Kathryn Maris
JOHN HAYNES
Letter to Patience
Seren £7.99Like Russian dolls, John Haynes the Poet, John Haynes the Non-fiction Writer, John Haynes the Teacher-Scholar, and John Haynes the Would-be Activist stand side by side – or one inside the other – in his book-length poem Letter to Patience. And these are only some of his personas – there is also John Haynes the Philosopher, John Haynes the Letter-writer, John Haynes the Political Scientist, and many others where those came from.
He is also a polymath who is kind to his readers. His long explanatory preface is useful and even necessary, as are his copious footnotes at the back of the book.
The premise of Letter to Patience is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a letter to a woman called Patience. But very little else about the book is self-explanatory. We find out, by way of the preface, that Patience is the proprietress of a small mud-walled bar in Northern Nigeria called Patience’ Parlour. Patience, 30-years-old, had been a lecturer in politics at the nearby university, but gave up her job because of political pressure.
This 60-page letter in terza rima is meant to have been written in 1993. But time is elastic in Letter to Patience. In fact so much of this epic letter is about time: the passage of time, the meaning of time. One of Haynes’ three opening epigraphs gives us a clue to this theme – this quote by Cavafy: ‘When we say “Time” we mean ourselves. Most abstractions are simply our pseudonyms. It is superfluous to say “Time is scytheless and toothless”. We know it. We are time’.
Indeed the first seven stanzas of the poem, which are divided into 52 cantos (the number of weeks in a year, if you hadn’t noticed), are devoted to time: setting us up in time (and place), and reflecting on time. Cleverly, the first stanza contains the letter-writer’s return address and also the date of the missive: 5 May, an intriguing date for a poem with a motif of political upheaval and injustice. Then Haynes sets us up in time yet more specifically, late at night when:
everyone’s asleep, the BBC
World Service News is on its perfect line
along that line once ruled invisiblyacross the globe to where that watch of mine
ticks on the inside of your wrist...The point here is that Britain and Nigeria fall in the same time zone, and the speaker-writer makes much of that seemingly minor link, because he’s looking for modes of connection. Instead of talking about timelines, Haynes talks about ‘time’ and ‘lines’ as discrete subjects, both of which become crucial themes. When he’s not drawing attention to time, which he does almost constantly, he’s waxing on about lines – lines of demarcation and boundary but, more often, lines of connection and communication. In canto 11, Haynes brings time and lines together: ‘The times shown on our watches are the same. / Across the map those strangers draw a net / of pure Pythagorean lines to claim...’ Geometry (and lines) come up again in canto 15 with:
And I can still now see
the chalk lines on a prepschool board, too crude,I learnt, to touch the true geometry
which has no magnitude and cannot lie...The prep school mentioned is the ‘empire-making boarding school’ that the speaker attended. It’s a source of shame, one that forces him to remember that there are the colonizers and the colonized, and that he falls on one side of the line, and Patience on the other.
The relationship between the speaker – who refers to himself as John – and Patience is unclear. Are they old friends? Comrades? Former lovers? What we do find out is that ‘John’ is married to a Nigerian woman, and that he has moved back to England with her and their mixed-race children in order to care for his ailing father. The father struggles with memory loss and – interestingly – has no sense of the passage of time.
If the themes are clear enough, the narrative itself can be troublesome, and the nine pages of notes are a crucial aid. The terza rima is so watertight that perhaps it forces an element of circuitousness into the poem.
Whatever its flaws, this is a work of great intelligence and immaculate formalism. Haynes’ rhyming energy never flags, his writing stays dynamic, and at the end he employs one of the best imagistic sleights-of-hand I’ve seen since William Carlos Williams. Through the description (in canto 51) of how John imagines Patience is sitting, and how he himself is sitting, the writer (John) and the reader (Patience) become superimposed figures. They are mirror images of writer and reader – ’mon semblable, mon frère,’ as Baudelaire and, later, Eliot would say. And we as readers, having seen the colours ‘black’ and ‘white’ appear again and again as objects, clothing, celestial bodies, ghosts and emblems of race, now see John and Patience as an image of black on white – very much like words on a page.
When John signs off, dawn has broken and ‘it’s getting light’. It’s getting light in the sense of sunrise, but also in the sense of epiphany, self-discovery, and making sense of a troubled world. Now that he’s left Patience’s Nigeria, he can at last see it clearly. He lets Patience into his clear new vision; and he lets us into it too.
Kathryn Maris, a poet from New York City, is the author of one collection, The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006), which has been shortlisted for a Poetry Book of the Year award in the US. She writes essays and reviews for British and American periodicals, and teaches creative writing at Morley College.
Poetry London