'A Freshly Whitewashed Room': Alison Brackenbury writes on Eric Ormsby ~ CookingFood.Org

For years, I had meant to read the work of Eric Ormsby. I had seen his poems in magazines, and felt drawn to their formal grace. The Baboons of Hada, which I have finally read, offers thirty years of Ormsby’s poetry.

The Baboons of Hada
by Eric Ormsby

There are many reasons to praise this book. My memory focuses on one poem: ‘A Freshly Whitewashed Room’, which describes the final illness of Ormsby’s grandmother. I entered this room just as I finished my new collection, Then, which, unusually, includes poems about my family.

My own parents came from families of skilled farm workers, who had always lived in the country. My mother made a perilous journey across class boundaries, by moving to London to train as a teacher. She then returned to marry my father, and spent the rest of her working life in the remote Lincolnshire village where she had grown up. My father began at fourteen as a ploughboy, like John Clare, but came back from the Second World War to find the horse harness being tipped into quarries. He drove farm lorries, in my mother’s old village, for the next forty years. While they lived, I was reluctant to write about their talents, tensions and their frustrated ambitions in a changing world. Their deaths freed me to do so.

Then, the new collection
by Alison Brackenbury

Several poems in Then also reach out to my grandparents’ generation (especially the men in my father’s family, which included five generations of notable shepherds). They were born as Victorians, by the light of oil lamps, but died in the age of nuclear power. In between, they survived two World Wars, often with humour and stoicism. I am working on more poems about them, and the notebooks and objects they left behind (including, now, those belonging to the women). I particularly admire their frugality, lack of snobbery, and closeness to animals: exemplary qualities, I think, for later generations. My father, like his own mother and father, died suddenly. But the hard, prolonged illness of other family members (including my mother-in-law, my daughter’s grandmother) has left me working on darker poems about endurance and pain.

So I was instantly drawn to the freshness and depth of memory in Eric Ormsby’s ‘A Freshly Whitewashed Room’. The grandmother remembered in the white room is ‘tortoised in a cast/ From chin to groin’ which ‘made her/ Itch with agony’. Many other readers of this poem may have seen parents, or grandparents, linger through years of pain, in body or mind. They may fear for their own old age. Modern medicine, with the best of intentions, can be very skilled at prolonging agony. Ormsby’s radical, respectful lines have never been more timely: ‘Sometimes I think the sufferings of the old/ Make heroes look ridiculous’.

Ormsby, a boy in the poem, reads to his grandmother, from ‘The Life of Stonewall Jackson in a high/Annunciatory voice’. ‘“Honey,’ she’d say to me, “go over that page once more./ I need the fortitude of good example now”’. The poem consoles only in its determined recall of truth. The power and inevitability of Ormsby’s final lines offer what I would like to recapture, in poetry, from my own families’ lost lives: ‘the fortitude of good example’:

With every word I read she seemed to me
Some punished stone an ocean works upon,
Lapping around her till it covered her
Down to the bare bedrock it rubbed away.

From ‘A Freshly Whitewashed Room’, by Eric Ormsby, from The Baboons of Hada (Carcanet, 2011).

Alison Brackenbury’s latest collection is Then, which is available now in paperback. The ebook is now available for pre-order from the Kindle store, iTunes and from other ebook stores.

Lapwings
by Alison Brackenbury
from Then

They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke
is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

my parents’ home, the heavy winter fields
from which they flashed and kindled and uprode

the air in dozens. I ignored them all.
‘What are they?’ ‘Oh – peewits – ’ Then a hare flowed,

bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed
round other farms. I only knew them gone

when, out of a sad winter, one returned.
I heard the high mocked cry ‘Pee – wit’, so long

cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air
to lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.
How had I let this green and purple pass?

Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)
fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,
squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

Did I once know the story of their lives,
do they migrate from Spain? or coasts’ cold run?

And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

With all the brilliance of their black and white
As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.

In other news:
Tonight at 10pm, Carcanet poet Chris Beckett appears on BBC Radio 3's The Verb to talk about his new book, Ethiopia Boy, a celebration and a lamentation of a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy. Tune into BBC Radio 3 at 10pm, download it for free, or listen online at another time on BBC iPlayer.