Book review

[sheenaghpugh]

Review of Ingrid's Husband, Paul Henry, Seren 2007 ISBN 9871854114389



What I hate about this book is the fact that I didn't write it. I am working on a collection myself and was getting on all right until I read this and suddenly felt like tearing all mine up and starting again…

Of course I already knew Paul Henry was a fine poet; collections like Captive Audience, The Slipped Leash and The Milk Thief showed that. (Have a look at his web site for some lovely earlier poems.) One of the strongest and most characteristic features of his work in those books is poignancy, a feeling of nostalgia, and his new collection seems to me to be haunted by a sense of loss, of spaces where things, people and relationships used to be. Since I love a bit of angst, this was always going to play well with me, but in the wrong hands angst can sound sentimental and self-pitying. It never has in his, and it doesn't now. Here, in "Gestures", he dresses the grief of loss in a new, 21st-century metaphor:

I've made you my password.
Your name lets me in each day,
your name and your age.

Absurd, how these plastic keys
diminish you, stay silent
when your name is played

and how easily, without knowing,
you let me in each day.

The loved one's name and age as the computer password was good enough, but then visualising the PC keyboard as a piano keyboard, creating that sense of something missing when the keys make no sound, adds the special Henry wrench. He does it again in "Sold", a poem about moving house in which the house being left and the state of the marriage that happened in it become intertwined:

but it hurts, all afternoon
our marriage has moved inside me –
the boys, the prints on the stairs,
the broken down cars, the holidays
in heaven and hell[…]

Shall we stay or leave then, love?
It's only the years moving inside us
and everything hurts in autumn..
Where shall we put them,
the years, in our new house?
the years we are moving out of?

The use of refrain here is typical of the musicality of this collection. Henry is himself a musician, as were both his parents, and music has figured in all his collections as a theme and a field of imagery, but I don't think any of his poems before have had quite the internal music of these. With some, you can see how they fit beautifully to music, but none actually need it, because the music is in the words and the spaces between them (I think some poets forget that space between words is as much part of the pattern of a poem as lead is part of the pattern of stained glass, but Henry handles space, on the page and in the voice, with particular skill).

He has also, in this collection, done what I wouldn't have guessed anyone could, namely written a long and most affecting poem about Newport, the town where he lives. If you've seen Newport, you will appreciate that it is unlikely poetic territory (though it is home to two fine writers, Henry himself and the poet and fantasy novelist Catherine Fisher). In "Between Two Bridges", the ghost of Henry's teenage self takes him on a night ramble through the town, or a version of it. This poem is also on his website, so I won't quote it at length, though I can't resist this reference to Newport's tidal river

barely a slough of itself in the cracked mud –
as if the moon had taken a long straw to the years and sucked.

I suspect I'm going to copy this review to every blog space I own, because I honestly can't see how anyone who loved to see words being thoughtfully, inventively and movingly used could fail to enjoy this book. In "College Library", two people are overcome by a sense of the passage of time on finding a book they once took out is still there, otherwise unstamped:

Their fingertips drift, collide
on lines once whispered by heart.
He snaps it shut again, for good.
The esplanade clock chimes twenty-five….

Small lines appear at her eyes, which he loves.
His hair comes away in her hand when they kiss.
Someone says Sh – a pair of heels on wood
near where the sun falls open at their feet.

Comments

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I'm not a great poetry person myself, but these - especially that last one "College Library", are lovely, so simple and spare and yet all these echoes behind the plain language are there.

And
"I've made you my password.
Your name lets me in each day,"

...oh.