Playful poems on everything from the dead to the washing up reveal an elegant imagination at work
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus offers a famous description of the workings of the poetic imagination, which “bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” while “the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name”. Mark Waldron’s witty and sometimes terrifying Meanwhile, Trees, his third collection, exhibits this tendency in an unusually pure form, whereby idle speculation generates a temporary but swarmingly detailed reality whose consequences may confound and alarm. The poems go too far ever to come back.
Theseus adds: “How easy is a bush supposed a bear.” For Waldron it may not be a matter of supposing. In the farcical “So I was at home doing the washing up”, an account of differing and strongly held opinions on how much washing up liquid to use becomes a defence of personal freedom and of identity itself, a failure of proportion recalling Heinrich von Kleist’s nightmarish novella Michael Kohlhaas, where a man robbed of his horses and seeking redress ends by plunging Germany into civil war. In Waldron’s case, he doesn’t even have to leave the kitchen: “no one could stop me if I sold / the damn house and everything in it / and spent all the money I got from / the sale on washing up liquid. I could / have it delivered in tankers if I could get / the parking permits.” The speaker recants, but Donald Trump is already out of the solipsist’s bottle.
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