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     I’ve never met Anne Stevenson, but having read this book I’d like to, which is not always the case when you admire someone’s poems. Endearing characteristics shine through this collection, like the joy in ‘Skills’ at the ingenuity in a complex piece of machinery (“this clever Matchbox toy”) and the adroitness of its driver. Or the loving insight of ‘A Parable for Norman’ (MacCaig); I only met that delightful man once but the voice she gives him is so right, I thought I could hear him speaking. I don’t doubt that the voice of Ted Hughes in ‘Invocation and Interruption’ is equally right; if I didn’t react so positively to that it was because, for once, I didn’t share her affection for the subject. This was rare; I kept discovering affinities and I don’t know if that was because I just happen to share a lot of interests with her, or because she is tapping into concerns which many other readers would share. I am certain very many women, for starters, would react as I and my daughter did to ‘Clydie is dead!’ – not the best title for a beautifully tender, wry elegy for a pet cat:

you will never again rule us by vocative law,
or pull back the bedclothes at six with a firm paw,
or bemoan the indignities of travelling by car,
or flourish an upright tail on crepuscular walks,
no, nor compile statistics on the field mice of Wales.

     Men would like it too of course, assuming they weren’t like the stupidly snooty male editor who told a friend of mine, “Women write far too many cat poems”. (Well, if men were half as nice as cats…) Knowing some people react scornfully to the idea of cherishing or mourning an animal, I have tended lately to disguise my own cat poems so that readers could suppose they concerned friends or children. I admire Stevenson’s braver refusal to care what the hell anyone thinks of honest emotion. She is always brave about that, and about technique. She uses child-voices and ballad metres, both of which can go horribly wrong and sound faux-naif. I worried for a while that this was going to happen to the dream-poem ‘Innocence and Experience’, but in the end the half-recalled snatches of playground rhyme are brilliantly sinister:

Singing sticks and stones
may break my bones
(but names hurt more).

Singing step upon a crack
break your mother’s back
(her platinum-ringed finger).

Singing who got up your mother
When your daddy wasn’t there
Singing allee allee in free! You’re
Dead, you’re dead, wherever you are!

Shades of Vasko Popa. Her willingness and ability to use different techniques give this collection a metrical variety absent from many (seventy-odd pages of free verse can get very monotonous after a while). ‘A Ballad for Apothecaries’, a fiercely political tribute to Nicholas Culpeper sustained over 80 lines of ballad-metre, is a rollicking success. She is fond too of complicated half-rhyme patterns, which she uses so easily that they become unobtrusive, as rhyme ought to be but so often isn’t. When first reading a poem like ‘Arioso Dolente’ or ‘Granny Scarecrow’ you don’t necessarily notice the rhyme, merely that something is making satisfying sound-patterns in the background.

     The back-cover blurb says she approaches ideas “by looking intently at small things and seemingly insignificant events”. That is certainly a better way to approach them than via windy abstractions, as one can see when it comes off. It is how ‘Granny Scarecrow’ conveys a changing way of life. The use of the dead woman’s dress for a scarecrow is practical rather than irreverent; you might call it recycling. And her granddaughters’ unease at the sight of it in winter, “starved in its field of snowcorn”, is seen to have wider implications, as is their choice of another route to the bus stop. They “avoid the country way” through the scarecrow’s cornfield, preferring the road which will take them away from the farm altogether one day.  “They caught the bus. And it caught them”.

     No technique succeeds always. In a few poems, as hard as I look, the events so carefully observed remain, for me, not just seemingly insignificant but genuinely so. I can’t see what ‘Incident’ is getting at, and I’m not sure the epigrammatic ‘Old Wife’s Tale’ and ‘On Going Deaf’ earn their place. The ballad metre, successfully used elsewhere, doesn’t feel quite right in ‘All There Was’; there’s an uncharacteristically sentimental feel to the last verse. And though generally I like the humour and wryness in her voice, I’m not altogether certain about “Mr unresting redstart” (‘Phoenicurus phoenicurus’) and “Mrs Blackbird” (‘Pity the Birds’).

     But these are awfully trivial gripes. As must be apparent, I like this collection a lot, and I don’t think it’s purely because of personally shared interests and affinities, although I am sure that plays a part. It is always fascinating to find a writer who draws inspiration from the sources that kindle your own interest. Two weeks before I read this book, I had been in the Italian Chapel built from a Nissen hut by prisoners of war on Orkney. Indeed I had written a poem about it, so when I read on Stevenson’s contents page the title ‘The Miracle of Camp 60’ (which is also the title of the chapel’s tourist booklet), my first thought was “Bugger!”. Thankfully, when I read the poem, it turned out we had seen the place quite differently. Her POW narrator sees the chapel as an oasis of joy, beauty and peace not only in war but in life (“happier than ever again”), and feels guilt, when he goes home, for having been happy there while his family were suffering the deprivations and violence of war. By extension, this guilt is that of all (reader included) who find pleasure and solace in art while, in real life, people suffer. Chiocchetti, the POW painter who was the chapel’s main creator, shares this guilt but refuses to consider it valid; art, he says, is a necessary earnest of eternal joy, a promise that suffering doesn’t last forever. Chiocchetti, both in real life and in this poem, was devoutly religious, but you don’t need to be a believer, in that sense, to hear something valid in that message. The one reservation I have about the poem is the narrator’s voice. If you use the voice of a foreigner speaking English, you can either write normal English and assume it stands for his own language, or imitate a non-native speaker. She opts for the latter, and mostly the blend of slightly fractured, over-formal English and a lot of Italian words works all right. But there are moments, when he says “how do you say”, or “regard” for “look”, when it worries me. I think it’s an inherently perilous technique, because it can look unintentionally patronising, Johnny Foreigner mangling English. Again this may be personal, to do with ancestry and being forced to read the appallingly unfunny portrayal of Fluellen at school. Stevenson’s Italian voice never descends to anything like the level of Shakespeare’s patronising racist ineptitude but years of hearing stage Welshmen say “look you” can make one instinctively react against this technique even when it is clear (as it is here) that the reverse of disrespect is intended.