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Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery
Following on from 2014 s In the Catacombs, A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetary, Chris McCabe again turns sleuth to search the cemeteries of London for a forgotten dead poet. This time he walks among the graves of Nunhead Cemetery and across the parklands, heaths and industrial estates of south London. Chris even locates what he believes to be the exact tree where William Blake had a vision of the angels.
362 pages, Paperback
Published September 22, 2017
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May 6, 2017
A friend of mine claims that I read books so obscure that not even their authors know they’ve written them. I laugh, because it’s a funny joke, but I can also get a bit unreasonably defensive at the same time. Cenotaph South might lend some credibility to my friend’s joke. But for sure Mr. McCabe knows he wrote this book, which is deeply personal, not at all academic yet very intelligent and fully informed, more romantically quixotic than scholarly dry.
Cenotaph South has two overlapping themes—the sub-titular activity and the author’s reckoning with the diagnosis and treatment of his mother’s cancer. Both are moving, in different ways, and both are proof of the vitality of poetry as a center to one’s life. McCabe alternates chapters between his two topics, the resulting juxtaposition of personal worry / family distress with his quest to find some genius poet hidden among the overgrown, faded, decrepit cemetery stone works. I am not fully sure that the quest for a lost poet isn’t simply a beard for his wanderings and wonderings but it doesn’t matter whether his muse is a person, an idea, or a faux quest. It sparks fine writing, intelligent discussion of poets past and present (Blake, Graves, Eliot, Browning, B.S. Johnson, Barry McSweeney—of whom McCabe makes extravagant claims: “greatest poet of the late twentieth century”—are among those he devotes serious attention to for their connection with the Nunhead neighborhood, if not the cemetery, or just as shapers of poetic opinion in the London air and fabric), and illustrates how someone with a sincere interest and generous talent can inspire reader interest even when it is lacking off the start.
Nunhead Cemetery is one of several built during the Victorian age to account for the fact that tiny churchyard cemeteries could no longer be the primary receivers of the ever growing city’s dead. Within Nunhead Cemetery McCabe finds deceased dabblers and professionals to the calling of poetry—William Cox Bennett, Joshua Russell, Cuthbert Collingwood, Kirwan de Verdon, Colonel Richard Hort, Godfrey Turner, Albert Craig, William Herbert, Tom Hood, Walter Thornberry, and Charlotte Mew. All get consideration, though only the last three get a chapter to themselves. McCabe is respectful of his calling when sifting any one candidate or another to be a lost poet. Indeed some are yet remembered (barely) in anthologies and the best of the bunch, Charlotte Mew, is yet prominent enough to not be deemed lost, though McCabe makes a good case for her being under appreciated.
A couple of years earlier McCabe wrote a book called In the Catacombs: A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery. This then is a companion to that book. The odds that I would look into that book increased dramatically as I finished Cenotaph South. McCabe, not native to London, is nonetheless in love with the city, its history and literature, its neighborhoods, traditions, transformations. His tiny interleaves of poetic musings on his mother’s illness and other family members deserve to be read as they are presented and on their own, which I will be doing shortly as I prepare for a proper review of this book for The Manhattan Review. They are sparely written yet convey that sense of awful disruption with moments of high relief with which illnesses like cancer unsettle us when they strike close to home.
Cenotaph South has two overlapping themes—the sub-titular activity and the author’s reckoning with the diagnosis and treatment of his mother’s cancer. Both are moving, in different ways, and both are proof of the vitality of poetry as a center to one’s life. McCabe alternates chapters between his two topics, the resulting juxtaposition of personal worry / family distress with his quest to find some genius poet hidden among the overgrown, faded, decrepit cemetery stone works. I am not fully sure that the quest for a lost poet isn’t simply a beard for his wanderings and wonderings but it doesn’t matter whether his muse is a person, an idea, or a faux quest. It sparks fine writing, intelligent discussion of poets past and present (Blake, Graves, Eliot, Browning, B.S. Johnson, Barry McSweeney—of whom McCabe makes extravagant claims: “greatest poet of the late twentieth century”—are among those he devotes serious attention to for their connection with the Nunhead neighborhood, if not the cemetery, or just as shapers of poetic opinion in the London air and fabric), and illustrates how someone with a sincere interest and generous talent can inspire reader interest even when it is lacking off the start.
Nunhead Cemetery is one of several built during the Victorian age to account for the fact that tiny churchyard cemeteries could no longer be the primary receivers of the ever growing city’s dead. Within Nunhead Cemetery McCabe finds deceased dabblers and professionals to the calling of poetry—William Cox Bennett, Joshua Russell, Cuthbert Collingwood, Kirwan de Verdon, Colonel Richard Hort, Godfrey Turner, Albert Craig, William Herbert, Tom Hood, Walter Thornberry, and Charlotte Mew. All get consideration, though only the last three get a chapter to themselves. McCabe is respectful of his calling when sifting any one candidate or another to be a lost poet. Indeed some are yet remembered (barely) in anthologies and the best of the bunch, Charlotte Mew, is yet prominent enough to not be deemed lost, though McCabe makes a good case for her being under appreciated.
A couple of years earlier McCabe wrote a book called In the Catacombs: A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery. This then is a companion to that book. The odds that I would look into that book increased dramatically as I finished Cenotaph South. McCabe, not native to London, is nonetheless in love with the city, its history and literature, its neighborhoods, traditions, transformations. His tiny interleaves of poetic musings on his mother’s illness and other family members deserve to be read as they are presented and on their own, which I will be doing shortly as I prepare for a proper review of this book for The Manhattan Review. They are sparely written yet convey that sense of awful disruption with moments of high relief with which illnesses like cancer unsettle us when they strike close to home.
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