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The Language Lobby by Carl Muller

I have just read Fran Landesman's book of poems, "Is It Overcrowded In Heaven?" - a work of quite an eccentric and one who loves being interviewed. She pays it's free psychotherapy, a reply to any one who asks that in both unexpected and quite charming. Actually, she goes about her eccentricity in a most charming way.

For one thing, her poems rhyme and that is fairly unusual nowadays. There's no reason why they should, but it does give me a nice and cosy feeling when they do. And her inspiration, her driving force is love and love affairs. She writes poems and songs, half-recites and half-sings them when she appears before her fans and I am told that Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan have recorded some of her songs.

She likes to perform. She says it is rather like a love affairs. Married, she remains the complete feminist. "The terrible thing about marriage is that it can deform you. It's like two trees growing together; wherever they touch, they can't grow properly. I conduct my life on the principal that I can have my cake and eat it. But you must choose a man to have children with and be your friend and also have love. That is important."

To have love....that is what her poems are all about although the sweet-and-sour rhymes allow us to think that love can also be quite a painful and unsatisfactory business. Is this true? Let us look at one of her poems. It is titled "why Should Love be so Hard on the Heart?":

Why should love be so hard on the heart
Why does it caress you, then tear you apart
Why does it fool you, why does it tease you
Why does it scare you, why does it please you

Why should love be so loaded with pain
Why does it betray you again and again
Why does the promise fade so unfairly
Why does the magic happen so rarely

Ah, those wonderful wild men
They hammer your heart like a fist
You spend your time yearning and sighing and burning
While they're always out getting pissed

Why should love be so tied up in knots
Well either it's that or it's making cheap shots
It gives us a kick and inspires our art
But why should love be so hard on the heart

Times are changing they tell us
There must be a new way to live
Alongside a new love, tender and true love
Who'll gladly return what we give

Why should love be so much on the mind
It staggers our senses and makes us all blind
There must be an answer, we're all so damn smart
So why should love be so hard on the heart

With this one complete poem and I shall give no more. To Fran, who was born in New York where she was called the Punk Grandmother (she is neither) and a female Woody Allen (which also does not fit). She lives now in London and the company that publishes her work is her husband's - a very nice arrangement of course.

Her poems of love are welcomed in many circles and, as she says, love can be very painful but there are many people who need more of an emotional life than others. She insists that she is one of these people. "Love is like a drug and I am addicted to it." In one of her poems, we have these lines:

Somehow the song of the honey
Seems less than the song of the sting

The read her poems is to know the autobiography in them. She admits that they are her diary and also that she is in no way a disciplined writer. "I can't just sit down and write. There has to be knock on the door."

Her themes hold a special sort of fascination for her readers and come loaded with a language that goes straight to the heart. It is unvarnished, agreeably tarnished and quite quirky with a lot of truth that nags the mind with declamatory finger.

Sometimes one stops to consider what sort of woman could write the way she does, with so much music in the love she moulds her way. Is it that she actually is a manic-depressive? She does admit that it is harder to write when things are not going well for her. She also admits that:

My voice may be gritty
But I like being witty
And talk about anything, on and on

A few more lines seem to lack logic:

I smoke and I think
I will die in a blink
But I'd rather die younger and make
An attractive body
Not old and not shoddy
Like an undertaker's powdered mistake

What does one do with a bewildering poet who says it all her way? She keeps bursting in one's head. She can well say: "Free love? That is ridiculous. Nothing is free!" and all London adores her. Truly it can be said: "Modern poetry, thy name is woman!"

(Readers who would like to secure a copy of her latest book, "It is Overcrowded in Heaven?" may ask Vijitha Yapa Bookshop in Nugegoda to order it for you from Golden Handshake Productions, 159, Wardour Street, London W1)

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