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Re-inhabiting a past life
On the eve of a rare public appearance as part of Jewish Book Week, poet Dannie Abse tells
Dan Carrier about revisiting six decades of deeply personal writing
WHEN the poet Dannie Abse decided to write a daily journal following the death of his wife Joan, he hoped it would provide an emotional lifejacket to keep him from slipping beneath a morass of loneliness and pity.
“I’m told diary-keeping can be therapeutic,” he says. “Certainly it is a prescription for the diarist to prove to himself that he is still alive. Like a prisoner’s graffiti on a cell wall, surely the words imply ‘I am here. I exist’.”
Joan was killed in 2005. The couple were driving back from their home in Ogmore, in Wales, when a car hit the back of theirs.
Joan died. Dannie survived.
“The past survives however much one tries to drive it down and away from one’s consciousness,” he adds.
“It rears up provoked by something overheard or a scene, a place, an object, a tune, a scent even.”
Although originally written purely as a way for a poet to face his grief, the diary was eventually published two years after his wife’s death. Called The Presence, it is a mixture of candid entries about how Dannie tries to cope, and his memories of a life spent together. Verse illustrates his emotions.
Nearly four years after the accident, Dannie is looking back again: this time over 60 years of poetry. The new anthology of his work marks six decades with the same publisher.
The Welsh-born Jewish author has had twin careers as a doctor and a poet, and is due to discuss “A Life in Verse” as a guest speaker at Jewish Book Week in Bloomsbury later in the month. It is a rare public outing – after Joan’s death, he cancelled all reading engagements.
He will be interviewed by fellow poet Ruth Padel, who lives in South End Green, Hampstead.
Dannie, now 85, says by putting together the new book he can clearly chart the way his lyrical voice has changed through the years.
“I went back over my work,” he says. “I looked through the decades and noted how I have changed as a writer.”
Each piece presents a challenge. It is not just hard for Dannie to choose what he would like to include – a task he says has been made more arduous without Joan’s lucid criticism, which was fundamental to previous anthologies – but each has emotions tied in with them.
Throughout The Presence he talks of how his wife appears in every thought he has. By looking at his previous work he has re-lived his life. “It has been very hard to choose what to include,” he admits.
“Even now, as I am going through the final editing process, I have felt I have left some good ones out.”
He laughs gently and then admits how the process is a mixture of pain and enjoyment.
“It conjured up a lot of feelings: it is quite extraordinary. I smugly think: ‘Oh my, that is a good poem’.
“Then I get overwhelmed with sadness – I remember the place and time that I wrote certain poems.”
He has included one called Yesterday’s Tiff. It is about an argument he had with Joan.
In it he suggests to his wife that he will stop her doing anything she enjoys – and that if she throws a party, he’ll invite “Kingsley Amis and other right-wing bores”.
“I am re-inhabiting a life past,” he says. “One’s poems are like spiritual X-rays. I notice the things I was going through: there are early poems, medical poems, later poems.”
His early works were clearly influenced by his Welsh voice – although he feels his Judaism, his Welshness, his work as a chest doctor, have all gone in the pot.
“The early ones are rather different,” he concludes.
“I was more lyrical. I was more inclined to song rather than conversation. I am still influenced of course by my Welsh background, but when I look back I see now I had to get out of the shadow of Dylan Thomas. Back then I was rather interested in ideas – later I was much more inclined to write from experience.”
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