30 contemporary poetry
with the natural world since in the third anniversary his mother
is described as having a ‘shadow of clouds’ (p. 8 ) upon her face.
More terrifying for the speaker is the moment when the mother
momentarily awakens and speaks, only to retreat to an imposed
stillness with a look that refuses ‘to recognise my own’ (p. 9 ).
Motion’s poem can be read as a form of arrested elegy, it marks
the attempts of a plain-speaking voice to understand the death-like
trance and suspension of his mother’s life. Moreover, the form
of the poem, its division into neat four-lined stanzas and sections
denoting each year, attempts to grant form and order to experience
through narrative. Throughout Motion’s poem personal events
are communicated and expressed through the intimacy of a single
speaking voice.
English poet Lee Harwood offers a further response to express-
ing bereavement through the poetic elegy. Unlike Motion,
Harwood’s poem is less assured of the viability of its task.
Harwood’s work questions whether poetry can mediate his experi-
ence and recollections. The poem enacts a form of ‘doubting’ elegy
as he searches for a discursive form which can enact a conversation
with the person lost. Harwood is moreover suspicious of com-
mitting immediate experience into poetic form, and alert to the
dangers of inscribing too much of his own persona at the expense
of the person he is grieving. The title of Harwood’s elegy is dis-
arming and self-explanatory: ‘African violets for Pansy Harwood
my grandmother 1896 – 1989 ’.^11 But the opening lines disrupt any
sense of static backdrop to the elegy; we are plunged into a world of
motion and attempts to create shape and form. The poem describes
the movement of fl ags on ‘silver pyramids’, purple fl owers that
‘present themselves to the air’ and the straining of a composition
as Chopin ‘fi ghts his way’ into music (p. 432 ). This spatial disori-
entation is echoed by Harwood’s attempt to organise his recollec-
tions around hospital visits, childhood memories and processes of
making art. Threads of phrases and conversation intervene, such
as snippets like ‘A real heartbreaker’ and ‘ “That was a bit unneces-
sary son” ’ (p. 432 ). These intrusions succeed in demolishing any
illusion of control that one may associate with the unitary voice.
Rather than the distinct chronicle of time exhibited in Motion’s
‘Anniversaries’, the speaker in Harwood’s elegy admits that for