Anna Adams was an artist and ceramicist as well as poet, and this week's poem, "Credentials," immediately displays her visual imagination with that startling view of the "stoneware bowl" as a "crater/ balanced on one foot …" At first, the reader can't be sure where the poem is going. The opening recollection is disturbed after one stanza, and the narrative unfolds with the accident which shattered the pot a few days later, then fast-forwards to the schoolboy son's adulthood, and his own son, Ammar. In a further metamorphosis in the fourth verse, the child is perceived in a rather Blakean image, standing between the father's knees, "a shining man,/ naked of his body, in his soul …"
The fact that the adopted child's features are not "blurred" by family resemblances symbolises a selfhood that the poet imagines not only beyond genetics but beyond time. The thrust of the poem becomes increasingly clear, with a further vision, the suddenly youthful face of the speaker's "old love- / my dear old love who had begun to die". As visions go, this kind is not rare. The younger selves of people we have loved over decades are always intermittently visible. But Adams makes her experience sudden and mysterious, imbuing it with sharply personal feeling. It reverses the image of the child-as-man, compressing time into timelessness from the other direction.
The conventional picture of married life as a bit of a foot-slog, reinforced by the iambic, sometimes faintly plodding pace of the poem, becomes interesting in stanza seven because of Adams's wonderfully dramatic treatment of the shadows. They are tall at first, driven ahead by the energy of the young walkers; then they shrink to "dwarfs" at noon, and, by sunset, are wearily trailing behind the couple. Having evoked a symbolic journey, the poem now alludes to actual journeys; place-names are listed. Something about the very English modesty of the itinerary touches the heart. And how quickly it seems to pass, "till we arrived, white haired,// at now."
The last stanza imagines everything woven into a bale or tapestry, to be hung across the sky "one day when all is simultaneous." Again, we move from quite an ordinary image (time as woven cloth) to a vision of complexity that recalls the old man who suddenly became young, and the child who fused present and future in one shining self. The vision is not so much of timelessness, as of everything coming together in a single time. "For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." the Psalmist said, but even that concept seems chronology-ridden compared with what the poem is trying to imagine.
The vision is not necessarily theological: at least, the last line doesn't hammer home a certainty. In using the word "mad" the speaker is almost doubting her vision as she asserts it. And yet the plain, non-rhetorical language with its preponderance of monosyllables suggests an almost casual acceptance that the strange, non-linear dimension exists. And perhaps it asserts the "credentials" of the title?
The poem doesn't rhyme, but its rhythm is carefully structured. In each of its nine stanzas, the last, fifth line is always foreshortened. This rhythmic shift creates a sense of calm conclusion in the first five stanzas. In the last four, the effect is rather different. With no full-stop at the end, the syntax straddles the break and diminishes it. A simile extends across stanzas six and seven, and another suspension emphasises the jolt from then to now, between eight and nine. It's as if the poem itself unrolled the occasions "coiled in the present" and finally fused into the sky-hung tapestry that is its culminating image.
In the last stanza, the shorter line is especially personal, colloquial and unanswerable. It's a perfect conclusion, resisting any grandly elevated tone, but not underestimating the significance and mystery of the vision.
"Credentials" is from Anna Adams's last collection, Time-Pockets. The chapbook was published earlier this year by Fisherrow Press (11 Bush Street, Musselburgh, EH21 6DB) while Adams was still alive, though suffering the aftermath of a severe stroke and unable to read or write. She died in October, aged 85.
While always respectably published, with eight previous collections from Peterloo Press, Adams was not widely known or fashionable. John Killick, her editor and publisher, argues in the chapbook's introduction that her poems could appeal to a much wider public. I think this is true. Poetry's estate has many mansions. Mostly formal, but still searching and original, Adams's work belongs in the one least visited, and often thought no longer to exist. £5 will buy you the key.
Credentials
Through the long telescope of thirty years
I see a stoneware bowl, perched on a table.
I had glanced up from reading, saw this crater
balanced on one foot, a flower of clay
brimful of light.
A few days later my young schoolboy son
swung his batwing raincoat round his shoulders
and swept the bowl from tabletop to floor.
It shattered, but its image stayed intact
in time's vacated room.
My son is now the parent of a child
called Ammar, meaning – He that shall not die.
I see him with clear eye: he is adopted;
his features are not blurred by likenesses
to this or that relation.
He stood between the knees of my grown son
and he appeared to me a shining man,
naked of his body, in his soul;
his constant self, complete from the beginning;
the self he would unfold.
And, one winter evening, my old love –
my dear old love who had begun to die –
was sitting by the fireside, half asleep
or thinking, with his face propped on his hand,
and he was young again.
He looked as he did fifty years ago.
His pouchy face was ironed out, uncrumpled;
his widely spaced, imaginative eyes
were full of thought, or dream. If I was dreaming,
my tenderness was real
as that I felt when we were setting out
with both our lives a mountain road before us.
We drove tall morning shadows on ahead,
trod on dark dwarfs at noon, and trailed behind us
tired shadows, stretched by sunset
and then we bivouacked in woods or fields,
and one another's arms. But that was then.
We made such journeys: Cornwall, Wales and Ireland,
the Hebrides, our children, middle age,
till we arrived, white haired,
at now. But those times live, coiled in the present
or rolled in an embroidered bale called Past:
a tapestry to hang across the sky
one day when all is simultaneous.
I've had mad glimpses of it.