Heart-breaking has become a blurb word – but what is poetry for, if not to represent the breaking
of hearts? This pamphlet carries out its
work lyrically, tersely, deftly, in poems that are restrained but also spill,
slowly, down the page. Many could be partially
re-lineated into iambic pentameters, and this contributes to the elegiac pace and
tone. They feel formal, even when free(ish),
and there’s a pause at each line-end, even when enjambed. In ‘Apologies to the Insomniac’, Peake
writes:
I have cultivated silence like a
bush,
pruning away at the edges, finding a
shape.
Grief
is kept mostly out of view in our culture, borne mostly in silence. Peake’s is for the death of an infant son,
aged three days, to whom The Silence
Teacher is dedicated. The poems both
convey and describe something of what this is like: in ‘Double Agent’,
Each morning, I make myself up.
I make up what I like: oranges,
say, or rhubarb…
…
It’s easy, like being a double
agent, except that both countries
are you,
‘The
Haircut’ recounts what happens when the hairdresser asks the narrator if he has
children. In ‘A Kick or a Punch’:
Months later, I found
a toy truck in a drawer, and felt,
not like a father, but a boy
who had lost a playmate,
The
‘I’ in The Silence Teacher feels as
at one with the author as could be – no playing around with the reader, but there
is playfulness. Fish take on clients’ characteristics
in ‘Aquarium in the Waiting Room of My Wife’s Obstetrician’, or become
fortune-tellers in ‘Koi Pond’, a 2-page poem that appears as limpid as the pond:
I went to pay a visit to the koi,
to see what they thought of my life,
and how I had been living it.
Beneath the imperturbable surface,
they mouthed the words, saying
“bleb” and “bleb” and “bleb”.
Some torpedoed, others swung
a lazy fin, like an oarsman,
turning a casual arc. Some lay
like unexploded mines, chin up.
This
poem, which can be read here at And Other Poems, is full of metaphor, some of it in layers (at least that’s how I read it);
if paraphrased it might sound laboured or over-complex, but the clarity and simplicity
of language and syntax carries one through.
And when our paediatrician
bowed his head, that man
of science became ordained
a priest of human religion.
What was his prayer again?
As
well as fortune-telling fish, there’s a wild-man muse who comes “down from the
forest, smeared with mud” to tell the poet off and command him what to write,
and a spookily oracular fisherman.
Several
poems tenderly draw in the narrator’s wife, both before and in time of
sorrow. This is from ‘How You Were
Conceived’:
Mockingbird sings all night,
and if she did not answer,
I too would become frantic,
baroque, filling the air with
trills,
to shorten the distance between
silence
and the silence that has no reply.
Most
pamphlets (let alone full collections) have at least a couple of weaker poems somewhere
in the middle; this one doesn’t. Assonance
strengthens the elegiac tone and Peake is a deft rhymer, unafraid of mostly
full-rhyme terza rima in the title poem, which opens The Silence Teacher, sets the scene for it, explains the title and ends
like this. “Her” refers to a girl who
can’t hear birdsong until, with a new hearing aid, she passes a nest.
Grief’s small hands cupped before
me,
reliving the news of our infant son’s
tests,
his brain as quiet as her soundless
sea,
and still as winter in a robin’s
nest,
I did not say: I was the one who
held him last
until the ticking heart stopped in
his chest
or what that silence taught, and how
it pressed.
The
whole of that poem is here on Peony Moon.
The Silence Teacher is published by Poetry Salzburg, in
their pamphlet series. I didn’t know
they had one, and wonder if the other books are of similar quality; they are
presumably as nicely produced. It’s been
reviewed over here in several places, and Peake, an American poet living in the
UK, runs Transatlantic Poetry on Air, internet-based readings (the next one has
John Glenday and Dorianne Laux). I met
him when we both read at the Troubadour in the autumn – people must have appreciated
his reading because they bought the pamphlet.
But I’d like to hear it more talked about. Maybe if the publisher were UK-based, this
would have happened.
