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Half a Field’s Distance by Robert Etty
(Shoestring Press, £8.95)
Available from www.shoestringpress.co.uk


The place in Robert Etty’s poems is, more often than not, Lincolnshire.  Half a Field’s Distance is his New & Selected Poems which draws on five previous collections and adds a substantial selection of new work.  A native of the eastern flatlands, a great deal of Robert Etty’s poetry arises from Lincolnshire landscape and life.  A glance at the contents page gives a pretty good idea of ground covered:  ‘Smallholder’, ‘From the Lanes’, ‘Meadowsweet’, ‘Tidyman’s Ginger Bull’, ‘The Plum Loaf Trophy’, ‘Sweet Peas’, ‘Fieldfares’, ‘Stile’.  Would it be too easy to say that this poetry flirts dangerously with the domestic and inconsequential?  Yes and no.  The concerns of the poems are overwhelmingly small, local and domestic, but there’s usually much more to them than that, especially in the new poems where there’s a quiet, insistent broadening out of ideas, a darkening of the tone.

     …  The one who took
     it softly, softly, counting on somebody’s
     fallibility to make his luck,
     comes good, if good is what the coming is.

                                                                      from ‘Come the Day’

   It’s not particularly easy to find illustrative quotations from Robert Etty’s poems, and not because there aren’t any – there are plenty.  It’s just that he tends to write in long, difficult-to-quote-in-a-review sort of sentences, long and (I want to stress) very beautifully cadenced sentences.   His writing is exceedingly deft, gentle and understated.  His use of rhyme and metre is commanding, and it’s rare that the reader has a sense of the form leading the poem - rather than the other way around.  Here’s a small poem in its entirety (the title forms the first line):

     I kicked it out of the clods,

     John Clare said when they asked him where
     his poetry came from, how someone so
     unschooled from somewhere so unvisited
     had learned the things he seemed to know:
     and in rushes at Helpston snipe were
     hiding, a vixen at dusk set up squealing;
     the sky was streaked with grey to the west
     and the earth was itself the feeling.

It would be crass and simplistic to say that this summed-up Half a Field’s Distance.  But it does feel like a partial microcosm of the work; the form, the ideas, the cadence, the quiet but resonant voice.