David Constantine

Liverpool University

Reviewed by Darren Guy

‘Poetry is not something you make up, it’s uncovering something that is already there’ David Constantine.

The first time I heard a poem by David Constantine was on a Radio Four programme ‘Poetry Now’. That was more than twenty years ago. ‘Garden of Red Hot Pokers and Agapanthus’ still sticks with me. I recorded it on a battered old tape machine and then re-wrote it on a piece of paper: I had never heard such colourful use of language. Such tenderness, beauty and its semi erotic style was unlike anything else I’d discovered in contemporary English poetry (apart from Liverpool’s own Brian Patton). ‘When you pushed open the gate in the garden wall, they dabbed your bare shoulder’.
So it was with great excitement that I discovered that he was reading and talking about his work at Liverpool University. This was under the title of ‘the Allot lectures’ and the theme was ‘Memory and Imagination’.
Constantine is a sensitive-looking man, with uncombed curly hair, and a thin defined face with high cheek bones. He looks like a poet and talks like one. He carries none of the arrogance or pretentiousness that is sometimes associated with poets; he had humility and kindness in both his persona and his delivery. Constantine talked and read with a passion about the love of places, people and things and about memory. He reiterated the importance of memory, and of remembering and how loss of memory leads to loss of identity. He talked and read with sincerity, about the lives of others. The lives of those struggling through the wars, through the decades of the 20th century. Then when prompted about the intense anger he feels seeing the so-called ‘modern world’ ‘overriding the importance of ordinary lives’. His particular focus was on the struggle of woman. And how their struggles are often overlooked- the endless tasks of keeping houses clean, raising children, feeding them, paying bills, keeping everything together even against great odds, hardship and great loss.
Constantine’s genius is in the fact that his politics are not obvious or overstated. His intense anger is hard to find in amongst the vivid imagery he creates, but it is always there bubbling under the surface. His poetry is human with sensitivity and vulnerability. It was not surprising then to quote Marx he understood that ‘We wont get by without Beauty’.

David Constantine’s ‘Selected Poems’ published by Bloodaxe can be ordered through News From Nowhere, Bold Street.