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poems

Introducing Angus Calder, Poet

by Kaiser Haq
To those interested in Commonwealth literature Angus Calder is something of a legend. As an editor, teacher, critic and organiser of literary events he has played a crucial role in bringing writers from Britain’s former colonies to the attention of a wider readership.
Just as significant has been Calder’s work as a social historian : The People's War: Britain 1939-45 (1969) has become a classic and has been influential in shaping literary portrayals of the Second World War; and the more recent Revolutionary Empire : The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires (1981) has been described by Edward Said as a ’gripping book’. His literary criticism to date adds up to a distinguished and variegated body.
Till taking early retirement in 1993 Calder has taught in the Open University in Scotland and, in Africa, in the universities of Nairobi, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Currently a free-lance writer, he is copiously publishing scholarly and critical studies, as well as creative work. Thus, happily, his career comes round full circle, for his involvement with literature had begun with teen-age attempts at verse.
As a promising young poet he was recipient of the coveted Eric Gregory Award in 1967.1 can only think of
excessive modesty as the reason for his having put off collecting his poetry till the appearance of Waking in Waikato this year from Diehard Publishers, Edinburgh. But, as the cliche goes, better late then never, and Calder’s many admirers and indeed those who encounter him for the first time in the pages of this slim, yet substantial, volume °will warm to its pithy, humane notations.
’Friends, faces, times, places memories are made of these,’ I recall from the commentary in a TV serial on the Great War. Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, is the mother of the Muses. And so it is no surprise that like so much of art and literature, Calder’s poetry is about friends, faces, times, places. Cricket, a game Calder loves as passionately as any Bangladeshi, is interwoven with these themes in the two poems reprinted below. In one of them, ’Rajshahi’, the Padma provides a magnificent setting for Calder’s musings, as, not so many years ago, it did for those of our greatest poet, Tagore. In ’Meditation on Mohammed Azharuddin’ Calder celebrates those unlikely, magical moments (whether in sports, the arts or in interpersonal relationships) that add the spark of meaning to our otherwise dull lives.
Meditation on Mohammed Azharuddin
for Sudeep Sen
Azhar's out for a duck before I switch on the TV... What a pang. As splendid Tendulkar smites on, 1 consider the love you and I share. Sudeep, for the art of Mohammed Azharuddin, a sizeable man with a serious face fil
and wrists which whip the ball "
past point or through midwicket faster than sound, though his feet aren't in the right place.
Have you ever yourself made moments like those, timing a stroke out of time? Once — in Surrey I think — I went out to bat with a lourd hangover, lunged at my first ball, and it flew Just over the fast bowler’s head, never high, for a flat six... Of course, I was out soon after.
Told of myself, such stories tickle laughter, as if a bad poet had written a great line (some do), or the least experienced cook had executed a perfect Pavlova (might happen).
Art’s nowise elite. A child can paint a definitive picture. Unaccompanied song from an untrained voice may be entirely beautiful. Like Azhar’s, all our imitation, practice, revision, response to advice and nasty critics.
merely frame (if we re in form) the swift gift of verb or rhythm which pushers words not there but there, like a perfectly placed stroke in cricket.
Christians speak of Grace, Zenpersons of one hand clapping.
I don’t think of orgasms, which are usually worked for, or the well rehearsed climax of a great Mass, but of something finished at once yet in time without end as when my daughter, aged three, held up bits of breakfast, declared. Here is a boy called Toast and he is looking for a girl called Friend', or what a colleague confided of unlikely late love, As soon as she came in, and our eyes first met, we knew.' Can what is given so randomly matter?
It has to, or we re bust, and life is nothing but genomes Jogging between dark and dust, soiled carryout cartons in the gutter, instant cliches coined and proudly quoted, and tea sipped doucely behind lace curtains by noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, while, half heard, the TV news says, "India's captain soon left, out for a duck".
Rajshahi
Osim and Sohel, Mahmun and Aslt down by the Ganges where the grey mud
sucking at sunset matched my grey hair, grey shoes you are a combination that can't lose.
in memory, if not in fact. In time and out of time, you hire a boat-small fish in the bilges as the sun goes down I sit astern like emperor or clown.
There is no other sun than this red ball.
no other life them this: breath's all we ll get.
Sage old and ardent youth are now confused I'm using you, and by you I am used. ..
For what, though? Oh. of all things 1 prefer
things used and worn, as Brecht said, but 1 see lads at the starting point, all sleek and new (that's Yeats) and wonder what I offer you.
Hope? Like the blazing pull that wee left handed bat played on the strath as we drove here : splendid as Sobers or as Gower in their primes ...
I fear that lad. though, will endure hard times.
six unrecorded, life reduced to mud.—
But. oh. those vivid pictures on rickshaws.
Bright sans on poor womens bodies gloat, as we do. on the Ganges, just afloat.
For a few takas as sun sets we get a lakh of rupees, red and glowing wealth Mud washes down the river towards ocean as we delight in motion and emotion.