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One of the best things about my laureate decade was the chance to collaborate with Peter Maxwell Davis, who was then Master of the Queen’s Music. We did a few things for events in the royal calendar, and a couple of larger and independent commissions as well: he set the five sonnets I wrote about Harry Patch, drawing on his own childhood war memories, and I wrote six more sonnets to drop between the movements of his String Quartet No 7, which is a meditation on the architect Francesco Borromini.
I’d had other things set before, by Tarik O’Regan and Jocelyn Pook among others, and enjoyed the experience very much. But the collaborations with Max, being larger in scale, made me think harder about what was involved. They made me reflect, for instance, on the various ways music can slow down words and make them hover in the mind, so the listener can concentrate on them more completely than might otherwise be possible.
It sounds simple enough, but actually this hovering allows something rather complicated to take place. Poetry is just as crucially a sound art as it is a sense art, and communicates large elements of its meanings via cadence, rhythm and other sorts of noise; it need not simply float above music itself, or decorate it, or give it a narrative. It can actually fuse with it. This fusion is one of the things we enjoy, consciously or not, when we listen to music by the greatest setters of poems: Purcell, for instance, or Schubert, or Britten. We hear two apparently distinct forms achieving a kind of unity, even as we register and appreciate difference.
Over the past year or so I have been talking about these things on and off with the composer Sally Beamish; she has been setting some poems of mine (sonnets, again) for a new oratorio called Equal Voices, that the London Symphony Orchestra will premiere at the Barbican next month. In narrow and particular terms, the commission worked like this: Kathryn McDowell (the MD of the LSO) and I had the idea that the orchestra should mark the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war; Kathryn approached Sally, who chose my poem An Equal Voice. We met a few times to talk about it; then she disappeared and wrote her music.
In larger terms, it happened like this. During the last part of my laureate time, I pretty much stopped writing poems: I had gone blind in the glare, and thought I might actually have killed myself off as a poet. But when I stood down and I discovered that my poems hadn’t vanished entirely; they had crept underground, and when they emerged again, I noticed a lot of them were about men fighting 20th-century western wars.
Why? Partly because, like a lot of other people, I had been thinking about what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and partly (which is a different sort of point) because my father had recently died. My father had fought in the second world war, and stayed on in the Territorial Army for 20-odd years after the war ended. In almost all my childhood memories of him, he is wearing uniform.
Eventually, I began to shape these poems into a sequence, about half of which appears in my last collection, The Customs House, under the title Laurels and Donkeys (the remainder of the series will be included in my next book). They refer to themes and incidents that run from the first world war through to now, and many of them quote from and acknowledge books I have read, conversations I have had, or interviews I have held that contain first-hand accounts of conflict and its consequences.
They are, in other words, varieties of “found” poem – a form I chose with a view to getting round the problem that besets all right-thinking non-combatant war poets, the problem that, for all their well-intentioned sympathy, their response will look gratuitous, or like a vulgar parade of sensitivity. I thought that by including the voices of men and women who had been “really there”, and confining my role to editing, selecting, arranging, tweaking – and, yes, sometimes adding (AKA “writing”) – I might be able to demonstrate an appropriate kind of negative capability.
Almost all the material in my poem An Equal Voice (which, in Sally’s version, becomes Equal Voices, where it is combined with sections from the Song of Songs) is taken from Ben Shephard’s book A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914-1994 (a few more bits are taken from Shell-shock by Anthony Babington).
As Shephard himself points out: “We hear more [about this subject] from doctors than patients … because most of [the patients] chose not to recount their experiences.” By stitching together and shaping some of Shephard’s examples of how this silence has been broken, I have tried to give one particular form of war-suffering a different sort of exposure.
And now it gets another different sort in Sally’s oratorio (she prefers to call it that, and not a requiem, because, she says: “It deals essentially with the (damaged) living, and also perhaps because I have attempted to create a vision for the future.” As I write this, I haven’t heard a note of the score. But I already know very well why Kathryn McDowell approached her in the first place. In works such as No, I’m Not Afraid (a setting of poems by Irina Ratushinskaya), Sally has been at once very ingenious in her treatment of sung and spoken words, and very emotionally driven. I know she will have written something fascinating – something that combines orchestral music with voices speaking, singing, whispering, shouting and even screaming; and something that negotiates the difficulties of the subject and of precedent (Britten, again, and his War Requiem). I feel privileged to have been paired with her for a part of all our thinking about the first world war in this centenary year.
• Equal Voices, by Sally Beamish, is performed at the Barbican, London EC2, on Sunday 2 November and at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Friday 7 November.
