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Singing in the Dark by Alison Brackenbury
(Carcanet, 2008)

Alison Brackenbury’s Singing in the Dark is what we have come to expect from a poet who has crafted poetry over the past twenty years, culminating in this latest collection of tightly written, considered poetry. For her fans (of which I’m one), the familiar tropes and subjects are there; cats, horses, the quiet moments of reflection and a reverence for history, crafted around the ballad form. I could lace this review with a reiteration of the musicality it contains, her preference for three line stanzas and the presence of full rhyme on every page; and yet the most enticing thing for me about this collection is her incessantly, and in places aptly dark, lyrical treatment of temporality.

‘City Cruise’ in particular marks the passing of time between friends whilst neatly knitting London’s history, underpinned by the ongoing constant of the Thames’ tide;

With the grey Thames calm and endless
With our first half century gone
Still late, we race the jetty, on
To the tilting decks, as careless

As stubborn schoolgirls we once were …

We see the steps where pirates drowned.

Brackenbury’s subtle use of time connectives and layering of (hi)stories is exquisite; the reader is carefully and flawlessly drawn from the mapping of one journey onto another. The journey of ageing, or indeed death, seems to echo from almost every page.

This is again prevalent as her choice of poetic subject; the elegiac poems dedicated to both Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley (not to mention Clare and Brahms) seem to exemplify her love and admiration of both music and lyrical capacity whilst exploring the darkness of those whose journey is cut short by tragedy. Perhaps in these poems – ‘Carried Away’ being the most powerful for me – there is an underlying sense of loss to creativity as a whole; the opening couplet (without the dedication) could just as easily apply to the suicide of Virginia Woolf – “Walk, with clothes, into the river: / You could stay young and strong for ever.”

But as is expected from such a diverse collection, this questioning of death and creativity is echoed elsewhere; in ‘Young, gifted’ she asks;

Yet if they lived, would they now fail again? …
They scrawled words, whispered song. …
Savage, yet sweeter, because they are dead.

Whether the voices or indeed the words that remain are savage and/or sweet because of death is left for the reader to decide, but Brackenbury is attempting to capture their temporality nonetheless; for all her voices are left in the darkness of history. There is also an underlying sense of lost or re-written history throughout the collection; a re-imagining of an unwritten history in ‘Lesbia, later’ concludes that “history loses us”; a revisionary version of happy endings in ‘The Jane Austen Reader’ leave a tension between truth and fiction; “But no you cry. No truth. These deal with love. / They are books we love. They must be right.”

The collection left me with a sense of marking time, (re)writing (hi)stories, an exploration of ageing with a knowing wink at the constant of history itself; Brackenbury poignantly asks, “[D]oes history lie?” I ask myself whether I need the answer or should I in fact, simply listen to her many voices.