lyric subjects 31him ‘(the tense continually shifts, past and present blur)’ (p. 433 ).
Moreover, Harwood’s elegy is fi lled with anxious rhetorical ques-
tions based on ideas of reciprocity, exchange and legacy: ‘What did
I give you’, ‘And you gave me?’(p. 432 ).
At every point in the poem the knowledge of his grandmother’s
everyday life informs the tumbling array of recollections. The
speaker’s frustrations at his inability to commit these everyday
experiences to the written page are also evident. With rage the
speaker taunts his ambition to reduce ‘this to yet another poem’,
savagely dismisses his elegy as ‘pages of words creating old routines’
that are ‘easy with the “truth”, turning facts to meet the story’ (p.
432 ). In a tirade against the gentrifi cation of experience and memory
he acts by ‘systematically’ smashing ‘all those pretty pictures’ since
‘they won’t do anymore’ (p. 432 ). Indeed the speaker refers to the
legacy left by the grandmother as the ‘other “stuff” ’ that ‘continues’
(p. 433 ). Whereas for Motion his poem is guided by the ritual of
bedside vigils and calendar months, Harwood’s poem dramatises
the knowledge of ritualised tasks and gestures observed such as
pickling onions, bottling fruit, mending shoes; in effect the daily
working patterns of ‘cooking, making, fi xing’ (p. 433 ). In ‘African
Violets’ continuity is created across generations. The speaker notes
that: ‘I fi nd myself moving as you would / not the same but similar’
(p. 432 ). Harwood’s poem jettisons any formal shape which will
guide his elegy for fear that it will immobilise his refl ections. Instead
he attempts through free verse to inscribe the momentum and often
unpredicted pattern of a conversation. In ‘African Violets’ the
single speaking voice attempts to ‘talk to you again and again / I see
you again and again sat there’ (p. 433 ).
SPEAKING (AUTO) BIOGRAPHICALLY: CATHY SONG
AND GRACE NICHOLS
Since the late 1960 s there has been considerable discussion of what
indeed constitutes an author. Critical and continental theory has
questioned the omnipotence of the author as one who orchestrates
and controls the meaning of any writing produced. Most famously
Roland Barthes’s essay ‘Death of the Author’ ( 1967 ) and Michel