New and Selected Poems. John Foulcher. Angus and Robertson.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
John Foulcher’s New and Selected Poems was published in 1993. It follows on from his previous three books of poetry: Light Pressure (1983), Pictures from the War (1987) and Paperweight (1991). New and Selected Poems takes a selection from these first three books and adds a number of new poems. The most noticeable thing about Foulcher’s poetry at the time and now is its intelligence. It has emotional intelligence (or character) to a large degree as well as general intelligence. His general intelligence manifests itself in cleverness (‘The Bay’):
outside, there were other terraces
and gum trees jammed into tufts of earth
as cigarettes lean in a half-empty packet.
Helen lit a Gauloise, and said
one had to take the past down, like scaffolding,
let a half-finished life tumble.
The association between the simile of cigarettes in a packet and the smoking of one by Helen is deft. Here, Foulcher shows cleverness in linking this narrative poem together. As well as narrative poems, Foulcher writes about history (‘Wars of Imperialism’):
From 66 to 70 AD Rome and Palestine tore
Jerusalem – in history it’s small, strong only to the Jews
who lost, living since then in tents.
Yet I think we should see more in this:
things ended when their Temple fell. Like a honeycomb,
cells progressively damp and alone, the great home
of God was peeled; brick by brick,
places more holy exposed to the light, the Romans marched,
spiralling in. And when light came
to the last place, the centre, He must have left . . .
Did they know what they set free then?
Something was there,
changing to light from ages of nothing –
scorching the known world, ripping the new world.
Foulcher has a good sense of history. Foulcher has the awareness to pick out an often ignored stage of history and then makes a convincing argument about it. He then has the final say with a brilliant resolution to his poem. Foulcher always comes up with good last lines. He also has moments of wit (‘Innes Foulcher (1897 – 1984)’):
We saw them always together: Nellie and Innes,
grey puffs of hair, and hands chattering with teacups,
words that hovered in the room
like blowflies.
Here, Foulcher uses enjambment (most notably in the continuation of the sentence without a pause from the last line of the stanza to the simile) to good effect. The simile also has a deliberateness about it. While Foulcher writes well about actual people, he can also conceptualise (‘Wind’):
In an apartment by the beach,
a man comes out and leans on the balcony rail –
he watches the wind
taking the day out,
chopping it up, throwing it over the cool, darkening sea
that bristles with foam like flares.
The ash from his cigarette slips into the wind.
Foulcher has the imagination to conceptualise a plausible scenario. Foulcher can also write monologues and finishes New and Selected Poems with a monologue. It is about a woman who has been blind from birth who sees for the first time after a successful operation. The ending is poignant (‘First Sight’):
Now, all my life
is like making love: I
am breathing it in,
it is breathing me everywhere.
This is the best ending in New and Selected Poems. It is suitably placed at the end of the book. But New and Selected Poems is not just this ending. New and Selected Poems has unpretentiousness, soul, clarity, subtlety, dignity and integrity as well as many other attributes. The publication of the book would find Foulcher in his early forties, a successful poet but with more success to come.
Michael Byrne 