South Reviews
Rik Wilkinson and Geoff Bould
A Hundred Mile Walk – Rik Wilkinson;
Shadows – Geoff Bould;
Acumen Occasional Pamphlets 11 & 12; each £3.50
Having spent countless childhood outings to find trig points, I was immediately at ease with many of the twenty-three poems in Rik Wilkinson’s A Hundred Mile Walk. Rik worked as an Ordnance Surveyor, and writes from a deep knowledge of landscape and nature. This is evident in the lyrical Take Five, a poem dedicated to the artist Richard Long, who produced an artwork using one of Rik’s maps. The poem opens ‘Maps do not show the heights of pine,/ The deer’s gnawed track, the sweeping bough’. In contrast, there is witty vision in Thames Source where the streams of the upper river are the wagging tails of a pack of dogs. The poet has a keen ear; using metre effortlessly, rhyme and part-rhyme carefully. In his sonnet, The Cockerel, Time he writes of grazing calves –’Twin-plumed breath burst on their snuffled feast/ And the heat in their red hide sweated and steamed’. Flight is another of the poet’s passions; although I was discouraged by the opening stanzas of The Last Flight, by the end I was utterly hooked. It wryly laments the triumph of common sense over passion, describing the day of Concorde’s final touchdown. I particularly liked ‘And this our precious O, the place of death and birth;/ The swirling blue, the weathered face of Earth.’ This is a most enjoyable pamphlet from a witty and humane voice.
There is also work that impresses in Geoff Bould’s pamphlet of war poems, Shadows. The poet was a tank-crew member serving in World War II, and many of the most powerful poems derive directly from that experience. The poem Tank describes a typical desert night for a tank crew; on guard-duty the night air ‘released our secret selves’; dawn brings a return to the careful rituals of military life, and the tense waiting inside the ‘brutal home’ poignantly nicknamed Chico. The spare language is vivid and chilling. In Mirage a strange but haunting comparison is made between a heavy tank and a shire horse. The poet clearly conveys the permanent damage war does to those who experience it at first-hand. In Search, images of war are inescapable – ‘...quartering my mind/ searching for a place/ beyond this circling lighthouse beam/ where I may sit without this fear’. Museum is a fine poem about reactions to the sanitised ‘artefacts of death’ carefully displayed in a military museum. Sometimes the poet adopts a didactic tone, which is less effective than when he simply describes. He is at his descriptive best in Refugees where an elderly woman is tenderly left by the roadside to die; this is an unforgettable poem, strong and sad – a complete condemnation of war. Shadows carries a helpful afterword from the poet.
Page(s) 56
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The