Ghost train

Having recently ordered the Selected works of the American poet Galway Kinnell, I'm finding myself drawn back to the same poem over and over again, unable to let it be. Appropriate enough: the piece, 'Fire in Luna Park' is about a terrible accident in a theme park and its haunting ending resists clear resolution.

The poem hinges on the idea of 'crying wolf' - the narrator relates how neighbours of Luna Park would often be kept awake by 'the screaming produced by the great freight machines', until 'it seemed the same big-lunged screamer cried out in mock terror / each night across the water, and we hardly heard and took no notice'. I was reminded of the children up the road from my house in Chesterfield, whose screams as they played in the garden would momentarily terrify me, assuming some accident, until I became so accustomed to them I almost blocked them out. Anyone who has ever held on for dear life and screamed on a rollercoaster or been on the kind of ride Kinnell describes that 'holds its riders upside down and pummels them until the screams pour out freely' will know that half-laugh, half-scream that fairgrounds produce.

In this case, it's the Ghost Train, jerking 'through dark tunnels / here and there suddenly lighted by fluorescent bones' that carries its passengers through the ground into a true nightmare, which we presume to be a fire:

'...last night the shrieks of actual terror pierced through our
laughter, and kept at it, until we sat up startled.

The Ghost Train, now carrying seven souls and the baffled grief of families
has no special destination,
but must worm forward, twist, backtrack, looking for forgetfulness,
through the natural world,
where all are born, all suffer, and many scream
and no-one is healed but gathered and used again.'

It's an ending typical of Galway Kinnell's lyrically dexterous style, an almost apocalyptic note that would seem heavy in the hands of another writer, but retains a certain lightness here, though the words themselves are incredibly poignant, appropriately weighty. There's something horrifying about the juxtaposition of fairground glee and mortal terror, an awareness of how the macabre often lurks behind the faintly ridiculous.

Kinnell is a singularly compassionate poet and his work recalls the poems of Robert Frost to me - a poet who he addresses a homage to in his 1964 collection 'Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock'. 'Fire in Luna Park' achieved for me that kind of rare memorability that, paradoxically, has the reader going back to the poem over and over as if they're scared they might forget its essence.

It set me thinking about the way a poem can immortalise its subject or, to take a bleaker view, keep the subject trapped in a kind of purgatory, separated from the real world, occupying the mirror-world of the poem forever. In April this year, I published my pamphlet 'Parallax' with Forest Publications; a series of poems about bidding leave and the secret lives of inanimate things, dedicated to the memory of Justin Wand who died in April 2009. You can never adequately capture somebody's memory in a poem, so I suppose the best the poet can do is to reflect on that - the poetry book becomes a kind of strange, Pandora's box of memories. In a sense, it could be seen as a selfish act, creating a character within the confines of the poem to keep them there, a dull imitation of the person you once new, a kind of Coppelia.

As Seamus Heaney says - far more eloquently - in an interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, memory occupies a strange place in poetry:

"You end up dropping back through your own trapdoors, with a kind of 'they-can't-take-this-away-from-me' feeling. There's a paradox, of course, since the poems that provide the recompense are the very ones that turn your private possessions into images that are - as Yeats once said - 'all on show'. Yet a poem saves as well as shows."

For some far less eloquent (but hopefully interesting) musings, you can buy my new pamphlet, 'Parallax' here.