Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The Spar Box by Pippa Little
Published by Vane Women Press £4.00

This is a strong collection celebrating both the fragility and resilience of the human presence on a wild earth. The opening poem Stagskin describes the birth of man from the body of a stag – a mythical transformation from beast to human. The man is vulnerable: ‘White as a sapling/With narrow shoulders’ and leaves behind ‘his skin, his crown’ – his disguise and his weapons. Little is preoccupied with the possibility of rebirth as in You Would Have Liked It Here – ‘Who you were/Begins again:/Your Footprints/Waking, the soft, pale stone of yourself’ and especially of being born again into a more simple life.

   In her title poem Her Spar Box she writes about a father’s ‘spar box he’d made from planks/Fetched from the pit-head.’ The spar boxes were made by miners in Northumberland and Cumbria to keep minerals and crystals found underground in. The poem acts as a metaphor for the whole collection, a world in which treasures are hoarded, in which marks, stains and traces are rescued and deposited in language where, like the Spar Box, they can be passed on.

   Little has a powerful voice which uses myth and metaphor with confidence and to great effect. She uses startling images – her lover’s ‘foot soles are luminous, your bones/Glow in their transparent envelope’. She writes of seagulls in snow ‘as they turn, some/Form a field of blades/Slit the glittering wall/Silver, black’. Middle European trains are ‘Rickety skeletons of light inside the dusk’s skin’.

   One is conscious when reading her of the darkness, of her Mother’s dying body turning into dust, but also of ‘living’s appetite/Its simple pleasing’. Her poems search for beauty and meaning in pain and sadness, what she calls ‘stroking the claw’. My only criticism would be of the capitalisation at the beginning of each line, which I personally dislike. But it’s a very minor point. These poems can be read over and over and still be startling, both profound and humble.