Marching On Paradise by Peter Steele

Peter Steele is a meditative poet with a gift for aphorism: joy / has more of gravity than of gaiety’; ‘You cannot find / your way, but it is finding you’. And of God he saysZ: ‘I’m lost for words except for those to ask / He’ll look my way and make me see it his.’ The taste for aphorism is matched by a taste for formal verse. Steele is fond of the iambic pentameter (as I am), of the villanelle, of complex stanzas, and in this book he revives the ballade with distinction. At the same time, he writes a good many reflective poems in long unrhymed lines of alternately six and five stresses and running to two or three pages. These tendencies won’t surprise readers of his first book (Word from Lilliput, 1973) or of his poems published in journals since then. What surprises me is that his second collection has been out for well over a year and there’s been, so far, a dearth of reviews. I’m surprised because Steele is plainly an accomplished poet. He knows what he’s doing, and he does it with assurance and virtuosity. So, why the silence? I can think of three possible reasons: possible, but not sufficient. One is that those two-to-three-page poems look a bit daunting: large slabs of verse, of a kind we’re not accustomed to reading these days unless they’re from Les Murray. We’ve come to like our poems short. But we need to remember that if we can’t take a page or two of solid verse there’s a lot of poetry we can’t take: Paradise Lost, for example, or The Prelude. And that there’s a lot that we’ll be missing. Again, some of Steele’s affinities are with poets much admired a few years ago but not much read today: Americans like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov, who similarly favour the reflective poem in complex stanzas or in blank verse. To some readers, nothing seems quite so dead as a recently dead writer or a fashion in writing that has just passed. But if we wait a few years, the ‘fashion’ may come to life again or not seem a fashion any longer. And a third reason: Steele is a priest–poet, and some of his preoccupations are not only religious but Christian. This is not going to recommend him to those readers who are impatient of a writer whose experience they don’t share from the start. ‘Not my scene,’ they say, and shut the book: true conservatives. Steele is a conservative of a different kind. He sees no reason to abandon forms of expression which have been found useful and which can still serve him today. Personally, I think a moratorium on the villanelle would do no harm, but I see nothing wrong (to put it mildly) with the other forms he uses. In his long-lined poems, for instance, the syntax moves with an engaging suppleness. Take the opening lines of the title poem: It should be morning when you see it first. Just now the trees have begun to kindle, spilling lighton path and moistened lawn, their miles of green fusing the gifts of earth and air. Stand in the doorway,your dreams for a while less foreign than your limbs, and watch the wrens assume a world, feeling their bodiesplunge with a style as buoyant as their song. I quote this not, only for its ‘technical’ virtues but to show Steele as a poet ready to celebrate the world. On the other hand, he’s ready enough to confront the doubts and. divisions which seem to be our lot in this century … and to show himself, as a believer in God, not to be exempt from these. In fact, some of the things he says to his God may well surprise us, coming as they do from a ‘professional’ Catholic: And being a timid man with a taste for armourInside as well as out, I prayThat you will keep your distance.Mostly it seems to work. You have the goodnessTo leave me home and dry. Why thenDo I feel, unwilling, brineIn averted eyes, sweat on the folded hands,The tongue stung as with salt, and insideThe tide mounting my veins? Here he is as honest in speaking about himself to God as to Peter Porter in the poem ‘For the Record’: Wary when pursued with charm,Cagey, asked to chance his arm,Liking all the shifts of style,Watching eyes above the smile …Easily induced to panic,Hungry for the epiphanic …That’s the story, more or less.One thing more: he tried to bless. Although Steele is not a devotional poet in the narrow sense of the word, many of these poems are a form of prayer: but the prayer is that of a modem man, who knows he must offer a troubled self to his Creator. Sometimes a poem, as I’ve suggested already, is explicitly a prayer: witness the opening poem, ‘To Thomas More’. But he’s not always on his knees by any means. There are several pages of verse epigrams, and there are some fine short lyrics such as ‘Mirror’, which I must quote in full: ‘Love me!’ we implore its glaze,Eyes on its vast serene;Here, in the shiftiness of days.A constancy is seen.Or so we hope. Nothing will fadeWhere Mercury is king,In eye and lip held like a bladeTo cut the moment’s string.Perhaps. And yet it snaps a faceFrom time into its zone,Owning between the flick of lidsThe eyes we do not own. This is the book of a serious but also a witty man, one who is, at this stage of his life, facing the complexities of existence with a quite proper gravity. The previous book, perhaps, had more verve, but that’s a quality that can’t be faked, and one shouldn’t try. At the same time Peter Steele seems to me a trifle too aware of the eyes above the smile, of the fact that truth is complex. It is, of course it is, but I wonder if, beyond all its complexities, it isn’t simpler than Steele’s poetry now suggests. My guess is that like some other artists (Bartok for example) Steele will come to see this, and that his work will attain a greater directness and warmth. Marching on Paradise certainly represents one honourable way of being human: it’s not only an accomplished but an honest book. I think that this very honesty will drive him towards a less encumbered affirmation than he can make at present. In any event, this is a fine book and I hope it finds readers who recognise its quality.

Philip Martin

From the New Issue

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

Letters to the Editor - April 2024

Poet of the Month with David Brooks

You May Also Like

‘Come closer and listen’: A tribute to Charles Simic (1938-2023)

What They Gave Him

East of Time by Jacob G. Rosenberg

Archipelagoes by Peter Goldsworthy & The Harlots Enter First by Gerard Windsor