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Sea Lilies: Selected Poems 1984 – 2003 by John Barnie
(Seren, £9.99) 174pp.
Available from www.seren-books.com


The editor of Planet from its revival in the early eighties until its hand-over to Helle Michelson last year, John Barnie has long been a key figure on the contemporary Welsh scene, forging links between Wales and Scandinavia, and writing on subjects as diverse as blues music and the natural sciences. The evolution of his poetry from the early imagism of ‘Encounter’, which describes swallows as “lighter/ than the air they/ breathe”, in contrast with the human feeling of being “heavy in our lives”, or ‘The Storm’, in which “I lay and heard the wind/ swear enmity to man” followed his thinking, leading the poetry into explorations of the meaning of Romanticism and more recent, typographically experimental attempts to write with an awareness of the connectedness of ecosystems. He often writes of alien perspectives, such as that of ‘A Worm’: “Squirts itself from earth in a jet-pipe of panic// A long pink muscle pumping itself// Flowing to the end of the tip’s rubber rattle”. In ‘Sharks’ “cartilaginous/ needs” blindly follow “mouths into/ nothing before them”. ‘At A Place Near Us’ describes “the Ultimate Laser Machine/ on top of Craig-y-Pistyll”, a construction erected without consideration for local ecosystems: “it was water they/ forgot, its cleansing power”, he writes, “the wheatears on grey fence/ posts, and dung beetles just rolling along, rolling// along, and buzzards and ravens”. By the end of the book we are entering poems that enact this missing awareness of the fine detail and obscure interdependence of organisms in the world, splicing the lines with hyphens and line-breaks just as geneticists tinker with DNA codes. ‘The Logic In It’ gives an account of a day’s work in a laboratory (“Reverse engineer the molecul-/ ar spring of the proboscis of a bu-/ tterfly and see how it uncoil-/ s in the delights of a flowe-/ r…”) while the composition of ‘Palaeozoic’ (“Cyanobacteria crowd the pool-/ s, blue-green blooms the near-/ est life’s come yet to prett-/ y flowers…”) enacts the process of evolution, the myriad tiny variations that transform life itself. It’s a process enacted in the incremental development of the poems themselves through this volume, the style perpetually reshaping itself within the recognisable voice. The reflections on Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley and Blake first published in Clay give way to the parties and social encounters of The City and the ‘Ghosts’ sequence, in which darkness threatens with a “past too black/ to remember. To forget”. In another poem, later still, we find an image of ‘The Sea’, whose waves “glitter with surgical needles/ and thin glass vials” in clear view of a coastal city.