Alcock Reviews Lane & Hill
There could hardly be two poets of greater contrast than Lane and Hill yet they come together to demonstrate the quality and diversity of west midlands poetry, representing Birmingham and Bromsgrove, respectively.
Reviewing Joel Lane’s first book, The Edge of the Screen [Arc 1999], in the CP Newsletter, January 2001, I likened his work to ‘a kind of CCTV’, dispassionate, grainy and all-seeing. This remains true of some of the poems in his latest book, Trouble in the Heartland, though, if the filmic analogy is to be pursued, we now have the selectivity of the documentary maker’s eye and hand – some scenes ‘fly on the wall’ others set pieces, recorded and analysed.
If I were to take issue it would not be with the poems but with the book’s back cover! The blurb rather over-directs the reader as to how the poems, in their three groups, should be interpreted and, even though it may have been written by the poet himself, I am not sure I agree. The buzzword is ‘chaos’ and, while I accept that a writer’s role may be to attempt to bring order out of chaos, it is a little too clichéd. The poems are more subtle than this. In the first section, ‘Hard Copy’, life in the city [Birmingham] is dissected and the echoes of his first book are strongest; a frozen city dominated by [even in these days of global warming] – snow. Section two, ‘Solo Flight’, is more inward-looking: personal dilemmas, quests and questionings. In the third section, ‘Common Ground’, there is a lot of music – karaoke, punk, 12-bar blues – offering a coming together. Its first poem is entitled ‘The Healing Begins’ and sets the tone. Even the city itself is changing: ‘The Ghost Market’ tackles the Bull Ring’s metamorphosis. But there is also a need to look back, to perceive a pattern that might suggest an agenda for the future, offering an occasional glimpse: ‘…through the torn-up clouds / I can see the faint swirl of a galaxy / frozen, a snapshot made permanent.’ [‘Andromeda’.] The other buzzword on the back cover is ‘hope’.
Several Cannon Poets attended Geoffrey Hill’s reading in Bromsgrove last year. Back for a while on home ground, he is as likely to be found in the lobster bars of the Massachusetts shoreline [Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University]. Now in his 70s, he is keeping up the pace of a prolific output with Scenes From Comus, and living up to Poetry Review’s simple accolade, that he is ‘staggeringly gifted’. Hill has also been accused of being the archetypal ‘grumpy old man’. Much of his recent poetry has been concerned with the process of ageing but his grumpiness, if that’s what it is, is more due to a perceived impatience with those who do not have his livewire mind for ideas or his meticulous precision of language.
Scenes From Comus is obviously intended as a parallel with Milton’s masque and there are many similarities. Milton collaborated with the composer Henry Lawes; this book is dedicated to his friend Hugh Wood, whose compositions include a symphonic cantata bearing the same title. Coincidentally, Hill’s book, like Lane’s, is divided into three parts. Here, each section contains poems of similar construction: of 10, alternating 9/7, and 12 lines respectively. Their metricality suggests music as does Hill’s convention of applying stress marks to certain syllables [the anti-grumpies react badly to being told how to read the poems but Hopkins got away with it]. Milton’s Comus was written to be performed at Ludlow Castle and some of Hill’s most accessible poems tour the border counties [‘where England ends half way across a field’] along the River Severn – the ‘Sabrina’ of both Milton and Hill: ‘There áre fawns, / even nów, ín the still haunted purlieus / between Bewdley and Ludlow; and stags rutting.’ Sexual prowess and decline of with age are not unknown in Hill’s work. War is another theme linking Milton’s time with Hill’s: the English Civil and Second World wars. As a bleak contrast to England’s pastoral beauty the harsh landscapes of Iceland are invoked. Being Hill, his jetlag breaking stopovers in Reykjavik lead naturally to comparing the works of Milton with his Icelandic contemporary Hallgrímur Pétursson.
Finally, I realise this review has failed so far to do justice to one further link between Lane and Hill: their humour. Joel’s poems are flecked with wry humour while Geoffrey’s share with his friend ‘that wit-bibber from Hull’ – no prizes for guessing who he is – the dryness of irony and yielding to the occasional pun. Two worthy books that both deserve to be read and re-read.
Joel Lane, Trouble in the Heartland, Arc [2004]
Geoffrey Hill, Scenes From Comus, Penguin [2005]
Page(s) 30-31
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