Review of Second Wind: new poems by Douglas Dunn, Vicki Feaver and Diana Hendry, pub. The Saltire So

This is a short anthology of poems, commissioned from the three poets, on the theme of ageing. I bought it both because I'd read and enjoyed the work of all three before and because it's a theme becoming somewhat relevant and fascinating to me. Indeed in the last two months I have read two individual collections, by Philip Gross and Tamar Yoseloff, centring on this very theme. Each poet's work in this collection is prefaced by a short note on how they worked, which is interesting though it left me slightly puzzled. Vicki Feaver says "The poems were written in solitude. But meeting with Douglas Dunn and Diana Hendry and sharing poems and ideas gave me the encouragement I thrive on". Diana Hendry, on the other hand, speaks of "meeting, talking about and workshopping poems", which suggests rather more collaboration. Her note also mentions that the topic they were given was, specifically, "Creative Ageing", and the editorial note indicates that the brief was to "challenge the orthodoxies surrounding ageing".

I can imagine why the commission may have harped on the positive, because one obvious pitfall of this theme is that it may produce something quite morbid and depressing. But pitfalls in poetry almost always come in pairs, and while avoiding this particular Charybdis, it is possible to veer into a Scylla of relentless chirpiness. I think this is why the Dunn poems, of which I'd been expecting the most, having long loved his work, partly disappointed me. The first poem, "Thursday", is just plain not very good. Lines like

If only I could tap my old exuberance,
High spirits that I plied in days of yore;
Then maybe I would find a kind deliverance
From the curse of being such a bloody bore

may be meant as amusing (I didn't find them so, but we old grouches are hard to amuse). But it sounds just like Clive James versifying, and Dunn is so much better than that. The next couple of poems are better, but keep coming up with slick one-liners like "one chirrup absent from the dawn chorus" and "So fall off a barstool swigging your hemlock" ("The Wash") that begin to sound like a desperate determination to make a joke of everything. In his prefatory note, he mentions that he re-read that unbearably poignant scene on ageing from Henry IV Part 2: "we have heard the chimes at midnight", but found no inspiration there. I suppose it wasn't jaunty enough.

Luckily the very next poem, "Wondrous Strange", shows Dunn back at his best, not trying to come up with easy answers to what is by nature elusive:

Now it can almost be heard. But not quite
Almost. Still on the far side of nearly,
It is the melody of a floating feather.

There are some memorable poems after this, notably "Curmudgeon", with a genuinely funny and observant one-liner, "he is a virtuoso concert pessimist", that leaves the rest standing, and "The Glove Compartment", which doesn't try to mitigate loss and mortality with flippancy and is starkly moving.

Most of the Dunn poems are set in the now of ageing; Vicki Feaver, quite often, comes at the theme through memory, looking back to a youth that has departed. She is

travelling forwards at time's pace
and backwards and forwards
at the mind's speeds ("Travelling").

There are several luminous remembered moments –pomegranate juice, dressing-up boxes – and a tendency to reinterpret, revalue in the light of age what is seen and experienced, like her reaction to the ageing, drying fruit in "Clementines". I think it's arguable that there are, in modern poetry, not just in this collection, too many "I remember" poems and that it's a theme which can become predictable, but it is very well done here. The most memorable poem, to me, was "The Blue Wave", in which she comes closest of the three to the "creative ageing" brief in celebrating a painter:

But in my head there's a painting
done in your nineties
when just to lift your arm

was an effort: a single brave
upwards sweep with a wide
distemper brush so loaded

with paint the canvas filled
with the glistening blue wall
of a wave before it falls.

One of those images that does in a moment the work of a paragraph.

Diana Hendry's selection is mighty unpredictable. We go from memories-of-childhood poems to coming-to-terms-with-the-present poems and (my favourites), ones which veer unexpectedly off at right-angles to reality, like that iconic oldie Cpl Jones going into the realms of fantasy. She takes risks, which means that not all of them will come off – I don't think "Meditation on an Old Bear" really rises above doggerel, and in "An Alternative Retirement" I find her praise of the Hatton Garden jewel thieves, or as she calls them "the glamorous gang riding off with the loot", plain annoying: a thug on a pension is still a thug, not a role model.

But other risks come off rather beautifully. "Autobiography" with its ballad rhythm has an air of Causley

And what d'you remember of fear, child?

Long grass, bare feet, imagined snakes.
Dark slid a lid across the day.

And "Beyond" is probably my favourite poem in the collection. Its syntax and lineation are freed-up, unconventional in a way no other poem in an otherwise completely conventionally-justified book is, and the thought-line is to match.

What is it about the need for it? The why
of flight        mountaineering        the gift of grace.        How dire

if ours was the only galaxy!

How happily the word sits in the mouth, satisfying
as a communion wafer.

This is the sound of the distant train
                               running through your dream--

be-yond be-yond be-yond be-yond.

I found this an uneven anthology, but its best poems, notably "Beyond", "The Blue Wave" and "The Glove Compartment" make it well worth the modest £7 cover price.