A Garden in the Antipodes

In drips and drabs I have read From a Garden in the Antipodes. A poem or two at a time. Sometimes four at once, and then nothing for weeks. Months. It has taken me over a year to read a thin volume of verse. Not because the verse was challenging or difficult – far from it. It trips along lightly and easily, dances gently through the garden, and amiably leads the reader along. I have read it as I have had time and recollection – not for want of inclination. When I have remembered the book was there, and had a moment spare, I have visited Ursula’s garden.

The poems were first written as letters to friends and family, and that is how I’ve experienced them over the year – as correspondence, of a sort, rather than a book of poetry. I have picked up the book with the frequency which I might expect to receive a letter from a friend in New Zealand. Not by design (I’m not quite that clever), but that has been the effect none-the-less.

And over the year I have come to enjoy Ursula’s garden, appreciate the progress of her fuchsias and Omi-Kin-Kan (what was that, anyway? A ficus?), and smile at the adventures and misadventures of Michael, her cat. It’s such a lovely thing to spend a little time there, listening to her tell you about her plans for the box of bulbs she just received, or talk about how hard it is to keep order in that section along the path…

In the last tree poems I have encountered the one that first drew my attention to Mary Ursula Bethell: “Fall”. When I read that poem in an anthology, I found it so amiable that I wanted to spend more time with the person who wrote it, to see what else she had to say.

And the last poem? “Dirge”? I realised after I had read it that anyone who had come to this verse first, without spending time in Ursula’s garden, would probably read it quite differently. It was very strange to read it over a second time, and think how it would seem to a complete “stranger”. This is how one would encounter it in an anthology – divorced from the other poems that illuminate its context.

It makes me wonder how much is missed in an anthology – and wonder why we never seem to republish the original collections anymore. There has been much talk lately about the way buying music song-by-song is cheating listeners out of the experience of the album as a whole – but that’s how we’ve been packaging poetry for years.

The anthology is the iTunes library (or mixed tape) of poetry. Even in anthologies of verse from the same poet, the poems are removed from their original context. Whatever vision the poet might have had when originally setting out the order of verse is lost.

I don’t think we fully appreciate how the poem we have just read influences the way we read the next one. At the end of a book of verse about gardening, one has a very clear picture to go with the imagery used in “Dirge”. Found by itself amongst poems about, say, war, or the woes of 20th Century society, the same poem would have a different resonance and evoke different images.

I have said that I first encountered “Fall” in an anthology, and that I enjoyed it and wanted to seek out the poet. I was fortunate that my library held an old copy of From a Garden in the Antipodes, and I could read it in its original setting – finding it where it fell in the pattern of poems. Where the poet set it (like a jeweller sets a stone in a broach). I am glad I encountered “Dirge” her, in its original setting, the first time I read it.

But there are so many poems that I can’t read in their original settings. While individual poems (the poets’ “best of” lists) are constantly republished in anthologies, the original books are curiosities held in a handful of libraries. I don’t have access to them. While novels are republished time and time again, it is the fate of books of poetry and short stories to be broken up and sold for spare parts.

And that’s a pity.

I have nothing against anthologies – I think they are an excellent way to meet writers and get a feel for poems or short stories from a particular place or genre. I just think we shouldn’t be neglecting the original collections: the book of poems or short stories that the author first negotiated with the publishers.

DIRGE (by Mary Ursula Bethell)

Easter. And leaves falling.
Easter. And first autumn rains.
Easter. And dusk stealing
Our bright working daylight
And cold night coming down
In which we may not work.

Easter. And morning bells
Chime in the late dark.
Soon those fluttering birds
Will seek a more genial clime
Time has come to light fires
For lack of enlivening sun.

Summer’s arrow is spent,
Stored her last tribute,
So, now, we plant our bulbs
With assured vision,
And, now, we sow our seeds
Sagely for sure quickening.

So, purging our borders
We burn all rubbish up,
That all weak and waste growth,
That all unprofitable weeds,
All canker and corrosion,
May be consumed utterly.

These universal bonfires
Have a savour of sacrifice.
See how their clean smoke,
Ruddy and white whorls,
Rises to the still heavens
In plumy spirals.

You take me – yes, I know it –
Fresh from your vernal Lent.
These ashes I will now spread
For nutriment about the roses,
Dust unto fertile dust,
And say no word more.