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Almost by Mike Sharpe
(Envoi Poets Publications, £6.50) 64pp.
Available from Pen Ffordd, Newport, Pembrokeshire SA42 0QT


Born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, Mike Sharpe worked in schools until retiring to rural Pembrokeshire in the late nineteen-eighties. Since then, he’s published a pamphlet, Incomers, with Shoestring Press, and in Almost gathers those poems together with many more, mostly cut from similar cloth. He is primarily a poet of the countryside, observing woodland, birds and a culture that once revolved around church, chapel and lambing times, but this is not a bucolic view, and Sharpe’s eye has more in common with George Crabbe than John Keats. In ‘Incomers’, he reflects on his own position as an outsider in Pembrokeshire, catching the sound “of soft Welsh words/ like whispering flowers” and considering “the salvage rights we’ve bought” in the home whose stone he has been striving to scrape free of lichen:

     …and so we’ve stripped
     such Celtic voices to the stone
     and with cold English eloquence
     replaced them with our own.

   Sharpe’s alertness to these social and economic contexts extends throughout the collection, from the decline and human cost exposed in ‘Farm Sale’ (where “strangers from the hills,/ with little covert signs,/ dismantle what he tried to hold” and “the smack of pen on clipboard echoes/ round us like a muffled shot”) to the historical account of nineteenth century agricultural workers migrating to the coal mines of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in ‘Walking For Work’. A recurring theme is the optimism inherent in nature’s ability to erase human urges towards tidying, when cut grass and hedgerows insist on reasserting themselves as havens for insects and birds, but the bigger picture is of harsh and demanding work broken by fleeting or ambiguous pleasures. Even ‘September Swallows’ become a cause for anxiety as Sharpe muses on the ‘fearsome’ migration ahead, “and them so ill-prepared”.