Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2 On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3 A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4 Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations
- 5 Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6 ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy's Différance
- 7 Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8 Living in History
- 9 An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10 Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11 Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2 On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3 A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4 Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations
- 5 Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6 ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy's Différance
- 7 Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8 Living in History
- 9 An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10 Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11 Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Letters of exile
In a Channel 4 television documentary broadcast in 2003 Philip Larkin observed of Hull, the city in which he had lived and worked for many years, ‘It is a bit on the edge of things. I rather like being on the edge of things.’ Not that living and working there implied some absolute attachment to place. On the contrary, being on the edge licensed a semidetached relationship with the place the poet happened to inhabit: he was always just passing through, just as, in his famous poem from The Less Deceived (1955) ‘I Remember, I Remember’, he dismissed Coventry, his birthplace, not as somewhere he had his ‘roots’, but ‘just where I started’. Larkin's attitude to where he happened to be at the moment is summed up more accurately in the image of desolation in his sonnet ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, from High Windows, with its possibly self-referential allusion (he may be writing the poem on that very paper) to ‘The headed paper, made for writing home / (If home existed) letters of exile’. The poem depicts the emptiness of the hotel's public rooms, hall, reception, dining and conference rooms, when all the salesmen staying there in the week have gone back to Leeds. The poem pointedly avoids saying ‘back home’, and Leeds is clearly just a metonymic elsewhere. Evoking ‘A larger loneliness of knives and glass’, the poem hints menacinglyat the possibility of murder at the heart of domesticity and dinner. These commercial travellers, like his notorious Mr Bleaney, from The Whitsun Weddings, in his ‘one hired box’, bedsit or coffin, are transients, archetypes of a universal condition. Larkin's parenthesis hovers ambiguously between questioning whether ‘home’ exists for these particular men, and whether, for all of us, it is now an obsolete concept; whether, indeed, it has not always been an illusion, useful for sanity, to conceal the fact that, in the long run, that ‘Cemetery Road’ called up in ‘Toads Revisited’ is the only place we're heading for. As Larkin wrote in ‘I Remember, I Remember’, paying homage to unevent, ‘“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”’. The edge of things, now, could be anywhere and everywhere. And the commercial traveller is the measure of all our lives.
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- Poetry & Displacement , pp. 20 - 40Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007