Holocaust poetry is hard to write and can horrify for the wrong reasons: the “so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it”, writes Adorno. But poetry is not always pleasure. Sometimes it comes from and responds to compulsion. This is Barkow on the death of his father, but stands for much in Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde, his powerful and moving collection:
I see your face a forlorn mask of misery and fear
You’re mouthing to me silently
howling through the fog across the years —
nearly two lifetimes now —
for God’s sake help me to escape from this. (‘St Magnus Christmas Eve’ 77)
The final line is both his father’s and his, the ‘this’ suddenly amorphous: grief, the weight of time and the past and our unavoidable rootedness in it, the pain of lives looked-back on, misshaped by chance or by the evil design of others.
West Cornwall today is long way in time and space from the Holocaust. Addressed, as the poem’s title has it, to a photographer in Auschwitz:
(You saw though didn’t you?
And took the sight with you into your rendezvous with
choking on the gas to death.) (‘Photography in Auschwitz’)
and us, we see maybe
A car parking at Sainsbury’s? (‘Photography in Auschwitz’)
But, just as the subtitle of the collection suggests, Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde, this tension – between what they saw and lived and what we see and live – in fact is the source of this collection, in at least three ways.
The first way in which the poems emerge from this tension is a form (both British and German) of pastoral poetry, where nature stands not for beauty in the countryside, far away from the city, but for a kind of horror, in which fields are killing fields: this bitter pastoral joins the here and the there, the then and the now. The very first poem, ‘The sky at Trereife at Oświęcim’ starts with a sunset, “Cherub blues and pinks/a godly afterglow of sunset” but soon is both a warning (“dark is coming — frost”) and an instruction on how to read these poems. Barkow writes:
My eye the surface of the sky
our sight reciprocal, our visions
incompatible and your neglect forgetfulness
fleeting indifferent flightiness beyond forgivable.
You dazzle me but tortured them.
The I/eye and the tortured victims are linked suddenly through and by the sky, dazzling and torturing. Of all the forms of writing, only poetry can legitimately make this link, which is (as the poem says) reciprocal though incompatible. It is a join that we all feel often: the same sun on all humanity and its deeds, but cannot be argued for or shown by evidence, as a historian might. Only in poems can it be given voice. This poetic move occurs again and again, each time both different and the same, both in joining now and here (West Cornwall) to then and there. It forms the overall structure of some of the poems, as well as the choices of individual words – “bloody pain” flowers in ‘The sky at Trereife at Oświęcim’; they died in “droves murdered in droves of droves” (‘The Three of them’) (drove, a pastoral word, as in ‘drover’, say); ‘Fog drowned my world/The countryside is dark green’ (The Sisters and the Brothers’). Bitter pastoral indeed.
The first poem, too, gives access to the second way the tension between here and there are the source of these poems. Both thematically and metaphorically they return again and again to forms of seeing: looking, painting, photography, filmmaking. These are all forms of mediated witnessing. For some, there is no mediation:
You knew what happened there saw with your own eyes
the blood and human pulp described the details (‘A Berlin Tale’)
But for us, after Auschwitz, there is only a kind of mediated witnessing, and it is to this problem of mediation the poems keep returning. “Ludwig Moos sets off from home/his hat his easel and his satchel filled with brushes paints” but his brother “Ernst longed to be a painter but his eyes were bad”. (‘The Sisters and the Brothers’). All the mediated forms of representation turn out to be blurry, inaccurate, eyes bad, gesturing at the horrors rather than picturing them. Auschwitz from the air “looks neat and tidy—trim efficient clean. In one corner/a little plume of smoke” (an echo of Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the calamity in one tiny corner of the picture). The same too in the pastoral, where the “fog rolls in once more to soften blur and mute/the craggy outline of St Michael’s Mount/against the soft grey watercolour wash of/sky and sea”. These poems are both trying to see but know that our seeing will always be – blurred. It is only in the most concrete moments of these poems where something breaks through: legs flailing as the character dies by suicide.
But the third way in which these poems stem from the tension between then and now is perhaps the most intriguing. The poems use what historians would call an archive: centrally of letters from just after the war, given to Barkow, but of many other things too, as the collection goes on. These are the source of many of the poems which retell or even ventriloquise members of Barkow’s family, killed in or surviving the Holocaust. This is also a kind of imaginative seeing, too, and is quite as fallible or as blurry as watercolour.
Even in remembrance you are lost to us —
your Stolperstein (who put it there?)
laid down with all solemnity
outside the wrong address. (‘Fritz’).
For me, however, these are the most interesting poems, a whole life, remembered or refracted, summed up but with the trips one cannot but make in doing this left intact. More than a whole life, really, the whole web of lives bound together which interact, pull, knot, untangle or are cut or sliced through, the whole fabric rent. Barkow writes that he intended to “honour these individuals” and “and to express my love for them”. It seems to me that this might lead a writer to saccharine sentiments, but here it does not. He honours them by given them their full due. Many focus on key moments of survival or suffering and the more concrete and vivid these poems are, the more powerful they are. (Very occasionally, a poem tips into a didacticism, where, as it were, the historian seeks to draw something abstract out from what the poet has already implied in a material image).
Slowly, as the collection draws to a close, the weight seems to fall on the writer (“My hand holding the pen aches and I put it down”). All poems of worth are, in some part, about poems themselves, a reflection on reflection itself. So the collection ends:
In every mirror is a mirror
in every room an empty room.
In every brimming soul the brimming endless need
that suffering find speech
our awful destiny
articulation. (‘The tears of ghosts’)
Attention is needed here. It says, of course, that there is a need for suffering to express itself, that it ‘find speech’. But it also says that speech is the awful destiny that suffering finds. This articulation itself is not something from which pleasure can be squeezed, but itself something that suffering has found – and so, an answer in poetry to Adorno’s concern. This is why, too, the articulation of the beautiful sky of West Cornwall is a pain as well as a joy. Full disclosure (as they say): I know Ben Barkow as an extremely talented and, indeed, decorated administrator and historian, and as an adept, sympathetic and thoughtful chair of committees. And now, as a poet.
Robert Eaglestone
Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought
Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London