The Solitary Man

There is no single idiom in modern poetry, yet if one were looking for such a thing, it might be worthwhile to begin with Dom Moraes. These sensual, melancholy poems possess a rare objectivity. They show us frequently some kind of ikon of the Atom Age; and their idiom carries the weight of the unequalled solitude of modern Western man, deserted by gods, heroes, ancestors and nymphs, ascetic even in debauchery, and at his best conscious that the times require him to be a saint or perish:

My income and my debts remain the same.
Still, I can feed my typewriter each day.
My agent tells me that I have a name.
An audience waits, he says, for what I say.

My audience – kempt, virtuous, and strange:
Those delicate, flushed girls with eyes like stars,
So lately come from college, long to change
page 4 The creature they observe in dingy bars.
The creature they observe sways where it stands,
Lifting uncertain arms as if to bless.
Even so great a gesture of the hands
Can hardly hold so vast an emptiness.

These lines from the end of the title poem, Moraes’s autobiographical masterpiece, ‘John Nobody’, are deeply ambiguous. The ‘uncertain arms’ echo the ‘distressful hands’ of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – and the ‘emptiness’ can be either the spiritual void of nihilism or the desert made explicit by St John of the Cross. Such ambiguities crowd the pages of this book.

After ‘John Nobody’ the two most nearly perfect poems are ‘Rendezvous’ and ‘Spree’, two Israeli portraits written lovingly for Nathan Altermann and Yosi Bergner. It seems that Moraes stands always at the point where cultures, religions, and national dreams, bisect each other – and his enormous passive strength comes partly, I think, from a creative use of the Anglo-Indian dilemma, partly from a determined primitivism which refuses to accept any myth of progress as other than a myth.

In a sense too he is one of the moderns who have refused to abandon rhetoric – the poems depend as much on the hammered phrase and the balanced epithet as on any particular image. Nothing more original has come out of England. One handles such a book with a rare sense of satisfaction.

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