what survived of you — Andrew McMillan

after hearing Larkin's Sunday Sessions

partly the voice of chipped vowels

decanted over decades, pauses frail

as grass, inflections casting hope out

like a lighthouse, but mostly what

survived of you was love, your million-petalled

flower of being here full-blossomed even now;

pulled from oblivion dark as a garage, I hear you

sitting, somewhere, put back together, stern,

sending poems, as though young men, over

stanza'd, distant hills to ears built like towns

(‘what survived of you’ from Every Salt Advance by Andrew McMillan, published by Sand Chapbooks, 2011.)

*

Don't remember which poem it is of Heaney's but in it you're walking across an American campus—Berkley, most likely—and there are these speakers set up in the trees, hanging down from them, weirdly bulbous, weirdly organic. So—if I remember it rightly—as the protagonist wanders under them, you’ve myth and gods hanging on the other end. The poem digging into that eerie experience, that occasional shock of the surreal at voice detached from source.

It’s not a subject you come across that often, so when I did come across Andrew McMillan’s ‘what survived of you’ I was immediately drawn to it. Having—like many—been enthralled by Larkin at A-level and later, clear of that, listened to and laughed at The Sunday Sessions it feels to me like wish fulfilment; I’d wanted it written before I’d read it.

Spooky how Andrew conjures up that Larkin sound, the poem more like the work of DJ Yoda (please somebody remix Larkin)—with its expert sampling, and scratch work—than an ‘original' writer. So, we’re in the Larkin echo-chamber with ‘pauses / frail as grass’ and ‘vowels / decanted over decades,’ which, down to the deft line break in the first, and the alliterative twist in the second, is like Larkin with the reverb turned up. 

In conversation with ROY Andrew said that he “look[s] on [Every Salt Advance] rather like people look on old photos of themselves" and that chimes nicely with the theme of this particular poem. What hasn't faded, what doesn't fade as fast as you'd think; what’s weirdly alive when you look or listen close enough.