We’re in the realm of memory here, the poet casting an eye (and ear) back upon a moment potentially long gone. We’re with the narrator, as they listen to a young Pascal play Bach on an upright piano. We follow them down the page, time cascading into soft, philosophical meanderings.

The poem is not unlike Bach’s own long, pale room of the Goldberg Variations, the subject matter which O’Brien, like a pianist himself, flutters over with a deft touch. The words are like a score that push our eye vertically rather than horizontally, where the staff is no longer visible but shows itself from memory; like Pascal who, in the poem, can play the ‘infant Bach’ at aged nine, ‘from memory’. The narrator has plucked a scene from memory, from his listening life, and shows us how the sonic gaze can bring mental clarity: ‘to play the keyboard is to / live / beside a river’. As the poet plucks the memory, the pianist plucks the moment from its general passing. What skills they both have, poet and pianist, to somehow deliver music ‘back, at last, // to silence’.

I’ve tried to ‘translate’ Bach into poetry before, to give language to a music that is already at the height of its artistic powers, as if to prove that Walter Pater was right when he claimed that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. In doing so, I continually encountered the limits of language, assigning meaning to the liminal space of music by projecting some scraps of narrative or character or setting. I think what Pater was articulating in his ‘condition’ is something akin to affect, and that this affective quality of music cannot easily be attributed meaning in the linguistic and semantic sense. The beauty of O’Brien’s poem here is that it manages to achieve something affective in and of itself, an atmosphere that doesn’t attempt to mimic Bach’s own, but that allows a small narrative to be performed with music as an accompaniment. The poem invites us to sit beside the river, as it were, and to be played to, where the words perform an air of their own doing; as the poet plucks his string of language, so too do his words. That one word—plectra—has the mouth do the playing.

This long, pale room of a poem is as much a reflection upon the ‘well-ordered air’ of Bach’s harpsichord composition as it is an existential pause, another ‘well-ordered air’ of the poet’s living. To listen, the poem seems to say, is to let ourselves fall into harmony with time and space. Everything seems to be okay within the world of the poem; our living is ‘not contained // so much as / elaborated upon’. Music is the great elaborator. The poet is the great conduit of this elaboration. We need not try and contain it.

lynley edmeades