Selected Poems 1930-1988 Read Free

strikingly in the disembodied mouth of Not I , and an element of narrative extortion is an undeniable presence in later Beckett. Another aspect of his later work is the harnessing of speech to carefully choreographed movement, as in ‘Roundelay’ but also in late plays and prose texts such as Footfalls and ‘The Way’. Chief among the late poems, however, are the mirlitonnades . These are described in an earlier John Calder edition ( Collected Poems 1930–1978 (1984)) as ‘written spasmodically on scraps of paper. Nothing dated.’ While some of these poems were originally written on café bills and hotel notepaper, this is not the whole story: Beckett carefully copied and arranged the poems in the mirlitonnades ‘sottisier’ notebook now held by the Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. If these poems are ‘breathtaking glimpses of being and nothingness’, as Justin Quinn has called them, they often take less than a breath to read aloud. At a minimum of as few as seven words, they are as carefully weighed as a Webern bagatelle, and come as close as anything Beckett wrote to honouring the ambition outlined in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun to ‘bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through’. The mirlitonnades rank high among Beckett’s late achievements, and do much to usher in the style of his late prose narratives ( Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho ).
    Beckett’s poetic last word was ‘what is the word’, translated from the preceding French text ‘ comment dire ’ in the Tiers Temps nursing home in 1989. (The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett reports that the poem was printed from Barbara Bray’s computer, Beckett’s ‘word’ processed at last.) And what is the word? the reader may wonder, mentally overstepping the mark and supplying the question mark the poem so noticeably lacks:

    folly –
    folly for to –
    for to –
    what is the word –
    folly from this –
    all this –
    folly from all this –
    given –
    folly given all this –
    seeing –
    folly seeing all this –
    this –
    what is the word –
    We can of course collapse the quest for the elusive Logos at any moment by deciding that the word in question is ‘what’, a suspicion licensed by the omission of the poem’s otherwise ubiquitous , jabbing dash, in the final line, as though coming to rest at last: ‘what is the word’. With fitting symmetry the French version, ‘ comment dire ’, contradicts any closure this reading threatens to provide by moving in the opposite direction, bogging down further and further away from the word it seeks (‘ comment dire – /comment dire ’). Dragged in both directions at once by the English and French texts, we are delivered to a final resting place of precisely nowhere: ‘unspeakable home’ once more.
    Where Beckett’s publishing history is concerned, his post-war poetry publications are effectively a series of updated Collecteds with the unusual distinction of becoming less and less reliable as they go along, the multiply defective Poems 1930–1989 (2002) marking a low point in the history of Beckett editing. The rationale to the present Selected has been to take a fresh look at the poetry without pretending to the scholarly exhaustiveness promised by John Pilling and Seán Lawlor’s forthcoming new Collected Poems in English and French . Nevertheless, some effort has been made to address the many anomalies that surroundBeckett’s uncollected and unpublished work. The mirlitonnades ‘sottisier’ contains a number of striking short poems, in both French and English, which post-date the publication of that sequence in 1978, and while Beckett made no effort to collect them in book form it would be wrong to see