Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David
Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the
world. The title of his eleventh collection, Belongings, signals that
these are poems concerned both with our possessions and with what
possesses us. Among much else in the word belongings, the poems draw on
a sense of our 'co-ordinates' - something like the eastings and
northings that give a map-reference - how you might triangulate a life.
The poems ask: Where do you belong? And have in mind also the hostile:
You don't belong here. Go back where you belong. Many, possibly all, the
poems in the collection touch more or less closely on such matters.
Perhaps all poetry does, showing a life in its good or bad defining
circumstances. In the poem 'Red', the defining geography is literal,
drawn from an old geological map of Manchester in which Constantine
finds 'the locus itself, a railway cutting / Behind the hospital I was
born in', from which the paths of a life led outward. In other poems the
particular becomes universal, a territory holding all our belongings,
our memories of the people and the places we hold in our hearts. Behind
these explorations another kind of belonging is challenged: our
relationship with the planet to which we belong, but which does not
belong to us.
