Review: Cenotaph South by Chris McCabe (Penned in the Margins 2016/17)

   The notion of poetry’s immortality is one of its most abiding and validating tropes, originating in its earliest manifestations both as sacred utterance offered up to the gods and as a repository of oral myth and tribal history. In both cases it was the musical, formal qualities of poetry which endowed it with the memorable (and indeed memorisable) property of transcending the flux of everyday speech and living on into subsequent generations. With the advent of printed books in the 15^th Century, the poet was able to construct him or herself even more concretely as a kind of vatic time-traveller projecting their works forward into a posterity that would outlive their own precarious moment of acclaim. This aspiration became a rhetorical device itself, employed most famously in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and made the motivating theme of Edwardian poet James Elroy Flecker’s ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’:

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

    But what of today’s far faster-scrolling cultural landscape, where we barely find time to read a poem before the next newly discovered, media-hyped prize-winner demands our skittish attention and where – with libraries and bookshops rapidly disappearing - half the poetry we encounter doesn’t even exist as print upon a page but is floating in a cloud somewhere on the vast hypothetical repository of the internet? Our sense of history and time has blurred, hardly helped by ominous global events that seem to undermine any concept of a secure futurity. Within such a flickering maelstrom of fake news and the otiose verbiage of social media, what body of poetry can stake its claim to survival into the next generation, let alone what used to be known as “immortality”?

  Such anxieties seem to haunt the margins of Chris McCabe’s ongoing project to investigate the obscure poets buried in London’s Victorian cemeteries, hoping to uncover a “mute, inglorious Milton” who has somehow (in Pound’s phrase) “’scaped immortality”. The opening instalment, In the Catacombs: A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery (Penned in the Margins, 2014), initiated an alluring prose-hybrid form that collaged documentary, literary criticism and autobiography in a multifaceted narrative which owed something to later works by Iain Sinclair (eg. London Orbital and Edge of the Orison), tracing intersections in time and location that eventually forge a deep-rooted, almost occult coherence.

    What gave this launch of the project a further edge and scope was McCabe’s collaboration with visual artists who were creating a “site-specific art-trail” within West Norwood Cemetery during 2013, so that the book and its dead poets could be experienced in a concrete, physical dimension. Interested readers could visit the cemetery (as I did that summer) and follow the trail with McCabe: he also deposited small oval stones printed with words from each of the poet’s writings at the sites of their burial (some now overgrown or displaced) and there was also a limited edition anthology of the poets placed in the columbarium. The leaving of poem-stones seemed a gesture in keeping with the overall project of seeking a perpetuity for poets’ words: one wonders how many of the stones are still there in West Norwood Cemetery today?

    Cenotaph South is a more personally-invested book, interspersed throughout by McCabe’s diaristic notations of his mother’s cancer-scare and memories of his dead father, lending the sense of a poignant self-pilgrimage to McCabe’s investigations, albeit often counterbalanced by the redeeming innocence of playful interactions with his son Pavel. There is also a more writerly level whereby McCabe strives to validate his place within the historical continuity of poets by constantly scanning  his surroundings for links with his antecedents, eventually elaborating a “coffin-shaped” path on the map of Nunhead, Dulwich and Peckham Rye which demarcates the area of his dogged psychogeographic research.

    The network of associations he traces is remarkably rich and diverse: he initiates his enquiries by trying to locate the tree on Peckham Rye in which Blake had a vision of angels as a boy, then visits Dulwich College, where Barry McSweeney did his last poetry reading in 2000, before visiting the house where Robert Browning lived on Telegraph Hill and the site of a pub in Dulwich Village where BS Johnson used to attend poetry events in the 1960s. He also comes across the grave of Henry Mew, brother of the poet Charlotte, who wrote a vivid monologue addressed to her brother called  ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’.

    By invoking such outsider-poets as Blake, Mew and McSweeney (significantly it’s the proto-Modernist Browning of the experimental Sordello he’s drawn to rather than the later renowned man of letters) McCabe seems to be attempting to delineate his own alternative poetic history, an idiosyncratic “historical grammar of poetic myth” perhaps modelled on one of the many books he cites, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. This is underlined in the chapter ‘At Home with the BBC: Reconsidering the Canon’, where his reflections on a BBC documentary suggest how the poetry establishment typified by TS Eliot and Faber worked with the BBC to endorse a particular narrow canon of mostly white male mainstream poets.

   As for Nunhead Cemetery itself, the buried poets McCabe identifies (with the help of historian Tim Stevenson) are a motley selection: mostly Victorians, like the once widely-anthologised ‘Laureate of the Babies’ William Cox Bennet, their often staid, sentimental verses hardly stand the test of time, although McCabe is a generous and knowledgeable enough reader to find at least something positive in all of the poets, especially George Thornbury whose documentary prose about London seems a precursor of McCabe’s own.

   Despite its potentially dark subject-matter, Cenotaph South culminates on a positive note, with news that McCabe’s mother is in recovery from her chemotherapy and that a new poetry-scene seems to be flourishing in the gentrified environs of Peckham and Nunhead, reminding us that “this is how the dead poets still speak – through the living”. An undiscovered poet of genius is yet to be unearthed from the tangled undergrowth of Nunhead Cemetery and therefore McCabe’s quest must continue to another of London’s Victorian cemeteries, leading the way for the next instalment of what is becoming a compelling and highly original sequence.