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Catch by Peter Carpenter
(Shoestring Press, £8.95)
Available from www.shoestringpress.co.uk


The cover to Peter Carpenter’s Catch features a photograph of a hooded figure striding away from the viewer across a shingle beach in which is buried (what looks like) an old rusted anchor.  It’s a suitably enigmatic image for a collection of occasionally difficult, periodically puzzling, intermittently idiosyncratic but always original and enjoyable poems, and I like them very much indeed.  They reach into the same sort of domestic and family territory as some of Robert Etty’s poems, but stylistically and in terms of the approach to the subject matter they are more off-kilter, more interestingly skewed.  Landscape comes into the picture too.  This is from ‘Towards Cap Gris Nez’:

     and after the tidy auberge
     we come upon it, and travel,
     the two of us again, into

     what might be gravel
     infill or snow, on past
     distractions of water

     towers, razor wire
     and war memorials,
     straight up into something

     fine as love high in
     the channel air.

It’s all rather subtle and rare, isn’t it?  The rhymes (travel, gravel, memorials), the clever enjambments, the surprise of ‘something // fine as love high in/ the channel air’, that turns the poem - on a sixpence, so to speak – from a landscape poem into a love poem.

There’s something modestly dazzling about Peter Carpenter’s writing, but also something wonderfully spare and taut.  Take, for example, ‘Homage to John Sell Cotman’ (the great English watercolourist and contemporary of Turner):

     Wherries less solid
         than cumulus
     about its business

     and the everyday
         gestures of water.
     Hands prizing open

     the jaws of eels.
         You sense futility
     in the great work

     rumbling on under
          human affairs
     massive as those

     Dunwich bells
          on the bed
     of the etching sea.

It reminds me, in places, of the modern pastorals of the poet R. F. Langley.  But Catch includes plenty more besides this sort of stuff.  There are sonnets (rhymed and unrhymed), list poems, monologues, and the tone jinks and darts from the tender to the sardonic, the wry to the comic.  Coming across work like this makes us grateful that there is still sufficient belief in the worth and the joy of poetry for editors and presses, large and small, to want to bring it into the world.