Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 34

On Trying To Be Too Clever

Now and then, a poem does something you think truly brilliant - until you realise that hardly any bugger has noticed or understood it. (It's particularly irritating if you happen to have written the poem in question.) Though actually, the one that has always had me tearing my hair about the obtuseness of the gentle reader is by Robert Frost, a sweet little epigram called "The Iota Subscript".

Saving the presence of those who already know, the iota subscript is a sort of ancient Greek equivalent of the silent E in English; you append it to a vowel (either eta, alpha or omega, but not to iota itself or upsilon), in the shape of a little squiggle underneath, and possibly it changes the sound somehow, though nobody knows for sure, not having been there at the time. The poem goes:

Seek not in me the big I capital,
Nor yet the little dotted in me seek.
If I have in me any I at all,
'Tis the iota subscript of the Greek.

So small am I, as an attention beggar,
The letter you will find me subscript to
Is neither alpha, eta nor omega,
But upsilon, which is the Greek for you.

Now, obviously, no one who has never done a bit of ancient Greek at school is going to "get" this, one can't expect it (I may say I only did Greek to get out of geography). But what really disappoints me is that every time I have ever quoted this to a speaker of ancient Greek, they wag their heads wisely and say "Ah, he got that wrong, you see; you can't put an iota subscript on upsilon, so it doesn't work". Whereupon I tend to bean them with something while screaming "He KNOWS that, you obtuse article, it's the whole point of the poem!"

This seems so obvious to me that I can't fathom how others can't see it. Yet... I have been on the other side too. The winner of the 2013 Forward Prize for best single poem was Nick Mackinnon's wry "The Metric System", and I helped to judge it. As you'll see, it has the lines "graduated in the metric system
that had taken us to the moon" and when we were talking about it in the meeting, Sam West, who do be rather scientifically minded for an artistic type, pointed out that this wasn't so - NASA uses imperial measurements, not metric. I regret to say that none of the other four of us had noticed, and while I can't speak for the rest, I would never have known what NASA used if he hadn't said.

What none of the five of us realised, at the time, was that the "mistake" was deliberate; as I now know, Mackinnon had been told this in error at school and was being ironic about it. This interpretation of the line didn't occur to any of us at the time; we all assumed it was meant to be read straight, though fortunately we also didn't think it really mattered what NASA used. And I still, actually, don't see any indication by which we could have known the poet's intent. But then, he wouldn't have wanted to signal it too obviously (or he'd presumably have put that particular statement in a teacher's voice).

It's one of the hardest balancing acts in writing (not just poetry), saying neither too much nor too little. Over-explain and you ruin the effect, while very possibly annoying the reader. Explain too little and the effect fails altogether. Put background information in a footnote and some readers (especially reviewers) will complain; leave it out and others (ordinary non-reviewing readers, mostly) will email you saying they wish you'd put footnotes in. Me, I would still contend that Frost's poem did enough, while I'm not sure Mackinnon's did. But I'm not sure either what I'd have done: put it in a voice, left it out altogether? Any views? I tend to think, still, that one should err on the side of too little and accept that quite a few won't "get" it.

Review of "Heart Archives", by Sue Rose, Hercules Publications 2014

when I am grit
and grilled bone, a snow of particles
in a ceramic body
("D25072049")

Heart Archives is what you might call a multi-media project. It began with a poem inspired by a work of Christian Boltanski, an exhibition, Personnes, which was staged in Paris and included his collection of recordings of heartbeats, to which visitors could add their own. The collection, Les Archives du Coeur, is permanently archived on the Japanese island of Teshima. Though it is the sound of life, it inevitably resonates with mortality, the "sound of people's absence" as Ben Luke remarks in his afterword to this book.

Rose then decided to create her own archive, concerning her close family and using the imagery of heart and blood that the exhibition had suggested. Like the exhibition it would be multi-media, in that it would contain both sonnets (14, which seems apt) and images connected to her family and photographed on her iPhone – Rose is an accomplished photographer.

Each poem is accompanied by an image, and the titles of the poems are the numbers of the images. This argues a close relationship between poems and images, but it is not in fact as simple as one illustrating the other. Rather, the image opens different possibilities, as becomes clear when you read the key to them at the back. This records the family connection, so, for instance, we discover that the image D25072049 shows the lid of a tin used to hold buttons from long-gone family clothes. In itself, this relates back to the poem, which concerns how people are remembered. But the actual image next to the poem, which we see before reading this key, is the picture on the lid of the tin, and it is a bunch of red roses. So before ever we know about the button tin, we are seeing the archetypal Western symbol of love, in a colour that recalls the blood which is a leitmotif throughout the collection, and, for good measure, the flower bears the poet's family name, Rose. The image, then, is being used to start off a whole husk of symbolic hares, which scatter in various directions with our minds following them. None excludes the others; what these images are best at is underlining the multiplicity of meanings a good poem should contain.

The same versatility and refusal to be pinned down to just one interpretation is found in the poems. When it comes to poems there is, as a colleague of mine once said, ambiguity hurrah and ambiguity boo. The latter leaves you wondering what that was all about, and often occurs when the poet wasn't quite sure either. The former is that quality which enables you to read the poem umpteen times and still see different possibilities. In the poem "T11222014" (this way of titling will never catch on), the narrator is a woman reconciling herself to childlessness, the end of the family line she celebrates. At the close of the poem, a "you" figure appears:

Still, when I comb
my fingers through your hair or do your nails
and see your features so like my own,

our hearts may not have synchronized in time,
but, blood of my blood, you're no less mine.

It isn't immediately clear who "you" is. The penultimate line suggests a husband, and he certainly appears elsewhere in the collection, but "blood of my blood" argues otherwise. It might suggest a relative, and the lines before it have described the kind of personal service one might do for an elderly parent, but that leaves the "hearts" line unexplained. Most of all, it might be the unborn, imagined child who is addressed, and the accompanying image, an X-ray of the woman's pelvis, could support this, but I don't think it excludes other possibilities. In truth, it seems to me that the past, present and future of the family line are all in the poet's thought at that moment, and by not identifying the "you" definitively, she is able to keep them in our minds as well.

As admirers of her debut collection, From the Dark Room (Cinnamon 2011) will know, Rose is skilled at using very personal, intimate material while entirely avoiding sentimentality. She does so here; the simultaneous accuracy and menace in her description of a human heart is typical – "an electric muscle the size of a fist" ("L27011945"). There is a lot of power in this little archive of words and images devoted to people who are either no longer here or will one day not be. Like the artwork which inspired them, the poems have a distinct tick of mortality going on in the background. This does not make them fatalistic or despairing; the very craft that has gone into them testifies to their belief that, in the absence of physical immortality, memory and memorability are worth cultivating. A poem I'd like to quote in full is the verbal, rhythmical tour-de-force "S31082011", in which she uses the metaphor of a heart transplant to speak of personal renewal:

This heart is sick. It's lost the knack
of skip, jump, swell and sing. It limps
back and forth, truckling, a cowed thing
seeking a chamber of stopped clocks,
the black of a full stop. It is crocked,
heavy with sorrows, the long doze
of evening, unaroused by the aromas
of skin, the urge to hunt and stalk.

Cut it out. Only the odd kink
or habit will be lost, an easy exchange-
young for old. Crack open the heart's cage,
implant the new occupant, shocking it
into motion if it doesn't take, then wait
for the build of passion, the soar, the race.

Review of Ugly Bus by Mike Thomas, pub. Heinemann

Mike Thomas is the author-cum-serving policeman from South Wales who in 2011 published a debut novel, Pocket Notebook, about a sardonic police officer called Jake who goes to pieces over the course of the novel and takes to chronicling his own disintegration in his police notebook. One of the characters from Pocket Notebook reappears here in a main role, but I won't deprive you of the pleasure of recognising him.

The "ugly bus" is a TSG van, and this novel features its crew of five officers working a shift in Cardiff on Boxing Day. So it's an ensemble cast, and the story is much concerned with group dynamics, with one person's effect on another and how the mere fact of being in a group can make people act differently. Martin, the sergeant, is educated, idealistic and modern in his outlook. But he is also young and relatively inexperienced in his role, so his authority over the older and more case-hardened four PCs is more nominal than real. And all five officers, being human, have their own problems at home to think about, as well as the drunks, football fans and determined troublemakers who contribute to the day's festive atmosphere. Meanwhile in another part of the urban forest, chance and an excess of drink are propelling another person on to a collision course with them…

Like Pocket Notebook, Ugly Bus is a blend of darkness and humour. There's a priceless moment, early on, when the crew, attending a briefing meeting, are relieving the boredom by playing Bullshit Bingo, in which the first to fill his card with management-speak clichés uttered by the boss is the winner:

‘. . . absolutely crucial,’ Da Silva was saying. ‘But let us not forget that today is for both sets of fans to enjoy themselves and the surroundings our fair city has to offer. We have the resilience and capacity to—’
‘House!’
Vincent turned when he heard the strangled shout.
It was David. Half standing, notebook in his hand. A look of pain slowly emerging on his face as he realised what he’d done, and where he’d done it.

David, a family man with rather too many ex-families and his mind never far from food, is one of the more likeable officers on the bus – certainly more so than Vince and Andrew – but if one thing becomes clear from this novel it is that nothing is black and white. Reader sympathy swings alarmingly as we see both the failings of the five and what they have to put up with, especially during the gripping scene where they are policing the Boxing Day football match and having to keep apart not only two sets of fans but two sets of political activists:

‘You fascist fucking pig!’ the woman screamed at him, the abuse made all the more absurd and troubling by her clipped and refined accent, because if somebody as well heeled as this had turned on them with such venom just for keeping people separated, then he dreaded anybody a little more hardcore showing up. Martin looked her up and down through smeared plastic: forties, neatly dressed in quilted jacket, herringbone trousers, cashmere scarf and light brown bobble hat, a delicate touch of make-up. She reminded him of his old deputy head teacher, except his old dep head never once spat in his face for wearing a uniform.

This is one of the moments where Martin's control of the situation is tested; there will be more, some of which he handles better than others. In the end, his problem is controlling not just four men but the van on which they all work, which changes their behaviour and is in many ways a character in its own right. The repeated mantra "what happens on the van stays on the van" is a crucial indication of what a sealed, hermetic, dangerous world it creates.

Just when you think it has no more twists and turns to offer, the novel's final scene is startlingly revelatory about who and what a particular person is. In a way, this shouldn't matter; in itself it alters nothing of what has happened, but in an odd way it does matter, partly because it gives a glimpse into the future; we can guess what will and will not happen next and we can also see that people who might wish never to have anything to do with each other again will have no choice about it. It also opens up a tantalising possibility; there are characters here whose story could well be continued in a third novel… Bring it on, I say, provided it has the tension, momentum, observational keenness and dry wit of this one.

Expelled from the garden: some random thoughts.

When we finish reading a novel, there's generally one of three reactions:

1. bloody hell, that was good!
2. meh
3. that's an afternoon of my life I'll never get back.

But there's one particular kind of book that gives me another reaction, a sense of massive bereavement and a wish to start straight in again at the beginning. This isn't, entirely, related to the book's intrinsic quality, though a downright poor one won't do it. I've been thinking about which ones do it to me, and have realised it is, above all, the world-builders. They are often historical, futuristic or fantasy and they tend to be long, the sort of door-stops that in Victorian times would have appeared in three volumes. They have to be long (or a series), because part of what they are about is not just telling a story but building the world in which it happens, and if, as is generally the case, this is not the everyday world in which the reader lives, then more time and trouble is needed to bring it alive.

The result, if it's done well, is that on finishing the book, I don't just feel I have come to the end of a story but that I have been evicted from a world, and desperately want to get back in again. I re-read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety about a week ago and, ever since, have felt nostalgic for the French Revolution; I daresay I shouldn't have much enjoyed being there in reality, but for some hours after I closed the book, I felt my life would be empty if I could not be the Lanterne Attorney or one of his colleagues. Mantel is good at this: I have read her two Thomas Cromwell volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, several times each now, and always end up wanting to live at Austin Friars.

But world-builders don't have to be absolute top-of-the-range writers, as Mantel is, to achieve this effect. Tolkien is nobody's idea of a great prose stylist; his dialogue leaves much to be desired, his characterisation varies alarmingly depending on what he currently needs the character to do, and some of his plot devices.... But he can build worlds; he's very good at it, in fact, and has the same ability to draw the reader into not only the story but the world in which it happens, so that at the end you find yourself again outside looking in, rather like Adam and Eve.

Canny world-builders do it in series, so that the Desperate Reader can repeat his/her fix simply by buying the next one. I'm not sure how long this works for. I suspect the effect might diminish the more we are given of the world in question and that short series might be best, because the important thing is to leave us not only wanting more but feeling there is more to want.

Try this, why don't you....

Michael Gove's statement that he wanted people to go into a school and not be able to tell if it was a state or private school led me to recall the days, not so long ago, when, as a writer with a book on an AS-Level syllabus, I went into many schools, both private and public, to give talks and readings. I, of course, knew in advance which kind of school I was visiting (and fixed my fee accordingly). How would I have known otherwise? Dead easy.

Not, I may say, from the pupils. Sixth-formers are curious, bright and stimulating whichever school you are in. They are also well-behaved, since by that time they are volunteers rather than conscripts. I can honestly say I found no difference between students in the two sectors. As for the staff, they tend to look more harassed in the state sector, for reasons that will become clear, but in both sectors I found them, in the main, dedicated to their pupils.

The giveaway, as soon as you stepped through the door, was the state of the buildings and furnishings. In the private sector there are freshly painted walls, carpets on the floors, edible food in the canteens and plenty of books in the libraries. In most of the state schools I went into, repainting was long overdue, buildings were shabby and sometimes leaking, every expense had been spared in the canteen and the libraries were poorly provided with books. This naturally produced a dispiriting atmosphere for the staff and encouraged the pupils to think education could not be a high priority, or it would surely take place in more civilised surroundings.

In other words, Gove, if you want it to be impossible to tell state schools from private, throw some money at them. Quite a lot of money. Because, despite that silly mantra so beloved of the rich and mean, "you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it", there are in fact many problems you can solve exactly that way, and some that can only be solved that way, and this is one of them. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to charge private schools two or three times what I asked from state schools.

If you want to know what's going on here and now, ask a historian

If there's one generalisation about genre writers that really annoys me, it's the one that says "people who write historical fiction are escapists, not facing up to problems in the contemporary world". In fact they are frequently addressing the contemporary a lot more adroitly than those who actually set their novels there and have less distance from their material. Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety" was published in 1992, quite a while before a post-9/11 world started getting twitchy about whether the ordinary forms of law were appropriate for fighting "terrorism". Here's Danton and Robespierre discussing the matter:

Danton: How do you tell a conspirator?
Robespierre: Put them on trial.
Danton: What if you know they’re conspirators, but you haven’t enough evidence to convict them? What if you as a patriot just know?
Robespierre: You ought to be able to make it stand up in court.
Danton: Suppose you can’t? You might not be able to use your strongest evidence. It might be state secrets.
Robespierre: You’d have to let them go, in that case. But it would be unfortunate.
Danton: It would, wouldn’t it? If the Austrians were at the gates? And you were delivering the city over to them out of respect for the judicial process?
Robespierre: Well, I suppose you’d…you’d have to alter the standard of proof in court. Or widen the definition of conspiracy.
Danton: You would, would you?
Robespierre: Would that be an example of a lesser evil averting a greater one? I am not usually taken in by this simple, very comforting very infantile notion—but I know that a successful conspiracy against the French people could lead to genocide.
Danton: Perverting justice is a very great evil in itself. It leaves no hope of amendment.
Robespierre: Look, Danton, I don’t know, I’m not a theorist.

Review of "A Hand-Book of Volapük", by Andrew Drummond, pub. Polygon

"Then a small band of Leibnitzians suddenly emerged from the shadows at the back of the church, academicians to a man […] blinking in the unaccustomed light, shouting out anathema and castigating us all for sullying their fond memory of a great Mathematician and Thinker. "Prime numbers are indivisible!" seemed to be their battle cry".

These unseemly goings-on interrupt the funeral, in 1891, of Prof. McInnes, a member of the Edinburgh Society for the Propagation of a Universal Language. Our narrator, Mr Justice, is the General Secretary. The Society, which hopes to achieve "Universal Peace, founded solidly upon Universal Comprehension", is, needless to say, riven with misunderstanding, acrimony and downright aggression, mainly because nobody can agree on what this universal language shall be – Latin, English and several invented tongues all have supporters, but none can carry the day. The cause of Solresol, for instance, is severely hampered by the fact that its only two adherents in the Society, or indeed in the country, are not on speaking terms.

Solresol was real, as are the other universal languages mentioned in the book; there seem to have been a considerable number of universal languages being invented around the last quarter of the 19th century. Two of them were Volapük and Esperanto, whose causes in the society are espoused respectively by Mr Justice and his opponent Dr Bosman. There was also, in the time of the English Civil War, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, who claimed to have invented a universal language, and if you ask what is the relevance of that, I can only say that he is an active character in the novel, despite being some 300 years old. It's that sort of novel.

Sir Thomas's plan for a universal language differs from most in preferring complexity to simplicity. Nineteen genders may be overdoing it, but he points to one of the chief problems of "simplified" language when he asks for a Volapük translation of strumpet, trull, Cyprian, wanton, hussy, slut, cocotte, Delilah and fille-de-joie, to find that Justice can offer only the same phrase for each (meaning, roughly, dishonourable young lady). Volapük, or any language like it, might do well enough for text-speak or office memos, but it has none of the nuance of languages that have evolved naturally. Later in the novel, Miss Smyth, an inhabitant of the lunatic asylum in which quite a few of the main characters are temporarily residing, asks Justice "When did a language ever come in advance of a conqueror? [..] Language, sir, is a means of Rule, an instrument of Power, a weapon of Oppression."

It will be clear by now that this novel is very much concerned with the nature of language, and indeed communication in general. There are two striking and game-changing moments when we realise that our narrator, while he hasn't exactly lied to us, has been failing to mention some quite important facts. There are also moments when our author communicates in Volapük, for the novel has a sort of primer running through it, with exercises which, you may be glad to know, have solutions at the back. Though you can perfectly well cheat with these, it's actually possible to follow the primer and read the Volapük phrases en route; as the novel progresses they become more relevant. And funnier, for like his first novel An Abridged History, which I reviewed here, this is a very funny book. I shall long cherish the scene where the Edinburgh census forms, collected by Mr Justice and accidentally damaged in a brawl with the obstreperous Leibnitzians, are reconstituted by the asylum inmates:

Mr Oliver, however, was outraged at the scandalous replies that had been given. "What manner of man", he demanded to know, "lives with six children, a wife, his mother, a brother-in-law and two lodgers, in a house which barely has two rooms?" I tried to persuade him that a great many of our citizens lived in such conditions, or worse, and that this form merely described an unpleasant truth. But Oliver, who was possessed of a mis-placed sense of social justice, was having none of it. At the stroke of his pen he gave the family another five good-sized rooms, evicted the lodgers and brought some comfort to the declining years of the house-holder's widowed mother, by resurrecting her late husband.

This notion, that you might be able to make a thing so, simply by writing it, underlies the novel. It has elements of realism, fantasy, politics, the picaresque: in short it's unclassifiable, which is probably why it isn't better known, as it ought to be. Oh, and you could also learn Volapük from it, if you wanted to. By the end, though, you'd probably conclude that this is a fruitless exercise – which is odd when you come to think about it, because though it is clear that the author is encouraging that conclusion, it's also clear that he himself can speak it… But as I said, it's that kind of novel.

Review of "Poetry of the First World War", ed. Tim Kendall. pub. OUP

This is a very scholarly, thorough anthology by a man who knows his subject unusually well, as any regular reader of his blog "War Poets" will be aware. The introductory notes to each poet, and the notes on poems at the back, are very full and informative; the chronology of the war years is helpful and though there's no index of poets, it can be argued that this is not really necessary; there aren't that many represented and the table of contents suffices.

This is because, as Kendall states in the introduction, he has concentrated on the "most important" poets who come within his remit of "poetry related to the War by poets from Britain and Ireland who lived through part or all of it". ("Most important", of course, is a judgement open to debate, but we'll come to that later.) This is almost the polar opposite of the approach taken by Vivien Noakes's "Voices of Silence" anthology, which concentrated on lesser-known voices to give a wider overview of the response to the war than might emerge from the well-known Sassoon-Owen-Rosenberg axis. Nonetheless the two have some principles in common. Noakes's anthology included several women; Kendall's prioritising of poetic quality does not, commendably, lead him to ignore, as some anthologists have done, the contribution of female poets who did after all live through the war as much as men did (indeed sometimes serving as nurses at the front) and whose take on it is both equally relevant and, in several cases, badly underrated by critics.

The real difference between the two seems to me that Noakes is primarily interested in what poetry of the time reveals about people's experience of, and response to, the war, while Kendall is more concerned with what effect the war had on English poetry. In this respect the context-setting in his introduction about how "Georgian" poetry is now viewed, and what it was actually like, is immensely interesting and informative. I had no idea, for instance, how commercially successful and popular the movement was; the first two of the five Georgian anthologies (pub. 1912 and 1915) sold, respectively, 15,000 and 19,000 copies (while The Waste Land was taking 18 months to shift a print run of 443). By the way, for all Ivor Gurney's throwaway remark, noted in the introduction, that the Germans had no poets of note, the soldiers he was fighting did, if he had but known it, share similar enthusiasms; the poetic hit of 1913 in Germany had been Stefan George's "Der Stern des Bundes" (Star of the Covenant) and many German soldiers went into battle with it in their breast pockets.

There aren't many actual surprises among the poets or poems chosen; the major one, perhaps, being Robert Service, who like A A Milne could switch from comic to serious mode when he had to. The omissions, of course, are more problematic, as always in an anthology, and where space is at a premium I would maybe quibble with the inclusion of Sassoon's "Glory of Women", which, apart from being, as the introduction rightly says, misogynistic in the extreme, just doesn't strike me as a very good poem. The other inclusion I'm not sure about is the short selection of anonymous wartime songs at the end. That sort of thing fitted in the Noakes anthology for obvious reasons; I'm not sure it does here, and without these songs, Kendall might have found space for some of his more regretted omissions, notably Gilbert Frankau. I don't want to play the game of "who should have been in it", because no anthology can satisfy all comers, but I do think that even by Kendall's criterion of poetic excellence, Frankau ought to be there. If not in the very front rank of talent, he is not far behind, and because his take on the war was not quite that of Owen & Co, he has been often overlooked. He gives a different slant, which is why Kendall finds it necessary to quote him in the introduction.

Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly well produced anthology of powerful and fascinating poems. It's far more useful than some earlier anthologies that managed to be completely blind to the presence of female poets, and it also finds space for some longer poems, where many anthologies, from this or any other period, would leave you with the impression that nothing but brief lyrics was ever written. It also happens to be a most handsome hardback volume, with endpapers and a sewn-in bookmark and at a very reasonable price, but that's secondary. To me it perfectly complements my Noakes anthology: the other side of the coin, so to speak, and the introduction in particular is hugely informative.

It's the way you title 'em...

What can a poet do with a title? More than you might think, I submit. An untitled poem is a wasted opportunity, because a title can be a great way not only to convey information that for some reason you didn't want to put in the actual poem, but to steer your reader along the line of thought you want them to go, without being too obvious about it. A good example is the late Victorian Francis Lauderdale Adams' poem "Hagar", about an unwed mother. Adams, writing for a Bible-literate audience, knows that by associating the girl with Hagar, Abraham's housemaid, he can convey that not only is she an unwed mother, she probably got that way courtesy of some respectable community patriarch. He can also set up the expectation that, in her hour of need, God will intervene to save her and her baby as he did in the Bible story – an expectation Adams will dramatically disappoint. Not a bad dividend from one word.

Here, however, is a one-word title working even harder. This poem by James Sinclair was written for a specific purpose. It is part of the Shetland "Bards in the Bog" project whereby poems, chosen by Jen Hadfield, are displayed in public toilets to attract the world's most captive audience. The particular batch including this one was written for the 2010 event "Hamefarin", when exiles and descendants of exiles returned to visit Shetland from far corners of the world. Shetland, like mainland Scotland, saw a great deal of emigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries as impoverished folk sought a better life elsewhere. Many never returned, and it was their grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even more distant descendants who came at Hamefarin to visit a "homeland" never seen.

The man who speaks this poem is seen at the start of his journey away from his homeland, filling his mind and pockets with memories of where he came from and what made him who he is, as all exiles do – "the wind will fit snug in my wallet". Though hardship may drive his journey, he goes, as many did, in a positive spirit towards a new life; there is a jauntiness about "the sails making dandy trousers", the "bottle of good humour" and "I will wear the sky beneath my hat". He is self-sufficient, an adventurer rather than an object of pity.

And if the poem were called "Emigrant", there would be no more to say about it. But it isn't; its title is "Immigrant", and that makes all the difference. Every emigrant ends up an immigrant; every immigrant was once an emigrant… The poem shows us a man setting out, hopeful, daring, entrepreneurial. The title invites us to wonder what will become of him, and how he will be viewed, at the other end – as a threat, a burden, an object to inspire fear, resentment or pity? It invites us, too, to consider those who are already at the other end of that journey here, and to associate them with the 19th and 20th-century impoverished crofters who set out in search of a new life. Emigrants when they set out, on arrival in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA, they were immigrants, and we can only hope they did not meet the kind of tabloid-inspired suspicion and hostility that greets similar arrivals here today.

And that's an even greater dividend from a single word.

IMMIGRANT by James Sinclair

Fill my pockets with lochs
the wind will fit snug in my wallet.
I will weave a scarf of mackerel, haddock and trout
the good fit of sheep on my feet.
My jacket, knitted peat and heather
with a bottle of good humour for the journey.
Planks of fishing boat bound tight as a belt
the sails making dandy trousers.
My back-pack holds the entire ocean
and last but certainly not least
I will wear the sky beneath my hat.

Review of Geraldine Paine's The Beginnings of Trees, Lapwing Publications, 2013

Geraldine Paine is not the sort of poet who rushes a book out every couple of years; her first collection, The Go-Away Bird, came out in 2008, also from Lapwing, and I reviewed it here.

This second collection, then, has been some years in the making, but the long gestation period shows in intensity rather than expansiveness: these poems are mostly brief, pared, sometimes epigrammatic, with seldom a word wasted. Blaise Pascal, allegedly, once apologised, "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short". It's baggy, wordy poems that can be churned out quickly; precision and spareness take time. Consider how much longer "Coming of Age" (quoted here in full) might have been, and to how much less effect:

She was twenty the first time. A back-hander
across the face, stinging. Her thirties were blurred.

At forty she tries a new eye-shadow, yellow
tinged with brown. Her fingers are gentle.

The ending here is redemptive, which I recall as a characteristic of her first collection. There are other redemptive endings here, like that of "Family Case", in which a young man's downward spiral is possibly halted by the willingness of someone to believe in him. But there is quite a lot of darkness here too, especially in those poems concerning lonely old age. In "Activity Class", the relentlessly cheery music and pompoms in the care home make a sombre background to the old man who has

lost seventy years
under the chair where it's sticky

or behind the chintz curtains
where his mother waits.

The old men of "Morning Men", sitting in the park "on hold" in contrast to the dogs:

One West Highland White chases another,
running flat out, in the moment, forever

are similarly comfortless. But in "Her Riley", a widower does seem to find a kind of consolation, looking at the car mothballed in the garage and recalling former times: in this ending car and wife merge, and past and present telescope to a point:

A rare beauty's
revealed, racing green, last taxed Nineteen-Sixty.
She'd loved the Derbyshire hills, the moors, distance.

This sense of the oneness of past and present, of the past being as real as the present, is one of the two things that most often redeem darkness in these poems – the other is human contact, from the most fleeting glance to a lifetime bond.

There is some wry humour in this collection – "English Bank Holiday" being a prime example – but also a pervasive sense of time, which in the final poem "There Can Be No Calling" takes on an urgency reminiscent of Louise Glück:

there is nothing left but time. This place is blind,
yet our eyes still stare. We are earth-hardened.
No words can reach us; there can be no calling.

Oh, teach me the inevitability of loss.

The collection's opening poem, "Release", is perhaps the most striking, an assemblage of images that work powerfully together but defy pinning down. It could be interpreted as a recovery from sorrow or illness, or equally well as an embracing of death, but in the end, I think, you have to accept that it is indeed what it says, an imagining of the very notion of release, but not in a way that can be narrowed down to a particular set of circumstances. Its unobtrusive rhymes, and above all the way it uses short and long sentences to create its movement, end in something very memorable:

This must be achieved noiselessly, don't draw
attention to yourself, they will count scores
to keep you longer in the dark. Now, pull
hard. But take good care. The shutters are full
of splinters. Gently. That’s it. You can see
green ivy climbing the trunk of a tree,
such fine leaves, so determined; and the slow
water, that’s a kind of green too. As though
someone has added milk. The sun is just
reaching the front steps; as it mounts, it must
penetrate this stone grey room. Come, you’ll say,
it’s been so cold without you. Every day
I’ve worked a little more to let you in,
to feel a remembered touch on my skin