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At the Skin Resort by James Sutherland-Smith [Arc Publications £6.95]

This is a welcome return by one of the 1970s’ most promising poets. Sutherland-Smith has lived abroad since 1980, chiefly in Slovakia where he married and started a family, and this, his first substantial collection for nearly twenty years, inevitably reflects the experience of living in a different culture.

He has lived through the collapse of Communism and the book’s first poems refract this through a sexual prism: a transvestite walks out in public before the Russian reinvasion of Czechoslovakia (Revolt); a clandestine relationship may be used by the secret police (To a Slovak Lexicographer); The First Free Elections are experienced in a brothel. There is also a touching poem about internal exile (Crayfish). These poems show Sutherland-Smith’s characteristic skill in rendering the half-formed thought or feeling in precise imagery:

Pigeons swirl before a braking tram.
I hope for them to rise and form
A spiral in the air that might become
The momentary shape of you asleep.
                                       (To a Slovak Lexicographer)

and, with a physical impact that he doesn’t attempt often enough,

She wishes it could be the Age of Steam.
For then she’d walk through warm, wet heat beside
The huge, black muscle of the locomotive.
                                                                 (Revolt)

After this strong start, the collection settles for something rather less. Poem after poem recounts the pleasures of country life in Slovakia. There are visits to a lake, a castle, his wife’s relatives; poems on mushroom gathering, finding an orchid, wet weather. Even Driving to Byzantium is an account of driving to a cottage in Slovakia into which the great cistern of Byzantium has been dragged to justify the title. In this poem, as in most, there is a refreshing directness of language:

I take a broom to sweep cobwebs from the well.
A spider large as my spread hand
Squeezes into a crack. A hornet rises with a twang.
They are the guardians of clean water.

The poems are well-observed, thoughtful, occasionally moving in a quiet way, but at bottom they are inconsequential, as if Sutherland-Smith isn’t able to progress from the actual to what interests him most - the intricate movements of the spirit. Give or take some local details, there is nothing to distinguish the experience rendered in these poems from visiting, say, Shropshire. I thought they might indicate a creeping conservatism, as in Ruthenia, a paean to a simpler rural past. But Sutherland-Smith hasn’t abandoned Western liberalism. In more ambitious poems, he logs the apparently undying illiberalism of Slovakia:

     I see bones of houses and the rat
Ends of history...
If time were abolished the Seigneur
Would come again for rent, the Tartar for loot
And the Jewish cobbler would still be spat at.
                                                                 (Nationalism)

From the dark the town police unfold themselves...
                                         They beckon me across.
I’m not a gypsy! I’m not a Jew!
                                                                 (A New Age)

This latter ends with the original, if not wholly successful, image of folding the Star of David until it reaches the density of a neutron star. In Musée de Beaux Arts Revisited, Sutherland-Smith subtly relates Breughel’s Massacre of the Innocents to Bosnia and beautifully turns Auden’s final image:

                if only the ship were a fable
Of the delicate informed heart that had somewhere else
                                                                                to go
But instead put about and looked for Icarus.

In some poems, near the end of the book, Sutherland-Smith does achieve an integration of image and experience that is simple, direct and utterly compelling. Two hint at the emotional cost of his emigration. In Wild Plums in Slovakia, the trees are leaf bare and fruit laden:

Black trees so ponderous with fruit
It seems fulfilment
And desolation are the same...

In A Snow House for my Daughter, snow

       can fall bleakly like a lack of feeling
Into spaces which we’ve spurned in the landscape of
                                                                       ourselves
Until all we gaze upon glitters like broken glass.

In The Year of the Comet the state of interior frozenness is acknowledged:

Sometimes I freeze, diminish into myself
Becoming less animate than the bark and cough of my car

but the poet turns to the ultimate frozen waste, the (Hale-Bopp?) comet, and declares it small compared with the loved one:

Though now it seems to hang like a cloudberry
Or one of the pearl earrings I gave you. I turn to
                                                          where you sleep.

Somewhere in the record of what might be my soul
You are a wave form; whether lesion or kink
Or natural contour is yet to be determined as I watch
                                                                   your curves

And think how unrandom we desire to be...

The effortless movement from vast to tiny, the urgent uncertainty of the reference to soul, the nod towards quantum mechanics or chaos theory, all indicate a sharp modern sensibility whose willingness to engage lucidly with final things is undiminished. Sutherland-Smith should leave the mushroom woods of Slovakia and resume his close attention to the movements of the spirit.