Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II.  One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”:   “There is a moment when contradictions cross, A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal And happiness could be impartial for once.”

The Irish poet Michael Longley died on Wednesday at the age of eighty-five. I’ve read him sparsely but recall a devotion to the natural world and to World War I, in which his father fought. Here is “Glossary” (The Candlelight Master, 2020):   “I meet my father in the glossary Who carried me on his shoulders, a leg Over each, hockerty-cockerty, who Would spend ages poking the kitchen fire, An old soldier remembering the trenches And telling me what he saw in the embers, Battlefields, bomb craters, firelight visions: A widden-dremer, yes, that’s my father.”   Longley adds some notes: hockerty-cockerty is to be “seated with one’s legs astride another’s shoulders”; widden-dremer is “one who sees visions in the firelight.” From the same volume is “Ors,” named for the French cemetery in which Wilfred Owen is buried. The English poet was killed a week before the Armistice while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal:   I “I am standing on the canal bank at Ors Willing Wilfred Owen to make it across To the other side where his parents wait. He and his men are constructing pontoons. The German sniper doesn’t know his poetry.   II “My daughter Rebecca lives in twenty-four Saint Bernard’s Crescent opposite the home Wilfred visited for “perfect little dinners” And “extraordinary fellowship in all the arts.” I can hear him on his way to Steinthals.   III “Last year I read my own poems at Craiglockhart And eavesdropped on Robert, Siegfried, Wilfred Whispering about poetry down the corridors. If Wilfred can concentrate a little longer, He might just make it to the other bank.”   This is “Poetry” (The Weather in Japan, 2000):   “When he was billeted in a ruined house in Arras And found a hole in the wall beside his bed And, rummaging inside, his hand rested on Keats By Edward Thomas, did Edmund Blunden unearth A volume which ‘the tall, Shelley-like figure’ Gathering up for the last time his latherbrush, Razor, towel, comb, cardigan, cap comforter, Water bottle, socks, gas mask, great coat, rifle And bayonet, hurrying out of the same building To join his men and march into battle, left Behind him like a gift, the author's own copy? When Thomas Hardy died his widow gave Blunden As a memento of many visits to Max Gate His treasured copy of Edward Thomas’s Poems.”   Longley’s wife Edna has edited two editions of Edward Thomas’ poems and one of his prose. Here is “Edward Thomas’s Poem” from Longley’s Snow Water (2004):   I “I couldn’t make out the miniscule handwriting In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem.”   II “From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left Fidgeting among the fallen branches, Then all the birds of the Western Front.”   III “The nature poet turned into a war poet as if He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.”

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The thing about life is that it happens, that we can never unhappen it. Even forgiveness, for all its elemental power, can never bend the arrow of time, can only ever salve the hole it makes in the heart. Despair, which visits upon everyone fully alive, is simply the reflexive tremor of resignation in the face of life’s irremediable happening. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote — a simple equation, the mathematics of which we spend our lives learning. Consolation is the abacus on which we learn it — this small and mighty… read article