The Australian poet's blunt language describes the expectation of abuse and offers a metaphor for the suffering of old age
Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rendition is an
intense account of some undeniable facts of the 'civilised' life and old age.
Photograph: Brentonwest/Alamy
"Rendition" used to be an innocent sort of word, likely to be found in a
kindly local-paper report of the end-of-term junior-school concert: "The Year 3
Recorder Band rounded off the evening with a tuneful rendition of 'Kumbaya'."
Now the juridical meaning of the word is the one uppermost in people's minds,
the qualifier "extraordinary" hovering with added menace. "Rendition" in this
sense means the handing over of a person from one jurisdiction to another:
"extraordinary rendition" allows the person to be sent to another country,
usually one permitting interrogation under torture.
This week's poem,
"Rendition", by the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, is shaped around a
litany of pleas, spoken by someone imagining, and expecting, various forms of
physical abuse. It's from the "New Poems" section of a career-spanning New and
Selected Poems, recently published by Carcanet. Wallace-Crabbe, born in
1934, is a prolific and versatile writer. His technical accomplishment is
immense, and the quick-thinking, good-humoured demotic makes it all look easy
and easygoing. But his poetry is also concerned with
the "blood and tears" that the painter and war-poet Isaac Rosenberg described,
in relation to his paintings, as necessities of art. He was uncertain of his
abilities as an artist, but when Rosenberg went into the trenches, he wrote
poems that were true to the "blood and tears" of a particularly terrible war.
"Rendition" has the universality and particularity of a great war-poem – but the
frontline from which Wallace-Crabbe reports is not that of the battlefield.
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