To call a volume of poetry Book of Matches is a charmingly modest gesture, especially from a writer currently sweeping all before him. There’s a touch of irony, true, but also an intelligent encapsulation of a successful attitude; unpretentious, unfussy, wryly amused. The title also presents the volume’s central conceit: the “party trick” of delivering a life story in the duration of a burning match. The first of the book’s three sections is a sequence of psychological self-portraits, all untitled. The contents page takes on a deliciously old-fashioned look, offering the first lines of the poems in single quotation marks; read sequentially, they take on the appearance of a personality-profile questionnaire: “I rate myself as a happy, contented person”, “People talk nonsense and I put them straight”, “People never push me into doing things”, even, delightfully, “I am very bothered when I think”. The last begins, “Some unimportant word or phrase”.
That typical note of unbothered deprecation also conceals its own mild irony; every word or phrase is important to Armitage, as his continued ability to literalize cliché testifies, making Northern English speech vividly, punningly apposite. The poetry is ingeniously direct in its language and address, but the brief, uncluttered pieces achieve an impact, whether humorous or grave, which approaches that of parable or proverb. One match cannot do justice to a life, of course; the second poem begins, “Strike two”, that baseball pun acknowledging as much, and by the last match, struck “hard and once” in a position of numb despair, various facets have been displayed, each participating in a metaphysical argument on the sufficiency of self and the nature of relationship.
Behind the ostensible gruff self-assurance (“Call me brassneck, call me hardfaced”), these Self’s-the-Man poems still convey a vulnerability: the game with matches is playing with fire, as the first piece makes clear: “A warning though, to anyone nursing / an ounce of sadness, anyone alone, / don’t try this on your own, it’s dangerous, / madness.” Throughout, in a theme developed in the various “matches” – ill-fated, ham-fisted, troubled or touching – of the second section, the safety of “a straight, indivisible two” is carefully supported. The gentle poem on an arthritic condition – ankylosing spondylitis – from which Armitage suffers, dramatizes an idea evident elsewhere: the danger of his joints seizing up, of becoming set in his ways, requires the intervention of a partner; “and you can choose / to snap me back to life before first light, / or let me laze until / the shape I take becomes the shape I keep. / Don’t leave me be. Don’t let me sleep.”
Behind, beneath, beyond all else, is the heart. When Armitage leaves himself to the National Health, in a jaunty legacy with none of Donne’s darkness or Swift’s spleen, he manically finds mechanical metaphors for all his organs, but leaves the heart relatively untouched “where it stops or hangs”. Behind the straight-talking, happy-go-lucky verses there is a wealth of affection and enthusiasm; it may turn out to be Armitage’s achievement to have adopted the unhysterical, anti-pretentious empiricism of the Movement poets without becoming encumbered by the fear of feeling which ossified their approach. There is also a joy in music; sometimes Armitage seems so chuffed with the euphony of synonymous or analogous turns of phrase that he threatens to rattle them out indefinitely; chuckling rhythms, embedded rhyme and near-rhyme, quirky idiom and puns. In “To His Lost Lover”, the Larkinesque list of unachieved stereotypical milestones escapes monotony triumphantly, both by verve and the insistent coupling of “heart” and “hurt”, lending the piece a pathos which, say, Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember” could never solicit. With typical nerve, Armitage prefaces the litany with the words “for instance” before embarking on an exhaustive tour de force.
The final sequence, “Reading the Banns”, is an epithalamium on the ultimate “match”, the poet’s own wedding. Tautly phrased, honestly and humorously observed, anxieties and all, the poems are a showcase for Armitage’s talents. In a final romantic declaration, Auden’s “Lullaby” is cited, but that “faithless arm” becomes an image of permanent fidelity; even so, Armitage retains his down-to-earth scepticism about rhetoric to the last. Imagining his wife asleep on his arm, and a fairy-tale deadline for a midnight departure, he concludes, “I should rather / cleave it from the joint or seam / than make a scene / or bring you round. / There / how does that sound?” The crafted simplicity and sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.