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The Cartographer Sleeps
Barbara Daniels
Shoestring Press
£8.95
ISBN 9 781904886143

The Cartographer Sleeps covers topics from sex
to science – no mean feat in a collection of over 60 rhyming poems which employ rhyme that without exception seems not to be imposed from without but dictated from within.

   The collection opens with 12 poems on the subject of love, all teeming with 21st century imagery. Daniels' casual tone masks acute observations of life's joys and disappointments: a man 'enhances' his lover using a mouse 'on his clipart', but, the poet confides, 'his hands will never move beyond the wire'. In Partners, 'She's there for him but she's a palimpsest / the manuscript of self is overlaid / well hidden under layers and seventh best.' In the cheeky yet chilling How Was it for You? we're reminded that 'The praying mantis never asks her mate/ this final question.' So, '... when I nibbled at your sweet right ear / why did you shiver? Was it lust, my dear?'

The poet's eclecticism is illustrated in her focus on figures as diverse as St. Sibolt, Dr. Johnson and the Duke of Wellington, just as her oblique treatment of them affords an insight into her creative process: St. Sibolt 'weary of the same/old miracles' kindles fire with icicles. 'Here is his chance to flaunt and strut – not wait for slow processions of the blind and lame/ to grumble past him in this dim twilight.'
Her concern with Dr. Johnson is not with his writing, but the man's physique, 'lumbered with huge flesh and heavy bones' his 'reason cannot tell him how to live, how his light soul could fly above disease'. Her astute Portrait of the Duke of Wellington:1814 captures the essence of all those portraits of the man: 'The eyes have it' and 'The nose is shaped for war'. She shows the Duke earning 'the braid...the coloured cavalcade/ of alpha males' at Salamanca, then deftly takes the glory from this 'blue-blooded, arrogant' soldier, cleverly mimicking the scorn that bedevilled the Duke in his later political career.

   In a poem about the Fibonacci Sequence, Daniels clarifies the formula of the Sequence for the lay person through a succession of deceptively simple images and rhymes that echo childhood counting games. 'I draw a zero, then think of a rabbit/.......Ears at the ready lest Reynard should nab it.'

   A series of playfully oblique garden/nature poems follows, beginning with Optical, in which Daniels explores North Whitehead's assertion, 'There is no light or colour... there is merely motion of material'. 'Is this, then, the material state', the poet asks, 'minutiae in endless fuss / sans colour, light, except for us: I realise, thus I create?' Capitalising here, as is her wont, on a wealth of literary knowledge, Daniels' poems often have a deep significance that their surface texture belies. That is not to deny the poet's lyricism: Dear Mr. Houseman conjures 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now', a sonnet which Daniels brings wonderfully up to date without losing any of the beauty of the Houseman poem:

in autumn sunlight, waiting for the gold
of fruitwood fires and winter's silvered cold.

One has to admire the way the sequences in this collection grow out of one another in an almost seamless succession of ideas. Following poems about Time and birth she takes us through The Origin of the Species to the wonderfully irreverent religion-based poems beginning with God ('who'd always thought Himself a technophobe') Formulates a Long-Term Strategic Project.

By the sixth lunch-break, most of it was done:.....
moon, stars and (top banana) a huge sun.
................................................................
Now Adam goes astray (too over-sexed,
one bite from that first Cox and he succumbs
to the eternal lure of tits and bums.)

As well as Daniels' penchant for enquiring into the scientific, she also perceives and comments on the artistic. In " She'll have no truck with metaphor" we see a witty twist on the use of the mixed metaphor – but then, this is a poet for whom 'The literal's too rational, too fixed / too straight for someone of my acumen'; this is also a poet who seems to know intuitively where to break a line.

never look a gift-horse in the stable
and my old gran sucks eggs but can't be taught
new tricks or make an omelette. I am able
to nip more rats in the bud than I can say:
I am hoist by my own trumpet every day.

Daniels has said that she uses rhyme 'for complex topics such as science and mathematics and to 'rescue' it from necessarily being associated with humour.' In this collection, rhyme enhances both the sense and music of technically adept poems that one cannot help but admire and above all enjoy. Whatever the subject, Barbara Daniels deftly defines the present age with comic brilliance. The Cartographer Sleeps is indeed 'remarkable for its formal skills
and for its witty, serious consideration of the world and its ways.'