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The Language Creatures, Isobel Thrilling, 2007, Shearsman Books.  £8.95 ISBN 978-1-9057002-1-9

Thrilling is a not sufficiently well-known poet but one whose exciting work has, however, far more precision and explores much more deeply than most. Her new book, her fourth collection, is a schooling in economical but vivid expression. Words fall beautifully on the page: for example, alexandrines (fourteen syllables) broken into three lines

Ravens of grief
still hang
in the grey and silver landscape.               (The Saxon Lyre)

Children catch sky in pails,
pieces of cloud,
little green crabs                                      (Honed)

I choose for my daughter
this gift
of a plum-coloured shawl                     (A Taste of Mulberry)

There are, in fact, endless sensitive permutations of short lines, with the result that the occasional line of five stresses or more may be used to carry exceptional weight.

Both in Thrilling’s general approach and the layout on the page, I found something elusive which ought to have been obvious at once: parallels with Chinese and Japanese poetry. Awareness of the Far East is everywhere, “I hadn’t known the Tibetan / singing bowl …” (The Singing Bowl), “I have put away my summer kimono” (Growing the Season), “This Chinese bowl is / barely tangible / thinskinned / as if spun from light” (Creation), “In China they would celebrate rain, / gaze from special pavilions” (Landscape with Rain). It is unsurprising therefore that we come across individual verses which are pure haiku

Night-rain: my mother brushing her
long, black hair,
two sounds braiding their silks. (The Daughter’s Tale)

and many more, perhaps a syllable or two short of the classic seventeen, which seem to breathe the same spirit: “a day of charcoal and pewter / luminous greys / soft-edged like fur” (Remembering Meg).

Exact descriptions of colour, exquisite tactile values, a close engagement with the quality of sound, pervasive references to weather and season, all mark an affinity with the oriental – and yet this is very hard-hitting poetry with a contemporary edge and explores some difficult themes. These include aging, severe illness, close friendships, the death of friends, the way adults sometimes repress children and destroy creativity with their own heavy-handed ideas (a potent theme, personal in ‘Birth of an Escapologist’ and critical of society at large in ‘Nursery Schools’: “crammed with loud plastic colours / squawking red, yellow, green / and blue …. Here, children are cartoons given / hammer-blows of hues”). An interesting theme runs through the book of the intrusive visitor, self-satisfied, and undermining. There is a strain of Jane Austen ‘crossness’ here and occasionally, rather unexpectedly, Thrilling ‘lashes out’.

She is not didactic and, apart from marked honesty about the mother-daughter relationship, she is not often self-revelatory. With all the emphasis on immediately pleasing sense impressions here – and there are many lighter poems – we could miss the ambition. This emerges in two main ways: frequent experiment with form, including delightful and almost extravagant examples, such as Aquarium, and in her willingness – her obvious need, in fact – to consider absolutes.

Sometimes she offers reflections, as in Remembering Easter, a questioning poem about suffering, which moves from a poignant vision of “the sick laid out / on the snows of their illnesses” through a picture of mental confusion to ask, “Does this make sense of part / of the Crucifixion?” More often, she uses the close analysis of a sensation, an impression, to take us beyond the edge of normal vision, as in Amber: “it brims in my hand, / yellow stone / a chunk of cretacious sun // It is warm to the touch, an ember from dusts, / not the ghost of a life-form / now extinct, / a shift in matter, gold blood”.