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

Here's a list of this year's blog reviews, with links to each. For me, this year's standout was Ferdia Lennon's novel, Glorious Exploits.
Poetry
The Electron-Ghost Casino  by Randolph Healy, pub. Miami University Press 2024
Velvel’s Violin by Jacqueline Saphra, pub. Nine Arches Press 2023
My Body Can House Two Hearts, by Hanan Issa, pub. Burning Eye, 2024
Iktsuarpok, by Nora Nadjarian, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2023
A Darker Way by Grahame Davies, pub. Seren 2024
Belief Systems by Tamar Yoseloff, pub. Nine Arches 2024

Fiction
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, by Paterson Joseph, pub. Dialogue Books 2022
The Yellow Nineties, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Three Impostors Press 2024
Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, pub. Fig Tree 2024
Cole the Magnificent, by Tony Williams, pub. Salt Publishing 2023
Nocturne with Gaslamps, by Matthew Francis, pub. Neem Tree Press 2024

Children’s/YA
Culhwch and Olwen, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Graffeg Ltd 2024
Starspill, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Firefly Press 2024

Non-fiction
Scotland's Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid, Misplaced and Misunderstood, Alistair Moffat, pub.Thames & Hudson 2023
The End of Enlightenment, by Richard Whatmore, pub. Penguin 2023
Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark, pub. Penguin 2023
The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer: The Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary, by Andrew Drummond, pub. Verso 2024
A Grand Tour of the Roman Empire by Marcus Sidonius Falx, by Jerry Toner, pub. Profile Books 2022
The Blazing World, by Jonathan Healey, pub. Bloomsbury 2023
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789, by Robert Darnton, pub. Penguin 2023
Femina by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2022
Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond, by Alice Roberts, pub. Simon & Schuster 2024
My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, pub. John Murray 2024
Night Train to Odesa by Jen Stout, pub Polygon 2024

A picture is more like the real world
when it’s made out of the real world.

Tamar Yoseloff has long been interested in poems that bounce off other art forms, witness her publishing company Hercules Editions, which specialised in the ekphrastic, often with illustrations. So it’s no surprise that she should produce a collection themed largely around paintings by Rauschenberg and music by Cage, with references also to other writers, artists and musicians – John Latham, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, among others. Indeed the sequence “Combines” is illustrated with the Rauschenberg paintings that inspired it.

I may as well admit at this point that I had never before seen (or in some cases heard) any work by most of these folk, not being much into modern art or classical music. I did consider disqualifying myself from reviewing the book on this account, but that would seem to imply that only readers with the requisite background knowledge of Lives and Works could enjoy the poems, and having read several previous collections by this poet, I knew she would not have written anything quite so niche. Indeed in “Bridges”, though the reference to Wordsworth resonates with anyone who recalls the relevant sonnet, without that knowledge we would still have a striking poem about London (another recurring theme of hers) during the covid lockdown:

      miss all those strangers, our city shut up
      like an oyster worrying its pearl,
      as I stick to my grid, never venturing
      far enough to find the river’s glint
      – all that mighty heart, as the poet said,
      stopped, the monitor switched off.

The pandemic perhaps also lurks behind this collection’s consciousness of mortality:

      Prints of dogs and hooves,
     our heavy-soled shoes,
     pressed in sand until the first
     stiff wind – how simply
     we lift from earth.
     (“Common”)

The pessimistic description, in “New Year”, of

      the season of fresh starts,
     all those resolutions like cut pines
     lined up for the bin men

is characteristic of the first part of this collection, shadowed by a brooding sense of things coming to an end; not just individual lives, but also perhaps a way of life, menaced by both the pandemic and the environmental crisis of which the poet is conscious; “it’s time to say goodbye to easy days” (“Summer Fields”).

Even in this first part, there are many references to, and riffs off, other writers and artists. The second part, “Combines”, is an ekphrastic response to Rauschenberg’s hybrid works “bringing together painting and collage with an assemblage of cast-off objects”, each poem being accompanied by an illustration of the relevant work. He talked, apparently, of “working in the gap between art and life”, or as Yoseloff puts it in “Trophy V (for Jasper Johns)”:

     A picture is more like the real world
     when it’s made out of the real world.

In the variant sonnet “Trophy IV (for John Cage)”, we get a sense not only of Rauschenberg gaining inspiration from the thingness of things – “A stroke of paint means nothing much/ but a boot speaks of endless journeys” –  but also of how artists, even in different fields, feed off each other:

    The composer gets a kick out of the artist
    striking a blow for rag and bone.

The third part of the collection consists of the long poem “Belief Systems”. This is itself something of a collage; it was written in response to the exhibition The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House, and owes its genesis to Blake’s illustrations of Thomas Gray’s poems, which in turn inspired his own poem cycles; to the world-view of artist John Latham, and to events in 2020, notably Storm Brendan. Again therefore we have art feeding off art, but also off reality, particularly the cast-off and abandoned, and the shadow of ecological catastrophe from the book’s first section is present here as well – if anything, more desperate:

    nothing we’ve made will save us
    from what we’ve razed. When the foaming
    flood hits shore
    our time is up.
    *
    The storm collects our waste.
    Circuits bared, maps to nowhere.
    Analog screens, their ancient stars
    trapped in static. All of it shipped
    to Surabaya; farmers ditch failed crops,
    sift plastic for gold.

This is a brooding, urgent collection, the kind that both entertains and alarms. As I suspected, it is perfectly capable of being enjoyed without extensive background familiarity with Rauschenberg & Co, though the notes at the back are helpful and informative for those who want to mend their knowledge.

A short journey, before doors slide open and they empty into their lives (“Clay Animation”)

The above line, ending a poem in which the poet speculates about fellow-passengers on the Tube, is a good place to start thinking about these poems. Nearly all are short vignettes, moments, transient but deeply experienced states of being. The title poem, indeed, centres on an Inuit word that describes the state of impatient excitement one gets into while awaiting a longed-for visitor. “I found the word which/starts here and ends when you arrive.” The weird thing is, the poem leaves one feeling that however welcome this visit (and this is a poet who seems, at least in these poems, delightfully and unusually at ease in relationships), it cannot possibly be as enjoyable as this state that precedes it.

Poets who work in a small compass are considerably helped if they happen to be good at coining memorable phrases. It’s a gift that can become a curse if overdone, turning poems into a collection of soundbites, but here it is well used, sometimes as a perfect shorthand for a state of mind (“the sound of listening to nothing at night”), sometimes to provide a close that echoes in the mind, like the ending of “The coast guard found an empty life raft”:

    The coastline called us back.
    Throw out everything you own, lose weight.
    I tipped all my words overboard,
    Lastly, the unreliable narrator.

There are many references to exile and war in these poems, not surprisingly since the poet’s Armenian grandparents fled Turkey for obvious reasons at the start of the twentieth century and settled in Cyprus. Nadjarian, born in 1966, was the second Cypriot-born generation in her family, but then of course politics and divisiveness caught up with them in their new location and the poet ended up being educated in England (she later returned to Cyprus and now lives in Nicosia).  I’m mildly puzzled, by the way, by the dust-jacket’s description of this as a “first collection”, because I know there’s been at least one other (Cleft in Twain, 2003), and thought there were more. The violence of the war imagery, e.g. “a country is being chainsawed”, from “We didn’t die, we levitated”, spills over into poems on other themes, like “Downpour”, which ends “still killing us, this rain, with its bullets”. There are also poems that reference relationship break-ups, and a pervading sense of mortality:

    We were once human and to human
    we may never return
    (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Uncertainty”)

In view of all this, it is perhaps odd that the overriding impression the collection left with me was one of colour and light, joy, even.  I think this is partly because of the vividness of her observation and description which, in defiance of the dictum about happiness writing white, actually seems to work best on that theme. “Hibiscus” is by far the most successful and sensual evocation of sexual climax from a female point of view that I have ever read, and in “The Perfect Child Emerges”, she lifts the everyday mentions of “sucking and sobbing” and “shiny new teeth” with a beautifully oblique allusion to the myth of Apollo’s birth and brief infancy:

  Then, with incredible speed away from you, a tall boy runs from one season to the   next. Away from this baby in the cot sucking its thumb, oblivious to the sudden  earth, the endless sky.

Nuts to Larkin; this is how to use the “myth-kitty” to universalise personal experience.

We did not want enough
to do the merciful thing. – “Mercy”

The poet has remarked that this themed collection “is about our common humanity”. That is true, inasmuch as all human suffering touches all humans. And there are near-explicit references to contemporary events, like the proposal to export refugees to Rwanda, glanced at in “Madagascar”. But the collection is very much written from the viewpoint of the particular, Jewish, group of humans whose history is hers, and who certainly have a great deal of human suffering to draw on. “Mercy”, the poem quoted above, is one of the few that is from a more general viewpoint and is indeed about the suffering of a bird rather than a human. And in some ways it’s an odd one, because the “merciful thing” that the crowd of anonymous people cannot bring themselves to do would, in this case, be to kill the bird, which is too injured to live. It would be somewhat alarming to see this as a direct analogy for the human condition, but I think the point is that “mercy” is not always easy and that we often, like this crowd, continue on our way rather than get involved.

In the poem “Jew”, the main speaker lists a mélange of facts, slanders, myths, cliches, symbols – “the Nobel and the intellect, the where, where, not here, diaspora, the klezmer, mazeltov, the shabbos bride, the candlestick, the yiddishkeit, the pogrom” –  while a subsidiary voice keeps interjecting with comments like “don’t dwell on that again” and “no no, move on, move on”. Since this voice is in italics, it could well be the internal voice of the poem’s speaker, anxious as to how it will come over. But it echoes the spoken and unspoken response that accounts of suffering often generate, especially from those who have been either responsible or complicit in it. Those who have come out on the “winning” side of any conflict routinely want the losers or sufferers to “move on” and forget their resentment; we see the same response in many situations, vindicating the poet’s claim to universality. In a much less extreme example, the recent anniversary of the miners’ strike led some to protest to the BBC that rather than watch programmes about it, we should all “move on”, in reply to which an ex-miner pointed out that he was in effect being asked to move on from his own history.

Saphra is eloquent on the impossibility of this in “The Trains, Again”:

    again the trains, it is this friend whose mother told her
    That is the tree, that is the tree
    – as she chopped the onions, stirred the soup
    bleached the bleachable, celebrated the spring:
    When they come for us, I will hang myself from that tree.

    When will they come for us, my friend?
    Can you hear the trains? I hear them
    in my sleep, rattling continents, heaving
    and breathing along the tracks of my veins
    riding my blood. There is no silencing them.

I tend to think of Saphra as a form poet, and though there is more free verse here than I generally associate with her, there are also sonnets, a ghazal and, in several poems that look at first sight like unrhymed couplets, subtle patterns of rhyme, half-rhyme and assonance lurking under the surface, eg in “Poland, 1885”, where the rhymes and near-rhymes cross the couplet breaks:

   a past I sought long overgrown
    the state of currency still volatile

    human traces vague, all guesses wild.
    Nothing left to find; nothing and no-one.

    But oh, the language: soft-tongued
    apologetic; those legends of tracks

     pointing towards infinity; haystacks,
    horse-drawn carts; disappearing villages

There’s no denying that, like all themed collections, this does harp a lot on one string, which is not everyone’s fancy in a collection. But towards the end, there is a note of redemption being sounded. It seems, in “20264” and “The News and the Blackbird”, to be intimately connected to birth and motherhood, and the second of these poems is particularly noticeable for the return of the bird motif, this time in a happier context. The blackbird “will not stop her song” and, when the narrator is obsessed with war the bird bursts out “suddenly in the key/of joy Look out! Look up! The stress on the bird’s femaleness is interesting; female blackbirds sing far less than males, more quietly and only in the breeding season. This one has a “chick-heavy” nest, the presumable cause of her outburst of joy. There is a parallel here with another recent collection I’ve lately read, Nora Nadjarian’s “Iktsuarpok”, which also has a background in war (Cyprus) and persecution (the Armenian genocide) and which also sees redemption and joy in human, particularly parental, relationships. Indeed the ghazal mentioned earlier, “Before the War”, is addressed to Nadjarian, and wryly encapsulates the universal, ongoing human condition of which both poets speak:

    Now truth drags out its death drawl: ‘To which current war do you refer?’
    We live in the dark of that question: no such era as ‘before the war’.

and I want to remember this, all of this, because it happened.

This last line from “To be continued” highlights two important qualities in Cooper’s poetry: it is observational, and much concerned with everyday life. What he is so anxious to recall is the woman and child who sat in front of him on a bus; their rapport with each other, their apparently slender means. This is all he could glean of them in a short time; there was no actual interaction, but as the title implies, after they got off the bus and vanished from his knowledge their lives went on. This title is actually unusual in pinpointing what for him is central to the poem. Another such, “Elsewhere she’ll fumble her flat’s key into the lock”, again speculates on the part of people’s lives the poet cannot see; in this case unexpectedly humanising an internet troll or scammer. Her fake profile shows her

    in a ribbon-adorned US army uniform
   on a sunlit porch, a tied-back-tight-ponytail-haloed smile,
   and her listed Facebook friends, each with glossy teeth

But the poet wonders about that “elsewhere”:

    how many of them are click-my-box trolls, too,
   in the same fluorescent-lit fourth floor room in St. Petersburg,
   keyboard-clicking demotivational posts on their afternoon shift.
   Will she then wait for a tram with a half-full shopping bag
   cursing herself quietly because, even though it’s pay day
   and she’s bought her son socks, she forgot a lightbulb.
   So, again, she’ll walk the corridor to her flat in the dark.

Some other poems use the first line for a title, even when this is fragmentary – eg “Before sunrise, eating muesli, I decide that”. Others seem to hunt for determinedly “quirky” titles – eg “One of the times when Willie Long-Legs and Laudanum Sam met Mazy Mary and Sarah Snuggles”. Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to feel a thoughtful, thought-provoking title, that you go back to and see new meaning in once you’ve read the poem, is a good sign, an indication that the poet knew what was important enough to make him want to write it and what he wanted his readers to take from it. Also, quirky drives me nuts. So it may be no accident that his observing-everyday-life mode, in which the titles tend to be more sober and considered, is where most of my favourite poems in this collection can be found.

The observation is often quite sharp, as in

   How his smile muscles were so under-used that
  when they twisted, tightened, I was always surprised

from “What the district nurse never included in her report”, and the “clouds of luminous breath” in the autumnal “Those on the ball before darkness surrounds them”. This poem is one of several where he goes beyond observation to find the universal in the particular, and again he is conscious that the people he is watching exist beyond the moment of his poem:

   and everything beyond all this is also here
  in this November afternoon

When not observing life around him, he does a lot of what-iffing, particularly about dead writers – “Rilke in his Audi on the M53”, “O’Hara and Melly meet up in Liverpool”, “M/s Eyre’s lover visits a writers’ course at Lumb Bank” and several more. I think there are a few too many of these and that some begin to sound like exercises. One that does work beautifully is “Almost meeting Keats on the doorstep”, in which tourists entranced by the museum that was Keats’s villa in Rome ignore the “pale-faced twenty-something” on the doorstep who could be Keats and surely has his illness:

   He coughs, smiles politely, asks for one euro so that he can get in.
  They ignore him and keep talking – the bedroom and bed were so tiny.
  Only the wallpaper’s changed. Locals were scared of infection.
  T.B.’s so contagious. Apart from that, it’s the same as when he died.
  They keep chatting, open an umbrella in his face. He turns away.

There are a few typos, notably “Hurworth” for “Haworth” and “MacDonald’s” for “McDonald’s” – that one is surprising, for one of the virtues of this collection is its easy familiarity with contemporary references. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon etc all seem perfectly at home and not dragged in for effect as sometimes happens when poets are desperately trying to keep up with the zeitgeist. And for such a sharp observer, I thought the reference to “pensioners” drinking Ovaltine was a bit of a cliché, but maybe this pensioner is unusual in never having done so…

But though I think it would be a stronger collection with at least 15 pages fewer (almost any collection of 100 pages could afford to lose that many), there is much to enjoy here, perhaps nowhere more so than in the interesting “Miss Roberta Frost and the owls”. This is a sort of reverse sonnet, sestet first and octave second. It is of course partly another what-if, as witness the lady’s name and the echoes from “Acquainted with the Night”. But the character, and the emblematic owl, exist on their own terms, and memorably:

    All she hears is the pad of shoes as her feet
   climb the stairs to undress, lie still, and the cry
   of an owl cruising along his airborne street,
   unseen, always aware, not saying good-bye
   to his mate but telling her where he is – height
   and distance – as he ghosts the empty sky.
   Then he answers her call, turns.

J K Jerome remarks somewhere that he understands Scots fairly well, because “to keep abreast of modern English literature this is necessary”. Were he with us today, he might be brushing up his Anglo-Saxon, or at least the dog-Latin-like version of Old English that a surprising number of recent poems and novels have employed to evoke their world.

This is the sequel to Beagrie’s Leasungspell, in which a monk called Oswin was travelling from his monastery at Herutea (Hartlepool) to Streonshalh (Whitby) with letters from Abbess Hild in 657 AD, the year of the Synod of Whitby. His journey was interrupted, to put it mildly, by a river-witch called Peg who captured him as he tried to cross the Tees and held him underwater. Eftwyrd begins with his escape from her and his resumption of his journey.

Leasungspell was conceived primarily as a spoken performance, in which format its blend of Old English, modern English and Northumbrian dialect would be easier to follow, as you can see and hear from various clips on YouTube (eg  here ). The poem also had a website, still called leasungspell.com but now occupied by something in Japanese about motorbikes. I assume this sequel will be similarly performed, but this is a review of what’s on the printed page. The casual browser, seeing lines like these

        þa hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide þruh eorþan sceatas,
        grandleás ġerārum begeondan æl eorþan cynedómas,
        an’ te gǣlde oferlang wiðin hits níedgráp nēþaþ
        overprice mi, tóslítness, multen me int’ sealt sprutan

might lose heart on the spot. But some of the words, especially when sounded, will reveal their meaning – “sealt sprutan” is not a million miles from salt spray, and remembering that the ð of Old English was our “th” gives you “within”. Many of the poems are in fact followed directly by translations into modern English. Some, particularly later on, have partial translations, prose summaries or even just a vocabulary. In effect, then, there are two versions of most of the poems. Will readers tackle both, and will they benefit from so doing? Let’s come back to that later.

Leasungspell opened with the words “Huisht, lads, haad ya gobs”, quoted from the folk song The Lambton Worm, and Eftwyrde too is a gallimaufry of quotes and influences. Many are from folk tales and myths; some from more surprising sources:

        Then I eat the plum fruits, so sweet, so cool, wondering if some
        one was saving them for breakfast before they were given to me.

Beagrie’s description of Oswin’s quest as a “fool’s journey” would seem borne out by the fact that Oswin’s letters not only get lost en route, they hardly matter, since when he gets to Whitby he finds Hild already there. But in folk-tale tradition he finds other things along the way, and possibly also loses some, notably his faith. He starts out from Hartlepool a Christian, but by the end he is questioning the effect of organised religion on human behaviour and realising how it can be used as a means of control and self-enrichment.

The narrative has a lot of tension, which is my excuse for skipping some of the OE versions to get on with the story. But that is what one does on a first reading; it doesn’t mean I would necessarily do it again.

Back, then, to the dual versions. Do they add anything to the concept? Something, certainly. A layer of distance, also some fruitful ambiguities. “Eftwyrd”, for instance, immediately suggests “afterwards”, and it is indeed a sequel to the former story. But given that an eft is the terrestrial phase of a newt and “wyrd” in OE means fate or destiny, it could also suggest the strange physical state Oswin is in after his sojourn underwater; he has become a sort of human/water creature hybrid whose appearance frightens others and leads to his being taken for some sort of demon. “Fish-on-land-fate” (or “fish-out-of-water-fate”) is not a bad summing up of what happens to him, both physically and metaphorically, during a journey that sees him become detached and alienated from the world he lived in when he set out.

Next time I read, I probably will try to get by without the translations. For now, though, they were for me where the development in Oswin’s thought-process became clearest, signalled by the change in his lexis and imagery between this:

        smoke coiling up from the harbour homes beneath
        like steam from a bowl of warm hearty broth;
        they cling like limpets to the strip of earth,

to this:

        yet without recognising the materials of the craft
        or where we set off from in the beginning,
        the freedom to transform across endless newness

        to the joy of the gods of betweenness
        with our overpassing bodies, where these gods
        almost believe in us and would trust

        us to stay with them without transfiguring
        into the next thing the way clouds pretend
        to be ten thousand things we hold by name

This is one of those themed collections where it is important to distinguish between theme and subject matter. Superficially, it concerns the dog, past, present and future: the first part is an imagining of prehistoric doggery- their creation myths (“In the Beginning”), their intrinsic nature (“Digging”), their relationship with early man, fateful for the integrity and independence of their species. The second part examines the present state of this one-sided relationship in more depth, while the third is set in a future where dogs transcend this relationship and become more like people. (Though it isn’t quite so straightforward, for there are three poems titled “In This Boke That Cald Genesis” scattered throughout the collection which continue the mythmaking.)

In all three parts though, humans are as much the subject as dogs. What they do to dogs by way of exploitation, alteration and appropriation is emblematic of what they do to the world in general. At the end of “The Man”, we see the dog’s dilemma, but we also see how easily, in these lines, “dog” could be replaced by “man” and “man” by “god”:

     Dog looked around at his lot,
     were he to leave the man
     he had nowhere to go, no source of food
     and no shelter.
     There was no way back
     to the place
     he’d come from.
     He had no choice:
     now he loved
     T H E   M A N

And in “The War Dog School”, even without the echo of Emma Lazarus the parallels would be clear:

      Shoeburyness, Essex, 1917:
      Airedale, Lurcher, Mastiff.
     We take your strays.
     We will clear out Battersea.
     Give us your terriers,
      collies and Great Danes.
     We will turn your poodles into pinschers,
     your retrievers into sentries,
     your pugs into pugilists,
     your Shih Tzu into soldiers.
     We want sagacity, fidelity
     and a strong sense of duty.
     We will place you on
     the Western Front,
     take our messages through
     clouds of mustard gas
     while men in trenches
     peer through masks.

     Missing from the cenotaph:
     the dog who ran across
     No-Man’s Land
     and collaborated with the Boche.

The man/dog parallels are well handled, as are those poems dealing with the dog’s essential nature – “Digging” is particularly convincing:

     Past amber and pewter, Thor’s hammer,
     through new red sandstone, coal,
     silurian slates and millstone grit,
     until the rock beneath claw
     turned hot and molten.
     As the earth he dug got hotter,
     he smelled the brimstone
     and felt the fires.

This is also one of the mythologising poems that worked for me. I’m not so sure about some others, partly because I doubt any species except ours is self-obsessed enough to make myths about itself, partly also because the “Genesis” poems are in a sort of cod Anglo-Saxon, a device I’ve seen in other poems and novels in recent years. I understand why: to convey antiquity, but there’s antiquity and antiquity, and Stone Age man (or dog) talking Old English doesn’t quite feel right to me, though I don’t profess to know how he could have done it instead – unless indeed he used the phonetic spelling technique he later employs in “Dog’s Final Testament”.

Some of the poems in the second part about how humans have altered dogs for their own purposes are excellent, particularly “Corinthians 13:12”, with an ending it would be wrong of me to spoil by quoting. And the fantasy of “The Rapture” uses humour to good effect:

     The land is shining
     now that it has gone to the dogs.

“The Dogs are Laughing” does a similar thing with its line My dog, why hast thou forsaken me?, playing on the famous dog/god coinage and turning its meaning, because here it is the worshipper, not the god, who has absconded.

I don’t think it always avoids the trap of anthropomorphism, eg the note of indignation in “Chihuahua”:

     You will not listen to baby talk.
     You have been called ‘teacup’ for too long,
     do not answer them, when they shout:
     Fifi, Foo-Foo, Pookie, Pumpkin or Tinkerbell.

This is surely a human point of view; the dog couldn’t care less what you call it. However, as the quotations above should make clear, this is an unusual, original and challenging collection.

This is a narrative poem in three parts by Joan Lennon, presented both in English and in a  Fair Isle dialect translation by Anne Sinclair, and illustrated by Jenny Wheeler. It concerns life on Fair Isle, seen from three viewpoints: coming, going and staying, ie someone coming to live there, an emigrant leaving, and someone becoming acclimatised to the island, plus three short “interleaves” which separate the longer sections. To quote the author; “three narrative poems, telling the stories of three women’s experiences of Fair Isle in three distinctly different time periods, interleaved with descriptive poems about the way the natural world was constantly changing. In geological time, Fair Isle has travelled from the South Pole, been part of and then split away from North America, been engulfed and scoured by glaciers, and surrounded by sea. Now it is midway between the Orkney and Shetland archipelagos, where the Atlantic and the North Sea meet. But physical change has not stopped. The wind and the water continue to carve and shape the Isle.”

It may be necessary to explain to non-Shetlanders that even within a remote island group, Fair Isle is quite particularly isolated, almost as close to Orkney as to Shetland and far enough from anywhere that, for instance, children at high school on the mainland have to board away from home during the week. Even its dialect varies noticeably, particularly in pronunciation, from Shetlandic dialect elsewhere.

To speak first of the original poem, the voice in the “coming” section is very much that of someone who has immigrated, as the isle’s first settlers probably did, from Scandinavia and is temporarily traumatised by the huge difference in the landscape, especially the total lack of trees:

    At home, she could see the other side of the fjord
    and the deep green pines clinging to the mountain.

    Here there was no other side

    only a heaving grey line
    where the grey of the water reared up to meet
    the grey of the sky.

 The second voice, which to me was the strongest, is that of a woman leaving the isle for the New World and apprehensive about her reception. This gives rise to a fascinating moment in the dialect translation; the lines

    Their sister had written to warn them
    “It’s only the English they speak here”

become in dialect

    Der sister haed writtin te warn dem
    “Dey oanly knap whaur we bide.”

That second line may not look much like the original, but to “knap”, in Shetlandic, means to speak affectedly, used in particular of a dialect speaker attempting more standard language. Here the translation arguably adds something to the original, and it isn’t the only time. When “stitching sky to sea” becomes “shooin lift te løybrak”, the care with which the alliteration is preserved by using “løybrak” (surf) instead of “haaf” (sea) is notable. When reading this section, it may help to know that the emigrating family could not have gone direct from Fair Isle to the Scottish mainland to embark for America. They would first have had to take ship north to Lerwick, then go south from there to the mainland, which means their ship would actually pass Fair Isle on the way south. This moment of keen nostalgia is skilfully conveyed:

    the bog cotton flying their flags of fluff -
    pinks, snugged down tight amongst the grasses -
    the way the sheep tracks rayed out
    beige through the brittle heather
    […]
    She couldn’t see them
    but she knew they were there.

The shorter “interleave” poems relate to the isle itself and its geography rather than to people. This is also true of the powerful illustrations by Lucy Wheeler; I don’t know enough to judge them as art, but they convey both the beauty and austerity of the landscape.

I’ve complained before in reviews about forewords detailing the author’s reasons for writing the book – the dreaded “journey” that is generally of interest to nobody else. In this case I would concede that some background is necessary, both on the place, which will be unfamiliar to many, and on the translation process. I do think the intro could be shorter; leave out all the chatty stuff about PhD proposals, funding applications, covid etc. All that matters is that she wanted to write about Fair Isle, went there to do so and that what developed was a project about three women on an island at different times, by three women on an island, working in different media. It is very readable both as an original English poem and in the dialect translation. There is also much interest, for anyone fascinated by languages, in how the translation process worked, and the illustrations are most pleasing.

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.

(and, perhaps, a way to avoid it)

I was chuckling over the Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (first published 1899) of Capt. Harry Graham the other day. You'll recall that this is the chap who writes polished little epigrams in which the speaker or protagonist reacts to some awful tragedy with inappropriate levity, self-interest or indifference. Like this:

In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell, --
We must buy a filter.

Or this:

O'er the rugged mountain's brow
Clara threw the twins she nursed,
And remarked, "I wonder now
Which will reach the bottom first?"

There are many,  many more; see here.  Thinking about them, two things came to mind. There have been many imitators, and nearly all fall well short. This is partly because they often don't match his metrical polish, but there is something else too — they hardly ever go far enough. When I read the Rhymes to my students and got them to write their own, I noticed that although they loved the transgressive frisson the poems gave them, they were hesitant to reproduce it themselves by imitating Graham's pose of brutal indifference. And nothing less will do; you can't just be vaguely catty or ever so slightly daring. You have to go far enough to create that momentary shock.

And that made me think of something else: the trap I think so many poets fall into of Needing To Be Liked. Poets have much in common with comedians, who also fall into this trap. In their case it blunts their edge and makes them sentimental (Robin Williams being a good example). With poets, it tends to manifest in an anxiety to come across as worthy and right-thinking, especially if they use the first person a lot, and a fear of uttering any sentiment that might shock or annoy a similarly right-thinking, liberal audience.

It's easy to see why they feel this way.  In the first place, readers and even many reviewers have an awful habit of supposing the word "I" in a poem means the poet,  and is uttering his or her own thoughts. Secondly, there do seem to be quite a lot of finger-wagging thought police about: I recall a review of a collection which included a poem in which a child was playing with a toy gun. The reviewer was indignant that the poet had neglected to include an explicit condemnation of "war toys", apparently oblivious to the fact that this had nothing to do with what the poem was actually about. Another poet caused a kerfuffle on social media, a few years back, by imagining Hitler as a young boy. Myself I would have thought it interesting to speculate on how a virtual tabula rasa turns into a monster, but no: seemingly some thought the mere choice of such subject matter automatically made one a fascist.

But the fact that we may be misunderstood by careless readers (some critics among them) does not mean poets should imitate spaniels, tongues hanging out for audience approval.  Even kind, liberal-minded people have dark thoughts sometimes, and poets should be ready both to acknowledge this in themselves and to make their readers think about it (as, for instance, Frederick Seidel does, not without getting into some trouble for it).

And in a small way, I think the sardonic captain can help us here. If you teach creative writing, introduce the Ruthless Rhymes to your students and get them to try writing their own. When they hold back, as they will at first, encourage them to be more transgressive, to see how far they can raise the shock quotient before their audience says "oh no, that's too much".

At least it might get them out of the habit of needing to be liked.