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Sarah Lawson: Below the Surface and Other Poems. Bristol: Loxwood Stoneleigh,  £7.95.
Gillie Griffin: Warm Bodies, Foreign Parts. Bristol: Loxwood Stoneleigh,  £6.95.

     First collections of poetry tend to be a slender breed, and sometimes they carry the trace of having evolved from that ‘lower’ species of publications we call the pamphlet. (I say ‘lower’ because the pamphlet largely leads a grassroot existence, not properly acknowledged by established publishers and bookstores.) Thus, Sarah Lawson’s Below the Surface seems at first an atypical specimen, boasting 128 pages and 90-odd poems. However, the explanation for its considerable length is simple: although it is her first collection, Below the Surface draws on 25 years of writing. But despite the time-span, there is little sense of development in Lawson’s poetry. In fact, the opening piece seems to epitomise the nature of much of her work: “Dear friend, my camera/ Has had another litter/ And I send you a keepsake sibling/ To remind you of our summer.” Lawson is a keen traveller, and instead of taking pictures she writes verses. Many of her titles sound like the sort of headings you would find in any hard-core tourist’s scrap book: ‘Going up in the Eiffel Tower’, ‘Camping Above Lake Komorze’, ‘Lunch at the Bamboo Grove’, ‘Souvenir of Stornoway’.

     Joseph Brodsky has described travelling as a state of solitary confinement where our existence is diminished to the role of observers-but-eternal-strangers. And this is the problem with many of Lawson’s travel pieces: their descriptiveness depends on the insight of a stranger; too often, they carry the anonymity and randomness of the average Instamatic tourist snap, and we rarely sense that the poet is getting below the glossy surface. Part of the problem is also Lawson’s poetic craft. There are times when her language slackens, and her pieces feel like unfinished sketches, half-finished poems that waver in the limbo of their own creation.

     As an observer, though, Lawson occasionally strikes upon an impulsive thought or association, which makes for the most satisfying passages in this book: manoeuvring a pair of crutches into the back of her car, they suddenly become “giant chopsticks/ I could pick up the dog with.” Such instants are refreshing, but also rare. The best part of Below the Surface is a sequence entitled ‘Dutch Interiors’. According to book’s blurb, ‘Dutch Interiors’ has previously been published as a pamphlet and was well-received, which would explain its highlighted position in Below the Surface. In comparison, most of the other stuff reads largely as padding, and you wish there had been a stricter editorial line in the selecting process. There are several poems that ought not have been included at all, such as ‘Flanders, 1985’, ‘Letter to Christine de Pisan’, and ‘Doing Donne’, a piece where Lawson tirelessly explains the conceit of ‘A Valediction’, and winds up playing with a tired old pun on “Donne” and “done”. At this stage - like Donne’s extended metaphors - the reader is at the breaking point. In the end, you cannot help thinking that if you had read ‘Dutch Interiors’ on its own, or a much more selective version of Below the Surface, you would have been more inclined to acknowledge Sarah Lawson’s merits as a poet.

     Gillie Griffin’s first collection, Warm Bodies, Foreign Parts, also draws on previously published sequences. Most notable is ‘Facing the Familiar’, a group of six poems about Griffin’s childhood experience of seeing her father die. Unlike Lawson, Griffin generally chooses to negotiate with a reality that ought to be familiar to us, and yet sometimes estranges us. While there is a deep sense of intimacy in her poems, it is constantly being threatened by the unfamiliar, and it is this dialectic that triggers the energies in Griffin’s work. In addition, Griffin seems to have a much firmer grip on her poetic medium. In ‘My Father Becomes a Chicken’, the daughter watches her father on his death-bed, and as his body slowly transforms itself into the likeness of a chicken (“Your legs, skinned to the bone,/ are coated in wrinkling yellow scales”, “I watch your swollen abdomen heave/ and ruffle up the white down/ I first mistook for bedclothes”), her grief and powerlessness turn into aggression:

One vertical slash
and I am at your neck, ripping it apart
with my hands
tearing through muscle, artery, sinew, nerve
screaming Come out you bloody chicken
I know you’re in there.

In the end, “I am dripping with blood and covered with feathers/.../while the savage beast makes off with you whole.”

     If you can’t get the pamphlets, and have the choice between Sarah Lawson’s Below the Surface and Gillie Griffin’s Warm Bodies, Foreign Parts, go for the latter!