144
PARTISAN REVIEW
Larkin's clear, hard, bitingly restrained voice-the voice of the emotional
accountant, who knows the price and value and final tally of life's losses:
"Man hands on misery
to
man .
It deepens like a coastal shelf. "
The added dividend in
High Windows
is the expanded use of Larkin's
colloquial voice; a voice which, in its careful manipulations of British
idiom, gives the poems an even greater range and conversational directness
and simplicity born of that slangy bravado .
The poems open quickly: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad";
"Groping back to bed after a piss . . ." ; "When I see a couple of kids/ And
guess he 's fucking her and she's. . ." The characteristic tension in
High
Windows
is between this surprising, involving diction and what follows; it
is a tension full of drama, internal comment and self-irony . Larkin rein–
forces our feeling that both high and low voices exist simultaneously , side
by side, in each of us-which makes this volume uniquely accessible .
Readers who like poetry are intrigued, caught offguard; readers who do not
like poetry cannot help being engaged. Of course other poets have used the
colloquial voice
to
similar purpose. But few have Larkin's dedication
to
and
skill with rhym'e and verse form, and both of these prematurely interred
devices serve to impose control and pace on the language's apparent
slackness. The reader travels great distances in the best poems in
High
Windows ,
from those irreverent, casual , conversational openings up the
scale of emotion
to
the "fresh-peeled voice" of Larkin's thrush, capable as
ever, of "astonishing the brickwork."
[he colloquial poems avoid condescension, the most serious problem
of dialect writing, by unwavering fidelity
to
the vocabulary of the charac–
ters' imagination and by vicious adherence to some of their worst impulses.
In the great poems, Larkin uses a similar, relaxed , thoroughly British
narraror who seems closest ro Larkin himself-how close I do not know or
care. The obvious suggestion is that this narrator suffers similar frustrations
and limitations, only he is more articulate at expressing them .
I
quote the entire title poem :
"When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-
\a
