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DAVID TIPTON: Pachacamac (23pp/25p); Black Clough (19pp/50p signed) - from the Rivelin Press, 157 Sharrow Vale Road, Sheffield, Yorkshire S11 8ZA, UK.

David Tipton had been writing a considerable number of years before he achieved the unforced serenity of descriptive tone of his present work. The self-conscious style and awkwardness in handling the unfamiliar, evident in his earlier poems, has now gone. For those in Pachacamac particularly, be seems to have learned from the Peruvian writers he translates. Two poems by Cisneros are included in the book and fit perfectly with those around them. It covers the years 1968-70, when he was teaching in Lima, and describes simply and effectively what it was like to be alive at that time.

     The exotic is no longer insisted on as something strange now but is accepted as part of the background of his life. The landscape is there as a frame for spiritual and emotional complexes. Revolutions and natural disasters rumble in the background but he himself is happily at peace, full of interest in everything he does, and in the company of his wife and three children. Even so, the menace of distant gunshots in the first poem, the detritus thrown up by the sea which turns up constantly, are there for a purpose. They look forward to more metaphysical threats in the knowledge that so much happiness cannot last.

     The poem “Plans” ends with the ominous lines “dreaming of the future/ as if our lives were endless”; in the final poems he takes leave of Peru, “moving on and glad to be leaving”. The collection is more than a finely written journal; it represents his poetic breakthrough, a work of diverse topics and many moods, but forming an admirable unity.

     At first sight the poems of Black Clough present a great contrast. Gone are the long, loping lines of continuous narrative, giving place to terser work made up of short bursts of speech, connective and transitional matter disappearing Into the hiatus between words. These are poems of the 70’s and deal with Sheffield and the surrounding countryside. But they too, for all that they seem to concentrate on rendering a scene and its moment of experience, are emotional vehicles.

     One can take them on several levels. Sheffield is one of my spiritual homes and it is easier for me to visualize his area of experience, see and feel as he does; nevertheless, the sense of place is compelling and any reader ought to be able to appreciate what they do. Just as he was able to handle the exotic without insistence, seeing it in the context of everyday reality, so he makes of the North something exotic by looking at it in the same scrupulous and impartial way.

     A sense of both continuity and discontinuity Is a major aspect of the work. It is revealed in the title poem, which deals with an expedition (such as he often describes), together with children and girlfriend, to a moor-land picnic spot, bringing to mind those he made in Peru when his wife was alive. It seems now “a lost paradise”, “a never-never land”. The next poem treats movingly a dream of his dead wife and the sense of futility he feels.

     Things move on but they do not change. Behind many of the poems there is the feeling, not now of the brooding menace underlying the Peruvian poems, but of abrasion. The still and joyful moments he experiences are thinner, they do not endure so long; life is hurrying them on. Unpleasant realities lurk behind even the best. The few poems dealing with the sea, and swimming, point this up. To treat it (or the business of living) with frivolity is to expose oneself to its ever-present dangers. Nothing melodramatic: it is almost humdrum, in fact.

     Tipton is not out to provide answers to the human predicament. It is enough to record It as he finds it, the thin ice of happiness onto which we venture, the black gulf of unhappiness underneath. We know it but we don’t like to think shout it. Nor does he, but it is there all the same.