BUSH, Duncan

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Nationality: Welsh. Born: Cardiff, 6 April 1946. Education: University of Warwick, 1974–78, First Class Honors in English and European Literature 1978; Wadham College, Oxford, 1978–81. Family: Married Annette Jane Weaver in 1981; two sons. Career: Since 1984 director of writing program, Gwent College, Wales. Awards: Arts Council of Wales Poetry prize, 1984, for Aquarium, and 1986 for Salt; Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award, 1995, for Masks.Member: Welsh Academy, 1982. Address: Godre Waun Oleu, Brecon Road, Ynyswen, Penycae, Powys SA9 1YY, Wales.

Publications

Poetry

Aquarium. Bridgend, Poetry Wales Press, 1983.

Salt. Bridgend, Poetry Wales Press, 1985.

Black Faces, Red Mouths. Ynyswen, Bedrock Press, 1986.

Masks. Bridgend, Seren, 1994.

The Hook. Bridgend, Seren, 1997.

Midway. Bridgend, Seren, 1998.

Plays

Cocktails for Three (produced Oxford, 1979).

Ends (produced Cardiff, 1980).

Sailing to America (produced Cardiff, 1982).

Radio Plays: In the Pine Forest (adapted from The Genre of Silence),1991; Are There Still Wolves in Pennsylvania? (adapted from Masks), 1991.

Television Play: Sailing to America, 1992. Novels The Genre of Silence. Bridgend, Seren, 1988.

Glass Shot. London, Secker and Warburg, 1991.

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Bibliography: A Duncan Bush Bibliography by Alain Sinner, Luxembourg, English Studies, 1994.

Critical Study: "Duncan Bush's Personae" by Richard Poole, in Poetry Wales (Bridgend), July 1992.

Theatrical Activities: Director and Actor: Play— His own Cocktails for Three, Oxford, 1979.

Duncan Bush comments:

Writing is finally like farming. You have a certain area of land of a certain soil type, and all you can hope is to work it all your life. For me this situation means, among other things, not growing potatoes on the same ground two years running. I write not only poetry but fiction and sometimes even drama, and I need to move between these genres. Occasionally they can be combined, as in my first novel, The Genre of Silence, which tells the story of a fictional poet in a dangerous time and includes the poems that outlast him. Or in my collection Masks there is a sequence of poems that depict a period of crisis in the relationship between a traumatized former soldier and his wife. When writing my second novel, Glass Shot, however, I did not write a poem for over a year. This did not worry me, on the principle already mentioned. It is only leaving one of your fields fallow for a season.

In poetry, though, as in prose, it is not how much land you farm. What counts is style, how you write. Yet the only guarantee in style is that the work come in some essential way out of the writer's own changing life or imagination or experience, out of that land you have available to work. Too many young writers start out imitating the style of others, and it is all too easy, so that the world even of published poetry is full of bad to middling, half-guilty pastiches. Good writing also has to be new each time you start and in some ways unpredictable even to its author, which is why so many established writers end up with the other fault, that of imitating themselves.

For me poetry is not merely a matter of running a leg in that old relay race known as influence or tradition. It is a matter of individual authenticity. To be genuinely of his or her day, a poet has to have the courage to be a renegade, a maverick. It is not a matter of postromantic or post-Freudian rebelliousness or anything as simple-minded as that. It is just that a good poet has a more acute critical intelligence and brings it to bear earlier and more radically in the creative process than a bad one. Perhaps this is why some of the poets I admire most are not ordinarily thought of as critics. In them, on the contrary, the critical process has already been subsumed wholesale into the production of a kind of poetry that is not only individually characteristic but decisively modern: Baudelaire and Dickinson, Rimbaud and Cavafy, Hardy and Rilke, Yeats and Owen, William Carlos Williams and Pavese, Plath and Pasolini & If these make what appears a set of unlikely combinations, it only enforces the point I am suggesting.

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Duncan Bush's poems are memorable for their dramatic touch and for their engagement with issues typical of late twentieth-century post-industrial society. As Richard Poole has pointed out, even in some fairly early poems such as "Pneumoconiosis" Bush adopted the technique of writing through personae, a convenient way of widening his field of enquiry while conveying a sense of immediate experience without raising the suspicion of personal outpourings. The title of his collection Masks acknowledges the way he slips into or behind different personalities. Perceptiveness and empathy are equally developed whether his speakers are women or men. It is, for instance, through the farmer's widow and miner's daughter in the short sequence "Farmer's Widow, Tawe Valley" that he manages to express emotions at the destruction of loved places in a way he would probably have shied away from in his own voice. In lines such as

   … a small black downward dune
 
 
   of waste high on the valley's side:
   the old deciduous woods decayed,
   decayed and fallen buried
   there, so much prehistory

there is a latent lyricism that contrasts with the detachment with which the death of a falcon is recorded in the next poem, which uses no mediating identified speaker:

   it reduces
   to a shuttlecock
 
 
   of pinions wind aflutter
   at the kerbside
 
 
   of a country road.
   And what bears it off is this
   long colony of ants.

One notable exception to Bush's dramatic impersonations or apparently unconcerned impersonality occurs in the three-part poem entitled "Coming Back." The piece is suffused with nostalgic sentimentality at his changed relation to his childhood surroundings:

                 And you
   see that tree—long suffering
 
 
   and safe, like an old horse—
   is still tree, and boyhood
   boyhood, while you've
   changed more than the city.

Yet the emotions it conveys are deflated by the tongue-in-cheek epigraph by Baudelaire that points to changes in the city: "Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville/Change plus vite, hélàs! que le coeur d'un mortel)."

Bush's impersonations include third-person presentations, as in "The News of Patroclus." Here Achilles, succeeding the Odysseus of his earlier "Ulysses Becalmed," is referred to in the third person, yet the depth of his grief and the danger that now looms upon him are conjured up from inside. The tolling repetition of the two-word sentence "He sat" conveys the numbness that follows the blow, and the opening image of "his silence [hissing] like gas/in the tent" has death lurking around him as it is introduced by "the messenger's apprehensive/useless, lamentory words." While suffering makes him feel invulnerable, he stoops on the way out of his tent to adjust "the loosened sandal at his heel of clay."

Bush's deftness at putting on other people's voices has not led him to full-blown drama. The closest he has come to writing for the stage is the sequence "Are There Still Wolves in Pennsylvania?" This work alternates the voices of a Vietnam War veteran, Wes Ball, and his wife, Linda. Although it was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, it is explicitly called "A poem sequence in ten parts for two voices" rather than a play, and the language used, while having a colloquial touch, is also unmistakably "literary," that is, sustained and economical, pruned and imaginative, in a way "real" speech rarely is. At one point, when Ball has gone alone into the woods on one of his ritual hunting trips, he wonders in the thick of the night whether there are any wolves left in Pennsylvania. The words he uses—"those evil yellow/slant eyes//in the Disney movies"—combine the unreality of animated cartoons with Asian features that the American subconscious all too easily associates with some archetypal enemy. Toward the end of the same section the hunter remembers one of his awkward attempts at attracting a girl on the day he graduated, but

   … she was already going
   going gone, like all
   the women went—water
   from a too tense-clenched hand.

The image here is evocative but inaccurate. While the intensive "too tense" adds to the sense of desperation, water flows from a clenched hand whether the clenching is loose or tense. His wife is aggravated by his odd behavior, angered by his willful blindness, and repelled by his persistent need to kill, yet she understands his vulnerability. As he dreams again and again of the fleeing girl he shot dead, he also understands, without the help of "no Dr. Freud or/fucking V.A. shrink," that the horrors he participated in are with him for life and that war has its obdurate ground in male vanity:

   … But
   what makes me cry
   is: what is it
   in us that longs so
 
 
   to bring down
   a running thing,
   as if to
   just see if we can?

Husband and wife are in fact closer to each other than they are aware, and this is part of the poem's underlying irony. The couple have little access to the thoughts and emotions that are fully revealed to readers or listeners.

The Genre of Silence is a kind of writing that baffles classification. It offers a prose frame in the form of biographical information provided by an invented editor for a number of poems allegedly saved from the opus of "Victor Bal," an equally invented poet supposed to have been a Russian dissident. While Bush's novel Glass Shot, filled as it is with fantasies that are often close to an appalling reality, can be read as criticism of social absurdities, its best-selling mixture of sex and violence is likely to leave many readers thrilled rather than critically engaged.

The situation is rather different in Bush's many poems confronting contemporary issues directly. Whatever he may say about his not being a political poet, he is clearly aware of the public dimension of human life, even in its most private aspects, and he is committed to exposing the alarming effects on people's lives of widening dissociations. In uncollected poems such as "Café, Rainy Thursday Morning" or, more powerfully still, "August. Sunday. Gravesend" the emptiness and boredom of unemployment combined with very real deprivation lead to a fatal absence of perspective and from there to the lure of destruction for its own sake. "Old Master" elaborates the glossy lie of the painted Dutch winter landscape reproduced on expensive Christmas cards "(for the expensive//friends)." The accuracy with which ice and snow are depicted suggests "warmth, like the first whisky's," and

   … the rawness of
   that wan and waning daylight
   only sharpens,
 
 
   as through a window, looking out,
   vicarious and comfortable confirmation
   of the Great Indoors …

But the use of parentheses in the last seven lines undermines the glow of complacency; too many are outside, looking in, sharing in the frustration of the stag faced with the frozen pond.

"Living in Real Time, Summer, 1993" is to me the most remarkable of these vignettes on the way we live. Written in response to the prolonged siege of Sarajevo (like Tony Curtis's poem "From the Hill, the Town"), the poem is less about the war in Bosnia than about the perverse effect of the false sense we have of being permanently and instantly informed. The speaker has stopped in front of the many screens in the window of a television shop in Cardiff's city center to watch "an over of the Trent Bridge test." Slackening interest from the uneven skills of bowler and batsman allows his eyes to slip "to the other channel banked in/other sets." We recognize the familiar view of some snipers' alley in one of those interchangeable towns turned by civil war into repetitive infernos. The sequence itself—the man running, falling, dying, dead, keened over by "the usual crazed, cradling women"—is a replay ("I realise/I saw these shots two hours ago"). Through some ironic inversion the cricket match is broadcast "in real time," while death in Sarajevo is a repeat. The man will fall and die again and again: "Over and over. And forever//and forever. No Amen." But the cricket match too, with which the speaker obviously has a far more immediate connection, is ultimately made unreal: "post-modernism [propped up by adequate video techniques] makes all things present, all things post-reality." The last two lines do not apply only to those who watch cricket matches on television but to all of us, willingly turned into resigned spectators. We have opted out of life,

   trained to the instant replay and the freezeframe:
   to the destined fact, knowing there's no way out.

Significantly, the speaker here is not felt to be a persona. The "I" is a real "I." The result is that I too, as a reader, feel directly involved, not just in the helplessness but also in the protest implicit in the writing of these lines.

—Christine Pagnoulle