The Book I Never Wrote is Ross Cogan’s second collection and as fascinating as his first, Stalin’s Desk, (Oversteps Books, 2005), in the title poem of which Cogan’s narrator speaks about his recent purchase of the former Soviet leader’s desk:
I knew what it was at once.
He had been pictured at it with his uncle
Joe moustache and portrait smile. It must
be it, I thought. I would have paid far more.
The leather top was stained and slightly torn,
the keys were lost and there were scratches on
some of the edges, but it cleaned up well.
Ages of dirt flaked off in leaves until
the oak beamed through. I looked for bullet holes
and searched for secret drawers but there were none.
Nor could I find state papers hidden in
the lid, or stuck under the drawers. No one
had scored a death warrant into its hide.
The humour in the portrayal of the collector who has achieved a coup is self-evident, we can see him chuckling and rubbing his hands with glee, but set in sharp contrast are graphic images (bullet holes, death warrants) not only suggestive of the horrors uncle Joe unleashed upon his people, but also of the obsessional care with which he attempted to conceal them behind secrecy, subtefuge and the portrait smile of his public facade. The poem is a micro-narrative managed with great skill. It is very readable, the narrator’s voice is chatty, conversational, bubbling over with pleasure at his smartness and totally lacking any sense of his absurdity. At the same time, though, the perspective of the poem is historical, its concerns political, moral, preoccupied with mortality and the passing of time. Nothing lasts. Even Great Dictators die and no amount of savvy, wealth or power saves us.
These are ideas, in particular the concern with time, developed powerfully and with great seriousness, throughout The Book I Never Wrote also. In the opening poem, The books he never wrote, for example, Cogan speaks of a haunting sense of potential unfulfilled, of the brevity of life and the folly of wasting time: The books he never wrote … pursued him through Oxford to the smart job, / the parties where he danced, long-limbed and young / to the black jazz band … Lastly clustered around the grave, / their paper thin bodies crumbling to dust. Likewise, in The things, the point is made that, Things trail their histories like streamers. / All the past uses of a tool cling / to it like cloth wrapped round its handles … We understood all this once, / buried jewels and swords with their owners. Life, as we’re told in Lines, is a trip through time that ferries us smoothly from moment to moment, age to age, birth to the grave. Hence, from the death long ago of a Roman centurion in Death in the Teutoburg Forest, where Weak green light sinks through the trees like a corpse settling in water and The jawbone of a mule juts from a bank, Cogan fast forwards us to The fallacy of unified field theory and a world in which randomness rules if anything does and it’s crystal clear that Einstein got it wrong, that all / law is local law, all measurement / relative … and the universe itself is cut / and drawn into a gaming board.
These poems, it seems to me, are acts of resistance against superficiality and momentariness, against the human tendency to prefer being preoccupied with easy pleasures, bread and circuses, trivia, to thinking about and sometimes visiting the dark places of the heart and mind to which thought may require us to travel. They are nourished, with great directness and clarity of purpose, not by transitory flickers of emotional reaction, but by systematic philosophical questioning, the understanding, as is made clear in The silences between, that whether or not we realise it, We can’t help telling stories, need to see / our lives as scripts and measure out our days / in acts and stage directions. And when we / look back it feels like studying a play’s / relentless logic.
Among many others, Ordering the execution and The sadness of aborted assassinations, for example, two poems in particular provide excellent instances of this use of apparently straightforward narrative, simple storytelling, to raise far-reaching and complex questions. In the first, Incident in a market town, set in an unnamed country, Pawel is taken into the street to be shot, apparently as an example to others of the wisdom of obedience. Soldiers use forceful persuasion to gather an audience of witnesses, ill-advisedly perhaps, because in the moments before his death, as if fear had tugged his tongue into nonsense, Pawel begins to speak Latin, fragments from the writings of St. Augustine and St. Jerome. I know this was a miracle, the narrator tells us, because / Pawel spoke no German and almost / no Russian. He was not a learned man … “We make ourselves a ladder of our vice,” / he said as the bolts were slipping into their sleeves, “if we trample the vices underfoot.” His blood / on the grey slabs, as rich and luscious as / the cardinal’s robes, that was a wonder too. The second, Tin planes, ends the collection; it is very short, but as with so much in these skilful and interesting poems, amounts to far more than the sum of its parts and is well worth quoting in full:
Each time a green tin plane, slick in its air
shell like a bee in glass. The card backs tore
open for us to heft their cold war weight.
Russian, American, transferred stars bright
red and blue on wings and fuselage;
we’d chip the camouflage in wild backyard
dogfights. Each stiff visit brought a new tin
plane swelling my bedroom’s metal squadron.
There’s nothing else. A pinched face fading like
a figure in a cockpit waving goodbye.
Order your copy of The Book I Never Wrote by Ross Cogan from Oversteps Books. ISBN: 978-1-906856-26-7, £8.00 52pp
©2011: Ken Head