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Danielle Hope, the assistant editor of Acumen, has enjoyed a serious career as a poet that has spanned two and a half decades (a time span incidentally almost identical to that of Acumen itself) and produced three thoroughly interesting volumes (Fair ground of Madness, Rockingham Press 1992; City Fox, Rockingham 1997; and The Stone Ship, Rockingham 2003). Of these City Fox to my mind stands with most books of recent years, and is much the best place for a newcomer to this poet’s work to start. Fairground of Madness has some of the poet’s best and weakest work. The most recent volume Stone Ship seems a trifle transitional towards another style perhaps, but contains several of Hope’s best poems (notably perhaps the rather oddly titled ‘Metier’, which is about prostitutes at Kings Cross Station).

   No doubt when Dylan Thomas was writing some of his best poems in his late twenties, or Shelley was amassing his large oeuvre by the age of twenty nine, Ms Hope would have seemed positively middle aged, but in an age where poets seem to be sternly treated as “Young” till the age of sixty, the essential neglect that her work has recieved should perhaps come as no surprise. It is sadly the way of the modern world for the Arts Council to help publish the work, but then make no effort to ensure either readership or assessment. Perhaps this article will go a little way to putting right one such piece of neglect.

   Hope’s poetry falls into two distinct parts. The first really only consists of the two sequences, ‘Hall of Mirrors’ (from Fairground of Madness) and ‘Lament Diary’ (from City Fox). ‘Hall of Mirrors’ deals with an early relationship, seemingly of someone who has been a dancer in her teens and an older man. Whether the girl continued to be a dancer is not entirely clear, but the image of the girl dancer in the mirror dominates the poem:

Look at the girl in the first mirror.
That’s me;
he called it the ballet-girl with campanula eyes,
feet lighter than the first breeze of heather.
But under the leotard
I am tough as tarmac...

   The affair is treated from the perspective of its breakdown. There is poverty, the lovers deceive each other:

And he and I wove lies in a wild needlepoint
of work, mates, delayed buses, tubes, trains.
Months later I still believed his.

   Yet five years on the images still haunt. That much is clear. Yet what gives the poem its remarkable quality is its indirectness in the midst of apparent clarity. Is the dancer the poet, or an image of the poet? It is hard to believe that a fiction could generate such feeling, but it could be so. What is certain is that the poem transcends the personal, and becomes an image for the failed relationships of a generation, and has a most individual music.

   With ‘Lament Diary’, there is no doubt that this is personal. This is what happened in the mind of one person after a very close friend died. There is all the rage that most people feel after a serious death, and something at least of a coming to terms. And yet there is a paradox with ‘Lament Diary’ that sets it apart from its contemporaries. The constant navel gazing that ruins so much contemporary poetry, when it confronts major personal events, does not occur. Instead the poems seem to write themselves with great directness yes, but also with a sense of this being any bereavement:

Do not tell me where to bury my grief
how much the garden spade needs me
why earth shrieks, what is chaff.

My grief is my friend
do not touch it.

   This is poetry, and for all the simplicity, it touches deep. Catullus was a greater poet, but he knew the same secret as Danielle Hope when he wrote of the loss of his brother.

   These are two remarkable poems, that ought to be in any contemporary anthology, and they are on an altogether higher level than the rest of Danielle Hope’s work. However, that is not to belittle a considerable body of poetry, that goes in many directions. If one notices a constant subtext, it is that the poems seem (despite the immaculate craftsmanship) to have evolved their own personality. This is often elusive. One is going along a path one knows well from the contemporary scene, and the poem lurches as it were for a line or two, and one is in some alternative universe. This is sometimes as well, for one would otherwise get a little weary of the constant pushing of political correctnesses, especially about War. Nobody in their right mind likes War, but perhaps one should experience it before writing about it; and Ms Hope has rather too many propagandist poems against it. The ones against Desert Storm in Fairground of Madness are particularly trying to this reader, having an air of rather glib propaganda, which is as dubious in its way as some pro-war Victorian poet of a century back. However, it must be said in fairness that by The Stone Ship, although an anti war poem like ‘Replaying the Battle of Naseby’, is perhaps too cerebral, and has too little of the imagination, there is a genuine air of thought about the origins of war, that is more interesting, if essentially propagandist. But I fancy Hope will never write well about war, till she lets go, and writes about it from inside her considerable imagination.

   However this is to quibble against an often powerful and interesting
poet. She can write of Nature grinding us all down (even our love
affairs), as in several excellent poems about moths. There is the odd
fine water-colour:

A birdless bare earth
a frost that snaps
under a blue sun
        (‘Windmills on the Moor’)

   There are a lot of poems about people, who are often in distress, whether it is an obscure relation who lost a limb through gangrene and the neglect of a husband, or a woman at her retirement party. On a lighter note there is a discussion of how much you can manage to take away of the extras offered by a posh hotel. On a more serious note there are the prostitutes of King’s Cross Station in ‘Metier’, a poem (as in a number of poems in The Stone Ship) that seems to have distinct underlying politics, but can be read for its extraordinary vividness. And it is the politics, no doubt, that to some degree account for the constant obsession with crossing borders, and being a refugee in one’s own time. And yet as so often with this poet, such moments are always ambiguous. There is a constant feeling of going after one theme, and finding another. It is indeed this constant double-take that if one looks at Ms Hope’s work as a whole is its characteristic feature. Thus take ‘Retirement Party’ (from City Fox). One minute we are in to social comment, plus sympathy for the person retiring:

....
its all politeness, owed favours
and sickly after shave.
Could be your job or mine.

   This is well written, with a sharp edge, but not perhaps unusual. And then something bizarre happens.

The room grows quiet as crows at night.

   Obviously crows are not that nice, and the satirical implication is obvious. However, the weight of the line seems to go far beyond that. Whether the poet consciously intends it or not, we seem in a different country of imagination, where things are happening beyond the immediate poetic intention. This is a particularly strong example of a tendency that grows common as the poet’s work develops, and brings her in many ways quite close to more obviously linguistically- oriented poets, for it would not take a lot to take her out of apparent realism into verbal abstraction. An often-seeming realist is frequently playing elaborate games in the shadows. An interesting question is to what degree the poet is aware this is happening. The Stone Ship suggests a change of style, arising out of this, is creeping up. Hope’s next volume should therefore be of considerable interest. As it is, she is as interesting a poet as any in her generation, precisely because her direction is so instinctive.