Review of Coldharbour by Kathryn Daszkiewicz, pub. Shoestring Press 2022

Names are fluid.

Several of these poems pick up on the names we give things and follow them down unexpected paths. There are places called Coldharbour (or Kaltenherberg) all over England and Germany; they are generally in forests or on hills and derive from a Saxon phrase meaning shelter without hospitality – they tended to be semi-ruined Roman buildings where the benighted traveller could find a roof, but no fire or food. In the title poem, it’s possibly their forest location that further suggests the fanciful derivation “col d-arbre”. The people of the poem are walking in woods, uphill, towards a place that may or may not be there, and which may refer to the fortification of which the Coldharbour gate in the Tower of London is the only remnant:

 You think you know the way –
 that there’s a tower somewhere at the top.

The poem in fact is haunted by loss and ruin, its journey hampered by terrain, darkness and unfamiliarity:

 we are walking
 toward woods I do not know
 uphill into a gloaming
 the day before the year turns

This journey through dark forests and towards a tower has a clear folk-tale aspect, and is not the only time folk-tale and myth underpin these poems. To those who object to the presence of myth in modern poems, I would say only that a “myth” is a story that has been around for a very long time, and the reason for its survival is that it generally says something of universal and lasting resonance. It is, as the late Mr Carson used to say, the way you tell them that matters; whether you can give them a turn that speaks to modern readers. In “Tam Lin”, the partner of a man having a nightmare finds herself holding on to him “like the Scots maid” who, in the ballad, holds on to her bewitched lover as he

 translates
 to beast
 to newt
 to snake
 to bear
 to hot iron bar
 breaking the spell
 to ferry you across

that liminal space
the bridge between your demons
and a dawn.

One of the myth-based poems here is called “The Myths We Make Our Own”, which seems as good a definition as any of how poets use mythology. This poem uses the myth of Demophoon and his deserted lover Phyllis, and intimations of betrayal and abandonment haunt the whole collection. Sometimes the betrayer is human; “Meres Knoll” reads like a dark meditation on a relationship that loses its attraction:

 What’s joined together second time around
 is always loose. There is no
 going back.

The creation of a mood via the build-up of small details in this poem – the cemetery, the stream “dammed with thrown stones and sticks” is impressive, not a word wasted.

But just as often, the betrayer is something more elemental: illness, dementia, the false traytour Deeth. It can even be nature, of which there is a lot in Daszkiewicz’s work. She is very aware of the natural world, but not in any idyllic way; the teeming plantlife in her poems can be as menacing as any other element. In “Cuckoo Pint” “branches of torn oak/grope at the thatch”. In “The Lovers”

 Cypress and holly arch in green union
 of leaf and branch and twig above their heads

but at the same time

 opportunists - bindweed, snaking ivy
 creep through the failing fence; last autumn’s
 leaves lie brown along the sides although it’s nearly Beltane;
 nearby, the broken eggshell of a dove.

The awareness, indeed constant presence, of the natural world in this collection manifests as a palette of bright colours, but the dark ground on which they are enamelled is what gives it depth and heft.