In the 1960s, "bread" was hipster slang for "money. As food, the doughy stuff has long been considered "the staff of life" although, as the Bible warns more than once, "Man doth not live by bread alone." In the Lord's Prayer, "our daily bread" represents spiritual as much as physical nourishment, and this week's poem, "Bread", is concerned with the equally essential and intangible "nightly bread" of poetry. It's by Penelope Shuttle and comes from Sandgrain and Hourglass, (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), a moving collection much preoccupied with what poetry can and cannot do when confronted by mortality in one of its harshest forms – the loss of a life-long partner.
Sandgrain and Hourglass takes us repeatedly to that mind-breaking edge. Penelope Shuttle's husband and literary collaborator, the poet Peter Redgrove, died in 2003, and her latest collection continues the elegiac emphasis of the previous volume, Redgrove's Wife.
These are love poems in absentia and, while they perform powerful acts of evocation, they are also poems in no doubt of the limitations of poetry. Poetry can speak of, and to, the dead, but only silence answers. In another poem, "The Keening" the single consolation that the speaker allows herself to claim is "this second sight of grief," and scant consolation it seems in the context of the poem's intense and literal anatomy of a cherished human body.
"Bread" is not a comforting poem but it lies aslant to the overall grain of the collection, almost a marginal note, a memo to self, that opens a window on what is, after all, as central to life as death is. If it's a poem about poetry, it's very much a poem about poetry as work, though the work is of a strange and specialised kind.
In the first three stanzas, the poet makes a refrain of the anaphoric "I work hard", reversing the phrase for added force in the fourth: "Hard I work". "Only a poet" seems to be the expression of a genuine modesty. There's nothing ironically self-congratulatory about it. "Only a poet" admits, perhaps, that the work looks easy, and rarely involves heavy lifting. It requires careful listening, as the poem goes on to explain, and resists emotional indulgence, "folding swans back into ice". But we're in no doubt that the work matters and that the "nightly bread" is as simple and necessary as the "daily bread". This bread is not only poetry, but the wholeness of self which poetry brings, the uniting of right hand with left hand, the nocturnal unconscious with the rational mind.
The speaker is measured, almost reticent, while gradually building up to an acknowledgement of the possibilities. She prays for "stamina" and "happiness" – simple, work-a-day blessings, which, when amplified, lead to some unexpected erotic mischief. Poetry has its moment of foreskin-free orgasm; then, in the fifth stanza, the speaker comes down to earth, "scrubbing doorsteps and stairways/ made of words." The single lonely line "I eat my bread dry" is indicative.
In the penultimate, and longest, stanza, the poet visits the past and finds her "unknown grandfather." The point of the poem now is to stand back, to be general rather than specific. This, the poet says, is what I can do – not this is how I do it. The grandfather, we must assume, is no longer alive. The poet never knew him. We're not told exactly what happened in these "blackout air-raid streets" though we are told the nature of the job, and the job-title: "this Superintendent of a Work Gang". He is the "real" worker, handling fractured water-pipes, but it is the poet who can repair, with her imagination, the forgotten facts of his life.
There is a faintly Eastern European flavour to "Bread." It could almost be a translation, reminiscent of those cryptic, haunting parables produced during the mid-20th-century high season of the communist dictatorships. In the free, rhymeless translations by which English readers know them, such poems seem to be picking their way through a silence thick with the unsayable. Shuttle has written that "it is the way the poem breathes that gives it form," and the silence between breaths is carefully built into her syntax. There are repetitions, but no rhymes, commas, but no full stops. In fact, this is the kind of poem whose precise cadences would allow it to work without any punctuation at all.
Finally, the qualifier in "only a poet" has a more defiant air. The voice that says "I can do this, / although I am only a poet," quietly argues back from the cultural margins, insisting that, through images and stories, the poet's work can "save lives" and even change the past.
Bread
I work hard for my nightly bread
even though I'm only a poet
I work hard at listening
to what my left hand whispers to my right,
and at folding swans back into ice
I work hard, praying for the stamina
of Chagall's favourite mistress
or the happiness of a woman
married to a man without a foreskin
Hard I work,
scrubbing doorsteps and stairways
made of words
I eat my bread dry
I reach down, pluck my grandfather
from the blackout air-raid streets
of 1941 London,
removing this Superintendent of a Work Gang
repairing the city's fractured water supply
from danger
I can do this,
although I am only a poet