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For All Seasons – Barbara Cormack; Acumen Publications, £3.50

In one of those numinous moments life occasionally throws up, I was reading Barbara Cormack’s poem November: Ayot Green on a bus, wondering why we were sitting so long at a stop. I suddenly realised it was November 11th and the driver was giving us our two minutes’ silence. Looking again, I read, “It could not have been more chilling / if the sun had been going down forever” and “In the distance we could hear the guns: / one last drive before dark.” Barbara Cormack’s poems are full of such deceptively simple language that turns out to be engaging with large issues. This nicely produced pamphlet is a first collection, appearing posthumously, her mostly unpublished poems having been sent out and about after her death by fellow poet Martin Cook. Douglas Cormack (whom Barbara met and married in her native U.S.A. before coming to live in England) has written the foreword, stressing how her “previously private insights on the human condition in the natural world and her lightness of touch” are here revealed “in a more sustained manner than is achievable by reading individual poems in isolation.” These (mostly) short poems of love, landscape, our place in the social and natural world, and survival (in its various senses) certainly benefit from being read as a group; telling juxtapositions – such as those between Landscape with Tree and In Sheep’s Clothing, Survival Training and Survival, or between Lilac Time and Memories – emerge. These self-effacing, free verse poems use rhyme, half-rhyme, and assonance subtly to present distillations of thought that seem the opposite of portentous. Read them in order, or start with the ‘manifesto’ poem So What’s New – the rueful conclusion of which (“I could think only of my own neck”) made me smile and shudder in rapid succession.