Tim Liardet

The Storm House

Cover image by Katarzyna Gajewska

Photograph by Tomek Radej

In 2006 Tim Liardet’s brother died in mysterious circumstances. The Storm House is a book-length elegy that is both grief-fugue and exploration of family psychodrama. The two parts of the book form a powerful narrative of sorrow and anger, the events recollected in the first part extended by the virtuoso sonnet-sequence of the second. From uncertainty, trauma and silence, Liardet generates force and gravity in ‘the spring and leap / of energy’ that is the creative life owed to the dead.

Combining an investigation into the mysterious circumstances of his brother’s death with a headlong rush into mourning, Tim Liardet invents the pugilistic lyricism of The Storm House…[he] crosses a tone of bewildered longing, (think of Tennyson’s “an infant crying in the night/with no language but a cry”) with brutally riveting imagery, like the flayed flesh of Francis Bacon’s portraits, and slams through a series of gripping lyrics toward the finale, the restless thirty-two-sonnet title sequence. Remembered incidents mix with “deleted scenes” to generate torrents of extreme feeling—the storm—that are framed by the structure of a family—the figurative house—left with its metaphorical roof torn off … What happened? might be the central question of all poetry that relies on memory—and what drives the thrillingly tumultuous Storm House is that the poet will never find out.

Molly Peacock, Poetry Review

The finest poetry collections have an internal consistency and a rhythm, a sense of order and unity between poems. Unified in the most tragic way is Tim Liardet's The Storm House, an elegy to a brother who died in mysterious, violent circumstances. It opens: "Trouble is with inventing a language, brother,/ when the only other person in the world who speaks it dies,/ you're left speaking to no one." The remaining poems tackle that paradox, speaking to "no one", yet also touching and engaging the reader. "On Pett Level Beach" shows a family photograph: "the younger son with spade, dragging seaweed around his ankles", already "about to walk out of the picture". The gruesome formalities of death appal the poet. "I very gently drew out your brother's tongue/ and placed it back again, said the coroner,/ but began to feel it might have done it by itself." Two police officers on the doorstep could have walked out of a fairy tale: "They are pale/ and gamine, they speak in unison like twins and might/ be either men or women." They have turned up "to tell the/ truth of the mysterious dying." The title sequence of 32 loose sonnets which closes the book is especially fine. "You lived among dangerous people. They were the men/ who picked the bits from your overcoat/ because they knew that shortly they'd be wearing it." The poet mourns: "Talking to the dead's not easy. I'm robbed in daylight/ of the gift of speech." This descent into the darkness is not morbid, but uplifting: "Look to the living... They should/ be kissed and kiss often and live to be a hundred."

Suzy Feay, The Independent on Sunday

Tim Liardet is not a poet for the squeamish, yet he manages a necessary reticence and compassion about the violent circumstances of his brother’s death by presenting them as a “mysterious dying” that first the family had to strive to understand, and now his readers need to comprehend, by piecing together the details he gradually divulges in these painfully direct and powerful poems.

Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times

The poems do not merely dramatise a loss or suffering, they embroil, assault, challenge the reader at every turn. Part of Liardet’s craft is to keep changing the lens, especially in terms of address and angle, to allow some form of communication with the ‘untalkative’ dead. The resultant poems reverberate and fascinate, as in the aftermath of trauma. We feel the two movements of tragedy; the movement towards the victims—the pity, and the attempted movement away—the fear. There is also the consideration of the limits of language (‘the mouthful of words’, as it is put in the first poem and in the fifth sonnet of the sonnet sequence) and its relation to a noble silence in elegy. Liardet shows time and time again a struggle with language to move us away from any form of ‘solution’. He ranges over phenomena and situations that fuse psychological distress with the sensations and experiences of the world.

Peter Carpenter, The London Magazine

Tim Liardet has affinities with Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas and, like Hughes, can conjure portent and grandeur. Like Hughes’s own poetry, Liardet’s is big-boned and confident; like Thomas, he knows how to use a cadence to slow the reader down, and make each word register firmly.

Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review

Liardet pulls off a genuine, agonisingly won tour-de-force. The collection is bravely written; nothing is spared, the tone never falters, yet the confrontation with the brother’s death shows such compassion, such empathy that the shocking material never diminishes into bathos or sensational melodrama. Indeed, it is Liardet’s quiet strength…that maximises the power of this taut, complex book. The Storm House recalls TS Eliot’s Four Quartets in its musical structure, its devices of repetition and paradox…the structure of the whole sequence is symmetrical, mathematically ingenious as the final thirty-two sonnets reflect on the first part and mirror it cleverly… each sonnet is built to contain the emotional weight that is so personal it becomes impersonal, delicately and subtly picking up images and themes from the first half of the book which appeared in a variety of forms…[they] comprise a jagged kind of music contrasting with the full orchestra of the sonnets in the second half.

Patricia McCarthy, Agenda

Poignant, deeply intelligent poems. From “the gongs of lily pads” to “Self Portrait with Patio Flames”, their beguiling language matches the originality of their approach to both the surfaces of world and the depths of family relationships.

Ruth Padel

It is rare for a book of poems to bring an original and deeply poetic talent to a human story as Tim Liardet does in this collection. There is horror in the story he tells, but Liardet takes the horror to its storm-lit root. The Storm House is a book of poems like no other, it is true poetry, sensationally assembled.

Peter Porter

Tim Liardet makes the human macabre dazzle in the dark.

Gwyneth Lewis

L I K E S L A N T R A I N

Trouble is with inventing a language, brother,

when the only other person in the world who speaks it dies

you’re left speaking, to no one. This mouthful of words,

of fat verbs and vowels and cases and morphemes

that stammer from the lexicon under the tongue

is desperate to be used and anxious to be heard

and competes against itself for the room to speak—

It crowds out my mouth with the need to keep alive

every O in our intonation before it ends up

on the dump with the clicks of Hittite and Kulinic;

our words seem stranded and strangely marooned

now there’s no one to read on the other side of them.

No one to read them the wrong way round and still

have them make sense, say they are the wrong way round.

No one to say the old humanist’s slanting hand

would not have wanted a mirror if he was the other side,

but the reflection’s more needed now, and I read in it:

lately, I confess, I’ve tried scrawling to myself in the glass

but, like any mirror-writing, it’s slant rain. And like slant rain

it goes on falling and tearing, falling and tearing.

Like slant rain it quickens suddenly and slows down

and is heedless of its own expenditure.

Like slant rain it goes on falling and tearing, falling and tearing

and the glass does not know what it sees.

C A L L I N G U G O L I N O

Through what might be

the earpiece

or some grainier,

more primitive

instrument, brother,

or perhaps

the miracle

of the auditory

nerve, summoning

some signal,

a ruched pinhead

of decibels,

I imagined I might

be able

to hear your voice—

it would be faint

and strange,

belonging

as it does now

to another age,

the pauses

between it

prolonged by the whelm

of distance,

the static of water:

instead, the

soft voicemail

kicks in to say

you are

unavailable

to talk.

I had something

to say, I had

something

to say, I say

to the tape-hiss.

T H E W A T E R - H A L T

The sshsshssh, the chambery smell of the dark

were borne from room to room by the Chapel official

in sniffs, her sideways glances, even in the look

with which she turned out of the candle’s blue-ringed circle

with over-earnest tact: the crucifix above your toes

offered proportion to sacrifice—its striped dazzling image

waylaying the retina among the shadows

when I confronted your final, fuck-it-all visage:

you might have sat up, brother, but couldn’t slip

the shackle of muscles which almost secured

a smile, thumbed and moulded to reshape

the malleable substance—your grim composure.

And for the more, there was only less;

and for your brow a freezing, terrible kiss.

T H E C O N S T A B L E S C A L L

Pity the police officers whose task it is to tell

the truth of the mysterious dying. They are pale

and gamine, they speak in unison like twins and might

be either men or women. One writes in invisible ink.

Mystery prospers, they say, when the eyes and the mouth

rest. The deceased’s toenails had not been cut for months,

so long, they seem to grow longer now his body shrinks.

They’re living evidence, say the officers, shoots of nail;

they arc in slow motion like the couch grass gripping

a plough that’s blunted and abandoned. Is this a human foot

or some unusual specimen sprouting brambles,

sprouting sickles, until they hook right round

and scratch at their own footsole? This is what the truth

does, they say, it tickles itself to laughter at

our attempts to uncover it. His toenails force back

their cuticles like buds and might’ve hooked him bodily

back into the world just long enough to tell us

what happened in those final hours. The toenails are like the case,

they say, dark and horny, growing beyond our reach:

they grow and they grow, they flourish like clues

and curl back into accusation. Was he murdered at a height,

who could not stoop to tend them for himself?

So far below, wild and tapering, the toenails might

be protesting against the body’s extreme inertness,

say the officers, they might be forming parabolas

of suggestion and still-growing questions or trying

to tell us the culprit’s identity, like Nosferatu’s

fingernails scratching a name on the air.

T H E B E A T I N G

What you brought home to our mother no longer resembled

a human face—every follicle magnified

among the kick-marks, a Galapagos of kick-marks;

one half of your head swollen to twice the size

of the other, like something trying to get out,

something misshaping the cranium from the inside;

the upper heavyweight lip split open

like a plum into halves—the slit of the eye glimmering

under the monstrous lid. She laid out your body

and placed her hands into the water of the bowl.

Her name for you, she said, had stuck in her throat

like a wishbone that wouldn’t go down and wouldn’t come out,

and your legs so hairy, obdurate and bowed

would have to be shaved, she said, shaving smooth inroads

into the crop-roots of your body hair. That noise.

She removed the rags of your vest, like the hands

attending the holy body—she ploughed you through

with wild protective love, and you lay there,

saved. She raised your arms to wash them, and vowed

to go out into the world, that moment, to find the man

who’d pummelled and kicked you to this shape

and break him in two like the laws of forgiveness

and have him hobble and limp to the left

as her lumpen darling limped to the right:

and she was the snarl amplified at such a distance from

your mouth, and it was a snarl for a snarl.

It was furious steel capped boot for steel capped boot,

you might say. It was meat for meat.