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The two epigraphs which open Sue Hubbard’s second collection position the reader well for the work within. Rilke’s lines from the ninth Duino Elegy (“we keeping pressing on, trying to achieve it, / trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands”) suggest the idealistic struggle which powers much of Hubbard’s work, while the lines from Fernando Pessoa (“Some have a great dream in life, and fall short of it”) alert the reader to the fact that many of these struggles must end in failure. Here then is a poet who serves as an antidote to the chirpy shallow materialism of much of our culture, one whose most apparent quality is an honesty about the difficulties of living in the early 21st century.

   In fact, Keats is the ghost invoked by many of these poems. This is not only because of the extraordinary lush sensuality of much of Hubbard’s work, but also because it was Keats who wrote that the sharpening of human vision convinces us that “the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression”. Hubbard’s first collection, Everything Begins With The Skin (1994), already suggested both her typicality and her uniqueness. Here were poems about an insecure and unsatisfactory girlhood, in part traceable to the insecure sense of self of a Jewish girl being brought up in the Home Counties; poems about a failing marriage and the difficulties of raising children alone; poems which conveyed the unbearable isolation experienced by some women at the fag end of the 20th century. Fashionable themes in some ways - but there was an overwhelming intensity about the treatment of them, contrasted with a kind of neurasthenic emotional exhaustion. Her treatment of the Icarus myth, for example, casts the boy as an idealistic Romantic aspirer in contrast to Daedalus the rational inventor, the man who warns about limits and conventions. But Icarus “needed visions / and possibilities, at night / dreaming”. The poem records with utter conviction the creation of the wings – “the old cockerel’s hackles / into warm wax” – and the markedly androgynous boy describes the flight as like a loss of virginity, the fall inevitable, and passive, despairing – a slow-motion plummeting from the heights: “the tug and ooze of brine-soaked wings / and salt bubbles breaking /
and breaking across my tongue”.

Ghost Station continues to mine three rich veins uncovered by its predecessor. Firstly, memory is an important source of inspiration, particularly of romantic encounters and family relationships. One section of this collection is devoted to the suicide of Hubbard’s brother. Secondly, many new poems extend her treatment of the natural world as a place of beauty where human idealism can best be contemplated. This is most vividly seen in Saratogan Morning, a 15 line dawn lyric in which the poet, a deer and a fawn are held in a “communion” which briefly threatens to become static as a picture on an ancient vase, only for Hubbard to report “a small red bird darted across / the clearing like something bursting / in from the rim of this material world”.

Thirdly, as an art critic, Hubbard often draws on the visual arts and, though many of these poems are amongst the finest examples of what is now a relatively common tendency in contemporary poetry, they also suggest an absence of Keatsian negative capability. From a wide range of images, the poems draw out Hubbard’s own key notes - a yearning idealism in poems such as Nude in Bathtub and Portrait of a Woman in Blue Tunic and a solitary exhaustion and alienation in The Sower, Crows over the Wheatfield and Room in
New York, 1932.

Hubbard’s work is confessional in that it values honesty and self-revelation as a good in its own right. An example is the poem Rope in which the now abandoned narrator recalls making love, “you / entering me from behind”, the lover pulling back her hair so that “my face / tilted upwards like the carved / figure on the prow of a ship”. It is the directness of this writing which is so persuasive and moving and allows the poem to end with the hope for a lost future in which “you would twine the now / silver-streaked coil, hauling / me in across deep water…as if never wanting to let me go”.

Though confessional in mode, Rope is also a highly imagined piece – and in this lies one of Hubbard’s fascinations as a writer. Her work is often heavily adjectival and especially visual, obsessively circling its subject to such an extent that an amazing transformation can occur and the reader is suddenly aware of being confronted less with confessional realism, more with a super-real, mythic experience. Rather than Keats here, or the confessionalism of Plath, an appropriate ghost to summon might well be that of Angela Carter. Of the new poems, it is the sequence called Metamorphosis which demonstrates this tendency most clearly and contains (for this reader) some of the most exciting poems in the book. Though the motor behind these poems remains often bitter experience, they are cut loose from having to record it, so that Moss Woman begins “All night her skin erupts, / her face a sphagnum mask.” Surreal this certainly is, but the sense of claustrophobia and loss of personal identity and of personal beauty is powerfully conveyed: “she shelters behind / the thick foliage of herself, / her heart in hiding”. This is remarkable writing, born of a long and painful negotiation both with personal experience and the art of poetry.

   Hubbard’s work has a relatively narrow range, her palette of forms and tones likewise. But we do not (if we have any sense) require Wordsworth to show more knowledge of the streets, ask Larkin to cheer up a bit, insist Lowell should stop talking about himself. There is a type of art that confidently positions itself early and continues to work that seam. Sue Hubbard’s poetry is of this type and it is simply the fact that her responses and style are not a la mode that her work is not as familiar as it deserves to be. It also means that Salt are to be complimented on recognising a writer of real worth and it is to be hoped that the security of this already respected new publisher will encourage Hubbard to ever finer work.