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From the supporting role which it played in Brian Wake’s previous collection, Unbuilding The Ark (Headland, 1999), the minor-figure-jackdaw, having shared both cell and sorrow with the imprisoned Cain, is now promoted to a central position as narrator/commentator in this new collection, Raining Upwards. A traveller through a brief history of art and literature, the jackdaw draws its own conclusions from the lives of some of its most eminent practitioners - distorting, as it goes, to suit whatever psychological drama it chooses to convey.

     Visiting Proust, the jackdaw reaffirms the great novelist’s pre-occupation with the presence of the past:

What seems, the jackdaw thought,
to matter most of all, and pecking bits
of hollow laughter from a dish,
sensations left like scraps of bread
along a backyard wall, and spilling drops
of overwhelming tenderness,
is not what happens, not the actual
event and now, but how, and later on,
it is recalled.

     There is a continuity in this new set of poems, springing certainly from the previous book but also somehow self contained. Reviewing Unbuilding The Ark last year the poet Matt Simpson said: ‘Something new and strange has been triggered off, something that is quite clearly Brian Wake’s own - a special tone of voice, original turns of phrase, a particular kind of playful seriousness and serious playfulness.’

     This playful seriousness is there again in the new work. As in the previous book, and throughout this one, we have the same weaving of meanings and images, the interpolation, the expanded and often juxtaposed syntax, the several layers of ambivalence. The poems themselves are often reflections on the dubious etiquette of art or else on language itself:

Broad as Mister, for example,
Shakespeare’s shoulders
might have been, I would,
the jackdaw thought, be (more than),
as it were, hard pushed to perch
up there with friends of, for example,
mine or sing.

     An entertaining book, Raining Upwards comes highly recommended. A work which deserves, as the say, to be read.