friday refrains · nick laird
Friday 26 January 2007 | I like a cookie
Zadie Smith and I have something in common: We were both first published by a young Cambridge editor named Nick Laird. To be fair, Nick went on to marry Zadie, and so far none of my editors has so much as proposed to me. But Nick did give me my first publication ever, in the 1996 Oxbridge May Anthologies—and made mine the first and last poems in the book, which has warmed the cockles of my heart for lo these many years.
Nick, whom I remember as a pleasant, somberly elfin sort, with a thin dark face and a glittering little gold eyebrow ring, has earned a spot 
of literary notoriety—and not just as (oh ridiculous epithet) Mr. Smith, either. His first book of poems, To a Fault, has been quite well received (won the Forward Prize in fact); and his novel Utterly Monkey did all right for itself too, though I’ve managed to find neither book in the libraries of this misbegotten mountain town.
Scraps of Cantab memory float to the mind-surface like pond scum. Such as when I showed up to the launch party to read, a few sheets to the wind already and dedicated to becoming more so as rapidly as possible, morose and self-pitying in a navy-blue jacket and silk necktie, because my date had cancelled on me at the last minute (Fionnula Rose! how pragmatically you returned to me my archaic, ridiculous romantic’s heart). Nick was kind about it afterward, me being sloshed and all: “I just thought you were dead tense.” Then there was the seminar we attended in our last year for the Literature Post-1970 paper, Cambridge’s euphemism for Three Hours of Your Life Free from and Relatively Unspoilt by IA Richards and FR Leavis. We joked irritatedly and eye-rolled over the kind-hearted instructor, how he invariably called upon class members from the relevant special interest group to speak to whatever piece of Literature Post-1970 was being laboriously deconstructed that day—so Nick was required to unpack the work of various Seamuses, Zadie (along with, inexplicably, me—because I’m nominally from the South?) to explicate Toni Morrison. We all did fine in the exams anyway.
Another fragment survives, of Nick standing with me in a gray stone college doorway one horrible winter day, waiting for the seminar to begin, smoking and squinting out at the pestilential fens and talking about, I believe, Bastard out of Carolina, rain beading dankly on our coats.
Scuttlebutt has it now that the pair are working on a stage musical about, yes, Kafka—which has unfortunate echoes of McSweeney’s Nietzsche! The Musical—but it will be if nothing else a glorious failure along the lines of Derek Walcott’s Capeman fiasco with Paul Simon, and probably will be brought out by Faber & Faber in a drab cover eventually and sold in the National Theatre’s bookshop on the South Bank of the Thames. On such artistic disasters are careers founded, strange to say.
That old Cambridge rag Varsity interviewed Mr. Laird in an issue no longer easily available online; it ran, in part, as follows.
SP: How important is exile to your poetry?
NL: I’m a bit uncomfortable with that word ‘exile’. There are writers for whom exile is a reality, whose governments make exile their only option—Joseph Brodsky, say—and there are writers, as has recently happened to the Northern Irish playwright Gary Mitchell, who are forced into hiding by terrorists. I simply moved. Exile doesn’t apply to me. However I think, at least for me, ‘elsewhere’ has been important. It makes it easier to get a handle on your childhood, your received ideas, and on the place where you grew up, if you get out of it, and out of range of it. Joyce says somewhere that the quickest way to Tara is via Holyhead, and that strikes me as true.
SP: Is being married to another writer a blessing or a burden?
NL: Probably a bit of both. It’s nice to have someone to talk about books to.
SP: Have you ever been in a fist fight?
NL: I have.
SP: What have you discovered since writing your last book of poems?
NL: That when a poetry festival schedules your reading for the same time as the Men’s Wimbledon Final you might as well stay in your bed.
SP: Describe a typical day of yours in ten words.
NL: Vertical, dog, desk, lunch, wife, paper, movie, run, drink, horizontal.
SP: What’s the title of your next book of poems, and what is your new novel about?
NL: I think the poetry book is called The War Artists, though I’m not quite decided. The new novel has the working title Glover’s Mistake. It has three main characters, a 35-year-old Englishman, a 50-year-old American woman and a 25-year-old Northern Irishman, and something pretty bad happens.
So we’ve got more bleak poesie and prose to look forward to. (Emma Gifford Hardy: “I hear Tom upstairs laughing. I suppose he has just finished another of his nasty poems.”) In the meantime, you can listen to the former lawyer from County Tyrone discuss his novel; and you can read some poems here.
•
Cuttings
Methodical dust shades the combs and pomade
while the wielded goodwill of the sunlight picks out
a patch of paisley wallpaper to expand leisurely on it.
The cape comes off with a matador’s flourish
and the scalp’s washed to get rid of the chaff.
This is the closeness casual once in the trenches
and is deft as remembering when not to mention
the troubles or women or prison.
They talk of the parking or calving or missing.
A beige lino, a red barber’s chair, one ceramic brown sink
and a scenic wall-calendar of the glories of Ulster
sponsored by JB Crane Hire or some crowd flogging animal feed.
About, say, every second month or so
he will stroll and cross the widest street in Ireland
and step beneath the bandaged pole.
Eelmen, gunmen, the long dead, the police.
And my angry and beautiful father:
tilted, expectant and open as in a deckchair
outside on the drive, persuaded to wait
for a meteor shower, but with his eyes budded shut,
his head full of lather and unusual thoughts.
(originally published in the Guardian)
•
The Last Saturday in Ulster
Behind her radiator
the leather purse is caring
for the old denominations:
liverspots of giant pennies,
fifty pences thick as lenses.
A Pentecostal home outside Armagh:
antimacassars, oxygen masks,
Martha glancing towards the screen
as if checking delay and departure.
An Orange march in Antrim
will see me late arriving:
and standing out at Aldegrove
an English girl might well believe
that time is how you spend your love.
Undriven cattle graze the long acre.
Pheasants fidget and flit between townlands.
The coins were warm as new eggs
in the nest of her priestly-cool hands.
(originally published in the Guardian)
•
Statue of an Alderman in Devon
You have to drive five counties
and come over the hill to Salisbury Plain,
pass the cloud-shadow grazing
on hayfields and A-roads and grass,
and decelerate into the very last town
where a sign points to the Ice Factory,
and in front of you is sea.
You have to take the second left
to find yourself, lost, of course,
in a hamlet with one phone box
and an empty stretch where seagulls peck
beside the bronze feet of an alderman
who watches, like some soul who outlived,
in the end, everyone he loved.
•
Hunting Is a Holy Occupation
In the strict fulfilment of my vows
I couched on thorns in charnel ground.
I never touched spirits or brews of grain.
Such lengths I took to keep the word
I plucked the hair out of my head
and walked a-squat like some great toad.
I shied from the cutter and neatherd
and ate the twelfth meal only, algae,
ox-dung and moss, wild millets and paddy.
I held my breath for as long as I could,
then got lashed awake with banyan rods.
So far I’ve come alone and naked,
licking my hands after eating, waiting,
to learn if God exists,
I hate Him.
(two originally published in Agni 64)
•
The Bearhug
It’s not as if I’m intending on spending the rest of my life doing this:
besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this poem a fishbone in my briefcase.
The scaffolding clinging St Paul’s is less urban ivy than skin, peeling off.
A singular sprinkler shaking his head spits at the newsprint of birdshit.
It’s going unread: Gooseberry Poptarts, stale wheaten bread, Nutella and toothpaste.
An open-armed crane offers sexual favours to aeroplanes passing above.
I hadn’t the foggiest notion. Imagine: me, munching cardboard and rubbish,
but that’s just what they meant when they said, Come in, you’re dead-beat,
take the weight off your paws, you’re a big weary grizzly with a hook through his mouth,
here, have some of this love.
•
(originally published in the Poetry Review)
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