Opposed to the ‘bigness of things’ is the section ‘Interiors’. In it ‘Noise’ is a highlight. Intelligent, subtle, it is a dialogue on the nature of sound which the poet convinces us has both colour and scent. Having transformed coathangers into an aviary with ‘twitterers, skeletal birds’ on opening his wardrobe, noise can be ‘soft and smells / of mothballs’, but also of ‘burnt rubber and freshly cut steel’.
The poetic movement flows from one image to the next building complexity out of simplicity. Finally passing ‘alarm bell red’ and ‘the green line on the cardiac monitor’, we arrive at white noise, then black, ‘the colour of absolute silence.’ Now:
My wardrobe will consist of black and white. Like an old-time nun or priest I’ll pass my days in silent prayer embryoed in rhythms of monotone chant. Sometimes I want my words ironed flat, the soundwaves in space a waveless sea. I want the universe to smell of starch again.
Just when you thought you the poem tamed, its final line throws out the quandary of meaning. Lynch’s style of poetry demands a finish that is uncertain. His work leans into possibilities. Where does the smell of starch fit in the scent and colour of sound? In between? Possibly, as the poems often seem to inhabit those liminal places, being one and another; not one nor the other.
Many of Lynch’s last lines do this – throw you off the scent of meaning. Deceptively simple, they are often multi-messaged. They draw you back through the subtlety of the poem, again, puzzling. No easy answers. It must be deliberate. In ‘Sonnet’, the card is ‘left blank for your thoughts’.
Poems in ‘Interiors’ darken, take on weight. ‘Plot’ is biting, fierce:
You do the table plan and round up night I’ll prepare toothpicks and dig ‘till there’s a dark space underneath the house. We’ll need an unflinching gaze an eye for the future and every last drop of disinfectant.
‘Blood plums’ and ‘The vexing’, as ‘the past exits the back door /where pot plants do their time’, are eerie and somehow threatening. Sadness and inevitability intrude and become exposed as in ‘Small things that lie ahead’ and ‘Subsequently’ in which ‘a slow siren / called from far off /and that was one of us’.
The use of the ‘window’ emerges in these poems, as do frames and their ‘sense of proportion above / a not-quite-flat mantelpiece’. Are things safer that way; clearer or blurred? Is it self-protective, a distancing method for dealing with the past or the dark?
I would like to see you / though beyond the window only the neighbour’s kelpie cross yawns at the sun ...
The third section, ‘Splitting spaces’ finds that death is always with us. So too are terror and love. But some of Lynch’s poems cross into subtle, ironic and often dark humour: ‘Pookie believes in Santa Claus’ and ‘Burying Mary’. It’s embarrassing that in ‘Duck season’ you can’t help but smile at Jemima Puddleduck ‘flying alone / and weighted with onions’. It finishes on: ‘Come be my quilt / or my quill’!
The final two poems of the book return us to trains and long or not-so-long journeys. The tragic train derailing in Traveston in 1925 is the subject of a powerful poem, ‘Crossing’. Softly composed, it is eloquent in its restraint and immediate in its use of the concrete:
Wingless, we drew a downward arc through the sky. There was a moment of stillness, as if our capsule might forever split space. I remember the slow dislodgment of a feeding bottle, a woman’s hat taking leave. Before the new configuration of tissue and kindling, before our bodies embossed earth, I hear a whirring of air. A howl. A child’s brief, disembodied cry.
No uncertain final line there.
And then the rise of understanding and acceptance in ‘The Face’, a powerful final poem that intimates the ‘seven billion ways’ of travelling with ‘the Other’, the call and response of the present and the past:
so that we and all our effects arrive on schedule not knowing the coming after.
Night Train occasionally has the nature of an enigma code if you choose to enter it that way. If not, it can be simply read and accepted as poetry written slightly aslant, slightly opaque. But with the poem ‘Blooming’, Anthony Lynch suggests his method: ., It is one that comes from within his process of writing as if unguided by the poet, Yet the uncertainty of that ‘guided’ moment’ is after all, constructed by the poet.
It’s the same with saying a word too many times and suddenly you’ve forgotten what earth, stamen, light, desire mean. All too strange or too familiar, we can’t decide. But this mouth explodes or we think it does and it speaks to us in tongues. We don’t always know the language and sometimes it isn’t subtle yet it’s an art of sorts and we have one colour committed to memory. A garment shrugged off, a doorway with red light open then closed then open again.
This book deserves to be read many times over. Its unassuming simplicity holds a multitude of meaning.
