The Poets’ Wives
Author: David Park
Publisher: Bloomsbury, Rs450
Three women write about their husbands — poets of fame and repute — and underscore with strong prose their saga with literature, individuality and society, says ANANYA BORGOHAIN
If Northern Irish writer David Park’s ninth book The Poets’ Wives is anything to go by, his artful prose is underlined and nurtured by a refined balance of romanticism and subjectivity. The gripping literature channelises through the accounts of three wives narrating their internal, conjugal lives. Entailing three novellas, the segments are titled ‘Catherine’, ‘Nadezhda’, and ‘lydia’. Joined by the women’s common thread of being subservient to their husbands’ worlds, the first two sections also have a verse of both Blake and Osip at the beginning respectively.
It opens with a first person account by Catherine, wife of English Romantic poet William Blake, who was unknown for the larger part of his life. Plain and illiterate Catherine is introduced to the alphabet by her husband when he helps her read his love letters. She leads the readers into the passionate and pacifist world of the drunkard, promiscuous poet who is gradually turning insane and a miscarriage that leaves Catherine infertile leads to his extra-marital liaison. As imagined by Park, Kate, mystified by her husband’s uncanny visions, suffers from the same as well. As in Blake’s words, “I have no need of a coat, Kate — I am wrapped in mortality, this flesh is a prison and my bones the bars of death.”
An inescapable trait of this segment is its avoidance of punctuation. Park’s, or rather Catherine’s, sentences are long and sans commas, colons or semi-colons, underscoring her simplicity and unconditional love and support that she cultivates for her husband.
The second novella takes us to the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s when poet Osip Mandelstam is executed for his revolutionary poems. Osip dies at a transit camp in 1938. His wife Nadezhda, memorises his poems in her attempt to preserve them, and in the process finds her own voice of dissent against oppression. In the Seventies, she publishes her own accounts of the struggle. The novella is further divided into segments which are titled in accordance with the year of action within it. It starts with ‘1939’ and ends with ‘1956’.
Park’s imagination celebrates this couple’s infinite love and strong stand against dictatorship, with a strong sense of Romantic idealism, way more than the dark gripping tale of Catherine does. He commemorates the poet as the speaker who mirrors the truth of the society he lives in. However, unlike the twists and action in Blake’s story, Nadezhda’s account is largely descriptive with not much happening in the background. But it is in the same art of describing where Park’s effortless control over strong prose comes to the fore. His imagination is fertile and moving, and he leaves his readers overawed with the scene where Nadezhda waits in a three hour long queue to deliver a parcel to Osip not knowing that he has already been executed.
Besides this, there are two points of extreme emotional foothold; one towards the end of the first section:
“He has tears in his eyes. He rubs them dry with the back of his hand. What remains for those eyes to seeIJ He catches her looking at him, their eyes hold each other for a second, then without words she tells him what he already knows, that the time has come for them to go.”
The other powerful moment is in the concluding lines of the novella: “Some day the cage doors will be thrown open, bluebells planted on the grave she will never see. Her lips begin to move. A voice for the dead, the words engraved eternally on the hidden chambers of the heart.”
The last account is by a fictitious lydia, wife of a contemporary Irish poet Don, who recalls the last days of her dead husband. Don was a cheating, thoughtless, below average poet funded by lydia’s money: “There was only ever room for one God in their marriage and it wasn’t one who watched over them from some heavenly paradise”. As she prepares to scatter his ashes in a small seaside town with her daughters (her son died in an accident in Morocco), she laments that he rendered his family life a hollow, loveless deal, much in contrast to the art he revered.
The paradigm shift from Romanticism to Modernism in this section is sturdily pronounced. The prose too enters the world of book shelves, coffee and ice cream.
Nevertheless, Park does end the book in his trademark Romantic notion: “She stretches out her hand, not in what they must think as a farewell, but in a greeting to her lost child who’s coming home from the earth’s distant places...reclaimed at last, she silently tells them, not by the drifting ash of words splayed on the water below, but by the constancy of her love.”
Park’s asset is his intelligent imagination and effusive vocabulary. Catherine’s account is the one with most action and emotions, whereas Nadezhda’s is where the prose is the strongest. By the time we reach lydia’s account, we enter the domain of the modern, and are filled with an existential angst and de-romanticising of the hitherto ideal, full-of-truth poet.
These three women behind the success of three arguably great poets figure in the role of both the inspiration while being paradoxically disincentivised by their works too. The symbiotic arrangement between the couples extends to the relationship between the verse and the muse, love and marriage, and life and death as well. It questions both the nature of art as well as the conflict between the individual and society; about ethics in writing as well as the suffering that comes attached to its dissenting nature.
While questioning whether a corrupt poet could write truthful poetry, through the character of Don, the mystical line of distinction between a romantic, evasive poet and a domestic husband is blurred substantially. This book is a sheer delight for lovers of literature, particularly those of the genre of prose.