Review of Cuckoo by Nichola Deane, pub. V Press 2019

First collections often contain a lot of personal family history, which is natural enough. One's own background is often the first place new writers go to find material. How well this works depends to some extent on how far the writer manages to lift this material beyond the personal and anecdotal and give it a more universal relevance.

Rather cannily, I think, Deane has scattered the "family" poems through the book instead of collecting them in one section, where they might have presented us with a forbidding phalanx of other people's relatives. We meet grandparents, mothers and sundry kinfolk alongside Akhmatova, Auden and drunken football fans on a train. It was in fact some of these more outward-looking poems that first impressed me, notably "A Sofa under House Arrest" in which the spectacle of Thatcher and Pinochet taking tea – gruesome enough in its own right – becomes all the more sinister by means of some subtle use of language. Thatcher

   lifts her little finger
   away from the Minton cup in a toy
   goose-step salute
   and so does he.

The closing image, biscuit crumbs falling on plate or floor

   invisible
   as the dander, the human matter, snowing
   this minute
   around the General
   and his guest also, across the grain
   of light.

is beautiful and deadly.

It was some while before any of the "family history" poems impressed me as much. This may be in part a personal reaction, since the early ones were much concerned with pregnancy and birth (been there, done that, glad to forget it). But I'm also not sure they quite got beyond personal circumstances to the universal. "My Father at Eighty-Six among the Clover of Happy Valley" on the other hand does just that. The anxious watching, the consciousness of vulnerability and mortality in an ageing parent are instantly recognisable and I regard it as something of a tribute to say that it is mostly pointless to quote from it because its effect is cumulative. But the universality of the "quarks and photons" with which it ends is earned.

I'm not altogether sure about some of the very short poems; nothing is harder to write than a really short poem, which can't afford to waste a word. "Cherry Tree Petals" feels more like notes from a workshop (and Housman's already done the bridal-and-death white as well as anyone needed to). I didn't get what "Bee Griefs" was aiming at, either. The title poem, though again I wasn't sure I completely got where it was heading, is interesting in its use of echoing sound patterns and internal rhymes, a device she uses quite a lot. They occur also in "The Ballad of Tom Dean", indeed giving it its rhythm and musicality. This is another "family" poem that crosses over into the universal: Tom, scourge of local bullies, becomes an iconic, almost a mythical, figure, the kind indeed of whom ballads are made. In this poem, as in the Thatcher/Pinochet one, style works together with theme. The sharp imagery of the battered wife, "a choker of finger-bruises/round her neck" meshes with the internal rhymes, the swing of the short, mostly two-stress lines (and how telling is the variant in the last line, where the extra stress is provided by the repeated word "laugh") to produce a sense of everything coming together as it should.