Reviews
Various
Wave, Pat Borthwick, 2007, Templar Poetry. 32pp, £4, ISBN 978-1-9062850-1-2
Peppercorn Rent, Alison Hill, 2008, Flarestack Poetry. 32pp, £3.00, ISBN 978-1-9064800-5-9
Poems from Grace Cottage, Patricia Huth Ellis, 2006, Wychwood Press. 53pp, £5.99 ISBN 978-1-9022792-5-1
Envying the Wild, Pauline Kirk, 2008, Fighting Cock Press. 40pp, £5.95, ISBN 978-0-9067443-1-4
Caret Mark, Mary Michaels, 2008, Hearing Eye. £3.00, 36pp, ISBN 978-1-9050824-0-7
Tidings, Shed Poets, 2008, CB publications, R of I. 48pp, 7 Euros. ISBN 978-0-9543878-8-4
Shall We Dance, Joan Sheridan Smith, Poetry Monthly Press. 36pp, £5, ISBN 978-1-9063572-5-2
Reading through a cross-section of members’ recent publications reminds me of Myra Schneider’s comment on Second Light: ‘Almost every day, I am struck by how much more ambitious women poets are becoming and almost every day I am impressed by [members’] achievements ...’. In these pamphlets there is, of course, a mixture of ambitious and what might be called, without derogation, ‘contained poems’.
A ‘contained poem’ (my definition) is one which sets out to capture a moment, probably in the poet’s own life, in language which aims to be definitive rather than novel, and succeeds in its aim. These poems are frequently wry or humorous, accessible to readers, and sometimes stick in our minds more tenaciously than more ambitious poems. Such poems are by no means easy to write and I often notice subtle rhyme-schemes and the use of appropriate forms such as the villanelle.
Examples might include Joan Sheridan Smith’s moving poem about an expedition with her mother to buy shoes (Final Shopping Spree): “In the end, she bought house-slippers. / They didn’t get much wear”. In Charlotte this poet looks back to the domestic chores of the Bronte sisters; while focussed on the mundane, it has the beautiful line, “Somehow she kept her pen serenely bright.”
‘Contained poems’ often refer to time past. Poets often seem to evoke the past, however distant, with a sense of ease and familiarity, though aspects may be painful. There are several such moving poems in Pauline Kirk’s Envying the Wild (good title!). Memories of monks at Revaulx, Roman soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall, graves in a fishing community (“women / who could keep shop and home together, / brew a fine beer or strain a cheese, // gut fish or crack a crab as they chatted. / Their laughter echoes in the gull’s cries”) stand alongside Kirk’s own family history, craftsman shoemakers on her father’s side. She says, “I think of them whenever I buy a pair / of machine-made shoes, and feel the pinch / of betrayal”. Perhaps family tradition makes Kirk examine with careful tenderness “this little boot with latticed upper / trodden down on one side” belonging to a Roman soldier’s child.
There is a powerful, plaintive note in Patricia Huth Ellis’s otherwise ‘contained’ poems. She uses unaffected language (which has its own eloquence) and a quiet tone which tends to distance pain. I was particularly struck by the lyrical, Que reste-t-il de nos amours?, a poem describing two women sitting at a table, thinking about the vanishing of the past. The same elegiac note is expressed rather differently in the poem, Chawton Revisited, which uses the refrain, “Do you remember Chawton, Jill?” to invoke a happy, animated time with a friend: “our mutual dislike of Aunt Norris / and her devious ways?” Both poems use references to literature and this helps widen the terms of reference. A line from one of her own poems, “all life struggled for its moments” (January Weather) appears to be a watchword for Huth Ellis, as she thinks of ‘now’ which will become ‘then’ and wants “to share the beat of breath / the silent, unconscious rhythm of life / that is not yet death”.
Alison Hill’s work is economical and interesting. Much of Peppercorn Rent is focussed on children, outings and holidays, though, sometimes, outside events cut across the familial magic circle, as when children playing are heard shouting “Heil Hitler”. There is no complacency and there is an attractive edginess. Particularly potent is the sense of fracture within continuity – the poem, Sand Circles, about meeting with a brother after a long interval; the understated but moving poem, Words Left Unsaid, about two women friends meeting after a long time-lapse: “I love spring flowers she said / drinking in their scentless glory”.
The Shed Poets are six Irish poets who meet ‘each week in a terraced garden overlooking Killiney Bay’. Tidings, their new collection, opens with a thought-provoking quotation from Ezra Pound ‘Poetry is news that stays news’. Contributing to this book are: Rosy Wilson, Maureen Perkins, Carol Boland, Bernie Kenny, Judy Russell and Marguerite Colgan. Rosy Wilson says, in Caheraderry – the fort of the oak, “I make time stop” and this seems to strike a keynote for the work of all six poets who essentially give us captured moments, including some lively evocations.
Though the basic material is mostly ‘life as we live it’, the poets seek to lift their poems. I liked Maureen Perkins’ The Dancer, a nostalgic poem with a twist in its tail – the stranger who comes to the town dance, “Natives amazed at his dash / on the dance floor, swooping / a girl off her feet / into the bend of a foxtrot”, has cloven feet. In The Table, Carol Boland has found a highly effective device, imagining a woman laying her life on the table: “She put there a bottle-green uniform / the measles and the fluffy pink calomine lotion / a rocking cot in baby blue”. Bernie Kenny’s delightfully direct I will remember this day introduces into a hot sleepy afternoon the stimulus of reading, “My book slips from my hand. Madmoiselle Emma Roualt / has become Madame Bovary, Charles is kissing her arm / from shoulder to fingertips”. Judy Russell introduces a strong note of pathos into poems which set the unusual against the daily routine – a woman has exciting war experiences, then suffers “quiet disappointment / of the laundry room / folding ambition sides to middle”. Marguerite Colgan says a lot in a little, with a rare talent for striking a timeless, fable-like note: “There was a girl went forth and / everything she saw delighted her / a hill, a bone, a stone” (For Georgian O'Keeffe).
Mary Michaels’ Caret Mark (the title referring to the ‘omission’ sign used by proof readers) marks a break – a very deliberate one – with ‘containment’. All the poems here, including a long prose poem, Rose and Crown, emphasise fracture rather than synthesis or resolution. Uncertainty, failure of communication, the incomplete, the unknowable are Michaels’ terrain. This writing is exciting, though challenging for both poet and readers. Her method involves interleaving incidents with unrelated incidents, intersecting time-frames, drawing in unexpected references to people and things and using ‘snippets’ of information and conversation.
Drawing an analogy with ‘black comedy’, this is ‘black poetry’, meant to be disturbing. It sometimes strikes a Gothic note: “Red wine flying across papers on a table / as if it’s been waiting its chance to pounce and spoil them” (Pulled Away); “Streaks of black in the pale green flower / in the purplish veins and uneven edges / of leaves positioned against the light // black plastic pot, the compost black / even the gloss on the earthenware saucer / delineated by a lamp-black shadow” (Hellebore). This relentlessness is sometimes a little stiffly formulated. However, the essential element in such an approach – that it should be grounded in real feeling and not merely an exercise – is present. There is a vein of strong feeling through the poems, a strong unifying theme – of what? Of waste, futility, but also of suffering shared?
Pat Borthwick's Wave demonstrates that her work is on the cusp of the ‘contained’ and the innovative and that across this range she is a very skilful poet, rewarding to read and study. Some of her poems are vividly remembered episodes in her childhood: the pace of narration and the humour are exemplary in Until I Did and Murder; also in Beech House, which is about an uncle who became senile – but this poem is especially subtle, wrong-footing us line by line, until we know we are inside a flawed mind, “my uncle is content to see the moon / open its bright eye. Or is that the sun? / A single snowflake?” Borthwick often uses an oblique approach even when she is writing about the very visceral, as in her long poem, Bought Cakes, which is about the killing of all the stock on a farm during (I presume) the foot and mouth epidemic. This poem is particularly moving and effective because it never butts in with authorial comment, but lets the place, the people and the long-term effects on the people unfold.
There are ‘tour de force’ poems here, such as the very clever In Praise of the Oologist’s Art, which is about obsessive egg collectors. The ‘placing’ of factual snippets in this poem (“A man from Cleethorpes adapted his ladder / by adding a metal crosier to each rail”) shows the deftness in her armoury of skills. In a few poems Borthwick’s ‘lightness of touch’ metamorphoses to an adventurous openness, an invitation to us to read in more than is actually said. The opening and closing poems of the book (Visit, A Reasonable Question for a Poet to Ask the Visiting Speaker on Optics at the Astronomical Society’s Meeting) both have this dimension. The title of the latter epitomises her vein of humour.
Page(s) 49-51
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