards. Repeatedly this subject brings out the best in him (as in greater, but certainly not less honest poets); in clinical, or self-lacerating, or even horrific poetry. And it's on this ground that, doctor and poet, he reconciles – and reconciles triumphantly and memorably – white coat and purple coat. "Song for Pythagoras" may claim that the style born of such a reconciliation must be "a hybrid", but it's untrue of Abse's writing. Only in a few early poems, in fact, does it strike me as uncertain. Characteristically plain and colloquial, eschewing rhetoric and verbal dazzle, the richness of a sensualist or the complexity of a symbolist, it's perfectly suited to its task. In, for instance, "The Pathology of Colours", "In the Theatre", "Case History", "Exit" and "Carnal Knowledge", Abse demonstrates conclusively the fiery qualities if ice.
Back to top ^