Reviews
Otters and Martens by Colin Simms
A5, perfect bound,162pp £9.95. ISBN 0-907562-50-7 Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4 4LD www.shearsman.com
Colin Simms seems to have nurtured no such messianic ambitions. Indeed the one intent of Otters and Martens seems to be to bring together all of his poems - spanning some 40 years - of the two creatures. What these 162 pages tell us is that here is a poet entranced by both animals' sinuous elusiveness; the shape of the poems, often with white space in place of hard punctuation, conveying the watery element of the one and the flicker-by glimpse of the other. (For martens the white gaps are, in one instance, between the print column uprights of trees.)
Along with his love of the two creatures Colin Simms, naturally, laments the industrial / political destruction of their habitats. (He knows his place, '...we the watchers watched...' [A way of martens through trees].) What makes this not only a book for those with a naturalist bent, however, is Colin Simms' very obvious love of language: the look of it, the shape of the poem on the page, sound strings, his telling use of local onomatopoeic dialect, and withal one concept weaving into another.
wethead weight but bulk
silkstrokes lodestone but arrow
flagstones fast paddle linking puddles with lithe light
airthins cannot be held I'm thinking sackskins
utterly wet your body slumps but is not yet dead
the lead loaded pole hasn't dealt put plumbed
death held off an instant a moment coming up now
for last breath reddening all the water here forever
no matter how often I come back I will come back
rub like you did against the bankstones, its terracettes
and the bark of alder and in the stiff thickets
Otter (Is Not)
Note his use of that one comma. Magnificent!
And slippery as water some poems spill over A5 and the book has to be turned on its side, white reflections among the lapping of print. And not all is otter and marten, but tales of poachers and bailiffs and anglers, with superstition and lore weighed among them. Nor are his observations of sea- and tree-weasels confined to the UK, he finds them in America and Asia too. At times a lament for all their decline; on occasion a celebration of their return, their enduring...This is why I write reviews, to come by books like this.
Page(s) 33
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