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Lauris Edmond: In Position. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £6.95.
Gillian Allnutt: Nantucket and the Angel. Bloodaxe, £6.95.

     The New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond was born in 1924, but did not begin publishing until she was over fifty, since when she has been most prolific. This new collection is a study of love and death and the death of love. It examines in particular the poet’s sense of her own portion of time, a time nobody else would appreciate (“They wouldn’t feel its kick, or/ understand this gleam in its eyes”) and which she regards, as this quotation suggests, as a mother might regard an impending birth or a lover the start of an affair. She may be an elderly writer, but she can write of her joys with a lithe, physical fieriness, and of her pains with fascinated, unflinching accuracy:

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven’t got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you’d think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller - well, it’s not so...
                                                        (‘In Position’)

It is this ability to capture “the entire unarguable truth” in plain-spoken deeply-felt metaphor, that makes her such a readable poet: as in her evocation (in ‘Lake Tutira’) of swans whose “eyes do not, and will not, blink”, who glide upon perfectly faithful reflections towards the edge of their natural element. Physical beauty sailing on in the face of change - like the old women in tea-shops she describes “holding carefully to their intimate,/ patient, unspoken knowledge of approaching decay”. Her poetry confronts “the clearer quotidian weather/ of morning and evening”, piercing the “ambiguous mist” that might dull the edge of other poets’ writing on old age. “The time has gone for lies”, she says, “and the kindness of lies”.

     The only ambiguity is in the central sequence, and concerns the identity of some of the subjects. The sequence, ‘Subliminal’, appears to deal mainly with the death of a former husband. The poem ‘One to one’, for example, opens: “Love ends, as it began, in a flash...” and we seem to be experiencing a death from the inside (as we did in ‘The Husband’ a few pages back - “this marvellous sheet of flame that swept across/ and took it all”), but it suddenly dawns that “this sheer end” is in fact the narrator’s realisation that a marriage is over. Yet even as we see it is not a death, we are shown a corpse (Edmond is never afraid of corpses) - “The marbled hands, the odour of/ embalming”: it is the dead estranged husband. So death and the death of love walk hand in hand out of “the changed, unloving years”. These ironic twists are characteristic: in ‘A Matter of Timing’ a nostalgically observed home proves by the last stanza to be in the hands of strangers; in ‘Tree Surgeon’ (Edmond is famous for her tree poems) a memorial sapling proves to be of a variety as short-lived as the person it commemorates. There is always a place in Edmond’s poetry for the unexpected, good or bad.

     The long third section of the book is full of a brilliant violent light against darkness, as if her timeless determination to burn to the very end makes Edmond draw courage wherever she can - from the trapeze artist (“a flare of crimson light in the dark”); from her daughter “like a flower, a flame” in an audience of dark suits; or from thinking of her grandchild back home while travelling through “dirty England” - even if that particular cloud of glory is made ironic by an adjacent poem about nuclear testing in the Pacific. Wintry moods are held off again and again by Lauris Edmond’s Spring-born joie-de-vivre. It is November and she is waiting for the dawn to catch fire. Hearing the birds, she remarks, with a casualness that conceals how moved she is: “it’s a blink of daylight/ in their eyes, that’s all. Imagine that/ being enough to make you want to sing.”

*

     Gillian Allnutt’s book is also haunted by old age, but at a remove, because Allnutt is considerably younger than Edmond. And whereas In Position does not introduce us to many live old people (other than the poet herself, the rest are dead), several aged figures stalk the pages of Nantucket and the Angel. One of them is the poet’s grandmother, subject of ‘The Garden in Esh Winning’:

Go then into the unfabricated dark
With your four bare crooked tines, fork,
And get my grandmother out of that muddle of dock and
                              dandelion root
And put an end to neglect
While the wind says only Esh Esh
In the late apple blossom, in the ash
And all the hills rush down to Durham...

The other is what Allnutt calls her own “elder ego”, her imagined 90-year-old self, the ‘Crone’ Nantucket of the title. This central sequence is conceived on musical lines, with thematic development and leitmotifs (angel, elephant, aphid...): it is playful, Muldoonish, as raucous as Crow, as psalmodic as Offa, with a touch of another Hill, too - Selima (to whom Allnutt declares herself indebted). Fancy rather outstrips necessity here, and I found this a stylish divertissement rather than the work of symphonic range she might have intended. But I would recommend strongly the individual poems earlier in the book.

     Allnutt is a poet of considerable spiritual scope, one whose sense of “old forgotten bridlepaths” pushes English mystical nature poetry a few inches into the next millennium, and whose awareness that this is nevertheless still “dirty England”, “a land of blown plastic bags”, gives her lightning visions a secure earth. She was wise, I think, to open the book with a striking poem about pylons:

Glumdalclitch, glumdalclitch, glumdalclitch
They mumble on dark summer days. They say Tch Tch
To the muddle of low-flying larks, bees, gnats and, later on, bat-
Mobiles caught by the light
Of the moon in the pliant wire...

This whole poem has a wonderful lyric authority, a broad open outdoor electricity to it; and it sits perfectly (not only for Brobdingnagian reasons) beside the witty claustrophobia of ‘Notes on living inside the lightbulb’. The opening of ‘The Singing Pylons’ shows what a sprightly confidence Allnutt has in the sound of poetry. She is unafraid of rhetorical gestures and audible music: “O where is Lillian, the long-legged logician?/ She to the island is gone...” begins ‘The Island of Old Academic Gowns’. Allnutt is one of our most versatile users of half-rhyme, internal rhyme and vowel-music. She has taken what she needs from folk-song, nursery rhyme, nonsense verse, from Middle and Old English, from writers as diverse as Hopkins and Rilke, generating a unique lyricism from the polarities of her particular obsessions: tight corners of all kinds, from living in that lightbulb, to “being the littlest Russian nest egg doll” or exploring the head of a deaf fisher-girl; then - the other pole - wide open waters, fens, marshes on which to drift (boats appear in many of the poems). If Lauris Edmond has her moments of natural living fire to guide her, Gillian Allnutt has “her angel Gabriel’s pocket silver/ pig of pure/ annunciation”. But what delighted me in reading this book was to discover a contemporary poet who listens.