The Place I Am
I have become a master of the craft
of moulding, patiently and with precision,
lethargy into shapes of hours and days.
My cast of mind requires a library
of books I wrote myself, sufficient booze
and shabby furniture. Beyond
the balcony is marshy coast. My gaze
slides along pewter-coloured horizontals
that evening sunlight turns to bronze.
It is a habitat where rare plants learn
to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground.
It is the place I am. It should be empty
of any presence otherwise.
Rage and tales of unmapped quicksand
are not discouraging enough.
The landscape fades. I fade. I mourn its beauty
leached into sketch and photograph
or into notebooks that birdwatchers carry.
The sea is close. I fear death by erosion.
It has grown dark but now the sky is starry.
I’ll jot down where I’d like my body found
but not by whom. I think that’s better left.
And better left, I also think, is when.
The airport glows inland. A homing plane
blinks across the ankles of Orion.
The title of this week’s poem anticipates analogy, the construction of the human self in geographical terms. It might suggest a creative-writing or therapeutic exercise prompted by the question “If you were a place, what sort of place would you be?” This would be an amusing and perhaps revealing assignment, but Bennet’s poem does something more strange and complicated with that act of translation: the person is also present, and often construed separately from the self-as-place.
The Place I Am declares itself slowly. It first introduces the speaker as “a master of the craft / of moulding”. The sentence evolves and becomes figurative, as moulding turns out to be transitive; we learn the kind of moulding being done is figurative, a moulding of “lethargy into shapes and hours of days”. The phrase “cast of mind” neatly takes up the idea of the skeleton of interior structure a moulding might require, and so the portrait of the solitary speaker is enlarged. But we’re not on solid ground, exactly. The demand for a library “of books I wrote myself” implies an unusually fortified autonomous space, a requirement to be pursued later on, when there’s an obsession with keeping trespassers away from “the place I am” (“Rage and tales of unmapped quicksand / are not discouraging enough”).
When the speaker’s gaze takes us, via the balcony, beyond the cosy inner sanctum of “sufficient booze / and shabby furniture” the view is presented objectively. The person who is the place has a long-sighted perspective on their own geography. Bennet’s angle is to blend the aesthetic and informative. Watery inlets are turned from pewter to bronze by the evening sun, “a habitat where rare / plants learn to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground”. A reader might be tempted to identify a seascape of the mind: it’s remote and the wonders are hard-won. Salt-water has forced difficult evolution on the “rare plants”: birds that nest on the ground face particular dangers. Trespass and, more fearfully, “death by erosion” threaten the arcadia, its creative freedom and pleasant sense of decline. In the place’s view, sketching, photography and note-making become environmental threats. Practical concerns may replace the artistic.
And so, among the small twists and turns of surprise in the narrative, we find the speaker preparing to “jot down where I’d like my body found”. Reticence hedges the plan: the identity of the finder, and the time the discovery is to occur are both “better left”. The idiom is one of understatement, and suggests perhaps a northern English terseness. It slips gracefully into the poem’s diction, its habit of never expanding beyond the essential. Interpretation also may be “better left”, and psychological symbols resisted. Maybe it’s best to let the place-person hybrid remain a mysterious entity, freed by the poem’s shifting boundaries of land and water, indoors and outdoors, to float between states of being.
Bennet was a painter before he became a poet, and has written a number of poems that are set in tangibly realised landscapes. This one, too, gives the impression of a real place - nowhere more compellingly than in its last two lines with their brilliant juxtaposition of images: the “homing plane” that “blinks across the ankles of Orion”. The poem’s portrait of human consciousness seems by comparison dreamlike and improvised. Bennet’s rhythms help the transitions. He writes a steady but never stilted iambic pentameter, and is able to move smoothly on occasion from the five-beat line to the four, for instance: “It is the place I am. It should be empty / of any presence otherwise”. We’re close to music and history, as well as painting, but with no sense that language itself is less than the primary fascination.
• Nayler & Folly Wood: New and Selected Poems by Peter Bennet is published by Bloodaxe Books.
