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The Heel of Bernadette is the debut collection from Colette Bryce, who first appeared in 1995 with Anvil New Poets 2, an anthology edited by Carol Ann Duffy. Born in Derry in 1970, it is unavoidable that Bryce will be seen as the latest in a very rich line of Northern Irish poets, from the generation of Heaney, Longley and Mahon, through to Muldoon, Paulin, McGuckian, Carson and others. It is refreshing then, to find that The Heel of Bernadette manages to sound like none of the above, without straying into idiosyncracies of style for its own sake or obscurantism. Indeed Bryce has a modern and light accessibilty, without compromising her subtlety of approach, which promises much for the future.

All this is true but bordering on the stuffy. People, sorry, male critics, can still be found wheeling out the same old terms when discussing a female poet. Foremost amongst these invidious words is ‘light’. Good collections are ‘light’, and the bad ones tend to be too. Serious subjects are often made ‘light’ in a number of ‘enjoyable’ ways. This is a real killer. All the profound and serious intent in the world can be disposed of as ‘enjoyable’ or ‘accessible’. Only that marvellously horrible epithet “Plathian’ seems to provide an alternative, and we all know what happened to her.

The trouble, though, is that The Heel of Bernadette is a light book, but here it is a genuine and serious virtue. The lightness is in part in the airy nature of Bryce’s lines, her ability to balance an abstract lyric quality with telling details and observations from life. The opening sonnet, Footings, provides an excellent example of Bryce’s sinuous rhythms, with phrasings that tilt on delicate assonance and minute turns in meaning:

You could see, for the life of you, no clear point
in monkeying seven, eight feet to the ground;
to slide from the belly, swing there (caught
by the arms, by the palms, by the fingertips), drop...

Without an exhibition of descriptive vocabulary, the reader is given a vivid picture of familiar ways of getting over a wall. The more athletic may have already jumped, prepared for the denouement. The speaker and companion have been positioned in comparison to each other, with the sestet providing the expected resolution:

And the lane it was yeared into two deep tracks
as we found our feet in the lengthened light,
for those with the leap approach to life,
for those who measure, look, think twice.
Both of us sobbing, I shouldered you home
with your hard-won knowledge, broken bone.

A variation on Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, with a fine coinage in ‘yeared’, is the result.

The sound of Bryce’s style is reminiscent in ways to that of her friend Kate Clanchy, both writers using similarly musical styles, strung around deft and loosely formal structures. Clanchy’s own debut Slattern and her latest volume Samarkand displayed poems which in their clarity seem destined for anthologies, and this is also a feature of The Heel of Bernadette. Other than Footings; three well-turned lyrics which stand out are Heroes, Plot Summary, Scene 4 and Itch. Itch in particular is memorable, as five sibilant couplets explain how “I believe that Jesus lives I deep in the ditch of my mother’s ear”. This surreal touch produces other dark and oblique moments, such as the Lewis Carroll-inspired Epilogue and Reading, a ‘specular poem’ (a form invented, as far as I know, by the Bloodaxe poet Julia Copus) where halfway through the lines repeat themselves in a mirrored order. Meanwhile, the potential of Bryce’s lyric voice is strikingly evinced in Every Winged Fowl of the Air, a kind of list poem rendering the cacophony of the modern world. In its music and lyric verve, the poem takes flight as a celebration of nothing, really, but itself.

In a manner reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, Bryce also extends the lightness of her style into the moral sphere, promoting a certain modesty through the verse which can stand as an approach to life in general. The key poem here is Heroes, with its telling opening lines “I used to side with suicides / the solemn mail of morning tides”. This poem may be dark in its subject matter, but the singsong voice and conclusion choose the light instead. As in Footings, the more extreme option (“the leap approach” now that of the suicide) is compared with, and discarded for, the careful and ordinary:

The ones that stopped, stepped back, slowed down,
have borned the time in minutes, hours,
have known the line but somehow carried on.
That girl with the swimming vision
who picked up the phone.
And this man, descending the xylophone
steps from the bridge, on this worn afternoon,
who knows, may clear the journey home,
take his coat off, put the kettle on.

It seems inappropriately heavy-handed to overstate this point, but the virtues of such an attitude, from someone from a society so often riven by extremes, are implicit in this poem and others.

Distance, and the division resulting from this, is a recurring motif in the collection. From the wall of Footings, the ‘Line’ of the Troubles (“not past Breslin’s, don’t step over”), to lovers speaking long-distance in Phone, Bryce draws out her theme. One of the most affecting of these poems is the Song of the Vagrant, a version from the Spanish. In many of the love poems distance in space creates and feeds desire, but the Vagrant is doomed to travel aimlessly, his desire, “you who gave me your kiss”, lost to time instead. Ironically, unable to ‘move on’, the Vagrant is left to “walk these streets repeated; tethered, tied”.

There is only one poem in the collection which crosses the page, but even as it stretches in stanzas, Form turns out to be the monologue of a hunger artist slowly starving herself. The collection is very much a series of short lyrics, which has its inherent dangers. Through their quick succession, the poems can end up passing the reader’s attention like rainwater off a duck’s back. Bryce more or less avoids this, and repeated readings reveal appropriate depths and ambiguous shallows. The Heel of Bernadette is not a big book, containing only 36 pages of actual poetry. Here is further proof that we have entered a new era of the slim volume, with sprawling eclecticism distinctly unfashionable. This is largely a good thing, honest, and The Heel of Bernadette doesn’t seem unsatisfactory in its length at all. It is possible that rather more poems, a few longer poems. may have augmented the collection. What we do have though is a fine debut, with much more hopefully to come.