I was at the Ormeau library yesterday evening to hear David Park read from his new book The Poets’ Wives. The author is a modest man with many years spent teaching. His relaxed manner settled us all in our seats, we were in for a treat.
The background to his latest book was fascinating. The gaps in the history of William Blake’s wife, Catherine, giving the author the imaginative space to create a tale of marriage and jealousy.
The second story is about Nadezhda Mandelstam wife of the Polish poet, Osip Mandelstam. David Park vividly recounted how the poet had written his own death warrant in the form of a poem criticizing Stalin in 1934. The author told us how he felt compelled to stick to the facts in writing about Nadezhda and her harrowing tale. Her autobiography is called Hope against Hope.
The third poet’s wife is an entirely fictional character who discovers beautiful love poems written by her dead husband. The realisation that they are not about her creates a dilemma – does she destroy them or preserve their beauty?
I had a chance to chat with Mr Park before the reading, and in the conversation he told me he liked a poem by James Simmons which I reproduce here –
Art and Reality
From twenty yards I saw my old love locking up her car
She smiled and waved, as lovely still
As girls of twenty are –
That cloud of auburn hair that bursts
Like sunrise round her head
The smile that made me smile
At ordinary things she said
But twenty years have gone and flesh
Is perishable stuff;
Can art and exercise and diet
Ever be enough
To save the tiny facial muscles
And keep taut the skin
And have the waist, in middle-age,
Still curving firmly in?
Beauty invites me to approach
And lies make truth seem hard
As my old love assumes her age
A year for every yard
odespinner 