Don Maclennan’s Selected Poems
Quartz Press/Snail Press, 2007
Reviewer: Kevin Goddard (Wordfest Reviews Editor)
I cannot call this a review of Don Maclennan’s poetry. It is as much a reminiscence of my own experiences of Don himself. One cannot review the work of a gifted and generous teacher of your youth with any objectivity. And so I make no claim to objectivity here.
The photo on the cover of Selected Poems is vintage Don. The rucksack is missing, but the climbing shoes are there – keeping the feet firmly on the ground, but working towards greater, untouchable heights. The hat is there too, facilitating the vision of what may lie beyond the horizon. I remember the look from watching him cross the field behind my digs to his own house every day in the late afternoon. The strides, like the voice, were a sinewed exactness, but the look was to some imagined place. I think he found it behind his door. There he could let the mind fly because there was somewhere to come back to; wife, hearth, bed, kitchen table, cup of coffee. It was not unlike the rock painting in Salem: “Like love it yearns/to be embodied;/inchoate it wants/a place to be”.
He tried to teach our restless, unkempt minds something of literature’s complexity, how it tries to mimic life, and how it mostly fails. We sensed that our restlessness was an adolescent version of his own, since for him, as for countless fine writers before him, the word’s failure remained intolerable, just as the inability to see clearly what might lie beyond was intolerable. “Being alive can never be/finally understood, no matter/how we brood on it”. But he has always known that the brooding (in both senses) can never stop.
As a younger reader I did not care much for the early poems. Too much navel gazing, I thought. And where is Africa, Don? Where is Soweto, or the Emergency, or the searchlights slicing the Grahamstown nights during the eighties? And why do you talk so obsessively about yourself, indulge in metaphysics while the gunfire cracks on the hill? I don’t know quite if he’s answered the questions for me yet, and doubt if he’s interested in trying. But he read a poem once, during the Grahamstown Festival – with other luminaries like Gordimer, Serote, Brutus and Vusi Mahlasela performing before him – which (to me) offered a kind of answer. The last line is the only one I remember from that event: “and you had lovely hair”. It seemed to overshadow all the others with a personal warmth, grief, despair and strange celebration of pain. It made Brutus’s rocks of Robben island more immediate, Gordimer’s detention cells and Serote’s weeping babies more real.
Poetry, Don taught us, and continues to teach us, is bigger than any single person or ideology. “The worst delusion is/to think you know what’s best/for other people”. He is as surprised as Neruda that poetry should have put its finger on him, feels caught in its “nets of thought”, but he does not forsake the life for the poem, despite an irritated surprise at his own ageing flesh. His response to Yeats’s “dying animal” is a rueful camaraderie, a body and a life encountered through its own words. “Poems make you/see and touch and smell:/they bring the world closer/so you can live in it again”. But, like the dying animal, and like the starlings in the stinkwood trees outside his old office, he shows how the poem slips away just when one thinks it in hand, becoming “astonishing and strange”.
