“If I shut my eyes to the new dark,” begins Nick Laird’s long title poem, “I find that I start to experience time in its purest state…”. Up Late, an elegy for his father’s death with Covid-19, moves beyond private subject matter, forming an intense examination of time and space, a terrifying reflection of current human existence:
On Sunday they permitted us to Zoom ... he was prone in a hospital gown strapped to a white slab.
The hospital gown split at the back ...
... He lifted his head to the camera ...
Up Late, passionate and angry as Hamlet, is formally brilliant, an exercise in control. The creator in Theodicy asserts, “ ... there’s no decent performance without restraint” – yet control isn’t always possible: “You could never let anything go, a trait/I also suffer from, and kind of admire, but/that isn’t possible here.” And restraint earns one satisfying rhyming outburst, “Alastair Laird is dead. Fuckety fuck. Fuckety/fuck fuck fuck fuck. My dad is dead. Bad luck.”
Like Hamlet, like George Oppen referenced in Feedback, Laird draws strength from contraries, “ ... in the wallet/ of the poet sit the business cards ... declaring, /on one side, the statement the other side is true,//…on the other side, the statement on the other side’s a lie.” (The Vocation). Talking to the Sun in Washington Square echoes O’Hara’s and Mayakovsky’s conversations with the sun while family feels central, “Looking after children means simultaneously building a field hospital, a hedge school, a diner ...”
Against the “new dark” Inside Voice’s precise observation of his son is full of sunlight, “Even the way he eats I kind of find/fascinating, chewing with a camel’s /abstraction ... I watch him as a lover/ or as a mother might. He’s as excited /about my pasta and pesto/ ... grated cheddar cheese I’ve just/cut the mould off as he is about/ Christmas ...”
The frustrations of filial love are nailed precisely, often exasperated, “ ... after Mum died,/left bewildered, adrift, ordering crap online” or deeply funny in Basically Adidas where Laird’s father acquires “a bootful ... of navy tracksuits ... I would set my head against the glass/just like this/as the Ford Granada sailed round the estate/ ... Dad ... standing on the doorstep/ talking to Richie Smith –/So what it is//is they’re basically Adidas,/they’re made the same, but they have these two stripes instead of three.”
