Nicola Healey

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The Accuracy of the Power

Crisis Actor, Declan Ryan, Faber & Faber, 2023, pp.62, £10.99 

 

Crisis Actor is the much-anticipated first collection from Declan Ryan, following on from his two pamphlets: Faber New Poets 12 (Faber, 2014) and Fighters, Losers (New Walk Editions, 2019), the latter of which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards. Unexpectedly, I was particularly captivated by the sequence on boxers which runs throughout the collection. I have not seen anything like these intense, suspenseful narratives in poetry before, which read like condensed sporting commentaries that flare into cautionary myths. They incorporate found material, through the terse, spot-lit words of the various boxers explored, and there is an infectious energy in these taut, forceful, yet often tender, poems: at times, it feels like the fighter’s vigour is transmitted into the poem’s speaker, and then to us. I especially liked how the narrator has an omnitemporal God’s-eye view, often leaving the present moment to flash forwards to the future, and then back again, which has a kaleidoscopic effect on the reader’s mind. Straight away, we are being urged to consider the whole story, not one part.

The singularity of these poems makes me hesitate before discussing them. In the poem ‘Jonathan Rendall’, Ryan writes: ‘He boxed well enough to write about it’. How does a reviewer (and a reader) approach poetry on a violent sport they know very little about? (With patience, open-mindedness and lateral thinking, for a start.) One may feel outside of this niche, controversial world, not able to truly feel the specific texture of its highs and lows, and thus do its complexities justice.

My main way in was by remembering Muhammad Ali, who forms the subject of one poem here, and is featured in others. When I was growing up, Ali was an awe-inspiring public figure: an intensely charismatic personality who appeared godlike, his reputation and aura transcended the sport. His bewitching strain of unsettling hyper-confidence (that somehow only he could get away with), often delivered through free-styling spoken word poetry, was held within a warrior-like yet gentle person. He seemed more myth than man, and he was loved for this. I like how Katy Waldman puts it in Slate: he had ‘quicksilver rhyming dexterity and the braggadocio of a Homeric hero’. She calls him ‘a Marianne Moore poem brought to life.’ This mythic swagger was eventually tempered by the fragile humility, and humanness, forced on him through suffering Parkinson’s disease, a physical deterioration which was heartrending to witness, but which he bore with quiet heroism and dignity, rarely losing his glinting wry eye smile (a Duchenne smile, which is a true smile), until it was cruelly stolen by the disease, as though he was fully aware of his former outrageousness. I enjoyed Ryan’s poem ‘Blind Cassius and the Bear’ (this was before Ali changed his name) just to hear Ali’s charged, urgent voice resurrected, clanging like a bell: ‘“Almighty God was with me. / I want everyone to bear witness; / I’m the greatest thing that ever lived.”’

Irina Dumitrescu’s excellent summation of ballet (TLS, 17 March 2023) could stand for the paradoxical unease and pull which surrounds boxing too:

[…] it can be hard to judge ballet from the outside: it is an art that demands hierarchy, discipline and sacrifice. It is also an art that embraces ambitious women. But the elements that make it so powerful can also destroy its practitioners – hence the pointe shoe as its consummate symbol. Ballet doesn’t fit into an ethical world-view that requires clear distinctions between abuse and support, harm and safety, self-care and self-annihilation. That’s precisely what makes it so fascinating.

Some people are driven to go to extreme lengths in order to give their life a point and structure, meaning and fulfilment – to feel that they exist – not seeing the fine line between glory and destruction – or seeing it, but seeing it as beside the point.

It is only boxing, though, which makes the violence which is implicit in all sport, and in all creation, explicit – and perhaps that’s why it often fascinates and appals in equal measure. It is honest and true, yet it is also theatre, entertainment. It is confusing in the sense that normal civil rules on inflicting harm don’t apply, and a spectator can feel complicit in any ensuing damage (which can be insidious and long-term – repetitive head trauma may have contributed to Ali’s Parkinson’s, for example). We could say the same about ballet, though we don’t, because the violence is hidden and thus deceptive.

What I was most left with after reading these compelling poems (most of which first appeared in Fighters, Losers) is glimpses of the poetry in boxing – not in the sense of physical movement, but in the human drama, actions, demands and cost, in and outside the ring; and often in the boxers’ own speech – their fighting talk. Boxing ultimately seems to be about ambition and passion, to the point of obsession: the addictive draw of challenge, risk, battle and victory, in the effort to realise one’s potential and limits – and even, self-destructively, of defeat (there seems to be a primal masochistic, or at least quixotic, element to this sport); hubris and not knowing when to give up; and the public humiliation this exposure can entail. The not knowing when one has been finally, irrevocably beaten – not just in one fight, but cumulatively by life and the vagaries of time. All of this, in a more diffuse way, could apply to anyone. As Ryan writes in ‘The Young God of the Catskills I’, when Trevor Berbick, ‘the champion’, is knocked down three times with one punch (he keeps getting up): ‘Berbick’s brain won’t accept he’s finished.’ More troublingly, this inability to stop exists within the unleashed ‘winner’ too, unless someone intervenes: in ‘The Resurrection of Diego “Chico” Corrales’, ‘Corrales, having let his hands go, will not stop until he is stopped’.

These are all themes of universal human interest, whether or not we are a fan of boxing and regardless of the complex ethical issues that surround the sport (summarised well by the philosophers Julian Savulsecu and Ingmar Persson in the TLS). We can learn a lot about human psychology and the human condition – as it pertains to both the practitioner and the spectator – from the trajectories of these extreme, and often uniquely tragic, lives in this brutally rarefied arena; and Ryan’s vignettes, full of pathos and tactful dexterity, are the ideal platform for this enlightenment.

My breath was taken away by these lines on José Luis Castillo in ‘The Resurrection of Diego “Chico” Corrales’: ‘His head is kept up by the force of his opponent’s gloves / and not the actions of his neck’, which staggeringly show how a boxer can be reduced to a limp ragdoll, all agency and volition lost. The starkness of these lines, with no adornment, frees the poetry in the horror of the (in)action itself. I loved the psychological depth and insight in this brief line: Castillo ‘smiles, which means he’s hurt’. The poem highlights the protective, almost parental role of the referee, who ‘steps between the men / to save him’. From the deifying title onwards, Corrales’s battle is presented as Christ-like: ‘Diego Corrales has risen from the canvas’; he has a ‘tattoo of Christ the Redeemer’; ‘his arms stretched out crosswise, / celebrating coming back from the dead’.

‘The Young God of the Catskills I’ was a poem in which I most thought of an alignment between boxing and poetry. Ryan writes (in Mike Tyson’s words): ‘“They think it’s just the power. / But it’s the accuracy of the power”’, which pinpoints the technique, control and precision involved if one is to land, and connect with, a truly effective punch, or line: it’s not just about unconstrained, unfocused power. Ryan lands these measured lines brilliantly, showing both power and accuracy, as he consistently does. The poem ends with the words of Trevor Berbick: ‘“Legally, I’m a spirit”, he will say between this night / and that. “I have no age.”’, which shows how boxers, despite their extreme corporeality, often collude in, or inflate, their incorporeality, when of course they are mortals with the same ultimate limits as us. This collusion has consequences beyond the ring when these gladiators fall: in this poem, Berbick is eventually murdered in a churchyard with a steel pipe; while, in ‘The Resurrection of Diego “Chico” Corrales’, Corrales is killed in a motorcycle accident, ‘his blood three times the legal alcohol limit’. ‘He basically killed himself’, the police report says. Perhaps what these poems are suggesting is that the world is more dangerous than the boxing ring.

In his 2021 essay ‘A Puncher’s Chance’ (which first appeared in The Baffler, and was reprinted in the Guardian as ‘Escape to Glory: The Intoxicating Myth of Boxing as a Way Out’), Ryan quotes Jonathan Rendall’s observation that:

It was as if all of them, the winners and losers and the managers and trainers, had touched something that only they could know about, something big, like truth. Because they’d touched it and knew what it was, they didn’t have to brag about it.

I wonder if it is this which unites boxing, poetry and ballet – the desire to reach for, and occasionally touch and express, even if fleetingly, and with great effort and pain, pure wordless truth. For these valiant triers, winners or losers, this transcendence must feel better, for a time, than the swamping void, a fraught flatness, that is felt to be the alternative.

The moral purpose of poetry, Percy Shelley argued in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, is to help us to see the (un)familiar world differently: it ‘awakens and enlarges the mind’, exercising imagination and empathy, helping civilisation, made of individuals, to advance. That is what Ryan has achieved with his boxing poems, in particular, which are imbued with passion.

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Elsewhere in this varied collection, and outside of the ring, though no less full of battle, I was particularly struck by ‘The Range’, a poem in seven parts, and probably my favourite poem here: it is a masterly meshing of form with feeling. Part ‘III’ is extremely moving:

You were betrayed; there is no other way
of saying this. The doctor told you to wash your hair
and go for walks;

I especially like the accusatory honesty in this direct opening, which proves how, sometimes, it is okay just to ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’ (which the poem lightly goes on to do anyway): there can be ‘no other way / of saying’ something, or showing it better. Don Paterson puts this rather more bluntly and exasperatedly (though rightly, I feel) in The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre (Faber, 2018): ‘“Show-not-tell” is merely the dumb war-cry at the head of a more insidious movement which appears to be seeking the total concretisation of the poetic line’ (p. 98). (Paterson feels this ‘widely circulated diktat’ is ‘a neurotic response to the otherwise reasonable observation that no one is listening’; pp. 177, 98). The plainspokenness and charged simplicity throughout this section are highly effective, delivered with incredible restraint (and suppressed contempt): the raw emotional material needs no increased drama by contorting language too far.

Further on in part III of ‘The Range’, a line break falls like a guillotine in ‘slaughtering / neglect’ drawing our attention to both of these frank, unfettered, justified words, heightening their impact. Why should the speaker say something other than what happened, which would only skirt around or obfuscate the truth? Taken more widely, these two strong words imply it is societal prejudice, ignorance and neglect that indirectly kill people. This whole measured and seamless section, in just twelve lean lines, captures the power imbalance between patient and doctor, especially when the patient is female (as medicine continues to carry a sexist and misogynistic legacy); the terrifying surrender of control and forced gamble with one’s life; and the (often misplaced) blind trust and faith that are required in healthcare. Full rhyme is used to brilliant effect throughout, so understated you don’t at first notice it. It is a magnificently controlled and realised piece. For me, this is perfect poetry.

Despite this poem’s opening directness, Ryan tends to ‘tell the truth slant’, with a certain degree of obliqueness: it isn’t always clear precisely what or whom a poem is about (aside from the boxing potted dramas – and even then, one senses these miniature epics serve as microcosms of wider conflicts, in both self and society). He doesn’t give too much away, but this makes the poems linger in the mind and not shut themselves down, leaving room for the reader’s imagination and for re-reading.

That said, I value intelligent directness in poems, in the right (micro)dose and when handled well: I feel it has more of a place than critics generally allow, perhaps because they think it doesn’t display enough intelligence or artfulness and that poems should be more knotty; more difficult to comprehend. Different brains work in different ways. Being direct can yield true and deep moments of clarity and connection, securing the reader rather than shutting them out with cloak-and-dagger games, smoke and mirrors (Ryan doesn’t do this; I just feel it’s a point worth making). For me, a poem that shuns directness and clarity is like one with the curtains drawn: I like some daylight to break in.

A poem that is suffused with sunlight is the assured and striking ‘Trinity Hospital’, which contains beautiful lines and imagery, chiming with delicate, natural assonance, as the speaker arrives at a transcendent moment of peace and quiet rapture: ‘You were lit skin, gilt / and honey, dressed in olive’; ‘I, being of sound mind, / will be delivered through orange groves / to you, the white church of my days’. I also greatly enjoyed ‘Rope-a-Dope’, which returns us to the themes of both boxing and the power struggles inherent in relationships, merging the two: the couple in the poem are watching an old fight between Ali and Foreman. I love the clever title, which is ‘a strategy in which one behaves passively or with little aggression until an opportune moment arises for successful action’. It is used in boxing, whereby one fighter leans back against the ropes, allowing the other fighter to throw punches, effectively exhausting them (the puncher) for later on in the match. Here, it appears to refer to the poem’s speaker as well as the watched boxer. I am a hopeless (non-)strategist in life – strategy has mostly never occurred to me – so I appreciated the subtle layered complexity in this poem. ‘You don’t believe he can soak up / all this pain and go on standing’, the speaker observes.

To return to ‘Jonathan Rendall’, a formally impressive poem which seemingly distils Rendall’s whole life and character in just eighteen chiselled, brooding lines – they literally feel chiselled due to the staccato rhythm and rapid-fire use of punctuation (commas and semi-colons), which fracture the sentences into punchy jabs. The overall discomfiting effect is of someone who ducked and dived, and jaggedly fought for his life, all his life. Some people seem fated to misfortune, no matter how hard they try. As Ryan brilliantly writes in ‘The Range’, ‘Bad luck has clung to your brother / like an impermeable caul / he couldn’t shake by getting out’ (that caul image is wonderfully effective and unusual, not least in suggesting that this encumbering limitation begins at birth). I didn’t know of Rendall, but the Guardian states he was an award-winning but troubled author, journalist and one-time boxing manager who was found dead at his home on 23 January 2013, at the age of 48, with police estimating he’d lain that way alone ‘for a number of days’, possibly up to two weeks. I was therefore moved by the final lines of Ryan’s poem, where, for Rendall, life’s battle is finally, indistinctly, over: ‘a laying down of arms, / somewhere in the neighbourhood of January.’ Whenever I hear of lost potential like this, I think of Derwent Coleridge’s rueful remark, after the death in midlife of his acutely gifted brother, Hartley: ‘he was helped through life as it was: perhaps, under altered circumstances, he might have been helped more’.

Crisis Actor is a short collection – just thirty poems – but they are so full of gravity and thought-provoking density that this feels right. The jacket states that ‘The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere’ – some may find this over-arching focus quite pessimistic and bleak sustained across a collection, and the dominant tone forlorn. The titular poem ‘Crisis Actor’ is in memory of Ian Hamilton (on whom Ryan did his PhD – a strong influence, or rather kindred spirit, one senses) and is replete with disgruntled lines inflected by the poet-critic: ‘your feeling you existed only if called upon to serve, / your somehow getting to be forty, the crappy things / you’d have to do if you didn’t do that crappy thing’. This realism recalls Larkin’s shuddering insight in his late twenties, gleaned from a Spanish proverb, on the Catch-22 that life presents at critical junctures: ‘If you have any choice […] Take what you want – and pay for it…. or you’ll get what you don’t want, & pay for that too’. ‘Most people’, Larkin writes in the same letter, ‘I’m convinced, don’t think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they’re carried out feet first’ (Selected Letters, p. 156). In both poets’ observations, there is an instinctive, incredulous aversion to social conforming and to unquestioned expectations: they object to existential sleepwalking, fearing a meaningless hollow and dissatisfaction at the heart of an unthinking, unexamined life.

Ryan writes elsewhere in ‘Crisis Actor’ that there is ‘An urge to be part of something to the side / of what was left; a margins fetish’ – a sort of compulsive voluntary marginalisation, in protest at ‘what was left’ and at the mainstream. But, in this poem, the ‘letting things go by’ is first done ‘on purpose’ and then ‘by mistake’, as uncontrollable life overtakes and exerts more (self-)inquisitorial pressure, leaving the refusenik with, what exactly? The mere shock of age and lost time again made me think of Larkin, in ‘Dockery and Son’: ‘Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes’.

A ‘crisis actor’ – a term I wasn’t previously familiar with – is an actor who portrays a disaster victim or a bystander during emergency drills or in military exercises, to help train the emergency services. The term has been appropriated by conspiracy theorists over the last decade or so to suggest an impersonator of such a victim in a staged disaster to advance a political goal. Deconstructed, a subtext of the title may be that, for many of the ‘lost causes’ and sensitive souls that Ryan writes about, there has been no one overarching tragedy (until each life ends prematurely), other than being born into existence and dealing with the consequences of that in a protracted crisis as life flows by. It is not that their woes aren’t real or true, but they are often overlooked or seen as self-created; so there can be a floating guilt that self-complaint isn’t warranted. It may speak of someone who feels they don’t fully inhabit their own life (‘your feeling you existed only if called upon to serve’). It also seems to allude to the acting that adult life requires, a performance which, usurping mystery and intuition, is anathema to a poet’s integrity; the falsity is wearing and hollowing (think especially of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’: ‘The little Actor cons another part’; ‘As if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation’). Any comparison of people to actors evokes Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely Players’ – though Ryan’s ‘actors’, whether by accident, despair or refusal, usually do not play out all the Acts, all ‘seven ages of man’. Life can feel like an extended rehearsal, practicing for the main event, when in fact every minute is the real thing. A boxer, too, could be seen as a crisis actor: their fights are staged and their personas often created.

Perhaps it simply means the poet(-critic) is the crisis actor, standing in and speaking for those in crisis, like method acting (a possessive form of acting, involving complete emotional identification with a role); ‘being strong on other people’s behalf’, as an interviewee in ‘Crisis Actor’ suggests Hamilton was. ‘Actor’ means someone who pretends for a living, but it also means one who takes part, takes action (in a crisis), rather than just standing by and watching, even if this too is a performance. For a collection title, and a debut one at that, it’s a very original and intriguing, bold statement.

Those ‘seven ages’ arise in ‘Mayfly’ (the name of a country pub here, but, cleverly, also an insect with a very short lifespan). The speaker, a city visitor, ponders that people who ‘live their whole lives, most likely’ in the countryside may ‘watch this cherry tree convulse into winter, what, / seventy times maybe’, which echoes (in a counterpoint liminal season) Housman’s alignment of one’s ‘threescore years and ten’ with a cherry tree’s springs (in ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’). I sensed a seam of ambiguity in Ryan’s poem, a subtle frictional tension, not least in the disquieting, unexpected word ‘convulse’, which makes one think of death throes: the speaker seems to be saying this imagined life is enviable, yet there is ultimately ‘not enough to delay’ him in this wider spot, which hints at a lack of rootedness. There is also a slight idealisation, or dreamy elision, as most people don’t live in one place their whole lives (the speaker is aware he is half-assuming, though, in the circumspect qualifiers ‘most likely’ and ‘maybe’).

The speaker and his companion arrange themselves ‘like collapsing parachutists’ – a wonderful image for a flying visit, that instantly conveys the way people collapse into their seats with relief; a parachute also suggests escaping from something (in this instance, perhaps the pandemic – the poem was first published in the TLS in October 2020). The speaker relishes the intensity of the drifting moment, but there is an air of trepidation over the future; a reluctance to leave this hazy cocoon, yet a vagueness over what is even being appreciated, evident in the intentional lack of specificity and sense of anonymity: ‘Some nameless river goes by’. For me, this conveyed how an unfamiliar pub garden can feel like a lost idyll (before one has even left) exactly because it is detached from our normal lives and surroundings, and even from time; what heightens the moment is that you can’t stay, or the enjoyment may be diluted in the staying. A Keatsian melancholy therefore laces this snatched life and its anticipated end, a note of ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die’. Given that a mayfly lives for only hours in some cases, it’s a perfect title for the poem, and also an emblem for the lives cut short throughout the collection. Faintly, the poem seems to be saying something unsettling about time. Whether we see one autumn or 70, if we really see it, perhaps once is a lifetime.

Despite this miasma of discontent that drifts through the collection, a desultory mood, there are enough bright glimpses, of love, friendship and nature, to suggest that hope and redemption can still be found, if fleetingly. Many of the poems retrieve and reanimate lives swallowed by history and misfortune, or by unrelenting work. Ryan dignifies and gently seeks to redeem outsiders, the suicidal and the lost, and what has been lost, such as Rendall, Nick Drake and Alun Lewis, to show that they are not forgotten; the very fact that the poems exist is therefore a victory. ‘You have a duty to one another’, a detached voice states in ‘Crisis Actor’, which reminded me of J. B. Priestley in An Inspector Calls: ‘We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other’. In ‘When We Were Kings’ (a poem in Ryan’s first pamphlet which doesn’t reappear here), he suggests that it is our social responsibility to recognise how much we are shaped by our living contexts: ‘The fact remained: / it was in our rivers they had failed.’ By illuminating marginalised states and their shadows, internal and external, with patience and compassion, he shows that this is where fuller human knowledge, granular truth and humility are found. As Rendall wrote (an observation which forms the epigraph to ‘Jonathan Rendall’): ‘I prefer losers. They’re more self-aware’.

I have admired Declan Ryan’s writing for a while now – I’m more familiar with his prolific criticism than his poetry, but these feed into each other. I’m amazed, in particular, at the breadth of subjects on which he can write without sacrificing depth, insight and care: boxing, Nick Cave, Robert Lowell, among many others. His cogent and alive prose always shows great knowledge (lightly worn), psychological attunement and detailed sensitivity. I know of very few writers who achieve this deftness and rigour in both criticism and poetry – both fields are equally important to me (and to each other). Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that ‘Thinking is my fighting’ – Ryan’s writing shows a lot of thought.

Crisis Actor is a valuable work for anyone interested in human life and poetry, in all its guises; and, conversely, for anyone who feels they have lost their life. Ryan’s subject may circle around failing – which we all do, in the end, in the ring of life – but this is winning poetry.

 

Nicola Healey’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Spectator, Wild Court and elsewhere. She is the author of Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her first poetry pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, will be published by Dare-Gale Press in 2024.