Michael Schmidt The Resurrection of the Body (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2007) ISBN: 978-1-902382-86-9, £8.95, 69pp

In Lives of the Poets, his seminal tome from 1998, Michael Schmidt wrote that ‘Anon is the greatest of the neglected English poets’.  The Resurrection of the Body, his first collection since 1997’s Selected Poems, opens with a reworking and re-imagining of a 9^th Century Irish ‘Anon’ poem, ‘Pangur Bàn’, supposedly found in the margin of a religious text, a tribute from a monk-scribe to a pet cat.  In Schmidt’s poem, the underlying concerns of that old text (‘I and Pangur Bàn, my cat,/’Tis a like task we are at;/Hunting mice is his delight,/Hunting words I sit all night’) are brought forth to suggest some of the central preoccupations of this book: history (and historic artefacts), interpretation of religion, the role of the scribe:

My name is neither here nor there, I am employed

By Colum Cille who will be a saint

Because of me and how I have set down

The word of God.  He pays.  He goes to heaven.

Neglect, then, is at the heart of this collection: neglected people, neglected moments in history, neglected perspectives.  The concern of naming and being named occurs here and also in ‘Jacob and the Angel’ and ‘The Resurrection of the Body’, two of the masterworks of this collection.  The former retells the story of that biblical fight as a sexual encounter, closeted by religious lies: ‘That’s when they found us/And tried the story out that we’d been wrestling,/He was an angel, I was Jacob. He changed my name’.  Schmidt’s talent is in managing to rewrite a scriptural story as a homosexual fling while still showing reverence for such stories and where they originate.  The title poem is a mesmerising account of Christ healing a sick woman, which slowly follows them down to a well where he pours water onto her, and through its steady pace allows the sexual intimacy of such an encounter to pervade: ‘she feels his desire/Confusing her, desire but not need, he holds her/Tenderly, his lips to her shoulder and hair’.

The poems that approach actual historic events are, for the most part, constructed with similar patience, Schmidt favouring the rhythms of a longish line, and with a restraint that avoids carving the subject matter into easily digestible verse:  ‘It was damp and chill that autumn, the stone scum-mossy./Two ships moored at the cobbled quay, their last/Old world landfall, to take provisions’ ('Erebus and Terror').  While sometimes this means that parts of the poems read as straightforward descriptions or statements of historical fact, Schmidt’s method is deeply seductive and perceptive, with the historical poems (amongst others) simmering with an allure of ambiguity.  One feels compelled to research some of the subjects (such as the photograph being described in the horrific poem 'Victor Casasola, photographer', that turns out be of a group of young homosexuals rounded up in a police station before their executions) but the great thing is that, while tempting, such google-searches are unnecessary, as the poems work (as poems should) to provide meaning before understanding, interest above knowledge.

Sexual desire, love and friction between humans are the topic of a number of poems. 'A Red Grove' is a slow-releasing love poem, where the subject of naming recurs to consummate a love, not a labelling: ‘You named me and at once I knew who I was’.  Its final stanza is beautiful:

            We need returns. I am tired, old and in love

            In a red grove of camellia blossom.

            You said it was rose petals.  It was not.

            We argued with our tongues but the pulse

            Said I am with you.  Yours said so, mine said so.

            My dreams and smallest movements take shape there. 

Other poems, such as ‘Third Persons’ and ‘Conceit’, are sinister and erotic, while some have a twist on perceived norms. The finest example of this is ‘Wanting to Think’, in which a narrator recounts the intrusion of another man into a relationship:

I want to think about you in my arms, the way we were

For a while.  Then he came out of nowhere to stay.

What could have become a narrative of revenge or jealousy becomes an intense, sexually charged examination of human interaction, where the idea of what we think about others, and what we think they might be thinking, is fused into a brave, truthful portrayal of desire:

That autumn, when I lay with you, you started pretending

These hands of mine were his hands in the dark, these lips

His and the tufts in my armpits his and you inhaled

Hungry, pressed again me, pressed against

A man you were imagining in my place

[…]

While all the time I loved you, as I love you,

He lay with me and he was satisfied,

I lay with him and not for a minute thought

Of how you watched through the screen door, but only

How musky, how good he smelled, and his hand on my chest.

The opening line, ‘Why, when I want to think of you, do I think of him?’, has, by the poems end, been transformed in meaning.  But this is no tawdry love-triangle; the poem challenges conceptions of sexuality, of sexual-longing, and of the solidity and tokenism of human relationships. The gender confusion of the poem (the triplet could be either male-female-male, female-female-male, or male-male-male) adds to its tenderness and believability. Its thirty lines say more about the psychology of human relationships, the unsaid impulses of the mind, than other poets manage in a lifetime.