If Howard Barker remains little known as a dramatist in this country, his name barely registers at all in poetry - despite having published five collections (among them Lullabies for the Impatient, which I recommend to one and all).
This probably has something to do with the work's lack of great formal finish: he's such a prolific writer that you wonder how much time he finds for polishing. But, as with the plays, there is a powerful and genuinely maverick imagination at work here.
As usual, in this previously unpublished poem, he is alert to both personal and political life without any implicit moral agenda. I love the "polished surfaces" of clarity here, and the "murmuring flung like a flag" by the knight's indifferent spectators.
After So Many Walls
After so many walls I have come to the wall
I saw a pale knight pluck his sleeve Futilely: Intuition slid over him as a snake Encompasses an urn I saw he ached for ignorance but he had Only clarity and its polished surfaces The arid evidence of years and useless Proofs: So he went to the wall and the wall Took him in: I saw then he was watched from cafés Where to stir a spoon was flagrant: The rich stood still with the poor: Then the murmuring was flung like a flag And the gaming commenced again
Both Lullabies for the Impatient and The Tortmann Diaries, Barker's most recent collection, are available from Calder Publications.
