Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

     I wonder about the singularity
    of a pair of three –
    an us.

Claire Crowther has in the past sometimes been seen as, if not exactly a “difficult” or “obscure” poet, at least a determinedly cerebral one, not afraid to use vocabularies that don’t often feature in poetry (like that of physics in her collection Solar Cruise) and always demanding thought and concentration (amply repaid) from her reader. As we shall see, her technical and verbal skills are just as much in evidence here, but this collection’s focus is one that is perhaps more immediately accessible; the experience of being married to a person previously widowed. A marriage in which, pace the late Diana, there genuinely are three people:

     It’s late. No, partner, not too late. Still
    one of us is late: (A Pair of Three)

The pun on “late” is classic Crowther, as is the happy coinage “werhusband” in another poem. In “Case Endings” she uses the lexis of grammar to ponder this complicated relationship:

   Could he/I/she be subjunctive?
   wouldwife couldwife

   Do ‘we’ have the present and/or the past?
   triplecouple oncecouple doublecouple

   Is every ending right?
   wo/man wer/once

   Can ‘I’ be objective about ‘them’…?
   foundwife lostwife

 Is this ending right for ‘us’…?
 wefinders wekeepers

And in “The Physics of Coincidence” she uses line breaks to jolt the reader into thinking:

 If two atoms

 share an electron and bond in one body
 in one compass-
 ion of matter swaying with so much co-
 incidence direct-

 ionless as the atoms

But alongside this intellectual (though far from dispassionate) wordplay goes a far more direct and emotional response, for instance, in “Over”, to the sheer implausibility of death, the difficulty in believing that it can have impinged on ordinary life:

  How could she lie so quiet
 when she had mending to do?

 How could he search for a vase
 while she made him a widower?

And her technical ability never shows so clearly as when she expresses the feeling of another’s presence in that simplest-looking and most vernacular of all forms, the ballad. No form looks so easy to write; none is so easy to write badly. In “The Visitor”,

   While he was out I read a book.
  I had to rest that day.
  Then I heard a key in the lock
  and steps in the hallway

the tension begins with the pinpoint rhythms of those third and fourth lines and ratchets up throughout.

If this review begins to resemble a series of quotes, that is because it is very hard to express an idea in more telling words than those Crowther uses.

  Must we all leave
  down the line lyrical lying where we will? (Illyria by Rail).

“And what should I do in Illyria”, indeed… This is one of those collections that, because of the universality of its subject matter, speaks immediately to the reader. But at the same time, said reader recognises the presence of a powerful intellect and a depth of meaning that does not yield itself at a first reading.

They were the doors out of the ordinary
  (“Mari Lwyd Finds the Forgotten Horses”)

There’s a kind of poem, much beloved of our present Laureate and others, which begins in the real world and then at some point veers off into the realms of fantasy, like Corporal Jones. It is not a mode I recall Ann Drysdale using much in the past, but here the very second poem, “Setting Off”, is one such: at the start the speaker seems to be a perfectly ordinary person, getting on in years, out for a bike ride. Indeed the first lines are achingly realistic about the laboured movements of age:

    I cock my leg stiffly over the saddle
    and settle my behind roughly amidships.

But by the time we go “through the closed gate”  “unseen”,  it is clear that the journey is now taking place elsewhere than in the real world:

  Having no brakes, I fly on through the brambles
  where nature’s creatures go about their business.
  If I had wheels, I’d crash into the wall.

There is an awareness of age throughout the collection, in the crafting of walking sticks, the appalled realisation that one’s neighbours see one as old, the passing of time that blurs memories:

  History happens at the moment when
  Where are they now? becomes Where were they then?

This is an anthology of “poems for a disUnited Kingdom”, with a “state-of-the-nation” focus, as the preface calls it. The call for poems, which we’ll return to later, asked “What does it mean to be ‘British’ […] Is it possible for the Kingdom to become United? Is it even desirable?”

This remit, for all the exhortation “interpret the brief in your own way”, was clearly always going to produce highly politicised, even polemical, poetry. Whether this works depends a lot on whether the poet can come at the theme somewhat slant, creep up behind the reader with a rapier rather than charging head-on with a club. The very first poem, Jim Greenhalf’s “Imperial Exodus”, had me exclaiming out loud with admiration at its subtlety and artfulness in this regard. It is a two-parter about the end of an empire, one part in the voice of the subjugated natives soon to be free, the other in that of one of the imperialists going home. But where is “home”? Clearly, it’s Rome, and the liberated natives are British:

      Did you see it, the last boat leaving?
      Thank God they’ve gone. Good riddance.
      All these years they’ve been telling us
      what to do and how they want it done.
      Things can only get better now, they say.
      No more Pax this and Pax that.”

Or is it?

      And they called us barbarians!
      They treated us as refugees in our own country,
      changing our habits, our customs, words

The point of course is that be they Roman, British, or what you will, empires are much the same everywhere. The second voice, gloomily contemplating a return to a place which he knows is not the “home” of his imagination, if it ever was, almost certainly did once belong to some Roman centurion, and also to some hidebound British administrator nostalgic for Fifties Britain and dreading a return to its modern incarnation:

      I’m sorry to be going back.
      Nothing glorious in that old ruin
      of slaves and foreigners
      pouring like floodwater over our borders.

This poem was a terrific start to an anthology, respecting the reader’s intelligence, feeling its way into the minds of its narrators and not preaching at us. Another that impressed me greatly was Gerry Cambridge’s “The Green and the Blue”, in which our narrator must find a way of living alongside the Neighbour from Hell, aka the Glasgow Rangers fan in the downstairs flat. It isn’t just that on match days the music is ear-splitting, it’s the question, in the narrator’s mind, of motive. Is the volume accidental or deliberately aimed at him as a Catholic? Face to face, the neighbour doesn’t seem as intimidating as the narrator feared:

      An uncertain
      broken-toothed smile. Skinny as a whippet, late twenties

Yet even his apparent co-operation about the noise raises suspicions about motive:

       Next time it’s too loud
      jist come doon an chap on the door. I understand
      this puts the onus back on me by apparent sleight of hand –
      Unconscious, or sleekit ruse?

The dance of approach and retreat, reaching out and suspicion, between these two is deftly done and rather moving. It’s also, as far as I can see, deeply pessimistic. I see no way for these neighbours ever to be part of a “united” society; too much divides them and religion is actually the least of it.

Division indeed is the keynote of the anthology. Rosie Garland and Mia Rayson Regan focus on the isolation caused by covid. Others highlight the divisions of Brexit. Many centre on race, from Aamina Khan’s “Yorkshire Cricket” to Ben Banyard’s “Scottish Tenner”, a far smaller incident but almost as redolent of distrust and suspicion as “The Green and the Blue”. Sexual politics and divisions, though not altogether absent, figure less, perhaps because only about a fifth of submitted poems came from women. Meanwhile Georgia Hilton likens England, in “Oh England I Love You”, to an “ageing parent”, right-wing and xenophobic, who constantly falls for well-spoken con men. It probably seemed like a good analogy for the way electors vote against their own interests; the trouble is, it relies on an offensively ageist stereotype. Believe it or not, the elderly are not all, or even mostly, gullible far-right bigots, and if we’re accusing people of having “fallen into the black hole/of internet conspiracy theories”, I seem to come across people of all ages who do that. The way government has managed to set different sectors of the community – young and old, black and white, gay and straight - against each other to distract them from the common enemy, ie those who have the money and power and are determined to hold on to it, would have made a good poem for this anthology, but this one just feeds into the prevailing narrative.

Many will probably feel angered and alienated by one or more poems in this anthology, since alienation is at the heart of it. There is certainly plenty of energy and commitment, though humour is in short supply, an exception being William Thirsk Gaskill’s wry sideswipe at bureaucracy, “On This Occasion”. The preface mentions that many poems were rejected for being “too hectoring and didactic”. I think a few still got through. Indeed, reading the text of the open call quoted in the preface, I don’t think I have ever seen quite so many abstract nouns in one paragraph, and if I’d read the call at the time, I would certainly have assumed they wanted poems about isms and ologies rather than people. Fortunately, they didn’t always get them. A few here do strike me as too obvious, and there are a couple whose point eludes me. But the good considerably outweighs the bad, which is most of what you can ask of an anthology.

The other thing you can ask is that it fulfils whatever remit it has set itself, and I think it does, in an odd sort of way. Though covid does figure, the acrimonious division that emerged between mask-wearers and anti-maskers does not, and nor does the way this division seamlessly followed on from that of Brexit. Whichever Twitter bubble one is in, the Venn diagrams for Remainers/mask-wearers and Brexiters/covid-deniers are almost perfect circles (and I did say “almost”, so don’t bother telling me if you’re the exception). This would lead me to suppose that the natural state of this, and perhaps any, country, is tribalism rather than unity, maybe because most countries are too big to be tribes in themselves, and that people will seize on anything to argue about just for the feeling of being in one tribe and against another. The poem which best encapsulates this tribalism is Gerry Cambridge’s, but the sheer variety of divisions represented here, not to mention the seeming triviality of some of them, itself, I think, answers the question in the preface, “Is it possible for the Kingdom to become United?”  Doesn’t look like it.

Everything is river and the river is more than itself

This fascinating concept consists of a pamphlet of two long poems, both circling around the themes of loss and grief and using images of water, particularly flooding. It is set and printed so that you can, literally, begin with either, meaning that the one at the back of the pamphlet is always upside-down in relation to the other, rather as if it were reflecting it in water. Even the numbering goes from each end to the middle, as it were, thus giving no clue as to which, if either, is meant to be read first. 

I began with the one on the side where the gatefold cover (or French flap, as I’m assured its technical name is) showed the author photo. The narrative of this is the death (by illness) of a man, and his widow’s attempts to come to terms with it. Meanwhile the town floods, as it has clearly done before, and what with this and her memories, the poem ends with the woman dreaming of swimming in a pool in the basement of a derelict building. 

The second poem begins at this point and is indeed far more dreamlike and disjointed, flashing between different memories of water and the lost man. Where the first poem was in third person, more detached and observational for all its emotional charge, this is in first person and veers between sense and dream-sense, the reality of flood and death and the unreality of dream until the two seem to merge – or, perhaps, the eternal reality is glimpsed beneath the transient: 

   I think I am in the river Cocytus,
  or maybe this is just black water
  running underneath an urban street. 

In the first poem, the build-up of water imagery is both unobtrusive and massive. Individual phrases, like “soaked in pain”, “pooled in his blood”, “seeping away”, could pass unnoticed in themselves, except that they all add up to the “slow drip of loss” at the poem’s heart. Of the two, this is the more centred on the man, the manner of his death: 

   In just seven weeks he goes
  from coffee and wine
  to peppermint tea
  to tiny fruits
  to water
  on a spoon

and her reaction in the immediate aftermath, when she is “overwhelmed/by his presence and by the absence of him”. The second poem is both more centred on the woman and more wide-ranging, exploring what water has meant in her life. In both, though, the floods which have in recent years devastated towns and villages in the area figure, both as a reality and a symbolic counterpoint to what has happened in the woman’s life. In the first poem, the description of the flood follows directly on her consciousness of his absence, and the “rage” of the flooding river might be read as an expression either of her feelings or of the destructive force that has taken him: 

   Everything is river and the river is more than itself,
  carrying vehicles on its back, a fallen tree, trying to
  drag its feet to calm the rage but it’s too headstrong,
  churning silt and gravel, spewing up a pushchair,
  plastic shoe, dead jackdaw, bin. Everything is brown
  and broken. Everything is wet.

This is bleak, and so too, in the second poem, is the woman’s dream of being in an underground river, so much in the dark that she herself loses colour and the use of her eyes, like a “cave fish”. But the dream ends, as it does in the first poem, with waking: “she wakes” and “I wake” are the last words of each. It isn’t so much upbeat as inevitable: rivers reach the sea, dreams end, life goes on.  

The way these twin poems play against each other, picking up references and looking at the same things from different angles, is impressive. There are 24 pages of writing here, but a great deal of reading; like the source of its imagery, this pamphlet is deeper and more various than it looks.
 

This is an anthology of poems published in aid of Ty Hafan, a hospice for terminally ill children in South Wales. All proceeds from sales go to the hospice; the publisher and contributors gave their work gratis. These contributors include several big names – George Szirtes, Philip Gross, Tamar Yoseloff, Rowan Williams and Pascale Petit among others, and a few poems are, fittingly, in Welsh. They also include one of mine, but as usual I have decided I can reasonably review the rest of the anthology.

The poems are themed around childhood and parenting. There is an introduction by Tony Curtis in which he outlines how the anthology came about, and one by the director of Ty Hafan in which she explains its remit. There’s also a third, which might seem like one too many, a foreword by Ilora Finlay which I think might be unintentionally misleading. Many poetry fans would read phrases like “this beautiful gentle anthology” and “poems to bring calm warmth to the reader” with apprehension, fearing that they heralded acres of sentimental undemanding hygge – I knew this couldn’t be so, but only because I knew the work of many of the poets. 

In fact most of these poems are by no means “gentle”, nor aimed at providing warm fuzzies – how could they be, with such a powerful and challenging theme?  Some of the children in these poems were wanted but never born; some died young or became estranged from their parents. Even in the happiest cases, children grow up and leave, while parents don’t live for ever – one of the most powerful poems here, or indeed in existence, is the late Emyr Humphreys’ “From Father to Son” with its almost unbearably moving vision of a dead father: 

    There is no limit to the number of times
   Your father can come to life, and he is as tender as ever he was
   And as poor, his overcoat buttoned to the throat,
   His face blue from the wind that always blows in the outer darkness

The anthology is in three sections; the first concerns conception (or failure to conceive), birth and infancy. In this section, poems that particularly struck me were Zoe Brigley’s “Name Poem”, about the feelings of would-be parents who go home empty-handed 

     and intimate as a gun to the temple:
    your name sounds the trigger click

and George Szirtes in his most playful and joyous mode for “New Borns”: 

    What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?
   I would, said Geraldine,
   For gooseberries, geckos, goldfinches, gorgonzola,
   I would enter the world.

There’s a whole alphabet of this, and knowing that among the names are those of the poet’s grandchildren somehow adds to its delight.

The second section concerns childhood and schooldays, and the standouts here for me were Jude Brigley’s rueful musings on why children seem to recall the times one failed as a parent better than the times when one succeeded (and how appropriate that this anthology should contain poems by a mother and daughter!), John Barnie’s “Standing By”, with its perfectly judged rhythms that make one want to read it aloud, and above all, Paul Henry’s spare, taut “The Nettle Race”, short enough to quote in full:

    Tilting into the garden wall
   three boys’ bicycles,
   frieze of an abandoned race.

    Briars cover the chains,
   their absent riders’ chins.
   The tortoise rust won with ease.

    Slowly the sun leans
   towards its finishing line.
 

In the last section, focusing on increasing distance between child and parent, the scope widens and we hear, through the words of writers like Abeer Ameer, Lawrence Sail and Jo Mazelis, the voices and concerns of the displaced and endangered elsewhere in the world. In Sail’s “Childermas” the hand-holding gesture of two refugee children becomes iconic, universal:

    They are following the bent backs
   of grown-ups with bikes and bundles, heading
   for Cox’s Bazar; as always, they are holding hands. 

    The last time they surfaced was in northern France, at the tail
   of a struggling queue on a beach.
   They were waiting to board an already laden
    black rubber boat – and holding hands, as always.

There are many fine, powerful poems in this anthology, and plenty of reason to buy it even without the impetus of a good cause. It can be ordered direct from Ty Hafan here.

This is an extract from a longer work, “Deretter” (“thereafter”), written to commemorate the 69 victims of the murders on the island of Utøya, Norway, in 2011. The Norwegian work has 69 poems, one for each victim, plus “Prosjektil” (Projectile), a poem written by Ruset after the murderer’s trial and based on forensic evidence concerning the movement of bullets through the body. This pamphlet has a condensed version of that poem, in both Norwegian and English plus 25 of the 69, in English only. 

The poems for the victims are written in the shape of faces, not very obviously so, but more so that the face suggests itself, resolving out of the words, as one reads. No two shapes are exactly alike; I don’t know if they were perhaps based on newspaper head-and-shoulders shots of the persons concerned, but they look as if they might be. Needless to say, this makes it quite hard to quote meaningfully from them, because the impact is carried in the overall shape on the page as well as the words. What one can say is that many are based on personal details, which, like the different face-shapes, individualise the subjects and bring them, often achingly, to life along with those who mourn their loss:
 

With an anthology, one is reviewing both the individual poems and the linking concept. If I were John Carey, I fancy I would be annoyed by the description of this concept on the back cover: “an anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems." This of course is preposterous: no one person could do it. You would need a committee of 25, speaking at least that many languages, and they would still be arguing by the end of the decade.  

Sure enough, when one reads Professor Carey’s foreword, it becomes clear the sensible chap was attempting no such thing – in fact he was doing something far more personal. He sees the anthology as a follow-up to his A Little History of Poetry (which I haven’t read) and states “I have chosen 100 poets, mostly but not exclusively English and American, who seem to me outstanding”. As for the poem choice, “all the poems I have chosen are chosen for a single reason – that I find them unforgettable.”  

When Steve Ely remarks that his name caused him to be “chosen” by the European eel as a chronicler, I doubt he is being entirely facetious. George Herbert, after all, was convinced that if “son” and “sun” were homonyms, this must be because the Lord, for some good reason, wished it to be so. Ely does nothing half-heartedly and having decided to write a book-length eco-poem centring on the endangered eel, his first act was to make an exhaustive study of its life, habitat and history. The result of this is that he is very much at home with the scientific vocabulary – geographic, oceanographic, biological – attaching to it. And being Ely, he sees no reason to avoid using this because it might be esoteric or unfamiliar to the reader. He does provide an informative glossary and notes at the end, which can profitably be read after the poem, but personally I would first read straight through, immerse yourself in this Sargasso of fascinating new words and rely on the meaning becoming clear enough from the context.

For one thing, the lingering on the tongue of lines like “leptocephalus, the larval form of anguilla” and “the thermonuclear/microplankton of the drifting epipelagic” pave the way for the sudden brutality of his description of the Gulf Stream, in which the same verbal euphony belies the words’ meaning:

     a roaring salt river
     hurtling north on the edge of the American
     continental shelf, its estuaries of blight;
     oestrogen-saturated sewage, methamphetamine
     neurotoxins, chromosome-warping
     neocotinoid run-off. The leptocephali soak it up
     and tumble to Hatteras with the flotsam
     of the current – single-use Canaveral
     space junk, the strip mall’s car-tossed,
    fast-food trash and radioactive manatees. 

He focuses on one individual eel’s journey from her birth in the Sargasso Sea to a Yorkshire pool and back again – eels breed in the Sargasso and find their way there from all the various European rivers and streams where they have spent most of their lives. Having made this epic journey and bred, they die. This eel’s odyssey encompasses, beside natural predators, the blades of hydro-electric plant turbines, potentially fatal pollutants like benzoylecgonine, found in the tissues of eels in cities where cocaine use is high, and indeed Mr Ely himself, who temporarily removes her from her habitat to make a study before re-releasing her.

Obviously the journey, though based on extensive research, is largely imagined, and some of the imagining creates startlingly effective imagery: 

      rippling spearheads
     of foliate gelatine, glittering in the half-lit heave
     like a shoal of shredded cling-film.  

Its single-minded purpose also generates terrific momentum. One danger of eco-poetry is that it can sound like a sermon or lecture. This poem never stands still long enough for that: the ways in which humans are casually fouling up the eel’s world are noted, deadpan and laconically, as she travels, never dwelt on – after all, new hazards are arising at every turn and demanding attention. Power pulses through these lines like the eels through the water, never more so than at the literal climax, when the eel finally mates: 

      the hypertonic waters are smoking
    with milt, and her shuddering body
    can hold it back no longer. She cracks like a whip
     and her body convulses, spurting gusher
     after gusher of glittering golden ova. 

Another way to get eco-poetry wrong is to make it so gloomy and doom-laden that it is no fun to read – as Brecht so aptly remarked, if you want to educate or persuade an audience, you must first give them an incentive to sit still. Here the incentive, apart from the intrinsic interest of the eel’s journey, is the joyfulness and delight of Ely’s language. He has always enjoyed diving into an ocean of words, and rarely has this trait been more appropriate than in this poem. In an earlier collection, Incendium Amoris, I occasionally found the allusiveness and linguistic exuberance detracting from the momentum. In The European Eel there is such a narrative drive that the passing allusions to other endangered or extinct former inhabitants of the earth, like right whales, passenger pigeons and evicted Gaelic crofters, speed by and become part of the poem’s landscape as if we were glimpsing them through the window of an express train.  

Fortunately this particular train can be boarded again and again, and the details of the journey noted more carefully. This is, I think, his most consistently powerful and entertaining book for a while, and certainly one of the most impressive books of eco-poetry I have read.

This is the second in a series of reprints, Northus Shetland Classics, and, like the first, concerns an author who died too young. Anderson died in 1888 at 26, of TB, like several of his siblings. (He came of an ill-starred but talented family; his niece Willa married the poet Edwin Muir and became a well-known author in her own right.) Anderson’s family were part of the ‘Shetland exile’ community in Edinburgh, where his mother had removed after the death at sea of her husband. Another member of this expat community was the older Shetland writer Jessie Saxby, who had acted as a mentor to Anderson and who first edited and published this book after his death. It contains his poems, extracts from letters to his brother and a friend, and an introductory essay from Saxby including several tributes from others. 

The letter extracts are fascinating, and moving because of the contrast between their lively, conversational style and what we know will shortly become of some people mentioned in them. Here, Basil’s younger brother Andrew, a teacher of engineering, has used his expertise to get a smoking chimney to “draw” properly: 

“Andrew calculated what was the requisite current of air necessary to draw that smoke up that lum, and of course, when he had ascertained that, drew up the window the precise distance to allow this current access to the room. He then betook himself to the kitchen.” 

Here's a recording of a reading I did lately, along with Matt Miller, Karol Nielsen and several open-mic contributors including Ann Drysdale. Many thanks to the folks at Carmine Street Metrics — Terese Coe, Wendy Sloan, Anton Yakovlev —  for the invitation.
Carmine Street Metrics Featuring Sheenagh Pugh, Matt W. Miller, Karol Nielsen - YouTube