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Is It Now, Daphne Rock, 2006, Hearing Eye. £3 ISBN 1-9050822-3-1

Reading these books, mainly pamphlets or longer collections by lesser-known poets (some should be much better known!), I debated what is about the right length to aim for for poets who are not household names and therefore have to sell themselves to the reading public? Of course, there is no simple answer. Optimum length must relate to the poet’s purpose, to the publisher’s aims (short introductions to new poets?), the quality and ambition of the poems.

A short (23 page) collection which packs a punch is Daphne Rock’s Is It Now. The £3 asked is a nominal amount for this inspiring pamphlet. I take these to be poems written after Rock was diagnosed with a dangerous form of cancer and – she is very direct about her chances throughout this book – was not expected to live long. She had a short extension of life and died last year. The richness and vitality of these poems is exemplary and several seem to me to surpass her previous work, though always a strong writer. The difference lies in the many-layered ambition of poems such as Years Later: Mewslade Bay, Gower, a Tintern Abbey type of poem about the different responses you may have to place/landscape/nature ‘years later’. One element here is the teasing consciousness of past vigour, “she is wound with wraiths and shadows / drifting and teasing, as if they could / drag her back, shadow ropes to bind her / with thin half words, reminder of / the glorious leaping from stone to stone”, “god knows / that these were not the legs she began with / on those bright mornings”. Another element is the vitality and resistance she communicates in this poem. Danger threatens, “waves filled with witches from the deep, calling / return, return. Hands strung with sugar kelp / tangle her feet” but we sense the fight-back. As in Wordsworth’s poem thought, emotion and animated depiction of the immediate scene are interwoven. In several of these poems there is a counterpoint between quite harsh realism, “the catheter bag gasping on the floor, murky with urine” and Rock’s relish of mental and spiritual vitality not yet extinguished, “Let my green soul sit on my lips”. Overall, the moving immediacy of these poems – also the bold freedom of expression and layout – is an important legacy.