Reviews
Barbara Dordi reviews Anne Drysdale's Between Dryden and Duffy
Between Dryden and Duffy:
Another Collection
Ann Drysdale
Peterloo Poets
£7.95
1-904324-29-0
Poems like that of the title poem, demonstrating the dry, literary wit we have come to expect of Ann Drysdale, will make you laugh out loud, while other poems will move you to tears. But this is also a poet who is not afraid to make her readers feel uncomfortable – tackling, as is her wont – subjects lesser poets would fight shy of, ' "Hers is the voice from the back of the lecture hall that always begins "Yes, but.." '
The very first poem, 'Running Through Dandelions' announces Drysdale's unique view of the world: she chooses weed over flower, and animal (a hare) rather than person, 'Rehearsing joy, anticipating fear,/ He dances for the turning of the year.' The poet seems to allude to herself here, 'galloping in exaggerated mime,' through the landscape of this 'dandelion' collection in which she holds up for scrutiny the ordinary, the neglected, the scorned upon, the tragic/humorous event, and through strikingly original imagery,
shows us the world through eyes which often startle us with their perspective.
The first sequence consists of 15 child-centred/nature poems from 'A Landscape in Waiting' (nominated for the Welsh Book of the Year, 2005), commissioned by Bargoed Town Council to celebrate the creation of a woodland park. Drysdale captures the naivety and sometimes indifference of children she worked with when planting the woodland then helping them translate their experience into words. In 'Leaves of Grass' she shows us a typical city kid in the countryside, '"Grass don't have leaves," said Rhys, emphatically, "Cos it's grass, innit."' The poet amusingly explains that to the city child, 'grass is an outdoor carpet, /An early prototype of Astroturf......He has been born into the generation /That coined the verb "to patio."'
This collection houses such diverse poems, in both subject matter and the cast and turn of language, that a brief review cannot be expected to do it justice. Subjects range from the wonderfully quirky, 'What God's got in his pocket', to the courageous 'Scattering His Ashes' sequence in which the poet articulates coming to terms with the illness and eventual death of her husband in poems which are passionate and moving, sometimes humorous, often selfmocking,
but never sentimental. 'My heart is giving trouble; it's been battered
and abused.' ('No Bad Thing') so anti-depressants were prescribed, 'Hurrah for happy Prozac in its coat of green and yellow!' In the deceptively simple and humorous work, 'My Lover Bought Me Saffron', lonely and distraught at the death of her husband, the poet eventually tries to invoke him by cooking his favourite kedgeree:
'I have spiced the space between us
With a cloud of yellow dust
And my lover will be drawn to me
As magic says he must'
Here, as in other poems in this section, the repetitive symmetries of metre and rhyme seem to mimic waves of pain and sorrow, as well as the effort to curb them. The healing warmth of the sun, 'magnificent...yellow, yellow' is recurrently conjured through dandelions, saffron, sunflowers, forsythia, even Apollo himself – god of music and poetry (who was also, incidentally, associated with medicine). The writing of this section may have been part of the healing process, but the reading of it is a potent prescription for any human condition.
The end piece, 'Meeting Apollo', balances well with the opening poem, illustrating as it does, the poet's approach to writing. Set in Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden, St. Ives, when the weather was a 'Snide giggle of soft rain on foliage', the poet retrieves a piece of scrap metal which was 'Beckoning from a lump of broken concrete', and takes it home to set it in the long grass of her own garden: a sculpture to 'mimic the perfection of Apollo.' The self-deprecating final stanza could be said to embody the spirit of the whole collection.
That's how I live, occasionally blessed
By random glimpses of the sad old god
Who wanders through the wreckage of the world
Twanging the slack strings of a busted lyre,
Seeking an echo in a mortal heart.
The lyrical drive of Ann Drysdale's work reverberates more than occasionally in our subconscious; Between Dryden and Duffy: is yet Another Collection which stuns us with its technical brilliance. Her poems can make us feel uneasy, sometimes sad, but much more often, glad to be alive in the wonderful world that she seemingly effortlessly enriches for us.
Page(s) 48-49
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