gareth reeves
As the poem says later, ‘But come. Grief must have its term? Guilt too, then’, but
withhow much conviction, or collusion, is impossible to say. Who is the speaker of
‘But come’, who the addressee? Is the poet-enquirer asking for, or being asked for,
indulgence; is the reader? Is this deception or self-deception? As the next line puts it,
‘there is no limit to the resourcefulness of recollection’. And the poem ends where it
began, but with the silence more absolute and more conspiratorial, encompassing
notjustthesocietythatperpetratedtheHolocaust,butallwhoattempttobear
witness, to ‘enquire’:
His wife nods, and a secret smile,
Like a breeze with enough strength to carry one dry leaf
Over two pavingstones, passes from chair to chair.
Even the enquirer is charmed.Even as he admits to this enchantment, the poet-enquirer is himself charmed into
writing these seductively conspiratorial lines, and the reader into relishing the
conspiracy. The precision is fake, or at any rate precise only verbally: ‘one leaf, two
pavingstones’, sounds better than ‘one leaf, three pavingstones’, for instance. It is a
question of style. But then, as Fenton’s poetry demonstrates again and again, style
means so much more than itself: even the reader is charmed. At the end of the
poem, that impersonal pronoun returns with renewed emphasis and inscrutability,
reinforced by the entirely monosyllabic context:
It is not what he wants to know.
It is what he wants not to know.
It is not what they say.
It is what they do not say.The fact of silence becomes the absolute of this poem. What is known and what is
said, and what is not known and what is not said, by enquirer and by those enquired
of, by poet, by speaker, and by reader, are reduced to an absolute conundrum
whose only certainty is this ‘it’ that refuses to yield up anything other than its own
intransigence—and the poetry which, seductively, conveys that intransigence.
‘A German Requiem’ makes remarkable play of the fact that ‘when so many had
died, so many and at such speed,|There were no cities waiting for the victims’.
Here literal displacement provides ample material out of which the poet can
work up metaphorical parallels for social and psychological displacement. ‘The
eloquence of young cemeteries’ is literally, as well as emotionally, true, for under
these circumstances identities could, it seems, be preserved only in a macabrely
literal fashion: ‘They unscrewed the name-plates from the shattered doorways|And
carried them away with the coffins.’ One can sense Fenton’s quirky imagination
homing in on such a fact. It becomes the occasion for ingenious, but at the same
time disorientatingly plangent, sardonic humour: an ‘uncle’s grave informed you
that he lived on the third floor, left.|You were asked please to ring, and he would
come down in the lift’—at which point the poem performs a remarkable change of