The Bluff
The newt that plays so delicately dead
must be on the qui vive unless terror
just flicks the switch. Its limbs go limp,
its upturned orange underbelly over-ripe:
a toxic flag unfurled from the beyond.
– Clubbed fingers, clammy green and spectral,
appear to have slipped off the frets
of a miniature guitar.
Unstrung, inert, the major risk it runs
from a sentimental species such as ours
is premature burial, but even that it seems to have
rehearsed for, lying days out under a stone.
It keeps dead up for quite some time and then
gives itself away. A blink. A twitch. How easily
it shuffles off its life – and then its death.
If this is play, it’s play for mortal stakes.
Play for keeps, and not keepsakes.
An all-in bluff no river card could save.
Sorry to intrude, I replace the newt
beneath its stone. There it can lie
pretending, presumably, to be alive.
Jamie McKendrick once said in an interview: “I’ve always liked the way poetry, or rather language itself, can remain mobile, can resist a fixity of terms.” This tonal flexibility characterises many of his poems, and it’s part of the appeal of this week’s choice, taken from his most recent collection, Anomaly.
Among a number of definitions, the word bluff indicates the tactics whereby a poker player sets out to deceive “through a bold bet on an inferior hand”. The card-playing analogy is lightly registered in the poem, but confirmed with a neat pun on “river card” in stanza three (“An all-in bluff no river card could save”). The newt’s strategy is of the more general zoological kind, if taken to new lengths. Assumed by the speaker to be dead, it pretends to that condition for an unreasonable length of time, then gives itself away by a tiny life-betraying movement at the last moment. (“A blink. A twitch.”) The speaker apologetically puts the newt back under its stone, and the poem concludes with a deft reversal, a fanciful speculation that the rescued newt is now “pretending, presumably, to be alive”.
The poem’s playfulness is serious, and the newt is cleverly, lovingly captured. In the opening stanza, it’s a creature “made strange”, as if observed by an outsider who, like the extraterrestrial visitor of “Martian poetry” makes sharp-eyed remarks concerning objects he knows nothing about, but simultaneously illuminates them. The newt, though, is the alien here. Those tiny, horror-comic fingers that “appear to have slipped off the frets / of a miniature guitar” are beautifully imagined. “Clammy,” of course, reminds us that the speaker has actually picked the newt up.
Perhaps the creature was merely peacefully hibernating, but the idea of its playing dead is a conceit that enhances the poem’s vision and resonance. The threat the newt perceives is not illusory. When, in the second stanza, we’re told that “the major risk it runs / from a sentimental species such as ours / is premature burial” the assertion is partly fanciful, but it seems to carry a sentimentality warning.
We humans enjoy animal stories, but we are hearing a new kind of narrative these days, catastrophe stories in which mammals, birds and fish die horribly, and sometimes die out as species, because of us. Those stories are mirrors in which it’s painful to see our reflections. The mystifying, semi-mythologised amphibian of McKendrick’s imagination is an endearing creature, and the imagination that creates its “bluff” with such humour and pathos is endearing, too, reflecting our best, or better, nature. But the threat of “premature burial” that might include extinction, is still present, however delicate the music of the poem, and affectionate the images. The threat to the newt is ultimately our own huge human shadow looming over the Earth. “If this is play, it’s play for mortal stakes. / Play for keeps, and not keepsakes.”
