Chris Andrews: Lime Green Chair

Launch Speech by Stephen Edgar

On one occasion, apparently, Schumann (or was it Schubert? I can’t recall) was playing a new piano composition to some friends.When he had finished, one of the friends asked him to explain the piece. So he turned back to the keyboard and played it again. I relate this anecdote because, when I first read Chris Andrews’s dazzling new book, it occurred to me that, rather than try clumsily to explain or describe its qualities to you, I couldn’t do better than to simply read you some of the poems. But no doubt you, and Chris, think that something more is called for.

Where to begin? One of the first things that strikes you about these poems is a sense of plenitude, of presence. Here are the ten thousand things of this world, all observed, all remembered, all recorded in sharp, memorable, witty, piercing phrases and images, from the most mundane and, apparently, inconsequential, to the hallucinatory, to the grand and momentous. From “Log”:

A hot air balloon in the shape of a house.
A manhole cover rocking when it’s stepped on.
A sour-smelling pair of trousers in the tram.

From “Far Call”:

stair-climbing vacubots, atlases that talk
in anti-rage tones, glossy torrents of hair
pouring in slow motion on flat plasma screens.

From “Kitchen in Transit”:

small wet footprints shone on the kitchen lino.
... Below: the casualty entrance,
the neon-lit triage nurse at her counter.
Beyond: black hills wearing necklaces of fire.

Chris Andrews, you come to think, not only notices much, but like Borges’s character, Ireneo Funes, he forgets nothing. Which accounts, perhaps, for the double nature of this abundance. On the one hand, there is great pleasure and gusto in these descriptions; as Chris Wallace-Crabbe puts it, “Andrews has an eye for every small thing in our modern cities: and the words for it. [He] drinks language with sheer delight.” On the other hand, there is something nightmarish and monstrous too in the relentless, ever proliferating processes of the world in which we are seen here to be enmeshed.

The second thing that strikes you, by way of contrast, is absence, emptiness. “I was transparent but only to others”, says the speaker of “Pond Life”. Or in “Sunken Sparkle” the school holidays “stretching ahead of her emptily”, one of numerous references to the vacuity of time. Or more disturbingly still, the student in “Rooms”,

who, on his first night there, will watch the slow stretch
of moonlight lozenges, wondering why he’s come
so far south in the world, beginning to feel
all-swallowing emptiness open inside.”

In “This Way Up”, we read of neutrinos flooding through the universe “like wind through a ghost”: one kind of emptiness flooding through another kind. Ghosts, indeed, and the ghostliness of existence are much in evidence throughout the book.

I spoke earlier of the hallucinatory. One very noticeable aspect of Chris’s vision is what Mark Ford, quoting Elizabeth Bishop on the book’s cover, calls “the surrealism of everyday life”. What, after all, could be stranger than that there is a world out there around us, and that we are in it? Think of those stair-climbing vacubots I mentioned earlier, and the glossy torrents of hair pouring in slow motion on flat plasma screens. Elsewhere: “a pink sapphire ring and false teeth/ in a lost-property box” (“My Life Without You); “a cat in a cooling undercarriage” (“Dim Thing”); or “A snake came flowing out of a dry stone wall” (“One Thing After Another”).

A recurrent strategy, dear to my heart, I have to say, is a juxtaposition of the beauty of the physical world and the horrors, or at least anxieties, of sentience:

[mist] lifts like this off a mirror-still river
where, as it is everywhere, cruelty is
unmistakable as a triangle, but
midwinter’s riddled with brilliant days like this.
(“The Mist Lifts”)

What, indeed, is stranger than consciousness, the philosophers’ hard problem which we are not remotely close to understanding or explaining? The strangeness of selfhood, or the illusion of the self — the way we can be absent from our own lives. “Who was that strange perfecter occasionally/ stepping in to give my life a sideways nudge?” asks the poem “The Strange Perfecter”, only to answer itself: “I was the perfect stranger continually/ stumbling by chance back into my life to find/ it was getting on pretty well without me”. Who are we: the body going through its paces, or the mental machine that observes them?

There is something here reminiscent of Beckett. Think of those plays like, say, Rockaby or Not I, with a voice that must keep telling stories, reminiscing and anticipating, to convince itself of its own reality. That abundance of the physical world is matched by the abundance of words, language generating itself, like a man throwing ahead of himself the stepping stones on which he will tread.

These poems offer an astonishing critique of modernity, or postmodernity. They mimic in some ways the constant sliding of one thing into another that marks our age of soundbites and short attention spans, of replicated images and lost historical depth —

…bumbling around like a zombie
in wonderland, where seagulls and sirens sound
different but familiar from soundtracks, I feel
like an extra in an atmospheric film
(“Tourism II”) —

where everything is present and interchangeable and evanescent: “someone elsewhere maybe wondered how Neil/ from Seven Up was going and forgot him/ within the melting span of a spring hail stone” (“Meanwhile”). They are instinct with the awareness that life is not teleological, that there is no built-in meaning or coherence, just what happens to happen, “parts never meant to compose any whole/ yet” (“Continuous Screening”).

And always there is “the mournful scandal of time’s passing”, as Mark Ford, again, says in the cover notes:

a world of hit-and-miss proliferation…
opening out and falling away,
shedding pods and husks and chrysalids,
naturally gathering scars and stains,
a world of wet casements and hinges working loose,
where it was always the beginning
of the end of the beginning of something else.
(“Burnt Umbrella”)

One thing that I haven’t yet explicitly referred to, though it can be glimpsed in some of the quotations I have read, is the pervasive wit, and on occasion laugh-out-loud humour, in these poems. Don’t be misled by the more serious thematic elements I have spoken of into thinking that this is a sombre or heavy read. “But she was wincing, What do you call that noise?/ and I’m like, It only sounds repetitive” (“A Different Party”). Or

When nothing else is happening, weather is.
Meteorologist, how’s that for a job?
Out by ten degrees and you don’t get the sack.
(“Weather Break”)

Or from “Zombie Charmers” (zombie charmers!)

… whose bluish foreheads are inscribed
with the epitaph of the corporate undead:
He lost his life trying to get a CV.
… We do jocular
menace: keep laughing or the gloves come off. Look,
it’s better all round if we win because we
are seriously bad losers, mate.

Yes, the book is full of the “liberating presence of wit”, as Mark Strand puts it in his Foreword, but, he goes on to say, “the message is dark, as it tends to be in most lyric poetry”. Mark Strand, did I hear me say? In his Foreword? What is he doing there? Well, as some of you may know, there is a prize called the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, named after the wonderful American poet, which is awarded for the best first or second collection of poems submitted. In 2011 Mark Strand was the judge; and Lime Green Chair won. Chris apparently did not think this an important enough piece of information to impart to me when he asked me to launch the book and I only found out when I was holding a copy in my hands. Now modesty is a fine virtue, but there are times when you can justifiably cry out: “I’ve won! I’ve won!” And possibly even whistle thrice.

I have only skimmed the surface of Lime Green Chair in these remarks. I have said nothing about the formal aspects of the book, but one notable feature is that, of its three parts, the poems in parts one and three are all written in the same form, a sort of meta-sonnet, or perhaps I should say mega-sonnet: poems with a first stanza of thirteen lines and a second of eight, often with the sonnet’s traditional volta after the thirteen. This form seems ideally suited to Chris’s modes and moods. Part two, though, contains poems both looser in form and often considerably longer. Among them are two particularly fine, and connected poems, “Burnt Umbrella” and “Walking Stick”; in fact, they are essentially one poem peeled into two, with the same female protagonist, in whose consciousness the relentless, ever proliferating processes of the world I spoke of earlier are both observed and replicated. Although these poems don’t lack the wit, the light touch seen elsewhere, the underlying shadow is more immediately apparent. Perhaps we could say the laughing has stopped and the gloves have come off. They are very impressive poems. And just as those two poems are related, sharing a protagonist and a number of images, so cross references occur throughout the book, characters, images, ideas, from one poem will crop up later in a different context, as though overheard in conversation, which gives a coherence to this jostling abundance.

February 2013

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