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         How quickly markings vanish without trace: ('Good Friday')

Some catastrophes can feel beyond the reach of poetry. The events of 9/ 11 are one such example; the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001 is another. For poets bearing witness to disaster, there is a fear that the poetic voice may speak uncertainly, that it will shake with anger, lapse into the silence of cliché. That said, the gravity of an experience may have its own imperative, and it is testimony to the quality of the poetry in Josephine Dickinson's second collection that throughout her personal account of the foot and mouth outbreak she holds her voice steady. Her poems, both harrowing and rewarding to read, are not dead memorials but a dialogue with experience, a negotiation with a dreadful reality.

Dickinson was closer to the epidemic than most, living in the corner
of North-east Cumbria most devastated by the disease, seeing at first-hand the government’s slash-and-burn policy for dealing with it. There are other fine poems in The Voice, but the resonance from those that begin and end it (‘Good Friday, 2001’ and ‘On the Wind’ respectively) can’t help but echo through the quieter tones of the rest. ‘Good Friday’ sets a pattern that Dickinson follows in other poems: the alternation of close and distant viewpoints (emotional as well as physical) as a means of engaging with a reality that is, here, almost too much to bear. The horror of the sheep slaughter at close quarters is interspersed with biblical quotations that feel as hollow and pertinent as the rattling bird in the tree:

Behold the Lamb of God
which taketh away the sin of the world.

The signs and colours of the natural world at one moment escape from the context of immediate horror:

the stones’ switched colour with the seasons;
a creature’s flit through the trees;
the lamb’s grave gathering a thatch
of twigs and leaves.

at the next, push us face to face with it:

Blood spatters, drips.
They roll in corners
on shitty concrete,
twitch their tails,
wrestle with pain.
I pierce their ears
with plastic pins.
They jerk, contort.

Image and feeling, almost inevitably, trample words in a first reading of this poem. While chronologically ‘Good Friday’ belongs at the end of the collection, its initial placing has more than theological significance, reactivating the emotions of rage and grief experienced by so many during the foot and mouth disaster. It is like walking through a museum in which the exhibits are still alive, in which no emotion has cooled.

It takes time, in such a context, to hear the inflexions of the poet’s
particular dialect. In the long, diary-style poem ‘On the Wind’, which records the months of anxiety before the slaughter, the alternations of near and remote feel less like polarities, their effect more cumulative than sudden. Here just clouds, rather than the words of Scripture, hang over the sheep; the diarist/poet looks up for both relief and portent, as the spread of infection closes the space between land and sky:

13.3.01.

Long, low black clouds float
over the horizon in the western sky
under the evening star.

Left out there to lamb on their own
they die an awful death.
What can we do?

We can do nothing.
There is nothing we can do.

(18.3.01).

Behind, in front
of Scarberry Hill
clouds hurry
from South to North,
their colours
never seen before:
cherry purple,
burnt rubber, wool.

This is a world out of joint: burning, leaching up into the sky, lambs born into fields surrounded by slaughter. Dickinson plots her dates on the page like the stages of the epidemic reported daily on the MAFF website; statistics and the vacuous statements of Blair and Nick Brown push their voices into the poem. The poem witnesses in words dug deep from experience, records whatever blows in on the wind. It is built from the material to hand, composed of voices and realities which often jar as they knock against one another. This is as it should be.

Within the quieter pieces, however, those slipped into the collection
between the exposed, raw worlds of ‘Good Friday’ and ‘On the Wind’ the apparent existential distance between Biblical quotations and sheep slaughter begins to close, to become part of a unified poetic language. Dickinson’s shifts of perception in poems like ‘Another Treasure’ can feel like the focusing of a camera lens that can see sharply close-to or at a distance, but never both together:

This is a biscuit maybe, a ginger thin,
a cinnamon curl. (It is trees on a steep
hillside far away.)

Parentheses fence off one part of the poem from another into ostensibly separable worlds. In ‘A Murder’, as the speaker ventures into a valley where the murder of a young girl took place, their function is to attempt the fencing off of an unbearable or inexplicable reality, to protect what is within the fence from the brutality of a world beyond it:

(I felt a little unhappy
to be down there
in the gloom of the trees.)
The girl, fifteen, was found
stabbed and mutilated, two
hundred yards from her home
(down there in the gloom
of the trees, while I could see
unending sunshine gleaming
on the slopes above).

Life and death remain the inseparable companions that they are in the foot and mouth poems; they don’t exist on separate planes but in
conjunction, occupying the same space, just as mushrooms and Fly Agaric toadstools grow in the same soil. This coexistence and co-dependence of opposites is expressed most clearly and musically in the superb poem ‘Your Way’:

How long does it take to reach the end of the lane,
almost stationary, frozen? You tell me, ‘Go
ahead and feed the ewes’. I get my jar and catch
you up, take longer than I thought. But you are there
still, moving barely perceptibly, just slightly
swaying side to side.

The space between the speaker and her companion is one which she
doesn’t close but moves within:

You often say, ‘Go on’ but often I say, ‘No’.
For I like to walk with you, your way, more slowly
than the elephant, as a galaxy at the
end of time, faster than the speed of light, so you
are swinging out of ken faster than glances can
any more pass between, faster than I can see
any longer, than I can ever catch you up.

The words and phrases of the poem — galaxies, frozen, end of time — repeat and echo across the four stanzas, but each time they reappear they have shifted, rearranged themselves into new shapes and clusters like the galaxies shifting with the changing horizon. There are no fences here, parenthetical or otherwise; not the raw harmony of the gathered voices in ‘On the Wind’, but the same language. The speaker and her companion exist independently, but find their rhythms in one another’s movement; speed and slowness become simultaneous perceptions, modulations of a voice tuned to many voices, incorporating them, never losing its power of speech.