Review of Sharp Hills by Chrissie Gittins, pub. Indigo Dreams Publishing 2019

 Who knew when
 two pigeons
flew down the nave
of St Paul’s Cathedral
in Kolkata
while a Bengali Choir
sang Auld Lang Syne

The momentary surprise in the fifth line, resulting from deliberate misdirection, which highlights the juxtaposition of two related but very different cultures, is characteristic of the first part of this collection. It concerns a journey to India, but what lies behind this journey is another, in the steps of a dead father who had been in this region during the war. So we are travelling in time as well as space, never more so than when daughter imagines herself dancing with father in a club that had a different name when he visited it long ago (“Dancing in Silchar”).
 

This personal angle gives the “Indian” poems an edge, and stops them feeling at all touristy, though they also capture, in “Becoming in Kolkata”, the way a more open and forthcoming culture can change a visitor: “I have become someone […] who smiles at other smiles”. The only poem in this section that didn’t work for me was the ballad “45 Squadron’s Christmas Dinner, Kumbhirgram Air Base, 1943”, and that is because there were too many lines whose rhythms went astray; if there’s one thing a ballad can’t afford, it‘s a faltering metre.
 

The poems after the “Dancing in Silchar” section are more disparate. There are sharp observational poems, like “Corbel Angel, Southwold Museum” in which the eponymous angel is allowed to voice its memories:

      From my load bearing view
     I could see snow flickering past windows,
 

     knew that day would follow thick night,
    that light would catch the flèche
 

     and glint on unknapped flints.

There are verbal exercises, like “No Salmon Is An Island”, a sort of mash-up of proverbs, quite a few poems inspired by art in one way or another, some more personal and a few of those weird juxtapositions that seem so popular at the moment. Some of them work – I liked “My Niece’s Boyfriend Couldn’t Attend Their Wedding Because He Had a Shift at the Holiday Inn” – but didn’t take to “W. H. Auden Got Married in Tesco (Ledbury)”, in which I felt the humorous treatment was perhaps not so fitting for a really rather noble act.

Chrissie Gittins writes poems for children as well as for adults and there are a few here which, though fine in themselves,  I thought might sit better in a collection for children, or at least in a separate section within an adult collection. “The Man Who Moved from Shetland to Glasgow”, with its repeated question “Where is the wind?” and the rhymes suddenly cropping up in “Rain in Nice”; indeed the whole sound of that one:

     Then, still.
 

     Until,
     a flash of lightning stopped
     all ice cream eaters in their tracks,
     the deluge was back –
     tripping down the tram lines,
     trickling down necks,

I suppose there’s no actual reason a collection should not contain poems for children and adults both, but I think one reads them in different ways, hence the thought of a separate section.
 

Many of the personal poems address loss, and the ways in which someone lost is still present, like “I Carry You With Me”, where an entire trip to Barcelona is viewed through the prism of someone who isn’t actually there and whose absence colours everything seen and experienced. This is a long, cumulative poem that gathers power as it goes on:

     I carry you with me to hear a disembodied saxophone playing
     up the terraces of Montjuic.
 

     Then I carry you home.
     To a Lenten rose, a log fire leaping with flames,
    and incessant unconscionable rain.

These poems on loss are the ones which come closest to the spirit of those in the first section, and I think also to their power.  The first section, for me, is the strongest and most memorable. The sense of the two simultaneous journeys, in time and space, gives these poems a sort of 3-D feel, a sense of change and of time passing, far removed from everyday “travel” poems.
 

     The temple bells still ring, rowers
     reach across the lake, drivers honk their horns
     with every breath. Practice gunfire rides
 

     around surrounding valleys.
    I hope you rested well at this hill station […]
 

     the monkey is gone from the top of the tree;
    the balcony rail, warmed by the sun, warms my hand.
    The car horns start an in-depth conversation.
    (“Leaving Nainital”)