Ron Hansford: Countryman Poet - Anthology Review by Sebastian Hayes. |
By: Sebastian Hayes |
Ron Hansford's latest collection is Flying into the Blizzard (Shaftesbury: Brimstone Press, 2009) ISBN 978-1-906385-10-1. This is available for £5.50, plus 50p for postage and packing, via the e-mail link for this website. You can visit www.brimstonepress.co.uk/biogs/RJHansford.htm for further details of this publication.
Other critical articles together with songs, stories, poems, plays, and philosophical articles by Sebastian Hayes are available to view at www.sebastianhayes.co.uk. Also visit www.brimstonepress.co.uk/biogs/SHayes.htm for further details of Sebastian's publications.
Context & Background
The village craftsman or small farmer has left few poetic records. There is nothing mysterious about this. Life for such people was a virtually unending round of practical tasks : even after the ‘day’s work was done’ there were still the chicken coops to shut up, doors and gates to be barred, logs to be brought in for the fire and so on. Those who knew what this life was like, even if they were not illiterate (which most of them were prior to the Victorian era), did not have the time to write about it, and those who did have the time did not know what this life was really like. What records and poetic narratives we do have come from men who grew up within this world but escaped from it to a more leisured — but not necessarily more contented — style of life. George Crabbe, author of the ambitious poem, The Village, started off as an apothecary’s assistant but ended up as a country vicar — the position that Hardy’s Jude the Obscure helplessly aspired to. Robert Burns failed as a farmer and earned his living for most of his life as a tax collector. William Barnes, the Dorset Burns, ran a crammers’ school for aspiring civil servants. Clare, probably the only English poet to have been called out for a confab with his literary agent while working with a sickle in the fields, gravitated to the asylum which, I suppose, at least fed him and kept him warm for more than twenty years.
There was also what one might call the ‘male supremacist agenda’ — “the feeling that poetry was a ‘cissy’ activity”, as Sylvia Oldroyd (Ron Hansford’s wife) writes pertinently. This prejudice is not to be despised : the male breadwinner needed to keep his nose to the grindstone and his hand to the plough, otherwise penury and disaster might well follow. An interest in poetry and suchlike matters has, in a working-class milieu, always been regarded as something a bit weird, certainly a taste not to be indulged too frequently, like a fatal attraction to gin or loose women. I can remember my grandmother’s scorn when she found me looking at a book on ballet — “Ballet! You won’t earn no money being innarested in ballet!” Shades of Billy Elliott.
Flying into the Blizzard by Ron Hansford
I say all this to give the background and context to Ron Hansford’s book of poems Flying into the Blizzard. For Ron Hansford still lives in the house in which he was born and brought up by his grandparents. Moreover, the house was itself built by his grandfather and was situated in an, at the time, isolated New Forest hamlet. Ron Hansford moved out of the rural niche by qualifying to be a librarian. But this was a relatively acceptable promotion which, as opposed to going to university (my own case), did not involve an absolutely irremediable loss of local status. In any case, instead of practising, Ron Hansford returned to the family building business for ten years. Subsequently, he did work as a librarian but carried on keeping chickens, rabbits and pheasants within his grandfather's old pigsties — which I don’t expect many librarians do these days. He didn’t need to get involved in any Sixties style ‘back to the land’ movement because he had never left it.
At first sight Ron Hansford looks more of a craftsman and chicken breeder than a librarian. There are no literary references in his poems, and few literary tricks and stratagems.
"your cupped hands harbour
A self-made universe"
I would have been irresistibly tempted to write ‘microcosm’ instead of ‘self-made universe’, but the latter is more accurate in the context of the poem, while it still suggests the idea of ‘world within world’. So it scores on both counts.
The deliberately spare, even prosaic language is deceptive. The succinctness and flint-like hardness of these poems, typically at most twelve lines long, is clearly the result of long and careful work : the lack of poetic ornament and artifice is the result of policy, not lack of time or ability. An actual lifelong carpenter or bricklayer would have been much more verbose, and would most likely, if he had written poetry at all, not wanted to celebrate his daytime activities at the bench. William Morris preferred to spend his evenings writing poems and stories about a far-off medieval world which never really existed.
Maybe Ron Hansford, because he has, so to speak, partly stepped out of the old rural lifestyle is, for this reason, able to appreciate what it had to offer and to celebrate it, but he has remained near enough to it not to feel the need to romanticise it. And one suspects that the intense concern with tradition, family roots and craftsmanship, so typical of Ron Hansford’s poetry, is there precisely because all these things are fast disappearing, and the poet knows it. This is the moment, he seems to be saying, to chronicle these activities and attitudes before a global movement of urbanization and mass production sweeps them away for ever.
The first thing that struck me about these poems is that they describe and celebrate ‘work’. The chief poetic themes in our poetry from the Elizabethan era onwards have been love and death. We very occasionally sense the shadows of these ‘eternities’ in Ron Hansford’s poems, but the foreground is stoutly occupied by much more mundane concerns: how to handle a carpenter’s brace (‘Breast-drill’), how to mix up cement properly (‘Mortar’), or ponderings about the origin of a local place-name (‘Place-Name’). This sort of thing is extremely rare in Western literature : even writers sympathetic to the labouring classes were interested only in their ‘condition’ (where and how they ate, slept and raised children), rarely in what these people did during upwards of ten hours of the day. As a French small farmer once said to me, “You’d imagine that work never existed before the time of Zola” (late nineteenth century).
Ron Hansford bleeds out most of the ‘poetry’ of the countryside and workshop. It is what is going on (or went on) that matters, not who does what and where. The manual activities, if not quite ‘timeless’ in the literal sense — because hand tools and working processes change as the poet realizes — are not specific to a particular person. Tools — wheelbarrows, carpenter’s rules, planes, trowels — are more prominent in Ron Hansford’s poems than the people who wield them. The breast-drill is doubtless a fairly recent (eighteenth-century?) invention, but since it was invented, the user has been obliged to handle it in exactly the same way, i.e. keep it rigidly horizontal, push against it with his chest, avoid touching the bit as he pulls it out of the wood (so as not to burn his fingers), and so on. The tool is greater than the man since it controls the man’s behaviour, and is even longer-lived (gets passed on from father to son).
The unspoken message is that human beings are not so important as they think they are (although they do have their importance because they leave their mark on the landscape). The Vikings (an entire people!) only rate a passing reference because they happened to land in their long boats near where Ron was born and gave their name to the small local port. And the greatest war in history (WWII) only flickers momentarily across the poet’s consciousness because of the peculiar concrete relics, the ‘dragon’s teeth’, that he comes across on the coastline near his place of birth.
Since Byron and the Romantics, poetry has concentrated on the individual to the total exclusion of the local community — for the very good reason that most poets did not belong to any such grouping, and did not want to. Typically, we have lyrics expressing one particular individual’s sense of loneliness or amorous unease, or again depictions of vast anonymous processes like World War I in which the individual gets swallowed up. Even nineteenth century ‘family’ novels only deal with family in the narrow context of the scramble to make a good marriage : Jane Austen’s heroines have parents but no ancestors to speak of. It is thus surprising, and touching, to find in Ron Hansford’s poems a deep concern with family in a genuinely historical sense. The poet is not marooned in a specific contemporary situation, he reaches back into a nameless line of ancestors and the contact is maintained by the enduring work-place with its inherited objects:
“Breast-plate judders against the chest
a flanged shank is boring through my ribs;
this poignancy of dead men’s tools”.
These days, family usually means a very narrow range of persons who are more often than not dispersed all over the globe and only get together for weddings and funerals, if that. But in a village or hamlet, everyone is more or less related to everyone else, and even second or third cousins are family. This shared environment and sense of relatedness means that, in such an environment, “No man is an island” is literally true — which it was not for Donne. In the poem “Country Cousin” there is no sense that the person in question was particularly remarkable or particularly loved — rather the reverse in fact — but the loss is, for all that, deeply felt because of the family bond
“You’re lost to me now
with everything you had of mine
the coincidence of shared knowing
I took for granted like a Wessex vowel.
You are taking into the ground with you
too many of my belongings.”
This expansion of the individual in space and time is, in part, comforting but can also be inhibiting. Like the primitive tribesman always conscious of his long dead ancestors looking over his shoulder, the author feels that he is being watched
“Sawing to the line
in a family workshop
ghosts reprove me
when I force the blade”
This relic of ‘ancestor worship’ explains the odd note of diffidence, even self-reproof, which surfaces from time to time in these poems. For the author cannot entirely rid himself of the feeling that he has ‘stepped out of line’ by becoming educated and abandoning the old style of life. He tries to get round this by viewing the writing of poems as a craft, and language as a living organism. This equation of words to raw material and writing to craftsmanship is much more than a simile, it is closer to the Zen-like idea that certain activities can be paths towards enlightenment.
"QUARRYMAN
Working the old levels, I squat in an open shed
splitting and dressing my soul’s slate
trying to roof the world with a wagon-load of words.”
This brings me to a curious aspect of these poems. They are deliberately pared down, austere, with the expression of personal emotion held strongly in check. But instead of sensing a latent and suppressed sensuality as in, say, certain poems of Tennyson, one senses an undercurrent of intense religiosity which does not quite dare to say its name. It is not for nothing that Ron Hansford intersperses the personal poems with a celebration of the Celtic 'Peregrini', the
“frail saints
braving cold seaways
driven by God’s breath.”
The use of religious similes, though it is sometimes tongue-in-cheek, in other places has a deeper though somewhat paradoxical significance. In “Contract Joinery”, we could get the impression that the mundane activity of joinery is being ‘ennobled’ by being compared to the way to live a human life : but one might just as well interpret it as meaning that the mundane activity of living is ennobled by being compared to the ageless activity of joining together two pieces of wood. And all this arduous activity is, when all is said and done, no more, but also no less, than —
“one way
to spend a lifetime
fabricating our own cross
the sky dark as heartwood.”
In most of Ron Hansford’s poems, as here, there is no specific message or moral as such, almost one might say no inherent meaning, but they are not for all that meaningless, they echo and resonate in the mind giving rise to a kind of mute understanding. (I have read that this is how Japanese haiku are supposed to act, but I have no doubt Hansford developed his own technique quite independently.)
The mood of these poems is thoughtful, elegiac, very occasionally lyrical, never despairing. It is neither pro nor contra life, things are as they are. Even when the poet does not use a single non-factual word and is apparently just noting down what he sees, he still manages to convey this distinctive mood
“Replaced by pier and ferry
the bar persists at each low water
a tongue of shingle naming a village.”
These things have happened, the poet is saying: the coming of sea-raiders to Hythe, the construction of a modern pier, the making of cement nest-boxes in my family workshop, my son’s birth, my second cousin’s death, the writing of these very poems describing these selfsame events… Such things, such events, are important and yet not important, or not important and yet important, and for precisely the same reasons.