Review of Oswald's Book of Hours, by Steve Ely, pub. Smokestack Books

I've read nearly 200 poetry collections this year, and most have disappeared into the mists of forgettery. This one was memorable for many reasons, but mainly because it does not come from what might be called the usual place.

It is easy to please readers by telling them what they want to hear, expressing opinions they share. And much poetry does just that. There is a liberal consensus among poets and their regular readers; many are in the same part of the political spectrum and share views on gender, race, sexuality etc. Religion is more divisive; there are atheist and religious poets, but even then, few extremes, because the default world-view, among European poets at least, is a polite, apologetic, near-universal tolerance. If other views are expressed by a persona the poet has chosen to adopt, s/he will generally make it clear that this is a persona, whose views are not being presented for the reader's approval; in fact the reader may be encouraged to disapprove or mock.

So if you create voices that speak, amongst other things, of their pleasure in killing (voices of highwaymen, men who hunt with dogs, Afghanistan veterans) and you do not present them as people necessarily to be abhorred, you must work quite hard to overcome an intrinsic recoil among many readers. As a pacifist who loathes the mere idea of hunting, I'm not on the face of it his ideal reader, so since I found the book mesmerising, I'd say he is bloody good with words.

For one thing, he has a very clear delight in them and is not intimidated out of showing it by any possible accusations of "elitism"; he's quite ready to send you off to look up his Church-Latin titles or the Anglo-Saxon and Old English in his epigraphs and texts. Though you probably wouldn't, on a first reading, because the energy in the language and narrative would be carrying you with it. There is tremendous energy and momentum in most of these poems, especially the "voice" ones:

Lazerlight lamp-kit, slipleads, dogs.
The long drive east to the ditch-cut flatlands.
Sleet strafing down. Wind howling in the hawthorns,
Shivering long-dogs, ears erect. The thousand foot
halogen beam. Green-eyes in hedge-bottoms.
Transfixed conies. Dogs running down the beam.

("Matins: Annunciation")

Even the dead do not stay still for long:

Under the golf course, the dead of England lie;
beneath the steel mill, their vernacular graves.
Rolling and turning in tectonic earth,
drifting turfward in turbulent methane,
the sphenoids of huscarls reveal in the borders
of the Whitehill Estate.

(from "Hours of the Dead")

The telescoping of time in this poem is typical of the collection and it has to do with a sort of folk-spirit he sees emerging over and over through English history, in figures like Robin Hood, John Nevison (highwayman, better known as Swift Nick), John Schepe (archetypal hedge-preacher), John Ball and a great many others up to the present day. In the sequence "Godspel" there are several such figures. Wat Tyler, fighting for the rights of ordinary people, is easy to sympathise with:

1. Three things: firstly, and no offence; never trust a King. That was our downfall, the idiotic peasant conceit that a divine right tyrant propped up by a cabal of mammonite murderers could ever rule with the interests of his people at heart. ‘King Richard and the true commons’ my arse

The next, Robert Aske, another campaigner for human rights betrayed by a king, is not unsympathetic either. But the last in the sequence is a soldier who died in the Falklands carrying wounded men off a mountain and might have won a medal but for his habit of taking enemy ears as trophies. He's not a nice man, but his bloody-mindedness is here connected with the fearless integrity of Tyler and Aske, and the message – the dead man is speaking from heaven - is clear:

13: It's like they say up here; Daemon est Deus inversus. Two sides of the same coin: you can't have one without the other. […] the rabble is the blood-pulse of England.

I think visions of folk-spirits can be dodgy, and many will not necessarily go along with a lot of this vision (in particular, his assessment of Scargill seems out to me, crediting the man with achievements that were mostly due to his predecessors). But in the end the memorability of poetry resides less in what it says than how it says it, and I found more power, energy, conviction and sheer verbal exuberance in this than in any other first collection I've read this year.