I know what they mean. Most of us (me included) would only embarrass ourselves by posting an amorphous mass of false starts, derivative exercises, personal junk we love too much to throw away, mere puzzles trying to be "complex", mere vacuums trying to be "clear", poems so long you daren't give up on them, poems so short you think they'll just about earn their small keep, medium-length poems with that inane middlebrow punchiness that you hoped judges of poetry competitions would reward.

But Douglas Clark's website is different. I've spent more phone-money than I like to think mooching through this hypertext labyrinth. It's a city; it's like being in his study; it's a bit like a mausoleum, too, a bit creepy. Don't let me mislead you, I'm not talking about "Rank My Site" web-wizardry here. So far as that goes, it's all very straightforward. The complexity, the interaction, the architecture is all in the words. You should go there

The site includes, I suppose, all his official poems. It includes pieces that the author himself says are in an unsatisfactory state. (I can't re-find the place where he says this, and anyway you don't know which pieces he's talking about.) It includes autobiography, reviews (some of them scathing), comments, essays, a poetry magazine, links to dozens of other sites, poems by other authors (some alive, some long dead). This is generous, but the extraneous stuff interacts with Douglas Clark's own poetry, too. The poems are organized and re-organized in confusing ways: there are collections (some also published as books), interacting sequences, selections, anthologies of selections, collections within collections. You have the odd experience of seeing the poetry from the inside out, standing inside the labyrinth and trying to imagine what shape the printed books would project into the paper world.

What binds this city together is the poet's frequent reversion to a small number of (often autobiographical) events, places and people. I tried very hard to avoid using that over-worked word "obsessive" in the previous sentence. Anyway, it's more deliberate than that. As you read on, these touchstones develop a sort of patina of myth. Everything cross-references. I can't illustrate this very easily from a poem or two, but I'll try. This poem (like many others I could have chosen) will also save me the bother of "biographical background".

Quixote

I

Coatham Hall is up for sale,
The house of the Amundevilles
At Coatham Mundeville
In the Jarldom of Sadberge,
Just five miles north of Danish Darlington,
We rented the older half.
That is my home.
Pevsner says
`Very plain C18 stone house with original staircase.
Large early C19 W wing. Shallow hipped roof over all.'
Coatham Hall is where I come from.
The wee Scots boy growing up in the English village.

II
Behind the high walls round Coatham
A wilderness:
Paradise for a small boy's summer.
Paths to be flattened through the head-high nettles
Where the trees had been cut,
The exploration through the woods to farmland.
The old house itself;
Kitchen walls five foot thick,
Damp running down,
The long stone corridor with the stag's head looking down.
I grew up there with clamped emotions.

III

.....
Heir to Irish Glasgow
I supported Celtic,
And walked around the University in a dream.
The beauty of Mathmatics.
A rich material world,
As entitled to from Coatham
But no meaning
Until Penelope blew my head off.
Love is all you need.


IV


Fiona and Susan,
Now thirty years and out of the mist,
Cats are much more sensible.
I came from the beginning.
Penetration is a male thing,
Not to be sneezed at.
I walked out in the morning air,
For it was that time of year.
The demons whisper: Have fear.
All love leads to breakdown,
Better to survive by oneself
Than live out an agony.
The old house at Coatham didn't have ghosts.
We played croquet and French cricket on the lawn.
Two younger brothers and my parents.
I wish I had the words for it.
'Love is a vapor/We're soon through it',
says Basil. Thirty years.
......


VII


Twentyfive years in Bath
Designing a wilderness at the bottom of the garden,
A substitute for Coatham.
Failing at another job.
I wish I could read my poetry aloud,
But too many nervous breakdowns.
I always sought the dream
Of having someone else inside your head.
And it came: schizophrenia.
My blood disease should kill me.
It tries every five years or so.
But love,
Not being alone in the world.
That haunts me.


VIII


The sand pit, the rockery,
The view over the wall at the Great North Road,
The white summerhouse,
Gooseberries and strawberries.
Edwin, my own age, at the farm.
I was born to greatness,
The English country house.
Now to be sold.
I went out from there determined
That I would solve everything.
And I have.
Me and the brilliance at Glasgow.
It is all clear.
I wrote it.

I've cut some bits out of this poem just so I can focus on the key themes, the trunk-routes through the poet's work.

Coatham Mundeville, his childhood home, recurs constantly. In another poem he says: "I will never stop writing about Coatham Mundeville." (The stag's head comes frighteningly to life in another poem.) Thematically this home and its lush verdure (nettles, gooseberries and strawberries) links to his present-day garden in Bath. There are many poems that talk about Penelope, Fiona and Susan. There are many poems about cats, and about breakdowns.

Somewhere else he says: "Tell the truth but tell it slant." In fact there is a constant game with truth in these poems. You feel close - uncomfortably close - to the author's experience but truth doesn't arrive simply. There are constant references to women (Susan especially) but there's a sort of elusiveness about it. Most people mythologize their own life, but do they distort it by doing so? Does anyone know the truth about themselves? Can anyone tell the truth, in particular, about relationships? The Mary to whom a whole avenue of poems is dedicated seems much more concretely present than Susan or Fiona in the text, yet she's in some way fictional, a fantasy-figure with a moral.

Mary and Sex

`The most important thing in life
Is getting your drink down you', I say.
`I prefer to fuck, after champagne', says Mary.
I think of Glenmorangie and peaty Bowmore.
I think of the barren years after Susan.
`I like to fuck', says Mary.
I have been silly.
`I like to fuck', say I.

Comedy in these poems is rarely separate from painfulness. Another avenue of poems, also on one level comic, is all about the poet's cat

Lovely - but not quite as rollickingly comic, not purely as "delightful", as you were expecting? The cat poems are a portrait of pet-owning. Much of what we are told about Fritz is lies, but a cat-owner's lies, not literary lies like T.S. Eliot's fancy-cake poems. Somewhere behind this poem is an anxious investigation of what keeping a pet really means to this owner and this animal. The subtle way in which each influences the other, in which the owner projects his own personality, fears and feelings onto his cat. But also (and this is clearer for us who can visit the website and make the connections), this is still a poem about Coatham Mundeville, about Susan, about the differences (and similarities) between love affairs and keeping cats. The themes of love/lovelessness/being alone/home/failure/pride cut through all these poems. They "interact".

So far I haven't said anything about the historical/epic elements in the poetry. I'll end with a poem that illustrates how these, too, connect to the themes I've already mentioned.

The recurring horsemen in these poems have a connection with (I don't want to say that they represent) urges in the poet himself: passionate, chaotic, simultaneously creative and destructive. When Attila (in "Attila at Chalons") has the Roman army at his mercy and doesn't loose his horsemen, doesn't burn Rome, I think that is one of the most resonant images in all these poems.

I'm the keener to say this because it's often when the poet dons his epic cloak that I'm most suspicious of his achievement. Have a look at "The Mong". It's a superbly exciting narrative, but I wonder if you'll think, as I do, that sometimes writing historical narrative consitutes a sort of evasion from writing the poems that most urgently, but with most struggle and heartache, want to be drawn out of your subconscious. I sometimes think the same, incidentally, when I read David Jones, Geoffrey Hill and Ezra Pound - quite good company (but I don't think this about Tennyson or Browning, in whose poetry the BBC costume drama wardrobe does appear unavoidable and natural).

The poems I've quoted have been chosen to give an idea of the range of Douglas Clark's work. They aren't necessarily the best: I'd put "Susan's Garden", "Heaven" and "Skiathos" among my favourites. Contrary to what the poet himself pretends, I think the later poems are as good as or better than the earlier ones. "Troubador" contains some weak stuff (I warn you of this because it heads the list on the website).

I suppose I've said absolutely nothing here about why I like these poems. I'd have to analyse verse movement and echoes and speech-tones, a rather exhausting thought. I'd need to talk about analogues, like the degraded confessionalism of Berryman's "Love and Fame". But, in my defence, I've probably quoted enough to give you an idea of what you think. His poems are sometimes manipulative, often beautiful, nothing if not lucid. Posing as an unfashionable traditionalist, he makes the electronic medium work for him as few other poets have yet done. In his own way, and perhaps paradoxically, he strikes me as a popular poet.

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