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 Martyn Crucefix reviews Julia Casterton’s The Doves of Finisterre (The Rialto £7.95), Tamar Yoseloff’s Barnard’s Star (Enitharmon £7.95) and Jen Hadfield’s Almanacs (Bloodaxe £7.95)

Julia Casterton has published chapbooks with Smith Doorstop and has been a presence on the London creative writing scene for many years. Her first full collection reveals her to be a poet of real originality whose work encompasses a powerful sense of the spiritual.

   She gives us conventional poems first – a series on the death of her mother in Spain. Even here, she pulls off feats of imaginative daring as in Resources which begins ordinarily enough by listing the books she has with her at her mother’s bedside: Chekhov and Lorca as it happens. The poem dwells on the details of Lorca’s murder and ends with an uncanny sense of the crossing-over of the poets’ worlds: “the knowledge of his last hours in my vigil by your bed, / the knowledge of my vigil by your bed in his last hours”.

   Writing mostly in free verse, Casterton rapidly sketches the details of a situation, but her focus is on the emotional or spiritual states arising from it. Waiting pulls no punches about a carer’s role in the “bedpan-carrying, soiled sheets school of love” but concludes with another strange transition as “fatigue takes love beyond itself” and both patient and carer are “astonished at what they have become”. This suggests why these poems of religious faith work so well – Casterton never denies the world of difficult facts. Attending what looks like a re-enactment of the Easter story, one of the actors falls over, “revealing black pants and ample legs as his uniform [rides] up”. Indeed the narrator feels the whole thing has been a “bit of a shambles, / a complete pig’s ear in fact”. The slangy language carries the sceptic’s conviction, but it ironically spills into the final line with its contrasting, steady, undemonstrative belief in what the ritual represents: “but at least he’s risen” (My Second Resurrection).

   Even more remarkable are the poems which record and enact dissolutions of the self. These become almost acts of prayer. In The World is a Child the narrator “passes the scummy graffiti on the tight-packed block of flats” but realises that she “has imagined them” in that her mind encompasses them, knows them for real. The poem concludes, “The world is a child, her own child. She says it to herself. // She sings it”. And later, Sand re-presents Blake’s dictum about the grain of sand and movingly suggests a moment of vision in which “All emeralds of thought, priceless stone / of innovation, all the complex ravels // of the past, [slip]… / between your toes, their silent stories sifting softly round your ankles”.

It is this interpenetration of things that makes up the spiritual quality of Casterton’s work. She combines this with an imaginative daring and an unshakable sense of mundane reality. She can even take on Robert Frost’s swooning, suspect attraction to the oblivion of the snowy woods and reject it – in a rare rhyme – in favour of the mongrel world of London’s “dirty streets and its blest confusion // At what is, and is not, pollution”.

In Tamar Yoseloff’s second collection, the spirit presiding over the most successful pieces is the Lowell of Life Studies. This goes beyond the drawing on personal material (often from the poet’s American childhood), to the seemingly casual forms of the poems, the telling details, the tentative observer, the reined-in emotional tone, the particulars implying a wider social malaise. In The Atlantic at Asbury Park, the narrator re-visits a childhood scene now dilapidated (like Lowell’s Boston aquarium). Being told that “Annie and I would sit cross legged / in the bandstand, making plans” is as near as we are allowed to the emotional crux of the poem. Youth, ambition, friendship – Yoseloff’s vision is a mostly melancholic one as now only “the ocean is the same, / black for miles, white caps, grey sky”.

Michael Hoffman used Lowell’s model to tremendous effect in his first books – but it has its limits. Yoseloff transcends them at times through self-revelation without self-conscious display. In the poem Partobar, the narrator walks out to ride the horse of this name, watched by an unsympathetic instructor and “the other girls…their blonde ponytails / neat down their backs, their jackets perfect”. The social as well as personal battle-lines are effectively drawn up in these lines and the poem proceeds in utterly convincing, tangible, visual detail: “I hit the ground, / dirt and blood in my mouth, my head like a bell clap / inside the hard hat”. The sense of ignominy is powerfully real – and frighteningly permanent. Even as an adult, she watches “braver girls trot around the field, / chins up, asses out”. She sees them at parties, with men who “whinny” their approval, while the narrator remains, re-living her failure, still daunted by the explicitly male horse, “my breasts like acorns beneath my vest”.

   A series of poems about a mother’s death conjures (in contrast to Casterton) a rather ghostly, tenuous, curiously unphysical image through the enumeration of clothes and other possessions. My favourite is The Delaware and Raritan Canal in which the mother strides on ahead of the daughter along the canal. There is no conventional closeness or emotional warmth; the reader gets the impression of a demanding and fierce maternal personality. The final stanza makes the daughter’s admiration clear: “But when she hits her stride, she could walk / all the way to the sea, arms sailing / forward, her course certain”. Yet even here the demands of the human seem deflected as she sweeps past “the houses of ten thousand people”.

   One of the attractions of this second collection is of Yoseloff casting around for different styles and subjects. She can be drawn to a quirky kind of fantasy in poems about bats, a woman who dreams of eels, and The Last Woolworths in America. A more productive vein is the sense of the unseen which inhabits the margins of many of these poems. Yoseloff’s buttoned down tone perfectly suits this in The Saints which suddenly sees the faces of spiritual figures in a “shop girl” and “the man beside you on the bus”. Equally exciting is Worry in which the frenetic, familiar tapping at the keypad of a mobile phone is suddenly equated with the actions of another man on a bus who “works / a string of beads”.

   Surprisingly for a first collection, this kind of casting around is not something Jen Hadfield does. In Almanacs, she sets out her stall with brief, compacted, often cryptic poems which possess the kind of verbal fizz and metaphorical athletics which Yoseloff eschews. The book is full of memorable images and phrases, but it’s when this vivid imagination is hitched to a strong engine that Hadfield’s work is impressive. The kind of framework provided by repetition in Staple Island Swing helps the poem rattle along the rails of “What I love… What I hate”. The incidental pleasures include a cormorant chick like “an overloved fuzzy bear”, diving terns “sticking our heads like hatpins” and the “guffy jazz of sea-cliffs”. Also, the book’s final poem sanctus, with its inventive, lively, funny, serious technique of listing angels, powerfully makes Hadfield’s point that every living thing possesses its own sacred nature.

However, there are too few poems like these. Most pieces are short and much more riddling. At times, the sheer brevity begs questions of consequence. Here is the whole of Ullinish:

A racing sky
   patched and manic as the next croft’s
untethered Bess.

A car bolts from its throne of rocks.

This poem is part of a long sequence called Lorelei’s Lore. You’ll have to take my word for it that it doesn’t possess greater clarity in its full context. The blurb describes this sequence as a “road movie in poems” and – while one hesitates to disagree with effusive commendations from Tom Leonard and Kathleen Jamie – this is not a movie I much enjoyed.

Hadfield is sometimes brilliant, but this book seems concerned with “compiling not transmitting / these garbled messages” (Full Walnut Moon). She shares with Bloodaxe stable-mate, Jaan Kaplinski, a joy in nature, a desire to collect images into substantial wholes, as well as a sense of the naturally sacred. But Kaplinski’s seemingly meandering sequences reflect his desire “to be a pedestrian, a wandering scholar who can / sit down on every hillside that’s to his liking” (Evening Brings Everything Back). His love of the ancient Chinese poets imbues his writing with the clarity of perception and the sense of humility characteristic of their work to achieve the kind of charmed passivity Heaney has associated with Wordsworth. Hadfield may become a very different poet, one whose powerfully shaping gift is more aggressively transforming.