Title: The Price of Everything
Genre: Poetry
Year: 1994
Pages: 100 pages
Origin: a tried and trusted library book
Nod Rating: 4 nods out of 5
Following in the footsteps of a review of Britain’s current poet laureate – Carol Ann Duffy – the Worm had a masterful idea of completing a tour back into time through all of the poet laureate’s that this island has had to offer. Of course, the Worm – in his blessed ignorance – was not to know that the position harks back to medieval England under the grand sounding title versificator regis (one of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer). The Worm has much work to do!
Next on this travel through time is Andrew Motion, the country’s poet laureate from 1999 to 2009 (the first not to die or be removed from the post). The collection under consideration in this review – The Price of Everything – was published five years before the bestowal of the laureate position, when Motion was a man just into his early forties.
The collection contains two long poems: ‘Lines of Desire’ and ‘Joe Soap’. As Motion states in the collection’s introduction, ‘both the poems in this book are about various kinds of conflict, and both take the First World War as their starting point’.
‘Lines of Desire’ consists of smaller segments: ‘A Dream of Peace’ (‘What should I die for? / Answer me that’); ‘Money Singing’ (‘Money is getting noisier… Money is getting taller… Money is getting long-faced… Money is getting ambitious’); ‘A Modern Ecstasy’; and ‘Lines of Desire’. Motion revisits the theme of apathy and lack of connection with the larger world concerns; he can simply ‘press the button’ or ‘change the channel’ at the sight of tanks, of soldiers standing in the desert, and of shouts – ‘it means nothing to me’.
Of the two, ‘Joe Soap’ is the greater and more ambitious poem. It is a combination of rhyme, of longer prose, of news reports, of thoughts and of political motive all woven together. It follows the character Joe Soap, who is everywhere and everyone: a man who is reborn in different times and locations throughout the twentieth century. As popularly known, “Joe Soap” is British slang noting a foolish scapegoat (‘soap’ rhyming with ‘dope’); its influence as a First World War song – ‘Joe Soap’s Army’ – is a clearly shown on Motion’s poem.
‘Forward, Joe Soap’s armyMotion’s use of the term is an everyman of life, akin to the name and usage of ‘Joe Bloggs’ in today’s society. As such, we witness the falling to earth of Motion’s Joe Soap several times during the course of the poem, beginning in 1918 and a police report concerning the suspicious death of Joe’s friend, Captain Atkins. Joe returns to the front-line before dying in action: ‘Nothing remained of Joe Soap. He had been on the earth, and then he was not on the earth. He had been a person, then he was no longer a person’. Yet he returns; not as Joe but as Joanna in 1930s Germany:
Marching without fear
With our brave commander
Safely in the rear’.
‘I first fell to earthAnd later returns back as ‘plain Joe’ many ‘thousands of miles east and a few thousand more south’. Here, a man gathering oil, he notices the transformation of the planet:
A whole sea and half a continent away from the country of my birth.’
‘There used to be silence stretching all the way up to the sun;The last time he falls to earth he is ‘sent out to die in some shit-hole basement lair. Don’t say you don’t know what I mean. You’ve seen me there.’ Throughout it all the Joe Soaps (and Joanna) are used for the bidding of others; Motion is ambiguous about this force, but it could be deemed the industrialisation and “progress” of mankind. That this “progress” is blind is a cause for concern, with a warning sounded out for the eventual destination of those on this planet.
Now there are pumps squeaking, and builders yelling orders:
Wherever next in the world,
And when?
There used to be high valleys even the birds said no to;
Now there are signposts, and a price for every grain of sand:
Wherever next in the world,
And when?
There used to be me alone, lighting a match in the dark;
Now there are flames, and a view into infinite space:
Wherever next in the world,
And when?’
The Price of Everything shows a poet in good form. Although the poems may be confusing due to a dream-like narrative, at no point do they disappoint the reader. Meaning can be induced, but only for those who are patient enough to stay the course.
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