OUR GENERATION
(for Steve Carey)
I hear the birds of Kenya singing as I write this
for Steve Carey who liked recorded bird song
as I do, the cassette shrill, a door falling-to
on squeaky hinges. Steve: a grating laugh
of one who was buff-crested, sulphur chested,
lost like me in distant islands of sound
in sonophilia for Kenyas and Britains and native
American woode, with its double-toned wood thrush.
Our own generation as its song.
Calls of "Will be!", "Will be!", like a Wilbye
madrigal, every generation in hope
of its many-coloured men and women.
And the fish-eagle's magical feet snatch silver fish
from gold-breeding lakes at all dawns,
as we snatch syllables from standstill moments
and lift that sound, a moment isolated, into sunlight.
Douglas
Oliver
1937 - 2000
Douglas Dunlop Oliver, writer: born Southampton 14 September 1937; married
1962 Janet Hughes (two daughters, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved
1987), 1988 Alice Notley; died Paris 21 April 2000.
FROM THE LONDON TIMES:
THE WORK of the poet Douglas Oliver remains an anomaly in late 20th-century
English poetry. Spanning 35 years, it reveals a contrary nature; erudite,
self-taught and dignified, defiantly old-fashioned if not Blimpish. He
was a poet, but no less a novelist; lecturer, journalist and translator
- exilic researcher, inventor of forms. His writings investigated the
instability of language, pitched against the language of political and
social upheaval, grief and human vulnerability. While possessing an English
register, often formal, his poetry works in larger contexts. The Infant
and the Pearl (1985), his most celebrated poem, satirised the reductive
values of Thatcherism. She was wearing a pearly suit, not silver-rose
pink, since sadly we seemed to be sharing a black and white world. But
the bearing of the front passenger meant a man for the media to deal with
delicately: a Joseph for dreaming and descrying dreams in the eye of his
leader. Oliver was born in 1937, in Southampton, and brought up in Branksome,
next to Bournemouth, the youngest of three children. His Glaswegian father
was an insurance manager. Home was Browning Avenue, a dilapidated 19th-century
cliffside estate built for Sir Percy Shelley, son of the poet. Robert
Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Bournemouth
in the 1880s, became one of Oliver's heroes, an instructor in "how to
wrestle with the presbyterian background in a way which restores honour
to the parents." Stevenson's house (Shelley's manor), King's Park, where
Douglas and his brother Brian watched boxing matches, and Christchurch
harbour, where he studied sea and shore birds, were childhood haunts.
The immediacy of childhood never left one, he believed, and was used by
boxers, priests and politicians to gain power over their opponents"
identity. He researched such vocations avidly; they were his prey but
he was also subject to them. Bournemouth School, a grammar, was not happy
for him and he did not stay beyond O levels. Following National Service
as an RAF accountant, he went into journalism, first in Coventry, then
in Cambridge, where he became a staff reporter on the Cambridge Evening
News. His first wife, Janet Hughes, a primary schoolteacher, whom he married
in 1962, is memorialised in the opening phrase of his collected poems,
"You know I"m working Jan." They had three children, Kate, Tom and
Bonamy. The poet J.H. Prynne, responding to Oliver's review of his second
book, Kitchen Poems (1968), welcomed Oliver in Cambridge to a new
clan, poets with shared empathies and raucous night lives. Oliver is remembered
as a ferocious and unprincipled player of the board game Diplomacy; sharp
at poker too. He researched in philosophy, witchcraft and theology, but
remained a journalist, with a privately disturbing family life. Oppo
Hectic (1969; from "o poetique"),his first book, was published by
Andrew Crozier's Ferry Press. Ferry would consistently publish Oliver
between 1969 and 1985. Oppo Hectic's 24 poems and discrete pieces fused
Pop Art, post-Victoriana ("Flesh-blue birds / two men sit on / khaki
rocks / eating birds gannets . . . Guillemot fry-up / with guano and dry
seaweed fuel. How long a feast? dodo bell-name remorse / laughter peals
/ more guillemot guillemot") and domestic poem into something both
erudite and witty. The wit verged on satire, came naturally and was not
played for laughs. So my word, love, attaches to the lining of his oyster
mouth; we"ll let him prosper it. Then Tom will announce, one day:
My father's dead. You're my father? Tom, who was born with Down's Syndrome,
died before his second birthday in 1969. His presence became a constant
motif, centring around the notion of "harmlessness" in many
of his father's subsequent books. In the Cave of Suicession (1974)
was set in Suicide Cave, an abandoned lead mine in Derbyshire's Peak District.
Oliver slept there for many nights over a period of months to achieve
proximity to his subject, which drew in his dead son. Cave was reproduced
as he had typed it in the dark, mistyped, the typos subverting a razor-sharp
narrative, creating working contrasts between surfaces and their durability.
A Now write for me the story of a man who acts so badly that I cannot
be his oracle, who lives with these failures w don continually reminding
him of what he cannot do; and then write me the tale of how he yet does
something worthy of me. Q How shall I write this? A By living it; that
rule has not changed. Oliver's first novel, The Harmless Building
(1973), was set in a town on the south coast of England, one late August
afternoon, the twin objects of Donald's ambition were both asleep, the
baby in the carrycot upstairs in a room of that Georgian museum building,
and Uncle Richard in an armchair in his Victorian house only a mile or
two away. A train crashes. The idiosyncrasies of a dysfunctional family
are portrayed through bereavement and catastrophe. This colourful work,
its frequent incidents owing more to concepts of sixth sense and premonition
than the subconscious, also deferred to French Structuralism. Oliver was
fluent in French, having left Cambridge for Paris to work as translator
for Agence France-Presse in the late Sixties. Stylistically, The Harmless
Building prefigured the early films of Peter Greenaway: In the park,
late-abed seagulls circled overhead, calling ?Jacques Lacan, Jacques Lacan?,
without giving further details. Oliver returned to England in 1972, to
Brightlingsea, where he read Literature at Essex University. He was offered
a post there on his graduation day having achieved the most distinguished
BA in the university's history. He taught part-time for five years, becoming
close to the critic Herbie Butterfield and, important to the latter part
of his life, two poets from New York, Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. He
composed The Diagram Poems (1979) in Essex from syndicated reports
on the Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay, empathising with the Robin-Hood-style
bandits. He cast a searching light on the indistinct politics of revolutionary
violence and its barbaric suppression. The early 1980s were marked by
nervous illness, of which psoriasis was only one manifestation. This period
saw a rekindled interest in boxing, in counterpoint to Jainism (the respect
of every living creature, a belief to which he devoutly kept). Peter Ackroyd,
when at The Spectator, would despatch him to Italy to review boxing
matches. In 1982 he took a lectureship at the British Institute in Paris,
teaching French pupils. Exhausting ferry crossings each weekend back to
England and further work that took him as far as Haiti and Grenada strained
his marriage and separation ensued. The Infant and the Pearl was
based on the 14th-century alliterative poem Pearl. He created a somnambulist
voyage in a car with Margaret Thatcher and various cabinet ministers.
Melancholy, deftly rhymed, seeing further ahead than the drive, Infant
is more than an allegory on power: The hills, though, were free, free
of disorder, hills of privilege, of prerogative governance, a regime arising
from the ruins of order: lording it over the lean shires; once the same
Britain, now they were Britain's border. In 1987 Kind, his collected
poems, was published, dedicated to his son. In the same year his correspondence
featured in Iain Sinclair's novel White Chapel, Scarlet Tracings.
Earlier published work featured in A Various Art (also 1987), an
unusually precise anthology which paved the way for a new readership,
and, three years later through Sinclair, his editor at Paladin, Three
Variations on the Theme of Harm. Nineteen eighty-seven was significant,
too, for his renewing his friendship with Alice Notley. Her husband, Ted
Berrigan, had died four years earlier. Oliver and Notley married. They
settled in New York. His later work evokes the friendship with her sons
Edmund and Anselm Berrigan, today also poets. Oliver worked as a computer
programmer in a cancer hospital and as a contact tracer for HIV patients.
"Penniless Politics" (1991), set in New York, was a photocopied
text Sinclair, as "Hoarse Commerce", published in 150 copies
and received unusual attention for a fugitive publication. "What
was the shock like," asked Howard Brenton in The Guardian,
reading T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land when it was published in 1922? I think
I know. I've just read Douglas Oliver's epoch-making long poem ""Penniless
Politics"." I never thought I would read anything like it in
the 1990s. "Penniless Politics" sets the literary agenda
for the next 20 years. Further media coverage followed, and Bloodaxe,
not known in 20 years for recognising experimental poetry, reissued the
book in 1994. In 1992 Notley and Oliver settled in Paris, where Oliver
resumed teaching at the British Institute. Three years later they both
read at Mike Goldmark's 'return of the Reforgotten" event at the
Royal Albert Hall in London alongside Allen Ginsberg, Sorley MacLean and
Denise Riley. From 1996 to 1998 Penguin, Talisman in the United States
and Etruscan Books published variants on Oliver's ongoing projects. The
Shattered Crystal, still to be published in full, partly derives from
his friendship with Gisèle Celan - Estrange, the Romanian poet
Paul Celan's widow. Oliver read this on his final visit to England at
the London festival For the Locker and the Steerer in March last year.
A handful of rich, yet sparse, works like "Well of Sorrows in Purple
Tinctures", "The Oracle of the Drowned", "The Heron"
and the sequence "What Fades Will Be" also retain an evanescent
quality where phrases and cadences flicker much like the ghosts Oliver
became increasingly haunted by. Douglas Oliver was emotionally telepathic,
gentle and almost devout. He was generous with his time and his advice;
he did not believe there were no answers, but neither did he insist upon
them. He was publicly supportive of writers half his age like D.S. Marriot
and Helen Macdonald. He researched the run-down banlieues of Paris for
his novel cum autobiography Whisper Louise, a dialogue with the
'red Virgin" of the Paris Commune of 1871, Louise Michel. Last month
Brian Oliver proofread Whisper Louise's final chapter, while his
brother's body gave way to cancer. His last walks in the city he loved
were walks to stave off pain. His last four months showed courage and
concern for others, as he lay in bed in his and Alice's one room unable
to stand because so much of his spine had been cut away. I retain an abiding
image of Doug Oliver, when I last saw him in December, psoriasis bleached
out of his face by chemotherapy, ever blackbird-like; surrounded by books,
papers, collages and coins. His last book, A Salvo for Africa,
reflecting from a purely European perspective on the future of Africa,
some 10 years in the gestation, was published four weeks ago.
Lament for
Douglas Oliver
by Ian Ayres
you were
this man in a bed this man dying man dying and it seemed youd go on dying
for a lifetime and it just took some getting used to but i never thought
youd really die though you glimpsed a deer waiting to take you home on
its back you glimpsed a deer no you couldnt die because you were a friend
to me and i cared about you and how can anyone i care about die? you left
me yet when you did yeah i know you left others too you left others who
were much closer to you, but i am selfish and disturbed i laugh remembering
what you said the last time when it was about Time that you spoke of wanting
to write two more books before you go you told me you couldnt help me
untwist my twisted mind but would help with my writing but only on occasion
because now is precious time time is running out you had three weeks left
exactly three weeks to the two-thousandth not so good Good Friday when
at about nine-thirty pm you shed your Douglas Oliver skin. did you rise
out of your body and witness all of your suffering rise up in your loved-ones
helplessly watching tears drop down from their beautiful eyes? did the
hospital ceiling open up into a tunnel of light where the deer awaited
you? will your little son be on the deer with you for the funeral the
flames the scattering of your ashes in Paris? there are so many questions
i want to ask, so many questions i wanted to ask you Doug but your generous
knowledge mesmerized me each time we met and i"d forget i"d forget to
ask what cancer felt like the pain the pain i saw on your face the pain
that morphine could only put spaces between the pain what was the pain?
had it the bite of tooth decay except the nerves being eaten away all
over the body? no it was your lower back back back in August wasnt it?
when did it start i forget i forget but i wont forget you because you
took time for me when you had so little time left you cared you actually
cared enough about me to take my work seriously and that touched my heart
Doug. you told me that all your friends are kind kooky not in those words
but that was your point and you made the point that i too was of your
kooky friends and that was the moment that was the moment that people
find embarrassing to mention that was the moment where you expressed what
makes this life worth living if only you were living now but i know youre
here standing next to me as i get this out though ive got to admit i had
no intention of letting your death get to me i made up my mind that if
you didnt appreciate my visits enough to want them everyday what an ego
i have then youd never see me again no i wasnt going for this once every
two months routine to discuss my writing i wanted to hear you speak and
speak man you could speak and the words youd speak fascinated me i wanted
to spend as much time as i could with you because of because and that
leads right into the brilliance of your mind the thoughts youd share so
freely though you were in pain and making an effort to stay clear on foggy
morphine. Now i dont know if im pretending or not but i feel your presence
your hand on my shoulder i know youre still with us oh oh Doug i remember
i remember when i asked you if you were scared and you said not really
but tears came to your eyes when you told me the hardest part the real
pain worse than the lower back worse than anything at all was having to
leave the people you love its the parting its the finality the no hope
of postcard communication send a postcard Doug wherever you are from wherever
you are send a picture postcard of you on the deer with your little son
telling us its okay youre okay we"ll be okay.
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