Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 16

Review of The Poor Rogues Hang by Thomas Tyrrell, pub. Mosaique Press 2020

I should perhaps state an interest at the start: I have had an unhealthy fascination with the history of pirates for many years, so could be expected to take an interest in a pamphlet of 17 poems on famous pirates. Those here are mostly, though not all, based on some of the pirates recorded in his General History of the Most Notorious Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson, who may or may not have been Daniel Defoe.

There is a considerable variety of forms among these poems, including sapphics and a sonnet, though many are closely or loosely based on the ballad form. This is a massively tempting form for poets; nothing looks easier to write than a ballad, and indeed nothing is easier to write than a bad one. At its best, it is a tight, spare form that uses few words to make much impact and has a rhythm that is at once both memorable and easy to speak. But it can easily become rhyme-led and galumphing. I don’t think Tyrrell always avoids this danger, particularly in those poems that follow the ballad form most closely, “A Frightful Ballad of the Third Lord Boyce” and “Of Captain Avery”. Their abcb quatrains are often on the edge of sounding like pastiches of a bygone form, rather than modern riffs on it

 By contrast, “Of Graínne Ni Mháile” and “Anne Bonny to Captain Johnson”, which use the ballad’s techniques of repetition and musicality but tweak the form quite a lot, sound much more authentic. Anne’s ballad, with its rollicking anapaests and light rhyme linking the verses, picks up on Johnson’s comparison of her and Mary Read’s story to a “Novel or Romance”:

     Ah, Captain Johnson, our lives
     were no mere amatorious novel,
     unlike your Roxanas, Clarindas
     and such drabs of the bookseller’s stall.
     I was pirate and woman and all,
     and I sailed with and lay with Jack Rackham,
     who, if he had fought like a man,
     need not have been hanged like a dog.

There is also from time to time an amusing correlation between subject and form: Mary Read’s sapphics:


     Anne, mad Anne, the girl that I stole from Rackham,
     know this now: however my death shall claim me
     our last stand is all that my heart could wish for,
     fighting together

and “Of Major Bonnet”, whose name inevitably suggests a sonnet. The image of Stede Bonnet bored in retirement and longing for “mad romance” is captivating; it also perhaps highlights a problem with this subject-matter. Much as I admire the enterprise of the pirates, not to mention their democratic leanings and rudimentary health insurance, it cannot be denied that they were basically maritime burglars, who quite often added murder, torture and rape to their crimes. When Ned Low is described as “the only pirate not to have/a redeeming feature”, I can’t help thinking Tyrrell is over-romanticising the trade as a whole. Low was by no means the only sadist on the block – what about Montbars, known as the Exterminator, and Nau l’Ollonois? – but  even  those with what he calls “the swashbuckling romanticised/look” could be vicious enough when the need arose.

Granted, the respectable folk were behaving no better: in “Pieces of Eight” there is an image of the Spanish treasure-ships full of the gold mined at the cost of human misery


     Pirates and privateers
     circle them like sharks

which subtly and skilfully recalls the way real sharks followed slave-trading vessels, waiting for discarded corpses.  Indeed the collection’s title comes from a line in the ballade “The Last Speech of the Condemned Pirate”, “The poor rogues hang; the rich rogues thrive.”  I think it’s arguable that the ballade’s envoi weakens its point by comparing its pirate speaker to Charles I, a rich rogue who did end up on a block, but the general point stands. And there is no doubt that the appeal of these deplorable but irresistible characters continues, as RLS forecast it would: those of us who are finding our lives dull are always going to be tempted at least to read about free spirits, if hopefully not to join them. As Major Bonnet muses, “there’s always piracy”….

Review of Cargo of Limbs by Martyn Crucefix with photographs by Amel Alzakout, pub Hercules Editions

crossing the liminal
     places of the homeless

Those who accuse poetry of failing to engage with current concerns do not really understand the process whereby events and concerns are transmuted into poetry. Disparate things come together and meld into something new, stirred round in what mediaeval Welsh bards called Ceridwen’s cauldron.  This osmosis takes time, but the material of what might be called the mass migration question, the steady westward stream of refugees and poor folk trying to better themselves, is just about ready now and is surfacing in many a collection.

Crucefix’s long poem came about in just this way: two quite separate experiences playing off each other. In 2016, the poet listens to a reading of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book 6 of The Aeneid, but finds the pictures in his head are not of the banks of Acheron but the shores of the Mediterranean, with the bodies washed up thereon, in particular that of three-year-old Alan Kurdi (the name at the time was widely reported as Ayan or Aylan but is indeed Alan).

So a world-famous photograph and a reading, a mythical river and a real sea, a classical poet and his twentieth-century translator, a morally quite dubious hero and the most innocent of small boys all blend in the cauldron. The result is a rethinking of the moment in the Aeneid where our hero, accompanied by his priestess guide, arrives at the bank where dead souls congregate in hopes of being ferried over but are only allowed into Charon’s boat if they have had their funeral rites. The others, the “resourceless” as Virgil calls them, are stranded between worlds and Aeneas, not always the most compassionate man, pities their plight.

In this version the priestess, appropriately for a book of both poems and photographs, becomes a “lensman”, and Aeneas is Andras, a credible Middle European-ish name  - and here I must dissent from Choman Hardi’s introduction, which identifies him with a demon of that name. There does indeed seem to be an Andras in the demonology, who commands thirty legions of demons, but this is surely pure coincidence, of which the poet may well not even have been aware. Andras here is just a name that happens to sound vaguely like Aeneas, and this Andras’s outburst at the end of the poem is purely human:

Suppose I know –
     even from what lives
     these wretches come –
     from what wretched plight

     out of what violence
     to want this – pay for this –
     say by what rule
     by what moral right

     does any man here let
     some pass and some pushed
     back into the night
     no less fraught than

     the cold and lethal waters
     these others scrum
     to risk their lives upon…

It is essentially the same question Aeneas asks – “how is it decided who are to retreat from the bank and who are to be conveyed?” But the tone of perplexed curiosity in his voice has here been replaced by frustration and anger. And the identity of the “sullen boatman” is more fluid. When he
     elects one but not another
     leaves the remainder
     he shoves them aside
     rescues as he condemns
then clearly on one level this modern Charon is a people-smuggler, risking these unfortunates’ lives for the money they pay him. But the phrase “any man here” invites us to consider others who make choices – immigration officials, politicians, those who elect them – and the degree of their/our responsibility.

The photographs, so appropriate in a poem partly inspired by a famous photograph, were taken by Amel Alzakout in unusual circumstances. She herself, in 2015, travelled from Izmir in Turkey to Lesbos in a smuggler’s small boat. She was determined to film the journey but had to do so secretly, with a camera concealed in her sleeve, as smugglers are unsurprisingly shy of being filmed. Halfway across, the boat collapsed but she filmed on until rescue came.

The result is photographs that capture the surreptitiousness and haste of the enterprise, fleeting moments filmed from odd angles, over people’s shoulders, so that one feels part of the scene in which she found herself. Forty-two people on that boat died in the water; had she been among them, we should have lost not only a talented artist but a most unusual and striking record, which echoes and complements the moving, restrained cadences of the poem.

It’s an odd title for a press, this Hercules Editions. Hercules was a hulking dimwit with no style or delicacy: the books I have seen from this press are tiny, beautifully crafted jewels. At the end of this one, Andras is sufficiently moved by what he sees to stop his cameraman filming. His reaction is understandable but misguided;, for just as Amel Alzakout’s shots give us a unique insight into her journey, so the words in which Crucefix commemorates the “great cargo of limbs” crossing the ocean humanises them and brings them closer to us.

Review of Between the Islands by Philip Gross, pub. Bloodaxe 2020

              We’re on the edge
 more often than we think

Piers, shores, gangplanks, a temporary road over an iced-up sea, a land bridge drowned in a tsunami. All very liminal, and behind all these edges, a consciousness of the threshold between the living and the dead.
The sea which dominates this collection is literal as well as metaphorical: at the end of “Three Fevers and a Fret” it speaks, angrily, of what is being done to it:

                Listen. Catch the glitter-swish
      of shoals switching grey-silver-grey to
     off. The shiver-to-stillness of the coral
     bleaching. The slow spreading of the spill
     to pools of silence.  The hundred-mile spool
     of whale song snapped. I have no words for you.

The inspired line break that throws such a weight on the word “off” in that quote reminds us that Gross is a poet to whom the niceties of technique are important. The title poem is a sequence of fifteen variant sonnets. It isn’t a crown of sonnets, but the last, elongated, line of each is broken in the middle and the first rhyme of each picks up on the last word before the break in the last. Thus, for instance, no. 9 ends

 over water. Are you ready… Can you hear
     me. This, slowly, in stuttering Morse. The pause
                                   before Yes. Loud and clear.

while no 10 begins

     The edge of things. Grey swell, imploding, draws
     curtains of spray.


Those punning drawn curtains remind us further that Gross, even when writing of the most serious subjects, is by nature linguistically playful and fortunately never tries to suppress this.  His wry epitaph for Brighton’s West Pier (Nocturne with a View of the Pier) is both gently humorous and oddly moving, as humour can often be.

     Always the other one, the lesser, West Pier Minor….
     The one famous thing he did was to burn.
     To stand up in a body of smoke. Then we turned.

     We still talk about him, sporting his new uniform of flame.

Nevertheless, this is at root a meditative collection, haunted and haunting. It often sounds edgily relevant and contemporary – the Somerset Levels, “chafed by long drainage”, waiting “for the sea to return, to be healed”. This is a surely intentional reference to the flooding of recent years, but the uncanny contemporary relevance of “the kingdom of Quarantine” –fever-struck ships seeing “the docks/they can’t reach” – must be serendipitous, the result not of trying to be au fait with the latest news but of addressing universal concerns that keep cropping up in new forms, like the “same-and-changing sea shapes”. His list of rocky islets in the Scillies:

     Hanjague, Menavaur,
     Ganninick, Crebawathan, Rosevean, Gorregan,
     Mincarlo

is reminiscent of the shipping forecast, that litany so often compared to a prayer. This collection takes a lot of reading; like its central image it is slippery, many-faceted and yields more each time you go back to it.

Review of Scion by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon 2020

The past beneath the skin

It has often been noted that “ancestry” is an interest that grows on us as we ourselves draw closer to becoming a part of history. As older generations die off, and we grow accustomed to being the older generation, with, moreover, plenty to remind us that our bodies too are ageing, it becomes more natural to see ourselves not just as individuals but as a point on a long line.

The particular heritage in this collection is Jewish, and this fact informs many of the poems, perhaps most memorably “Tracks”, in which Rose sees an elderly Jewish man boarding a train and reflects that

    He will settle himself on a seat
     to the sound of a whistle,
     unfold a paper or open a novel
     by Wiesel and exit any time
     he likes. He can call the shots
     on his passage; he can alight.

It is also relevant to the “godless, faithless” authorial voice’s self-questioning about who exactly she is and where on this line she belongs: one may discard a great deal about one’s heritage and still be shaped by it. Hence the Yiddish dialect words that recur throughout the poems; there is a glossary at the end, but I don’t think most readers will need it, for this is a strand of language familiar to most of us via the screen and the page if not in our own lives. In this sense it is part of our heritage too, and indeed throughout the book it is commonality rather than difference that emerges. Though the old gentleman in “Tracks” can indeed exit  the actual train when he chooses, journeys in a poem can hardly help being metaphorical as well as actual, and in that sense he and the rest of us are all bound for the same inescapable terminus. The poems about bereavement, the loss of those ahead of us on the path, are universal in their relevance, perhaps especially those addressed to a still-living sister:

     “Let us rejoice”, hands joined
     in a chain of family and not,
     spinning, kicking, other hands
     dropping until it is just you and me,
     clasped hands thrown into the air up
     and down and up, chopping through
     the song, eyes on each other, joy
     and pain, all our dead here
     at our backs  (“Hava Nagila”)

It should be noted that “haunted by time and death” in a collection does not necessarily mean “depressing”. Rose has always been adept at leavening serious themes with humour, as in “On Redundancy”, her wry farewell to various malfunctioning bodily organs,

     surplus parts that relinquish

     their hold on the pith
     of our anatomy grudgingly
     when pared from their home.

And the missed relatives are not merely losses but presences, their place in the line anchored by lively memories of their personalities.  The “jubilant man of mirrors/and romance”, the woman singing “a beat behind the radio”, with many others, both crowd and enliven these poems. An interesting motif that runs through this collection is trees. From the World Ash of Norse myth onwards, trees become images for human activity, and the last poem in the book, “This Time”, sees the narrator walking through long avenues of trees that “lead to infinity”. In one way they are emblematic of the human bloodlines with which the collection has been so concerned, but they also take things beyond the human, to an oddly reassuring timescale of centuries.

Review of Widow’s Welcome by D K Fields pub. Head of Zeus, 2019

‘There’s power in stories and a story of power.’

This is a novel set in a fantasy world, and when I saw a map and a long list of gods, I did fear I was in for one of those interminable legendary back-stories before anything happened. But nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact we are plunged straight into a police-procedural whodunnit - finding out who, to be precise, strangled a man, sewed his lips together and left the body where it could easily be found.

This fantasy world is not actually unrecognisably different from our own; if you think it bizarre that an election should be conducted by means of six different groupings each nominating someone to tell a story, and the listeners voting for the narrative they prefer, ask yourself what happens among us.  And our protagonist, Detective Cora Gorderheim, with her scruffy coat that acts both as concealer and comfort blanket, her disorderly office, her taste for gambling and her frustration with the machinations of Them In Charge, could fit very comfortably into our world too. Cora needs to find out not only whodunnit, but why; this is the first of a trilogy and by the end she has apparently solved the first question but is still partly puzzled by the second.

The setting is a capital city, Fenest, which is somewhat like a 19th-century earth city before the advent of the internal combustion engine. In her job, Cora is better acquainted with its mean streets than its fancy ones, and they are well evoked, as, later, are the docklands where another character plies his trade.

Precisely because it’s this kind of book, I shall not risk any spoilers. I will mention only that the novel revolves around the election going on in the capital, and the structure of this election, with the candidates’ nominees each telling a story, determines the structure of the book.  Two of the stories are interpolated into this first part, and I assume the same will happen in parts 2 and 3. These stories are clearly going to be relevant to the book’s theme, which is basically an unjust society and (I assume) how to put it right. The first interpolated story is about how prejudice and fear are the children of ignorance; the second about the misuse of wealth to manipulate people’s lives. They are well written and not without interest in themselves, but I did wonder if they were not a little too long. I think my reason for feeling this is, in a way, a compliment to the novel: I was so intrigued by the main detective-story thread that I slightly resented it being delayed.

Several novels and poetry collections I’ve read lately take up the theme of refugees, strangers, and how we treat them, and so does this:

“If she’d wanted to forget about what she’d seen at Burlington, the ’sheets weren’t the place to go. The Daily Tales had little else to report. The cause of the plague was clear, said the unnamed writer: those coming to the city from outside its gates were to blame. A certain kind of person, for which Cora read ‘poor’ and ‘southern’. The ’sheet suggested a more selective entry policy was needed for future elections, ‘to protect the safety of Fenest’. Cora scrunched the sheet into a ball and threw it over the gig’s side. With any luck another gig would soon trample the ’sheet and its message into the muck; little good it would do in stopping the spread of such ideas. Even now, over breakfasts and first smokes, there would be people in Fenest saying to one another that southerners brought disease, because they were poor, because they were dirty, and so it only made sense to keep those people out… Her parents would have been loud in saying such things. Ruth wouldn’t have though. Cora picked up the other ’sheet from the floor. The Fenestiran Times took a different view of the plague. What could be more certain than sickness if people were left with nowhere to stay? The plague at Burlington was the result of the city’s neglect, not a fact of southerners being where they shouldn’t. That led neatly to the Perlish and their failure to invest in necessary things like new houses, more water pumps, drains. Which led back to the election. Like always.”

So will I read parts 2 and 3? Well, I think I might. As in all the best detective stories, Cora has solved some mysteries but uncovered others and I do want to know how it turns out, who wins the election and what Cora’s long-lost relative has to do with things. The writing was sharp enough to keep me hooked through this volume, and I think there’s some mileage in it yet.

Seditious blogpost

I can live with staying at home, especially since everything is shut and there's nothing worth going out for (I am actually more concerned that when this is over, so much of the leisure sector may have gone to the wall that there will still be nothing worth going out for). I think the "one walk a day" instruction is OTT, and is certainly being over-zealously interpreted by some police and councils - that's the natural tendency of jacks-in-office, which is why it is important never to accept what they do without question.  But again, I am lucky enough to have a garden I can work in, so it doesn't bother me too much.

What does increasingly bother me quite a lot is what I can only call the masochistic, puppy-like enthusiasm with which some folk are greeting the temporary, probably necessary but surely to be regretted, sacrifice of their liberties.  I have seen them saying online that people should "do as they are told", "not moan about it" (pardon me, it is the inalienable right of every citizen in a free country to moan, especially about the authorities and i shall go right on doing so) and "trust the government" - I would have laughed out loud at that one, if it weren't so potentially serious.

These folk tend to reference the "spirit of WW2", which only goes to show that they have talked to few survivors and read no Mass Observation diaries of the period, in which, believe me, there was much grumbling and little automatic trust. But I'd like to go back a little further in history, to the start of the 19th century when repressive measures, born in Establishment fears engendered by the French Revolution and Napoleon, in turn bred dissatisfaction and frustration that culminated in the Peterloo massacre. The slightest sign of disaffection was enough to panic the authorities into arbitrary legislation; at one stage, in response to what was probably a pebble thrown at the window of the Prince Regent's  carriage, Habeas Corpus was suspended (for four months, "initially").  "Seditious meetings" were also banned and the government also tried to apprehend all printers and writers "responsible for seditious and blasphemous material" - they mostly failed at this, because juries rightly baulked at it and thanks to Charles James Fox's Libel Act of 1792, they and not the judge had the power to decide what was libellous. Not the first nor the last time the sublime Mr Fox would make a nuisance of himself in the eyes of over-authoritarian regimes.

Of course we are not at the stage where the soldiery are riding down peaceful protestors, but then the Regency did not get to Peterloo all of a sudden; it got there via a slow accretion of measures whereby the government granted itself too much power and characterised even mild expressions of dissent as "sedition" or even "treason".  Nor did they learn from Peterloo; instead they passed the "Six Acts" of 1819, which outdid all repressive measures so far, forbidding meetings of more than 50 people and providing for 14 years' transportation for those guilty of "blasphemous and seditious libels"  - ie, as J B Priestley remarks in "The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency" (Heinemann 1969), anything a Tory magistrate disliked.

This is one reason why I think it was unwise for Parliament to allow the strengthened government powers in the Coronavirus Act to run for as long as 2 years without further parliamentary scrutiny.  And it would be even more unwise for the general public to stop scrutinising what government does, questioning it if it seems excessive, and generally regretting, even if accepting, the necessity for even a temporary infringement of liberty.

Review of "Solar Cruise" by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman 2020

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hus was my physicist received with joy in a few desolate marinas.
Brigid agreed with that good-time god, Electron,

 that there should be a lyric outcome.
not for immortality, which the gods already have
,
(electrons don’t die ever)
but for mortals whom the gods seem to want to impress at parties.

(The Crystallier: A Memoir in Which I Fable the Sociopolitical Side of Science)

At first I seriously wondered if I were qualified to review this, since I know absolutely nothing about physics and find any scientific concept hard to process – the level of my understanding may be gleaned from the fact that I cannot read the phrase “Higgs Boson” without getting a mental picture of hogs and a bison. I decided, however, that since the majority of readers would surely be in the same boat (you'll see what I did there in a minute), the reactions of a scientific ignoramus to poems heavily concerned with physics, and in particular with solar energy, were relevant. Also, by the time I came to this conclusion, I was enjoying reading the poems.

As one might expect with such an abstruse subject, communication is being achieved very much via metaphor. The central image, unexpectedly, is one of a cruise on which poet and physicist are partners and passengers and where he, the physicist, seems to be trying to convert his fellow passengers on the SS Eschatology (a ship of fools? An ark?) to the concept of solar energy.  Meanwhile, alongside the image of humanity voyaging to disaster, the field of science yields its own imagery to illuminate human activity, as in “The Triptych of Power”:


i The Chosen One

when one golden photon from a sunbeam
lights up a crystal solar cell
it gives all of its energy to one of the cell’s electrons

ii The People

though many electrons hold the crystal solar cell
the chosen electron rises
and creates a positron from each electron’s rib
which frees them all
unexpectedly
and thus together
they make electricity


These two images of gold and voyage interact throughout and come together in “Cabin Coffin”:

Yet there is a gold burnishing the diminishing room: is it the thing we’ve grasped that is almost in the world’s grasp? Has it steamed off the physicist in his last fear, like last words? Or off me, like a poem, all lyric glitter bubbling?


The parallel between physicist and poet is constantly stressed in wordplay: lyrics/physics, physics/physic. Playful as the suggestion may be that Lisa Meitner’s special insight into the splitting atom, which she described as “waisted”, was aided by the fact that “a man does not have a waist/ He has a midriff. A middle”, Crowther, like George Herbert, does not really think the way words act and echo each other is ever mere coincidence. She plays too, throughout this collection, with lineation, parallel text and line breaks, continually forcing us to think again:

There’s a scar-
City of prophet. (Wingding)

The voyage of the two protagonists, and of humanity in general, is also full of literary and historical allusion, quite apart from the lexis of physics, and I wouldn’t claim the navigation is always easy. But both the central relationship and the passionate belief in a cause come over very clearly and strongly, and the dense, intricate verbal technique yields more with each reading. It struck me as remarkable that a collection with such a powerful and deeply-felt message never sounded like preaching. Indeed my memories of it - apart from the wry humour of the “rapture physicists” and the ship’s foghorn that goes “ohhhm, ohhhm” – are principally of excitement, the excitement that comes from thinking about something new. I’m not surprised this book netted a Poetry Book Society recommendation. It can be ordered from Shearsman, and this is a good time to be supporting small publishers, and indeed authors in general.

Review of The Breach by M T Hill, pub Titan Books 2020

If I’m not lonely, then I’m adrift. It means a lot to feel wanted, to understand your place in another person’s world. Who is Freya to Shep? Who is Freya to anyone?

The trajectory of the first part of this novel is one I always find potentially interesting: a focus (in this case a bunker in the Lake District) and two people’s lives converging on it from very different places. It’s set in what feels like a fairly near future, with self-driving cars and a lot of other fancy tech, but our two protagonists, Freya and Shep, are in reassuringly orthodox jobs; a journalist and a steeplejack. The author clearly has some knowledge of both trades, or has done some cracking research, because Shep’s working life in particular is conveyed very vividly indeed: speaking as someone with a visceral fear of heights, I found it downright scary at times.


Shep edges out from the platform until only his toes are left. He opens the biter’s mouth and takes up his starting position. He swallows and leans back, legs like a bipod, lines good and taut. Kapper feeds out rope until Shep stands fully horizontal off the platform lip. The sun on his bare arms is close to unbearable.
‘Holding,’ Shep says. ‘Guy cable’s two metres down.’ And he commits one sole to the beams that support the platform, heart raging. Past his excess rope and dangling gear, the tower’s first hundred metres taper gracefully into the base pad. The merging blue-gold horizon out to sea. Eyes up, and he almost can’t stand the beauty of it: a shimmering curve rolling up, up, up for another nine hundred metres into the heavens, his angle giving it the appearance of a solid blade. The rush is acute.


Shep’s hobby is “urbex”, exploring man-made structures, often illegally and always dangerously. Freya meets him because she becomes interested in a story she covers about the death of a man, Stephen, who was also into this.  It emerges that Stephen and his girlfriend Alba had explored a deserted bunker, where Shep and Freya also go. This bunker is on land owned by a couple, whose young daughters and gardener have already apparently seen strange things there and which is a focus for interest from authorities and others.

What is going on in the bunker, and what effect it has on those who go there, is the book’s central mystery and obviously I shall avoid spoilers about it. But there are other hooks, particularly in the first part of the novel: how will Shep and Freya connect; how will Freya reconcile a sense of morality with invasive journalism; will Shep, whose liking for alcohol is not the best match with a job involving heights, survive his next ascent?  In the second part, where the effects of what happened in the bunker are becoming more obvious, survival in general is an urgent question.

I was reading online, without what Jane Austen calls the tell-tale compression of the pages ahead to warn me the end was nigh, which is probably why it came as a mighty surprise.  When I saw an acknowledgements page, I actually thought I must have clicked twice, or that maybe something had been left out of the document. Reading again, I could see what was going on: it’s one of those books where the choice of end-point is always going to be arbitrary; in fact in some ways the end is a beginning.

This novel is in a genre (futuristic, borderline SF) that I don’t normally read much. But I don’t think one would have to be a devotee of that genre to find it enjoyable and intriguing, because its sense of the world we live in is very strong and vividly conveyed.

Review of "Wing" by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2020

They’ve made a morning of their own, called Matins
(“Clock”)
It is humans who give things names. All Francis’s collections delight in words; this one specifically exults in names. It is a collection focused on nature, on landscape, creatures, plant life from roses to fungi, but seeing them all through the eyes, microscopes and imagination of humans. An early poem, “Mere”, sets the tone when its landscape is figured in images drawn from human activity: the windblown water “shivers in its sequins”, the heron, ironically, “mimes a pond ornament”, while a mallard “takes off from its runway of splashes”.

The names we give things are taken from what we see around us, or at least from how we interpret what we see. Hence they are images in their own right, and bring with them a wealth of associations among which Francis’s imagination can happily range – “while the liberty caps rioted on the verge by the police station” (“Liberty Caps”). Nowhere is this more evident than in “Pomona”, a celebration of apples through the seasons, and of the names people have given them. From the names of the winter apple trees, winter emerges:

The air has a bite to it now, White Must, a Hoary Morning.
A Winter Coleman holds out grey arms in the orchard.
A |Pigeon plumps itself in the cold, and mistletoe makes its nests
on the rough battlements of the Tower of Glamis.

In the last verse, apples and those who have named them become one:

When the last Gloria Mundi has fallen, where is our Seek No Further?
The ancient Ribstone Pippin tree slumps on its crutches
while the Ribstone Pippins sleep out the winter in newspaper,
old Ribstone Pippins mulling their spices and parsnippy sugars.

That “parsnippy” is typical of Francis’s uncanny accuracy of observation and word choice. The “seedcake fragrance of aunts” (“Pomona”), the late sky that is “custard curdled with rhubarb” (“Rose Absolute”), the seemingly dead ant that “rose to all its feet” (“Ant”). This is not the desperate search for novelty that causes some poets to scrabble for incongruous words and far-fetched comparisons: it is the freshness that comes of observing closely and describing exactly.

An interest in technical challenges has also always been part of his poetry and surfaces here in the trochaic syllabics of “A Charm for Earwigs” and the single vowel of “Monomoon”, which would be a wonderful one to read aloud:

go soft
on woods, wolds,
moors, rocks,

nod
to crops, cows,
shorn flocks,

throw off
spools of floss, whorls
of cottonwood blossom.

There has always been an exuberant delight in the beauty and variety of the world in Francis’s poems; indeed I sometimes wonder if it has led him to be underrated by those who seem to think serious poetry’s job is to depress the general public. It is very much in evidence here, perhaps more than in any of his other collections, yet behind the upbeat note is a darker one.  The end of “Pomona”, with its richness of fruit, is winter, old age and death; the fascinating creatures under Robert Hooke’s microscope are being literally studied to death, and you don’t want to know the recipe for oil of swallows, even if it would cause your aches to “wheel off on long wings”. Other wings in this collection include those of the flies under the microscope, the end-of-summer butterflies in “Wingscape”, beautiful but doomed, and the fatally failing parachute of “Freefall”. The end of this poem,

Sleep on the wing, the way swallows are said to,
sleep on the wing

is a little reminiscent of so many plays of Euripides in which some despairing character cries out a wish to be winged, to fly away from earth and grief.  Only they can’t, of course, any more than swallows can actually sleep in flight, and it is this unspoken consciousness of being anchored that shadows the brightness and throws it into deeper relief.

Review of Sleeper by Jo Colley, pub. Smokestack Books 2020

Well, you know me, I have a thing about identity and change/concealment of same, so a collection about spies and others who hide their identity was always going to appeal. This is organised in five sections, moving gradually from the historical to the personal and dealing successively with the Cambridge group that included Philby, Burgess and Maclean, then with the wives of Philby plus some other women in relationships with spies or themselves spying, “Cold War”, in which the title is more metaphorical than historical, next “Sleeping with the Enemy”, in which we have definitely moved into personal territory and how people in relationships hide from each other and seek each other out, and finally “Motherland” in which a mother is both remembered and re-imagined.

I like this concept, and quite a lot of the time it is well executed. I don’t think the three “Redaction” pieces, which are essentially mashed-up quotes from John le Carré novels, really earn their place – I see the rationale, the comparison of the spy fiction of the time with the even more incredible fact, but think it could be more economically done. A lot of research has gone into the early sections and she is good at pinpointing the facts that illuminate, like Aileen Philby’s eerily appropriate job as a store detective. The title poem is an excellent analysis of the strange limbo that is the existence of a “sleeper”: an agent whose job is to assimilate in foreign territory and who may or may not ever be used. Such a person must blend in, be inconspicuous, become part of their new world yet not so much that they cannot sabotage it when called on. It is a recipe not so much for a new identity as for the lack of one:

          Look at my life. Do you look at my life? Can you even see it?

Among the more personal poems, I like the idea in “Motherland” of memorialising someone not only by recalling what they were but by imagining what they might have been, the other lives it was in them to have led. In this sense we are all sleepers, all sailing under colours which, while not false, are not the only ones possible, and a mother who loved the sea could indeed have been the “captain of a Grimsby trawler”.

It might be useful for Colley to rethink her use of the second person pronoun. I used to frame poems in it sometimes myself, but stopped because I became convinced by the argument of Matthew Francis that it made no sense to have a conversation with someone who couldn’t hear (generally because they were dead) and who already knew all the things you were helpfully telling them. This is not always so; in the Motherland section the idea of a daughter having a sort of mental conversation with a dead mother is entirely apposite – indeed I think she could have exploited it further by using it to differentiate the memory poems from the imagined ones, as well as using italics for that purpose. But it’s harder to see a good reason, in “You Weren’t Expecting a Lady” for addressing Kitty Harris as “you” and telling her all about her affair with Maclean, which presumably wouldn’t be news to her. And in the Aileen sequence it can be confusing when in one poem “you” is Aileen while in the next it is Philby.

There are also a few missed typos: it’s Gore-Tex not Gortex and “full fathom five”, not “fathoms”. But in this section, “Sleeping with the Enemy”, there is also a fine poem, “Gaze”, where a woman’s attempts to retreat from and frustrate a male gaze are captured in some sharp imagery: the tight-shut scallop which the wind tries to prise open; the insistent, controlling mobile phone that

          insinuates a chip an implant
          at the back of her neck

The imagery of cold and whiteness in the “Cold War” section is effective, too; it seems to be a strength of hers. All in all, a sharp, thought-provoking collection.