Review of Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025

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“Object permanence”, as the notes explain, is “the understanding that objects can continue to exist even when we cannot perceive them”. This collection delineates various people, including the author, via objects, places and moments that have been important in their lives. This is as good a way as any to bring characters to life, provided the writer chooses the right details, and Berkeley proves very acute at it. In “Behold This Woman”, a long list of details gives a vivid picture of a somewhat intimidating woman, “hair upswept in a fury”, who might be the speaker’s mother, but perhaps even more impressive in this regard is the poem, short enough to quote in full, “Bendinck’s Bittermints”:

     He was not a man for confectionery
     but my father loved the way the spartan shell
     cracked against the tongue to yield
     an inner sweet asperity. A small
     box would last all January.
      A second mint, he said,
     would taste the same, so why
     would you eat another straight away?

The same sharpness of observation surfaces in her forensically accurate rendering of remembered adult expressions: “And the wind comes up/ All the Way from the Urals” (Gibraltar Point) and attitudes: “Save the string because you never know/ when you’ll next need string”.

Memories of childhood, various temporary jobs, incidents, people, all combine to build up a kind of autobiography. Artistic influences figure too, The end of “Darning”, “Between my fingertip and thumb/ the needle fits. The thimble finger steadies it” acknowledges its debt to Heaney, and though “Places I have slept”, according to the notes, “’ owes its inspiration to ‘Sleeping’ by Raymond Carver.”, I did wonder too if Tracey Emin’s famous bed was not somewhere at the back of the poet’s mind.

There is a certain humour in these echoes, especially that of William Carlos Williams,

     you won’t
     forgive me

     I have eaten
     the last tomato

and indeed an acerbic humour has always been characteristic of this poet’s work, as in “Coin of the realm”:

     She’s looking right, into the future
     where her bareheaded son will be crowned,
     looking left, into the past. She wears a crown
     (or is it tiara?) because without it
     she’d just be a woman, but the king
     is a King, bareheaded on coins
     and, like all depictions of monarchs,
     shown for simplicity’s sake
      neatly cut off at the neck.

By its nature, this is a collection full of personal references, but that need not, and does not, render it inaccessible, because they are mostly the kind of references to which a reader can easily relate, or substitute his or her own memories for those of the poet – we have nearly all, in childhood, been on a trip to the seaside like the one in “Gibraltar Point”, that did not live up to expectations. The one poem where I did feel I didn’t really know what was going on was “Monday at Kettle’s Yard”. I was hoping to find a reference to this in the notes, but in vain.

Mostly, she works in free verse, but when she feels a poem belongs in a form, she handles it deftly. “Breaking news” is a villanelle, appropriately for a poem in which “ it’s all happening again”, and “Missing”, again aptly for its subject, is a lipogram omitting one letter of the alphabet in each stanza. This must be a fearsomely complicated thing not just to do, but to get a decent poem out of, and testifies to considerable technical skill.

The longest poem in the collection is “The bowser”, about a disused water-tank around which childhood memories cluster and whose decay mirrors changes in the wider world. In one italicised section it speaks, like an object in an Anglo-Saxon riddle poem, recalling its past.  Then the poem segues into a long lament for all that the object and its falling out of use stands for:

     O stubborn tank of stale water
     o lumpen iron emptiness
     o grim beacon of loyalty and decay
     of foundries in west midlands
     young men trained in technical drawing
      taps and gaskets
     baffles and wheelhead valves

Again this format echoes place-laments through from Anglo-Saxon times to the nineteenth century, though they tend to concern ruined halls, mansions and abbeys. But this poem is none the less powerful and evocative for memorialising a water-tank. This is a collection notable for its keen observation; the poet had various jobs when younger, but judging by her eye for the telling details in all of them, she was always at heart a writer.

The book may be obtained from this address.