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Alice’s Cat by Anne Grimes.
Peterloo Poets. 87pp. £7.95

The Unreliable Mushrooms: New and Selected Poems by Terry Gifford.
Redbeck Press. 96pp. £8.95

The Home Key by John Greening.
Shoestring Press. 90pp. £8.95

In Alice’s Cat, Anne Grimes memorably explores a range of concerns from the strictly personal and domestic to the more public and political. A number of poems dwell on the waste of war, as well as its atrocity but she allows the horror of such conflicts to be suggested by concentrating upon describing individuals who have suffered. The fine ‘Geraniums’ begins with the single word sentence “Survivors.” That encapsulates what geraniums in tough growing conditions are as well as pointing, more importantly, to those who lived to tell the terrible tale of the Holocaust:

                        …We went into Belsen
Six weeks after the Allies entered,
There was a smell, sweetish, not unpleasant
Like crushed geranium. Now to pinch a leaf
Is to breathe again that quickening grief.

   ‘Time Please’, written about a photograph of the poet’s mother in a Luton pub is described as being “grim as a cannon” while trains:

screamed over the bridge and down the line,
set glasses trembling in the bar,
caused greenish gas
to dip and flare and forced
a lull in taproom chat.

   The ominous note is obvious. Grimes wonders what was being
celebrated, finishing with the sobering reality that “the buoyancy of
men who’ve had a few beers” will be those who maybe “gasped out their lives together / in the stinking mud-holes of the Somme?” The title poem, ‘Alice’s Cat’ lays the foundations for the rest of the collection in that it engages with a number of themes that are either developed or dwelt on. Among these are loss and politics. This is a clever poem without obviously trying to be so. It is both engaging and enigmatic in equal measure. Carroll’s Cheshire Cat is conflated with a real cat owned by a woman called Alice and if the experience of trying to help someone negotiate the end of their life as painlessly as possible were not universal enough, Grimes frames the scenario with the fall of the Berlin Wall:

It began well didn’t it, all that euphoria
in Europe, but in the spring an old woman died.
Now a cat dwindles with the year,
an unnamed monster gnawing inside.

   The counterpoint between the energies of life and the entropy of death is well realised. The cat assumes enormous symbolic proportions. Just as surviving feline pets can turn feral, the festering resentments of decades of repression in Eastern Europe were unpredictably dangerous. Grimes is also in touch with the day to day. She strongly fuses form, theme and content, her sonnets being among her most successful poems. ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’ dwells on the procession of generations, as well as loss. Grimes delays the certainty for the reader that the grandmother is dead until the closing rhyming couplet of her Shakespearean form: “Puddles hold the image of a fiery eye / and catkins shower against a sloe-dark sky.” In ‘Ghosts’, another sonnet, the inability to accept the loss of a parent, coupled with the awful recognition that the child is now at the front of the mortality queue, is truthfully captured:

                               …When I wear the coat
She bought herself the month before her death
I feel I’ve become my own grey ghost.
Once, as I approached a shop-window pane,
There was my mother peering at me through the rain.

   Terry Gifford’s, The Unreliable Mushrooms shows a fine sensibility at work. He seems to be searching for a post-pastoral pastoral mode and achieves this in a way that avoids sentimentality. Gifford is not an Eco-poet any more than Hopkins was. He is a poet who spends a lot of time in touch with nature, and his outdoor pursuits have given him repeated first-hand experience of “exposed bedrock”. Exposing the bedrock of our lives is exactly what Gifford achieves. The Unreliable Mushrooms is impressive in its coherence, range and assurance. His voice is gentle yet insistent, rugged yet reflective. Like the mountains and other natural phenomena in which he is so acutely interested, their relationship with the human is never lost sight of. He is grounded and rooted. Relationships are mused upon as we see the poet in the context
of real landscapes, such as the climbs with his son that reflect upon the simultaneity of certain knowledge of affirming love but also the terrible precariousness of life (several of his friends have met their deaths on mountains). Gifford moves well beyond mere artfulness and flashy allusion when he employs Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ as the background music to ‘Montagne Des Agneaux 1994’. Father and son negotiate danger together and reach the summit together, a journey towards knowledge for the father aware of being: “equally poised / between your birth, my death.” There are not metaphysical dimensions here, the verities of this lived life are enough, made immortal in film: “We photographed each other / grinning and grinning.” The “sheer snow” and “vertical rock” are conquered dangers that one false move could easily have made them sacrifices to the mountain of lambs. ‘Water Powers’, the opening poem in this volume draws attention to human responsibility in respect of pollution. As the element of life, it provides the environment for fish that feed migrant birds but it is also an element threatened by nuclear power stations:

Fish, osprey and all of us must wait
For what the seasons’ chains will carry
When water powers work their worst
On our advanced naivities.

   Similarly, the consistent concern for what humans do to the eco-systems of the Earth is also redolent of Hopkins’s ‘God’s Grandeur’ where he presents an industrialised society that “wears man’s smudge” but in a way that shows a connectedness with the primal energies of the earth that are just that. A Wordsworthian animism is evident but not a Romantic pantheism. There is an overriding sense of human responsibility to nature, born out of a recognition that sustainability is not just a mantra trotted out at political summits. Gifford’s concern for the planet never becomes tub-thumping and one is minded of Hopkins’ plea in ‘Inversnaid’ – “long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” – in several of the poems. The fulcrum about which Gifford’s poetic sensibility turns is the reality, for him, that humans labour under the misapprehension that technological advance is ipso facto essentially good. He repeatedly reminds the reader that severe damage is being done to the environment and, by extension, to us. The final poems in each of the second and third sections end on a warning note. ‘Borrowdale
Evolution’ is a bitter indictment of the arrogance of officials who arrogate the protection of the environment to them:

But sometimes a walker with Self-Leadership Grade 3
Applies for a day on the Ecological Trail
In triplicate, for next year, if the Geiger count is clear.

   ‘From Jack Scout Crag’ opines, “one day submarine explosions will rupture our skin.”

   The precariousness of the balance between life and death – what
sustains us, and what threatens to annihilate is returned to frequently.
A recurring idea, derived from his mountaineering, is the negotiation
of danger. The precipice, need for safety measures and the interdependency of mountaineers are stressed frequently. The Unreliable Mushrooms is an impressively wide-ranging garnering of Gifford’s work over a seventeen-year period. One of the most striking things about it is its coherence of voice despite the fact that the first and last poems in this volume are so temporally separated from each other. The title poem, ‘The Unreliable Mushrooms’ muses upon the danger that still lies in not having thorough knowledge of nature and that our interdependency in terms of knowledge of the natural world can be a matter of life and death. To make something as mundane as an omelette we must first be in possession of absolute certainty. Underlying this is that this knowledge, now in fungi identification books, has been hard won; someone had to be poisoned for knowledge to be passed on; we don’t know everything on our own: “I can’t cook / these until you call…I need our book. / Then I can start my own wild mushroom omelette.” Sham ecologists are taken to the cleaners.

   In the opening poem in the ‘The Bag Man’ (New Poems section
of this volume) he exposes the hypocrisy of a man (probably
representative of most of us) who “Railed against dams, but littered the verge with his cans / where the wilderness has been lost.” The repeated motifs of climbing and viewpoints gained as a result provide metaphorical insights, as do fossils. ‘The Stone Spiral’ presents, in both physical and spiritual terms, the equilibrium necessary for survival and progression. An ammonite “…squats in stone / Buddha-like, biding its time/ Accepting its own nature…” The natural and the inevitable are harmonious and welcomed. The poem concludes: “I wonder by what form – bunker or core, / A menhir or a Henry Moore – our species / Will be known to its inheritors.” The omission of a question mark seems to short-circuit the possibility of any or either answer but the problem of the permanence in artistic or natural forms certainly seems to be one of Gifford’s preoccupations. As Hopkins said, “The mind has mountains, no man fathomed” but Gifford goes a long way to help us make sense of some dangerous terrain.

   The illustration on the cover of John Greening’s collection, The
Home Key is enough to alert the reader to the intention of the poet. A computer keyboard with its alphabet arranged in the familiar nonsequential way signals an approach that is tangential and unexpected. The home key is musical, spatial and geographical in its suggestiveness. His range is impressive, suiting form to theme and content with great assurance. Greening is a fine technician who understands rhyme and exploits it to both musical and semantic effect. He returns repeatedly to the idea of home in this collection and the sequence ‘Nocturnes’ that constitutes the second of this four part book (impossible to do justice to here) explores literal and moral landscapes that are redolent of Auden. The opening poem in The Home Key is ‘Bucolics’. The emboldened letters A-Z begin each of the twenty-six stanzas of the poem, reminding us that all meaning we make is communicated through our alphabet. The poem, as well as summoning Auden, connects the past with the present in refreshing and illuminating ways. Indeed, the past and the present are presented as being in collision. Greening’s puns and rhymes work well without being overworked. Stanza six begins: “Fords unmake cars; they lap at electrics”. Deftly, the whole of mass production and manufacture is rendered as nothing compared to the power of what has always been such a powerful element in the earth’s energy. Always beneath the modern, man-made landscape is the ancient and original, signalled in Greening’s topographical and linguistic awareness:

Deserted villages, shapes under turf,
the tofts and crofts, a mill-tump, a torn-down
church at evening, as the blackness curves
across – see, there, below the sheep, a frown.

   Here, responsibility to the past is suggested. The allusion to Goldsmith is obvious but Greening alerts us to the way the centre has been ripped out of so many communities. The landscape words serve to show how modernity has effaced so much. Greening could well be telling Goldsmith that things turned out just as he had feared – only worse:

Hundreds, where the free men came each full moon
To meet by tree or crossroads. From this tump
Try spotting the mosaic: hundred stone,
Moot hill, landfill, refrigerator dump.

   The rhyme of ‘tump’ and ‘dump’ neatly draws attention to the damage done by human activity that Goldsmith saw the stirrings of. One word effaces the other, just as the unnatural landscape effaces the natural, their similarity of sound deftly exposing the way in which we are ultimately unable to perceive vital difference. ‘Sunday, December 1998’ recalls the death of the poet’s father in a way that brings together personal and political concerns. In the first section, after trying to accept his father’s death: ‘A moon stoops above those / wretched / cowering trees that still survive’. These trees, symbolic of the bereaved are also a reminder of the fact that the way we treat the environment is an index of how we deal with each other. The second section of Auden’s ‘Bucolics’ resonates here: “A culture is no better than its woods.” In the final section of the poem, images that recall his father’s war experience are applied to nature in “spent shells/ of birch, pontoons of sycamore…” as he returns to “the sluice”, a place he had meant to take his father “but never did”. The theme of responsibility is now extended to the architects of wars:

                                     The footpath ends at the
    Butcher’s,
    low moaning from the slaughterhouse. How many in their stripes
    have earned a living from dead meat since the First War?

   The butcher’s striped apron leads to an association with the stripes of officers and their presentation as slaughterers, responsible for those who die as cattle. ‘Estuarine’ is a well wrought sonnet that explores the relationship between the past and the present. The liminal position of an estuary – not entirely river and not quite sea draws attention to the conflict in all of us between retrospect and prospect, as well as to what damage has been done:

                 Moving forward, it looks back
and opens up to give its broader views on
the century it has left: so much poison,
so much waste, hauls for a shimmering new age
left to float out on the lunar froth, sewage.

   The generation that sent men to the Sea of Tranquillity has advanced technologically but regressed ecologically. Again, Greening’s sure-footed handling of rhyme is telling: new age is sewage. ‘The Eden Poems’, a sequence centered on The Eden Project in Cornwall is a fine exploration and furtherance of the themes already touched upon. The first two poems in the final section of the book, ‘A Letter to My Daughter in Spain’ and ‘Summer Wings’ are celebratory and confirmatory. While his daughter is experiencing a new culture in Alicante, the poet wryly
writes of the contrast between

…I repair this bike, turn Rocinante
over and wrench the chain free where it’s jammed,
and curse work, oily Protestant wheel…

   Don Quixote’s horse was just an old nag, of course, so there is also a subtle return to the home key here – realism replaces escapism as age advances. The concrete poem ‘Summer Wings’ is like coming across a quotation in architecture, so familiar is Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ – a glance at the page invites immediate comparison. There is real elevation in this poem that exults in the energies of nature and the achievements of humanity. Here is an eye that sees the incandescent wonder of the world without the need for Herbert’s or Hopkins’s transcendence. For Greening, this is all there is, and there is nothing better than “…dragonflies who hoard the sun / jewelled surface to flame a tortoiseshell / and peacock on their quest for the buddleia grail.” The collection finishes with ‘Aubade’, a finely wrought reflection upon seeing clearly. This is certainly a poem that celebrates the approaching of the dawn but it also reminds us of the fact that we are blinded to the connectedness we have to the whole cosmos and should “…reacquaint a working soul / with powers more than nine to five.” The perspective of the poem is expansive since the view we are given is that seen through an astronomical telescope. Greening reminds us that “…the busy blur
of here, / our light-polluted atmosphere…” is the place “where every
life is bound.” The ambiguity of ‘bound’ is well presented in its
suggestion of both journeying destiny of all our possibilities and the
imprisoning inescapability of what we allow to happen to the Earth.
Like Terry Gifford, Greening does not lapse into attempting to reconstruct a pastoral idyll in a sentimentalized way but shares with
him a worried attention to the way things are in respect of our treatment of each other and the planet we inhabit.