sheenaghpugh | Review of Where the Birds Sing Our Names ed. Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2021 (Reply)

This is an anthology of poems published in aid of Ty Hafan, a hospice for terminally ill children in South Wales. All proceeds from sales go to the hospice; the publisher and contributors gave their work gratis. These contributors include several big names – George Szirtes, Philip Gross, Tamar Yoseloff, Rowan Williams and Pascale Petit among others, and a few poems are, fittingly, in Welsh. They also include one of mine, but as usual I have decided I can reasonably review the rest of the anthology.

The poems are themed around childhood and parenting. There is an introduction by Tony Curtis in which he outlines how the anthology came about, and one by the director of Ty Hafan in which she explains its remit. There’s also a third, which might seem like one too many, a foreword by Ilora Finlay which I think might be unintentionally misleading. Many poetry fans would read phrases like “this beautiful gentle anthology” and “poems to bring calm warmth to the reader” with apprehension, fearing that they heralded acres of sentimental undemanding hygge – I knew this couldn’t be so, but only because I knew the work of many of the poets.

In fact most of these poems are by no means “gentle”, nor aimed at providing warm fuzzies – how could they be, with such a powerful and challenging theme? Some of the children in these poems were wanted but never born; some died young or became estranged from their parents. Even in the happiest cases, children grow up and leave, while parents don’t live for ever – one of the most powerful poems here, or indeed in existence, is the late Emyr Humphreys’ “From Father to Son” with its almost unbearably moving vision of a dead father:

    There is no limit to the number of times
   Your father can come to life, and he is as tender as ever he was
   And as poor, his overcoat buttoned to the throat,
   His face blue from the wind that always blows in the outer darkness

The anthology is in three sections; the first concerns conception (or failure to conceive), birth and infancy. In this section, poems that particularly struck me were Zoe Brigley’s “Name Poem”, about the feelings of would-be parents who go home empty-handed

and intimate as a gun to the temple:
your name sounds the trigger click

and George Szirtes in his most playful and joyous mode for “New Borns”:

    What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?
   I would, said Geraldine,
   For gooseberries, geckos, goldfinches, gorgonzola,
   I would enter the world.

There’s a whole alphabet of this, and knowing that among the names are those of the poet’s grandchildren somehow adds to its delight.

The second section concerns childhood and schooldays, and the standouts here for me were Jude Brigley’s rueful musings on why children seem to recall the times one failed as a parent better than the times when one succeeded (and how appropriate that this anthology should contain poems by a mother and daughter!), John Barnie’s “Standing By”, with its perfectly judged rhythms that make one want to read it aloud, and above all, Paul Henry’s spare, taut “The Nettle Race”, short enough to quote in full:

    Tilting into the garden wall
   three boys’ bicycles,
   frieze of an abandoned race.

    Briars cover the chains,
   their absent riders’ chins.
   The tortoise rust won with ease.

Slowly the sun leans
towards its finishing line.

In the last section, focusing on increasing distance between child and parent, the scope widens and we hear, through the words of writers like Abeer Ameer, Lawrence Sail and Jo Mazelis, the voices and concerns of the displaced and endangered elsewhere in the world. In Sail’s “Childermas” the hand-holding gesture of two refugee children becomes iconic, universal:

    They are following the bent backs
   of grown-ups with bikes and bundles, heading
   for Cox’s Bazar; as always, they are holding hands.

    The last time they surfaced was in northern France, at the tail
   of a struggling queue on a beach.
   They were waiting to board an already laden
    black rubber boat – and holding hands, as always.

There are many fine, powerful poems in this anthology, and plenty of reason to buy it even without the impetus of a good cause. It can be ordered direct from Ty Hafan here.