This week's poem, "Balance," by James Womack, recalls the mediaeval poet's desire to fix earthly events in their planetary context (Dante's geographical and cosmological scene-setting in the Divine Comedy springs to mind). The title itself evokes, for the astrologically inclined, the month of September, which, towards its end, is ruled by Libra, the only sign of the zodiac represented by an inanimate object, the scales of justice.
Though astrology is no longer the respectable branch of enquiry it was in Dante's time, that dimension helps secure the poem's moral bearings.
September has become, for most of us, a month stained by the opposite of balance. The inferno of 9/11 has changed our imagery, even for the most peripherally connected. A poet can't refuse his or her own reactions. But any responding poem must itself conduct an extreme act of balancing, finding a place where it can manoeuvre and function fully as poetry, without crudity or pretension, but avoiding a sort of aesthetic inoculation that can also occur. Womack's poem, with its historical sense, its tact and quietness, rises to that demand of balance. Its cleverness is not a pose: the flow of its syntax and rhythm give it the feel of true elegy. While its position as this week's poem signals its topicality, it would earn its place in any month or week.
"It," the pronoun that opens the poem, might stand for a noun-defying subject. It could be the horrific event that suspends time and momentarily defeats language. More likely, it refers to the "globe" of line two. This "globe," with its indecisive twisting and turning, seems to evolve and grow into the "calm but firm" mother, "the world" which keeps it in check and holds it in suspension. "The world" suggests everyone is implicated in this wished-for holding operation.
Eight lines in, the poem exchanges the idea of time's suspension between night and day for a realistic imagery of blurred boundaries. There is daylight, but it's dark and "gritty" with particulate. The speaker goes on to describe the kinds of particles: "masonry-dust, plaster, / Powder, snowflakes, soot." The mention of snow-flakes in the list, while it might evoke blizzard-like billows of smoke, heightens the sense of unreality. It's as if the seasons themselves had been thrown into confusion by the chaos let loose.
The caesura in line 12 leaves a pause to allow the image of all this detritus to fill the reader's mind, after which we are ready for the detail of domestic personal reaction. Again, there is the idea that time could be stopped, and, if it could only happen, this would be "fine by us." The tearing of the page from the calendar is an image of childlike helplessness and the longing for irrational magic we all experience when we would give anything to erase a particular day or discover that the night's bad dream was only that. The first line recurs, with an extra stress filling it out to a possible iambic pentameter: "It didn't want to let morning come."
After the well-timed halts and gasps, the syntax starts to flow again, this time in an ominous present-tense: "But the mechanism / Slips suddenly out of gear – we are / jerked forward, lose balance once more." The continuing result of the loss of equilibrium is more lost equilibrium. For some readers, "the last station of autumn" will be a reminder of the Stations of the Cross and the Crucifixion, another occasion when an unnatural darkness descended. But there's no real sense of closure. "The scales have fallen" is a Muldoon-ish pun but earns its place, forcing us to see the harshly-lit wreckage. The scales have fallen from our eyes, and the balance which might have been a political possibility has also been destroyed.
The autumn setting does not necessarily pin the poem to one particular event. That reading is clearly present, and the first that comes to mind, but the poem remains open. We may think of natural disasters – the eruption of Vesuvius and smothering of Pompeii – or of other human acts of violence that, whatever their scale, shatter the timelines and skylines of the individuals concerned.
The reason why astrology fuses so convincingly with a poem steeped in 21st-century conflict is in the title. "Balance" sums up the moral obligation of politicians and citizens, the difficult opposite of all fanaticisms. And the poem registers the concept at a formal level. Longer than a sonnet, it nevertheless glances towards that form's symmetries. There's the semi-Petrarchan rhyme-scheme in the first 12 lines, which have an inner pattern of ABBA-rhyming quatrains. The repetition of present participles at the beginning ("morning", "rocking", "twisting", "turning") suggests the search for a rhythmical equilibrium which is song-like and reassuring, though the metre usually works against this regularity. So its movement helps the poem to touch the reader's emotions, with the gestures of grief, the hand-wringing and rocking, forming a shadow-play behind the onward-flowing rhythms.
James Womack is a young Cambridge-born English poet whose work will appear in an impressive anthology of new writing, New Poetries V, due from Carcanet next month. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, and in the Bloodaxe anthology, Voice Recognition.
Balance
It didn't want to let the morning
Come, as if the globe were rocking back,
Back and forwards, twisting gently like
A fair-day weathervane, and turning
Towards the sun, turning us away.
Calm but firm, the world like a mother
Did not allow it to be either
One thing or the other, night or day.
The sky was gritty with darkness, with
The light and the dark mixed, for the air
Was full of masonry-dust, plaster,
Powder, snowflakes, soot. I thought that if
I tore the page off the calendar
The next page would have the same number.
It didn't want to let morning come.
Fine by us. But the mechanism
Slips suddenly out of gear – we are
Jerked forward, lose balance once more.
This is the last station of autumn –
The sun is up, the scales have fallen.
JAMES WOMACK