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"A Twist of Malice: uncomfortable poems by older women" Joy Howard (ed.)
Grey Hen Press, £8.00

"Bundle o’Tinder" by Rose Kelleher
The Waywiser Press, £7.99

Do you prefer anthologies or collections? I owe my long acquaintance with many favourite poets to school anthologies. (I wish more anthologies appeared on current syllabuses.) Anthologies are gateways: the only poetry books, if any, present in many households. As long as good poems flare within their pages, my one reservation, as a writer, about the current best-sellers is that I would love more of my own work smuggled into them. But, as a reader, I must admit that as soon as I find an interesting anthologised poem, I long to flee the anthology for the coherence and intensity of one of the poet’s collections.

I must dispel the smoke of unsuitability by stressing that although I may not be the keenest reader of anthologies, I am sympathetic to this anthology’s chosen twists. In my careless twenties, I did not believe that women faced any particular obstacles to publishing poetry. I now know that they may face particular difficulties in writing it, sometimes through the workings of family, where problems may spring from either sex. Clearly there are some very fine, and moving poems now available for publication from older women, which compete for oxygen with accomplished material from much younger writers.

I admire the boldness of the editor of "A Twist of Malice". She declares "First and foremost, this anthology is meant to entertain". A wicked smile adorns the cover. How do you write entertainingly about malice? Perhaps by a patient powder-trail of detail, such as Jude Goodwin’s "smoky rose/ dress" or Ann Alexander’s menus, "She will have latte, sponge fingers"- en route to a killer ending:

                    Of course I didn’t gloat
      I never say a thing.
                                                           (Berta Freistadt)

         They will be leaving early. 
      I will be picking up the bill. 
                                                           (Ann Alexander)

Ingenuity helps to delay the explosion. Alice Beer’s vengeful first wife in ‘Time Out’, who will "slip in just before one" to the place she is ‘staying’, is, in fact, dead. M. R. Peacocke’s brevity echoes on after the mysterious voice caught in an orchard: "My spade/ struck on stone/ No one."

A surprising absence in this anthology, of the echoes of history, is highlit by Pamela Coren’s sudden reference to ‘the arrow-slit where the barons shot my father’. But Ann Alexander brings a stylish reworking of Snow White: ‘God knows I tried […] I took a course in parenting. She cried.’ Angela France catches the lilt of myth: ‘She returns from the sea with a boy child’, who ‘salts his drink of water’.

Salt in the flame may cast a benevolent light. Ann Drysdale’s Eve drinks, in lazy couplets,

Out in the garden in a dressing gown
Breathing old apples as the sun goes down.

But the poems’ shocks darken, far beyond the entertainment of light verse. Clare Shaw’s poem is a troubling child ‘its spiteful little elbows in my back’. Ruth Silcock’s incantatory ‘Perils of Ageing’ throws the old to the wolves. Marianne Burton’s roses eat the dead:

the firm ones, the green ones, the liquid ones.

Gil McEvoy’s language, for all its passing pleasures, is forged under the pressure of pain, the weight of a life:

For I’m a hard woman now:
I am diamond, carborundum,
and I wipe out fools.

Two hard judgements could be made upon this book. Its slightly confused subject headings do not illuminate the poems. It is rather too indulgent to writers who favour feeling over form. Anne Stewart, whose Christmas poem ends in the sly rhyme ‘hatchet’, shows that elegance may be a good friend to malice.

Yet "A Twist of Malice" is also a good friend to its reader. Its editor boldly allocates generous space to each poet. This risks repetition, and alienation of an unsympathetic reader, but it can also allow the poems of a previously unknown poet to explode and flower in the mind. I was increasingly mesmerised by the dark powers of Ruth Sharman. I would not like to be left alone with her scrambling vines, her choking waterlilies, or the quiet "white garden" which she turns into a jungle. Nor would I open her wardrobe:

                                                                 The dress
he hooked me into was my wedding dress,
and it was black and fitted like a skin.

But the skilfully twisted fuse of this anthology will light my path to her full collection.

I must turn to another collection, Rose Kelleher’s "Bundle o’Tinder". This book won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for 2007. Richard Wilbur has contributed a foreword of glowing praise. I can only agree, humbly. This first collection is a revelation. Here is the ending of the first poem,"Asperger’s Muse", about a boy who chants numbers, remembered and reproduced by Kelleher:

71693993;
Seeking spoken sanctuary
in the perfect circle’s key
he draws a closed perimeter
around himself; and though I cannot
understand the tongue he speaks,
I know he sings a hymn to something
steady, central, infinite.

The short, delicately rhymed lines settle into a hypnotic, falling rhythm, like a Shakespearian charm. Kelleher’s own reverent listening entrances the reader. This is the slow fuse of poetry, from patient technical tricks to vision.

‘Asperger’s Muse’ opens into celebration, but Kelleher’s poems frequently close with hint and menace. A quiet list of the features of a school ends with "the rectangle" (also the poem’s title) "where Father Geoghan’s portrait used to hang". In ‘Famine Ship’, the memory of a slaver begins to unfold, also in a tense final line:

the freight we carried twenty years ago.

The poem has done its work. The line sinks into the reader’s mind, igniting echo and story. One of Kelleher’s strengths is her remarkable ability to confront two worlds, as in ‘Not Our Dog’, the story of an adoption:

                                                          and the dog
growls low in its throat, and bares its teeth at me
while I choose curtains for the nursery.

Kelleher’s is a tough, colloquial voice. Her outspoken poem ‘Lourdes’ addresses the sacred place as a fallible person: "You’re hard to get to/ and can’t fix everything". But she is not afraid, finally, to expose her own desire: "Cure my doubt." Kelleher’s short lines are excellent, an unshowy proof of strength.

My praise for Kelleher acquired a colleague for this review. My husband, sceptical about the worth of much new poetry, read the whole of "Bundle o’Tinder", captivated by its humour and by the delicate, playful sensuousness of ‘How Ticklishness Evolved’:

whose touch was feather-soft before it stung.

I was particularly moved by ‘Neanderthal Bone Flute’, which shows a rather different Kelleher, eloquent and bare. Her work does not depend upon lush adjectives but upon an inner vision overflowing into sound, as the syllables at this poem’s close overflow the measure of the traditional sonnet:

Let bone be flute, the music in our marrow.

The poem is its own music, but in hoping that the Neanderthal musician might be our ancestor, Kelleher, as she admits, defies the taut subject heading for this poem,‘Science’. Yet she is often adept at integrating science into her poetry and her vision. ‘Impulse’ refers to synapse and robot before - without contradiction -"The spirit moves".

It is a bold ending. Kelleher’s diction also often startles. A giant ray’s landing is ‘the splat’. This is accuracy, not conceit. Though she can deploy rhetoric most effectively, Kelleher is never histrionic. The final lines of a short poem about September 11 are charged by understatement:

preferring to go on just as before
but loving what I loved a little more.

I have few reservations about "Bundle o’ Tinder". Occasionally a theme is stretched too thinly – although across very well-made bones – as in the various mermaids and crabs in ‘At Sea’. Very occasionally a poem struck me as rather crowded and overwrought. The frantic lists of ‘Gingernut’ end by stretching word order to the limit. The fuse can snap:

                                                 nor is the fox
with its slim black feet more elegantly dressed.

Yet, two pages on, how eloquently Kelleher summarises the great ‘Rays at Cape Hatteras’, as they rise briefly above the sea: "rude fliers in the face of disbelief".

I stand in awe of Kelleher’s formal accomplishment. Technique is the imagination’s fuse. This book’s strength is underpinned by varied quatrains, three-line stanzas, passionate sonnets and quick couplets. Its rhythms include falling trochaics, quietly authoritative iambic pentameters and the often despised, essential, lilt of folksong. Rhymes in multi-syllable words often sound facetious in English, but Kelleher’s delicate use of part-rhymes is both serious and spirited:

be you saint or Aztec goddess
heal the earth, cast out the darkness.
Evil times are now upon us.

One of her favourite stanzas is the brooding quatrain, abba. This is a reflective collection, whose brief title is not explained until the heart of her book, in ‘Ditty’."The saddest songs are those that burn/ black as a match and a bundle o’tinder." Kelleher commands,"Slowly unroll each note".

I would note that there is not a bad poem in this book. Page after page delivers excellence, a memorable line, a jolt to the heart. Why was "Bundle o’Tinder" not on every English prize list? Perhaps this is a slow-burning poetry. Collections blaze; but the anthologist may be the more patient incendiary.