Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Journey from Winter: Selected Poems, Valentine Ackland, (ed. Frances Bingham), 2008  Carcanet Press. £18.95 ISBN 978-1-8575487-6-1

“For Ackland, being a poet was
not something which one practised
daily but a vocation which infused
every aspect of living.”

Spanning nearly forty years, Valentine Ackland’s Journey from Winter is a comprehensive selection of her work which is inextricably bound to the guiding principles by which she lived her life. For Ackland, being a poet was not something which one practised daily but a vocation which infused every aspect of living. She ‘owned’ her poems not merely in the sense of authorship but in placing herself firmly within the poem whether as lover, revolutionary, champion of the unfortunate or a sage defining and re-defining the role of the poet. For Ackland, this role was not merely a layer down of words but bore the heavy responsibility to speak out against any injustice, to be emotionally truthful no matter the consequence – a role which befits an intermediary between heaven and earth, between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh.

It is this powerful emotive drive towards truth that initially led Ackland to defy her beloved father, a father for whom, even as a child, she would brave the bombs of WW1 whilst the rest of the household fled to safety. Her refusal, at sixteen, to relinquish a sexual relationship with another girl caused her to be cast out from his home yet, even though forcibly separated, she continued to write moving laments to her beloved. Ackland never disguised the fact that her poems addressed love between two women and the first section of Journey is a mutual exploration with the already established poet Sylvia Townsend Warner of their long-term relationship.

Whether a Dove or a Seagull is a sequence of 109 poems, 55 by Ackland and 54 by Warner, which vaunts their physical love, emotional commitment and the sheer creative joy each found in the other. Written in a near antiphon-response mode the individual poems were published unattributed which affected their reception – people were more pre-occupied with the authorship, than appreciation of the poems.

The birds in the title of the sequence symbolise the many aspects of their love from the gentle domestic dove to the restless, untamed seagull: each is equal, each has ascendancy on a particular day. “And I must know before I go away / If for today / The weather of our love is wild or fair / or ill or well” (Whether a dove or seagull lighted there). The direct, simple language reflects the sentiment whilst in the lyrical The rocket is loosed acknowledges the complexities of love “ ... not straight, not forging straight – / ... Heaven is dark and away” as the “Brief twine of flame, this must fall to ground and die, / As we…”

Many of the poems within this sequence are the precursors for Ackland’s later pre-occupations. Which poet cannot identify with ‘It has ceased to have life since I wrote a poem about it,’? A poet – and possibly a lover – is identified as ‘A thief who must drain the sap from the tree of life.’ Yet in so doing one must constantly question what it is to be a poet.

Another pre-occupation is expressed in the grittiness of The Lonely Woman, which depicts the life of a country woman whose only contact with the world is the passing farmhands who bring the paper of an evening. This poem is a precursor to Country Conditions, a collection of prose writings exposing the utterly impoverished life of country folk, especially women, during the depression. Ackland was equally at ease in writing about love, the sea or the countryside and, although she could be romantic, she wasn’t falsely sentimental especially in her ‘pastoral’ poems. Hence the 1938 In those far mornings, when the cold winter lay a shepherd bleakly trudges “the steep way to home from hut / was the way from birth to the grave so slow / he passed, with the dark on his shoulders like a pall”.

The pall that lay over Europe in the 30’s and 40’s was the depression, WW2 and the Spanish Civil War. In this latter both Ackland and Townsend Warner, now Communists, served with the British Red Cross. Ackland’s poetry became increasingly and overtly political with titles such as Communist Poem, 1935 and Instructions from England. However, after WW2 she engaged in a deeper exploration of the relationship between body and soul with all the hesitations and uncertainties that entailed. “There are no true maps of the kingdom…” (Journey from Winter).

It would be natural for Ackland to engage upon such an exploration having witnessed the horrors of the Spanish Civil War but perhaps recognition of her mortality was also made evident to her through her ageing body and the concomitant realisation that physical joys were no longer liable to be fulfilled as intensely as before. For Ackland, love, especially physical love, was still the fundamental driving force behind her poetry, hence loss of physical prowess posed a peril to her poetical powers.

Whilst undoubtedly, at least initially, Ackland owed a debt to female predecessors such as Sappho she may also be compared to modern women poets. She has the political fervour of Adrienne Rich and the concern for the environment of a Jorie Graham. For her there was an intertwining of all living beings. Certainly, if her work is lost there will be a greater loss to the history of women’s poetry which makes this edition an invaluable addition to one’s bookshelf.