Wildcat dreams in the Death Light by Regan M. Sova

This review originally appeared in the Brazen head Here

Reagan M. Sova. Wildcat dreams in the Death Light. First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages.

 ‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.

It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.

 Set in the first decades of the 20th century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, falls in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the festival of light for his dead relatives.

 A lot happens.

 At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:

 i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission
the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J
i had the song in hand but i
could not do it without the right guitar
nor the Locksmith keys
not even the rabbis have them 

While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW.

Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names; The Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs, The IWW; recognisable conditions; whites only hospitals, and historical events like the Frist World War, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.

The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitive hucksters and frauds. An American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and where the good guys find friendship and love and win despite the odds stacked against them.

The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings to the party.

The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battle Field Where the Moon Says I love you. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he  has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.

By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm of legend.  

When Alf, the circus master, asks the 13 year old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:

i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle
i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight
i have seen bob’s jar of brandy
i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster
i have seen the blood trickling
from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating
i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness
i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain 

This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.

As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.

In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for two hundred and fifty pages.

Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating a distinctive story world.

The Release by Jeremy Hooker

 

This began as an attempt to write a review of Jeremy Hooker’s The Release (Shearsman 2022). Then I began to wonder if it is possible to write an honest response that wasn’t distorted by the paradigms of the literary poetry review.

‘The Release’ is a combination of prose journal recording time Hooker spent in hospital between June 2019 and August 2020 and the poems that grew out of the experience.

I read it in one sitting. The remains of ex-tropical cyclone Tiffany were still rummaging round the coast, occasionally crashing rain against the house. When the floor to ceiling curtains were blown horizontal, I remembered to stop and close the windows. Otherwise, I went on reading. 

A positive, enthusiastic response.

I wondered if I could review it. Then it occurred to me that what might be important was my reaction to the book, and my ability to explain that was secondary. We learn to read poetry in school, and we naturalise the idea that the appropriate response to the poem is analytical and critical. 

I am increasingly convinced that an enthusiastic response is initially more important than the cerebral one that comes in its wake. Without it, or at least an acknowledgement of its absence, criticism starts in the wrong place and is never more than a performance with a text as a starting point. I’ve read so many critical discussions of poets and poems that make me wonder if the critic or reviewer enjoyed the work they were writing about. 

In hospital, Hooker was reading Barry Lopez’s Horizon. It’s impossible for me to read his comments without remembering the first time I heard that name, who I was with, where we were, or remembering sitting on a sand dune watching the sun rise over the Pacific, reading Crossing Open Ground. 

It’s for me impossible not to be interested in what Hooker has to say about David Jones. His book on Jones is still one of the most sane and lucid discussions of that baffling writer, and over the years he’s qualified and revised his opinions and hasn’t been afraid of doing that in print. I’ve recently being struggling with a critical book on Jones published in 2021, wishing the writer had Hooker’s clarity and generosity. 

And the poems. The Selected Poems, published in 2020 were impressive, but these seem to have picked up and gone further, giving the lie to myth that poets do their best work in their twenties.  

However, to enter into dialogue with a third party about poetry it’s necessary to go beyond the subjective. Who cares about my reaction to Barry Lopez? Who was David Jones? And then there’s another immediate problem. How do you talk about poems? There are ready made tool kits available from which you could cobble a passible review if you were lazy. 

There’s The Reviewer Tool Kit. It contains phrases and words like ‘brilliantly original’ ‘innovative’, ‘genre breaking/bending’, ‘searing’, ‘coruscating’ ‘raw’, ‘honest’. The poet is ‘reinvigorating the language’, ‘redefining poetry’, ‘pushing the boundaries of the possible.’ Most of the time, if you’re honest and not ignorant or suffering from Historical Amnesia, you know they don’t apply. You can count the truly original, ground breaking genre breaking poets in the 1500 years of English poetry on one hand. 

There’s also an Academic Poetry Tool Kit which has changed so greatly in my life time. The formalist reading gave way to ‘theory’. That seems to have faded. Today, you don’t even need to read the poems. If the poet is dead, you can rifle through the biography and the letters, commenting on statements which suggest political affiliations no longer in fashion, or time bound attitudes that are no longer acceptable. Or the poems can be discussed in terms of ideologies, praised when flying the flag for whatever group is currently fashionable, or whichever particular ideology the critics are currently marching behind, damned when they don’t. 

Either tool kit allows the reviewer to sound like a wine connoisseur flaunting the appropriate vocabulary; the equivalent of a knowing wink or secret handshake for a limited circle of cognoscenti. To most people, it sounds like a wine connoisseur fraudulently trying to sell the nastiest chateau de plonk. Or for those of us old enough to remember, earnest music critics trying to intellectualise The Stones.

To strip away this sludge and get to the experience of reading a book requires an effort and the results are neither succinct nor pretty. In Joyce’s phrase, one is always going to be ‘almosting it’ teetering preciously on the border lines of an informed and hopefully intelligent subjectivity threatening to disappear into vagueness.

After all, the book that redefines your world can bore your best friends. Your highly erudite, well-read acquaintance thinks there’s something very wrong with you because you cannot see any value in the poet he or she is spruiking.

And discussing poetry becomes even more difficult, when dealing with a poet like Hooker who avoids the tricks and twitches of the fashionable. 

One of the earliest surviving comments on a poet in English is Laȝamon's succinct praise of Wace, whose work he must have lived with and known inside out and backwards as he translated the 15,000 lines of his work.

Boc he nom þe þridde; leide þer amidden.   
þa makede a Frenchis clerc; 
Wace wes ihoten; þe wel couþe writen.

‘He could write well.’ There may be few poets in history who are original ground breaking language reinvigorating or boundary pushing but there’s a host of great poets who wrote well and will always be worth rereading. Tongue in cheek, is there anything else needs be said about Yeats? 

However, (again) if I move from the subjective to the public, is my knowledge of poetry broad enough and deep enough, and have I considered it thoroughly enough, to validate the statement ‘This is well written’?

It is still not enough. There are any number of modern poets who can ‘write well’ whose work is instantly forgettable. Their books are on my shelves and once read rarely get taken down. Who would pay to hear a guitar player run scales? The poem has to be well written, and at the same time offer something to the reader beyond the spectacle of a self-applauding performance. 

I don’t know the answer, or if there is an answer.

END OF PREAMBLE.

The Prose.

The journal entries in The Release are an elegant record of a questioning intelligence moving through a difficult personal time and shaping that experience in clear precise prose. 

Presented as an integral part of that experience, there’s a perhaps unfashionable set of questions. What is the purpose of writing poetry in English in the 21st century; what is the purpose of art; is great art possible or desirable; what is the role of ego in first person poetry and why is the NHS so badly underfunded and staffed by overworked people who appear in the pages of the journal as compassionate figures doing their best.

For Hooker the first question seems as important as the last. He navigates his way tentatively, while recording his dealings with the other people in his ward, the staff, visitors and the inevitable health concerns, so the literary is not presented as something precious and off to one side but as mundane and important as being wheeled off for an ECG. 

‘Feeling his way’ [his term] allows the writing to perform its own contradictions and avoid didacticism. I might agree with him that we need admiration bordering on hero worship in poetry, immediately qualifying that by pointing out he’s hard on his heroes, but that thought is already qualified by his references to the television in the corner of the ward and the politicians we’ve been saddled with by a different kind of hero worship.

At a time when the concept of ‘Great writing’ is often treated with suspicion, Hooker advances a case for the human need for art that does more than pass the time or reassure the audience that they’re marching in the right direction with the right crowd behind the right slogans. 

He quotes Barry Lopez twice: ‘All great art tends to draw us out of ourselves’ and then Arvo Part’s wife telling Lopez that ‘what her husband composes can reassemble a person.’   

Hooker comments on the second quote: ‘This is perhaps the greatest claim for art’s potential effect that I’ve met. I know that it’s true.’   

Stand in front of a work of art, literally or metaphorically, and experience awe. Realise the gap between you and the made thing, and have the humility to recognise the gap and the confidence or faith to make that leap to embrace it in all its challenging alterity. If, as Hooker says ‘Poetry speaks human. And human is relational’ (p.30) then in doing so discover, paradoxically, in your reaction to the singularity of the work of art, a relationship to common humanity. 

Perhaps you’ve never done this. It is difficult. You’d have to overcome so much; the automatic qualifying doubt a modern literary education drills into students; the profound suspicion of art as ideological weapon with designs upon the audience; the baffling but popular idea that art should reflect the viewer’s aims and interests, should comfort it with platitudes and commonplace, should above all else agree or provide a fashionable banner to march behind, and if it doesn’t then the best response is the bunker mentality where you hunker down behind the barbed wire of your own unexamined beliefs and then wonder why the art you see, the poems you read, are so instantly forgettable.

For decades, Hooker has been engaged professionally with what used to be called ‘Great Writers’. His pantheon is personal: Richard Jeffries, Edward Thomas, David Jones, J.C Powys and others. Over the course of that engagement he has refined his own ideas about them and his own work. The knowledge that there is Great Writing, and the nagging questioning of what makes it great and what it does that other writing doesn’t, informs his own poetry. The concerns in their broad outline are common enough, what makes Hooker’s exploration of them is the honesty with which he’s willing to approach them, and the fact he does it without recourse to theory or its jargon.

There are no easy answers. There may not be any answers at all. But reading Hooker is to follow a single intelligence moving through them, and we don’t have to agree with where he goes or how he gets there, but we should be grateful someone is willing to mark out the terrain.

The journal records four stays in hospital. It provides the ground (in both the common sense and the old fashioned musical sense) for the poems. Hooker is present in the prose: his reading, his questions, his biography, his memories, but he’s absent from the poems. The prose at times risks making the reader answer the question: why are you staring over my shoulder? The poems are stand-alone works of art.

The Poems 

Escape

Over the hills

            as a shadow chases cloud

            as a clod springs up 

            becoming lark

as thought from the lamed body

            flies

beyond the blinds

as word leaps to lips

seeking a way

            over the hills.

 

One tempting manoeuvre for the bemused reviewer is to slip into a discussion of ‘What the poems are about.’ Cue memories of English classes and the teacher demanding ‘What is this poem about.’ ‘What do you think the poet is trying to say?’ Even if I thought those questions were worth asking, and outside the classroom I’m sure they are not, they are made redundant in The Release by the prose.   

The prose is a journal, as such there are parts of it that are personal: memories, the absence of a loved one, lists of names who visit or call that mean nothing to someone who doesn’t know them. An honest journal cannot avoid what Lewis called ‘privatism’. But the poems, while produced by the experience and the concerns, float free of their circumstances and stand alone as achieved works of art. 

This distinction is fascinating, not only because it seems to answer one of Hooker’s own questions: how to be a lyric poet and not be a poet who parades his own ego as subject matter. Perhaps the metaphor which allows me to get closest to what I think is happening is the idea of windows, which runs through the prose and then becomes a poem which ends: 

Truly we owe thanks 

to the art of the glazier

which lets the outside enter 

and the inside reach out

driving back the dark.

                                    In Praise of Windows. (p.76)

A man in a room, living his life, his memories, concerns, interactions, connected to the world allows the outside to enter. That’s the prose. But he’s looking outwards, and the poet practises the art of the glazier, letting the outside enter, but shaping it as poem, as objects to illuminate the dark. They capture bright moments of seeing. 

Metaphors are always inexact, therefore two quotes to qualify this image. The first is from Hooker’s tribute to R.S Thomas.

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’ .  Selected poems, p. 251

It’s so very apt for R.S.Thomas, but I’d conscript it to describe Hooker’s best poetry. I live by an estuary and every gull on a post evokes Hooker’s poem of that name in his Selected Poems. The two seagull poems in The Release do the same thing. The everyday is presented in a way that is accurate as observation, but shaped in a way that invites the reader to look again. You’re being offered a glass to look through that frames the object. If you live on the coast no poem can make you see sea gulls ‘for the first time’, that’s nonsense. But a poem can colour the way you see them. 

As for style, it’s not easy to talk about a poetic that leaves out the tricks of the modern poet yet delivers far more than the simply declarative. The best way to illustrate Hooker’s style would be to reprint the book here. 

As that is not possible, another useful quote, this time from Briggflatts, where Bunting is praising Domenico Scarlatti. Initially it might seem strange to link Scarlatti’s fifty-five notes to a bar ripple and rush with Hooker’s uncluttered poems. Bunting first, then Hooker.

 

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

Gulls

 

First, they were voices

speaking a language 

familiar to me, but

untranslatable, that

sounded like need need need 

 

I felt it was the sea

they were crying for 

the element that mothered them

restless provider, giving 

and withholding,

constantly unstill.

 

Ghost bird, pleading

theirs was the voice 

that troubled my cradle.

In age, it returns

with the night wind,

shrilling, bringing back

the beginning, promising the end.  

                                                 (p.93)

No pyrotechnical ‘see here’, no congested cadence of jumbled syntax, no boastful ‘Look at the vocabulary I pillaged from the thesaurus’ or ‘Be impressed by my references to things you’ve never heard of?’ Hooker writes well. It should be the highest praise. 

In the prose, he writes about art as conversation, and the poems have a conversational tone only someone who is tone deaf might think artless. However, Art as conversation means more than just tone. It’s difficult to explain. You know it when you read it and the effect is complex and profoundly satisfying. 

If the poet and the man in the hospital bed are the same man, unified not just by a shared flesh but by an intelligence that refuses to split them, a particular kind of intelligence which takes the world in and shapes it into verbal patterns, then it follows that the poem and the world it describes are not separate. 

The poem isn’t the world. It cannot make the sunrise or be the sun. And the sun cannot care for the poem. But the poem can acknowledge the world, frame it in a way that invites looking, and simultaneously situate both writer and reader in it. 

The last three lines of the Bunting quote get at this in a way that I can’t verbalise. 

The magic of the effect of an honest poetry in dialogue between the poet and the world and the poem the reader and the world lies in a complex of ideas clustering round that word ‘acknowledged’. 

[…] and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

The short version review. 

Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’, along with Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that Happen’, would have had my votes for outstanding poetry publications in 2020 had there been votes for such a thing. They are very different poets, but equally admirable. The poems in ‘The Release’ move on from those in the Selected with no loss of quality. Here’s hoping there will be more. 

Until then, buy ‘The Release’. And Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’. And while you’re at it, buy Scully’s ‘Things That Happen’ and contemplate how two excellent poets can be so wildly different.

 

 

   

Translating the Mabinogion. The story-teller's strengths and weaknesses


Plodding onwards, now in Ystoria Gereint Uab Erbin,  I am still in awe of the story teller’s skill. 

He walks such a fine line between a minimalist narration that would be the envy of Raymond Carver and notes for a story he hasn’t written. 

Here’s the incident that kick starts the story ‘Gerient Son of Erbin’. The quotes are taken from Sioned Davies' impressive translation.

A Forester has approached Arthur at the feast, and after the formal greetings:

‘Tell us your news’ said Arthur.

‘I will Lord,’ he said. ‘A stag have I seen in the forest and I have never seen anything like it.’

‘What is it about it for you never to have seen anything like it?’ said Arthur

‘It is pure white, lord, and it does not walk with any other animal out of arrogance and pride because it is so majestic. And it is to ask you advice lord, that have I come. What is your advice in the matter?”

‘I shall do the most appropriate thing,’ said Arthur, ‘and go and hunt it tomorrow at dawn; and let everyone in the lodgings know that, and Rhyferys (who was a chief hunstman of Arthur’s) and Elifri (who was the chief squire) and everyone else’.

The speech isn’t ‘described’. The same verb is used every time. The speaker is identified, but how he (or she in other instances) speaks is left to the audience. ‘Tell us your news’ said Arthur. Bluntly? In a resigned tone? In an authoritarian manner?

It’s up to you. 

There is no need to indicate who is being spoken to. ‘Let everyone know’ is obviously not addressed to the Forester. But ‘Arthur turned to his court officials and said’ would be redundant. 

There’s no description of what’s happening in the background during the conversation either. Nor is there any description of Arthur’s reaction, (there’s no description of Arthur), but I think you can hear him lean forward, suddenly paying attention at ‘I have never seen anything like it’. And you can hear the courtiers nearby voicing their approval when after ‘the most appropriate thing’ Arthur says ‘I will go and hunt it’. 

The style invites the audience in and asks it to participate, but also gives it the freedom to make it its own. 

I like this very much. It reminds me of the best of the traditional ballads, where everything that isn’t essential has been stripped out. You could argue that it produces too much ambiguity? Is Arthur bored or annoyed or excited? And the answer is probably that it’s not as important as what he says. You could argue that the style is the product of an exterior world, and we live in one that likes to pretend it has access to intention, character and emotion. And a great deal of modern fiction is based on the convention that the writer not only can but in some ways is obliged to tell you what the character/s is/are thinking. But it’s one of modern literary fictions more dubious characteristics.

I'm at the editing end of the current writing project.  The next part of A Presentment of Englishry is almost finished. I’m weighing up how much I can cut out. I’d like to follow the medieval method, but I suspect most modern audiences would not be happy with such a minimalist approach.  

On the other hand. 

I’m not so enamoured by the story-teller’s habit of describing what people are wearing. This happens to a greater or lesser extent across all the stories I’ve translated so far, and I’m beginning to assume there will be curly auburn hair, tunics and surcoats, brocaded silk and boots of Cordovan leather. In a status conscious world clothes are obviously a mark of status. But it seems there wasn’t much variation available.

The Forester who speaks above is described as:

A tall auburn haired lad, wearing a tunic and surcoat of ribbed brocaded silk, and a gold hilted sword  around his neck, and two low boots of Spanish leather about his feet. 

60 lines later, Gereint is described on his first appearance in almost identical terms, when he’s seen by Gwenhwyuar and her maid as they are trying to catch up with Arthur and the hunt. 

A young bare-legged, auburn-haired noble squire with a gold hilted sword on his thigh, wearing a tunic and surcoat of brocaded silk with two low boots of Spanish leather on his feet and a mantle of blue purple over that with a golden apple in each corner.   

You’d be forgiven for thinking the story has just got interesting and the forester is riding after Gwenhwyuar. Instead it’s an encounter with one of the story teller’s limitations. 

But they tend not to outweigh his strengths. 

Jeremy Hooker's Selected Poems 1965-2018

 

Jeremy Hooker: Selected poems 1965-2018 (Shearsman 2020)

It’s a strange feeling to hold a man’s writing life between two covers, and it would be presumptuous to pretend to be able to ‘asses’ it on such short acquaintance. But the book is very good. One of the great joys of interest in poetry is that there are always so many fine poets to discover. Ignorance is a fine place to begin, as long as you take it as a place to leave. 

My prior Knowledge of Hooker is limited to the fact he was the author of a ‘pioneering study’ of David Jones, which I admire.( ‘David Jones, an exploratory study of the writings’ (1975).

I bought the selected because the blurb named David Jones and George Oppen as formative influences and I was having difficulty trying to imagine how anyone could combine those two very different writers.

The poems in the selected are grounded in places and things. They epitomise what Donald Davie called ‘a poetry of right naming’. In full knowledge of the slipperiness of words, or the slippage of the signifier if you want to be French, the poet doesn’t ‘Flinch’ into language or in it (to misquote Seamus Heaney) but tries to be as precise as possible. 

What I love is the fact of it. 

A channel kept open, shipping
stone for the cathedral;
blue Cornish slates;
coal from Woodmill
to Blackbridge Warf. 

A channel used, disused,
restored, until the last bridge
passed under the railway bridge
now abandoned, framing
water that is going nowhere, 
but silts, with passages 
the colour of stonedust
and boys rowing, a surface
silver and boiling
where blades dip and turn. 

from Itchen Navigation p. 102 (last stanza omitted)

The resultant poetry is lucid and compulsive. I can’t remember the last time I read a selected poetry from start to finish and then went back and read it all again. Although Hooker discusses the idea of Ground in the essay at the back of the book, and in more detail in his recently published essays , ‘Art of Seeing: essays on Poetry, Landscape painting and Photography’ (Shearsman 2020), the places in the poems shift: the Solent, Wales, Holland, The Holy Land. The poet is not so much tied to place as exploring places.

The book also provides on answer to a writing conundrum.

What kind of poem would you arrive at if you avoided a regular rhyme scheme and the predictable rhythms that gave melody and memorability to so much poetry in English written before the 20th century?

And then went further. If you avoided the tricks of the Avant Garde: no pyrotechnics, no disordered syntax or paratactic clauses? If you refuse to treat the poem as some kind of puzzle that the reader is invited to solve? If you were to avoid ‘clever’. 

If you avoided the thesaurus, and choose words you’d use in normal speech placed in normal order. If you avoid the temptation to be ‘poetic’, not pretending to thoughts and insights no one ever has in any given situation? And if you avoid the temptation to show off your considerable reading by dropping in allusions to other poems and poets? 

 If you avoid the selfie poem, where the words on the page are the debris left by your incessant scratching at your private itch, hoping your readers will sympathise with your pain for the length of time it takes them to scroll down to the next offering?

Take all that out and how might you end up with anything worth reading? 

One answer would be Hooker’s selected  poems. It’s the absence of the usual tricks of the trade that make them hard to discuss.  What to praise in words used carefully with a respect for the thing described. An unobtrusive control of rhythm. Poem as record of an intelligence moving through a landscape and recording its impressions, inviting the reader to not only look at what is being presented, but to look more carefully at the world he or she is moving through where-ever that might be?

Reading the selected reminds me of reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters. After reading Rusin on clouds, or light on water, you may never paint a picture, but you from time to time you find yourself paying attention to the detail in what you’re looking at. 

Hooker’s poem have the same effect. As he wrote about R.S.Thomas: 

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

                        ‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’  p. 251

 And that is a gift gratefully received.

Susan Watson’s ‘The Time of the Angels’ (in 'Long Poem Magazine' issue 21)

Susan Watson’s ‘The Time of the Angels’ (p.61-68 in Long Poem Magazine issue 21, spring 2019.)

 

Warning: Enthusing in progress…

Susan’s Watson’s poem, or sequence, is divided into pieces of varying length and form, each with its own title. The prose introduction states that in 1979 its author was writing an honours thesis on Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. It also refers to ‘the‘end of an era’ marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979. The poems are written in third person ‘because I wanted to distance myself from the nameless young woman reading.’

Literary criticism and autobiography made into public art.  It’s a very impressive balancing act.

Of all the poems in the magazine, I read this one first for a very superficial reason. If I were to take one book to a desert Island, I’d take an untranslated Malory. This is the only book I’ve written poems to and about. So, there’s an element of envy in the admiration that follows.

There’s also a personal irony; in 1980, I was planning to write an honours thesis on Malory. I was gently but firmly told to do something else. Had I been allowed to follow my obsession, A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2019) might be about Malory, Lollards and the War of the Roses and not Laȝamon, Anarchy and the legendary history.

I start with this because I recognise the quality of Watson’s reading of Malory.  There are other fine poems in the magazine, but this one stands out. 

The first poem in the sequence is called ‘Why she began to fall in love with the works of Sir Thomas Malory’.

It stands as an overture to the rest of the sequence. Each of its irregular, short stanzas presents a reason ‘why’, but each introduces ideas and images that are picked up, extended and passed on as the sequence unfolds. This means the intelligence is there, in the architecture, where it should be if a sequence is to be more than a collection of random pieces.

This first poem begins:

 

Because of the narrative voice
a plain voice threading beads

 The first two lines announce the validity of the reading, and the writer’s skill: the unobtrusive metaphor is effective as a description of Malory’s style.  The idea of things in sequence, like beads on a thread, how they can be similar and yet vary, how repetition can be a form of variation, are all important ideas in what follow in the poem.

As a reading of Malory, the sequence provides interesting ways of rethinking the book. Malory’s knights eagerly fewter their spears and charge at each other before the hat has time to drop. Sir Thomas obviously loved to write about their endless foynings and slashings. But as Watson points out the ‘customary moves’ of this ‘courtly love dance’ repeated so many times, like those almost identical beads on the thread, lead up to the sudden shock of their disappearance in the combat between Mordred and Arthur.

 

At one point Watson describes the act of academic writing:

She’d already explained all the things
That blood meant and means
In those customary terms that she had borrowed  

which felt like a great sheet of iron
preventing things she really thought and meant

 

But the poems, not being essays, have the freedom to move around those sheets of iron, to explore and suggest possibilities, to make their own links.  

Initially, Maying reads like a reflection on one of Malory’s most famous passages, alternating its long lines, some about the passage, some evoke the physical reality of reading, but then the piece bends gently to suggest something about Malory himself while perhaps also suggesting something about the poet’s life and choices at that time. To get that many things happening coherently in a poem is a tribute to the writer’s skill.

Guinevere is perhaps Malory’s great creation. She is his great contributions to English literature. It’s hard not to wonder where she came from. And it’s hard not to occasionally feel the author is suddenly speaking in his own voice about things outside the story. In the post-modern world of dead authors and author functions one might feel awkward advancing such an idea in an essay,  but the Maying opens a space for reflection:

‘Also she likes

the sudden subtle taste of cinnamon in the raisin cake, this voice, this brief scenting of a voice: Sir Thomas Malory Knight

Her idea of essayists:

men sitting in towers looking down, judging, but not like this. What had happened, what made those lines flow out just then?’

 

As Watson writes, ‘Contrition and sorrow lie lightly under the surface of those words’, leading to the final line, ‘ So he had forgiven her then’.

It’s done lightly, and well. The cinnamon in the raisin cake is another one of those metaphors you might miss if you weren’t paying attention.

The danger is that if the reader isn’t interested in Malory, the poem could sink. However that is not the case here because the sequence is more than just ‘a reading of Malory’.

Even in Maying there’s a feeling of life choices being considered by the narrator: ‘Adventures’ or the quiet of books; a withdrawal into the library or the risk of riding out.

People fall in love with a book. The academic essay rarely manages to capture the untidiness of recognition and obsession but ‘The time of the Angels’ as a whole, effectively conveys the way a book inflects the world of the reader, providing new ways of thinking and seeing, while the world inflects the reader’s way of seeing the book.

In ‘New year 1979’ the gothic arch on gothic arch, leading away down the corridor, is both a physical description of a place, but also an image of Malory’s narrative. Since everything is predicted at the start, the story leads inexorably to its final point, like the vanishing point in a drawing of perspective, but the doors leading off, opening and shutting, are like the strange sub texts that bubble under the stories.

The world in 1979, in England, was cold, and threatening. The poem is dusted with snow. Margaret Thatcher was about to come to power. Although Woods didn’t quote it, her description of going to the polls, and her feeling of frustration, evokes Malory’s denunciation of the English: Alas! Thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme.

What I initially thought was my only criticism of the poem, on reflection, might be an example of how good it is.

The sequence ends:

‘Was Merlin there in the polling booth?
He’d never have told her 

She’s taken the aventure
set out on a quest, without knowing,
chosen the man she’d marry.’

 I initially thought the last two lines are the only point in the sequence where an ambiguity suggests something hidden and personal. ‘The man she’d marry’ has made no appearance in the poem, unless we’re still with metaphors and the man is Malory. But on reflection the stanza underlines the difference between the book and lived experience and allows the subject to exit the sequence.

In Malory you know how the story ends from the start:

 

Because of the prophecies
Like setting books down on a table
Those things must happen[…]

 

But life isn’t like that. Merlin doesn’t turn up at the polling booth (though political pundits would like to pretend they have the power of prophecy). There’s no one to tell you how the story ends. Encounters are random and meaningless until they are given significance in retrospect.

The paragraph introducing the sequence says that ‘this is part of a longer poem’. I would very much like to read the whole thing.

 

End of enthusing

Tom Pickard's 'Winter Migrants' and 'Fiends Fell'.

Tom Pickard’s Winter Migrants Carcanet (2016) and Fiends Fell (Flood Editions 2017)

 

I wrote the first half of what follows and posted it on Lady Godiva and Me nearly a year ago. I’d been rereading Winter Migrants in a cottage on the North-East Coast of England. The wind coming off the North Sea battered the walls with a vindictive persistence as it tried to rip away the roof.  It wasn’t a review: I wanted to celebrate the book because it was the most enjoyable new poetry I’d read in a long time.

 

1

Winter Migrants

My test of a slim poetry book (78 pages) by a single author is can I live with it for a week? Can I read and then reread and not feel the urge to read anything else. And then if I put it aside and come back to it, does it still hold my attention? Most modern single author collections of poetry fail this test, miserably. 

I bought Winter Migrants as soon as it was published and I’ve been rereading it ever since. In terms of my test it’s an excellent book. 

It’s split into three parts: two sequences: Lark and Merlin, and from Fiends Fell Journal and a third section made up of individual poems.

Pickard’s poetry has almost always been the record of one intelligence moving through time and recording what he encounters in precise language. 

 

a wren

perched on a hawthorn

low enough to skip the scalping winds,

 

sang a scalpel song.    

 

This first poem from Lark and Merlin is a good example of an elegantly spare, stripped-down or stripped back poetic. It belongs to what Donald Davie once celebrated as ‘a poetry of right naming’. The poet works to find the best word to describe the world he lives through. 

When Alice complained to Humpty Dumpty that he was making the words do too much work, Humpty boasted that he paid them extra for their efforts when they turned up for their wages on a Saturday. Presumably there's a small queue at Pickard's every Saturday and they have negotiated for overtime. 

While I was rereading Winter Migrants I was also reading Baker’s The Peregrine. Both books have the same detailed observation of movement and light, landscapes and their wild inhabitants. Ruskin would have approved of both writers’ honest attention to detail. However, while Baker’s prose overloads the reader, Pickard’s poems have the advantage that everything unnecessary has been left out. What I envy most is his ability to capture the effects wind has and describe its movement over a landscape. In this he’s as good if not better than Ruskin at his best; he also has the added advantage of brevity. 

Sometimes minimalism doesn’t leave much for the reader to do except admire the poet’s skill. The Sequence solves this problem. Lark and Merlin might be a record of a relationship. There’s a she/you and an I. But the subject is absent. There’s no biographical context (factual or fictional) to distract from the poems. And I don’t understand how this works, but the absence of the subject creates the space which holds the sequence together. 

It also allows for the complexities of shifting power within a relationship, the confusion as well as the celebrations:

 

She asked about my heart,
Its evasive flight;
but can I trust her with its secrets? 

and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey,
tell the fleeing lark it is enamoured of its song? 

or the singing lark turn tail
and fly into the falcon’s talons? 

The final section of the book contains an assortment of poems on a range of subjects and in a range of styles, from the satire of ‘Whining while dining oot’ which puts the boot into a certain type of regional poet, to lamenting a death, ‘Squire’; to expressions of frustration with his contemporaries; the marvelously quotable, ‘To Goad My Friggin Peers’. 

At the end the book returns to the sparser tone of its beginning with ‘At the Estuary’ and ‘Winter Migrants’, both short sequences.

And as a PS. As someone who has often grumbled about the absurdity of blurbs on poetry books, the paragraph on the back of Winter Migrants is a model of how a poetry book could be described.

2

 Fiends Fell

Winter Migrants contains extracts from Fiends Fell Journal, a mix of prose with poetry.

A year later (2017) and Fiends Fell has been published by Flood Editions. The blurb says it charts a single year out of a decade spent ‘on a bare hilltop near the English-Scottish border’.  It contains ‘Fiends’ Fell Journal’ and ‘Lark and Merlin’.

Journals are dodgy things. The journals of poets have to compete with Coleridge’s and that’s a non-starter. The range of possible reasons for reader disappointment is vast. You are being invited to stare over the author’s shoulder and share his or her navel gazing. There is an explicit invitation to voyeurism and your willful indulgence in it might not be healthy or edifying.

The temptation to be ‘poetic’ or ‘profound’, to claim thoughts that one never had or to edit for effect must be immense.

So I hesitated because there was also the specific fear that the journal would turn out to be a prose exposition of Lark and Merlin which would bury the poems in the details that had been originally left out.

Should have known better by now. The postman delivered it early in the day. I had plans. There were things I had to do, and I thought, I haven’t got time for this. But I want to read a bit. Just a few pages. And many hours later I’d finished it and all the other things I had planned to do were still waiting to be done.

The Journal is the record of an intelligence moving through a landscape and taking careful note of everything seen, felt and heard. It’s also, incidentally and occasionally, about the writing of The Ballad of Jamie Allan. For those of us who like that book there’s the added bonus of a short run of 6 pieces about Nell Clarke, one of Allen’s partners, which doesn’t show up in The Ballad of Jamie Allen.

It might sound like a strange compliment, but it’s honest poetry and prose which doesn’t fudge itself by pretending to ‘poetic thoughts’ or attempting to be ‘literary’.  In the wrong hands, the prose could easily become poetic pose in the worst sense of ‘poetic’: The solitary wind whipped figure served up as metaphor for the modern poet facing society’s overwhelming indifference. But one of the reasons for reading Pickard is the well-founded faith that he isn’t going to do that. 

The blurb, which is another good example of how to write a blurb, describes it as a Haibun, but the alternation of Prose and Verse you find in medieval Welsh and Irish texts feels like a comparison more appropriate to the wild landscape. The obvious comparison is with Basho, who is nodded to in the text, but Basho was never this angry, physical or funny.

There are the inevitable traces of autobiography, but in an honest journal the writer is talking not to the reader but to himself, so here there is no explanation or background, just memories and interactions picked up and passed over. The gaps in Lark and Merlin are not filled in. Rather than an invitation to voyeurism, there’s an invitation to share a walk.

The background to ‘Whining while dining oot’ is provided, but the information doesn’t detract from the poem, and, perhaps ironically for those academically inclined to believe context is everything, it doesn’t add anything either.

As in Winter Migrants, the wind and weather become characters in the narrative. Pickard records his share of memories, meetings and dealings with humans, birds rats and mice, but the weather is his significant other in this book. It keeps him indoors, threatens him at night, bullies him when he’s outside, and just occasionally leaves him alone.

There’s been a lot of nonsense written recently surrounding the financial success of Milk and Honey and the ‘renaissance of poetry’ in Britain. There’s an unforgivable ignorance in some of the commentators who seem to think poetry of direct statement was invented on Instagram. Pickard, and others like him, have been plying their trade for decades, mostly unnoticed by the press, who would rather promote the self-centred whining of the wilfully ignorant for no other reason than the success of their sales pitch and the size of their royalties.

Nothing I’ve just written does justice to the pleasure of reading Winter Migrants or Fiends Fell. Which is really what makes Pickard stand out. He’s very good, but he’s also entertaining and thought provoking, and enjoyable. 

He reminds me what poetry was probably like before it was turned into a ‘pedant’s game’ or the chopped prose equivalent of a selfie: worth rereading. 

 

 

 

Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves

I don't remember when I first read this story.  Carter wrote a lot, and a great deal of it is impressive, but 'The Company of Wolves' may be my favourite short story along with Le Fanu's Carmilla. 

You don’t read this story; you enter it.

You walk into a room, doesn’t matter how rustic it is, but it does have a fireplace, and you sit down on one side and Granny is on the other.

Maybe you belong to a generation that didn’t have a granny who told ghost stories. Mine told the most frightening ones I’ve ever heard. They were frightening not because they involved multi colour deaths, CGI and a thumping sound track; they were frightening because she believed every word she said. And it was that understated conviction that returned after the lights were off to keep me awake.

 But you may not have had a grandmother like that, so enter, sit down and turn your phone off.

Carter takes two risks early on. If you know this is a version of Little Red Riding Hood she makes you wait for  four pages (in the edition I’m using) before Little Red makes her entrance.  But your average modern reader doesn’t know much about the werewolf, so the information has to be delivered. It’s delivered in a rambling, anecdotal way.  

Her second risk is that her opening hops around from anecdote to one liner. You didn’t hear it but you must have asked Granny about wolves when you sat down, or you made some disparaging remark about people who believe in Werewolves and granny is putting you straight. 

The narrator is heterodiegetic. Not a participant in the story but an inhabitant of the story world, and the story telling is localized. This happened ‘up the valley a little way’ or ‘in our village’ .  The wolf lore is balanced against the mundane: a woman is stirring her macaroni; a man is too shy to piss in a pot.  And if, dear listener, you’re impatient or not paying attention, you are not going to understand the ending of the story.

The style is an enviable combination of voluptuous extravagance and precision. If you think of it as excessive you miss the point that excess can easily become meaningless overload.  Carter’s language calls attention to itself, but remains precise. A simile moves its bored audience from one thing to another that is similar. But you enter Carter’s similes and they surprise: you can stay inside them for a long time as they create a loop. Wolves are as unkind as plague. Think about for it a while. What does it tell you about Plagues. What does it say about Wolves. 

I think Carter understood something primal about Folk tales. I don’t mean she knew them. Obviously she did. She had translated Perrault. I think she realized how old the metaphors and symbols are. It would be easy to use a word like cruel, or unsentimental, but the stories belong to memories of times when terms like ‘cruel’ were meaningless. The world was the way it was in the forest and understanding was the price of survival.  

I think Carter knew in her bones we all still live in the forest. Despite the sugary nonsense of Walt Disney and Wedding Planners, relationships are dangerous. It’s why Vampires were such potent symbols. It’s why the werewolf is such an obvious, powerful way of thinking about human beings. That nice young man might become an animal with his clothes off?  How to deal with him?

The story offers something missing from Perrault. Perrault’s story is didactic and authoritarian. Men are predators: girls are victims. Step off the path, you die. It’s a frightening moral about obedience, the death of curiosity, and ridged gender roles. (And if it’s a while since you read his version, you should go read it. Little Red dies. End of story.)  Carter knew her Freud well. In Perrault, Wolf is Id and Little Red is ego, and they are at war and one or the other must win.

Carter offers a much more interesting ending. Ego accepts Id: Id is tamed by Ego:

You were paying attention to the beginning weren’t you? 

Josephine Balmer's 'The Paths of Survival'.

I’ve been rereading, ‘The Paths of Survival’ since it arrived. It is such an enjoyable, thought-provoking book.  It also looks good. Cover design and blurb are exemplary.  

 A book length sequence of poems, each poem identified in place and time. The sequence begins with one of the the book’s few anonymous speakers, standing in front of a glass case in a museum, looking at a fragment of Aeschylus’ lost play Myrmidons, a scandalous piece of work which celebrated Achilles’ love for Patroclus. The sequence then moves backwards through an imagined history of the text as the editors, translators, copyists, book lovers and Aeschylus himself speak, stepping out of the shadows at the point where the text intersects with their lives.

It’s an impressive feat of imaginative reconstruction, this bringing to life a fragment of text. The voices lead back to a heavily footnoted reconstruction of what little survives of the play.  At the back of the book, ‘Historical Notes and Sources’ provide a short note on each poem, identifying speakers and contexts. Between the play and the notes a final quote…I have been silent too long. The play is not the end, or beginning of the sequence, the play gave shape to something that existed before it.

I have to admit that part of my enthusiasm for this book is that it’s about books and language and I recognize myself in the situation of the first speaker.

Still I am drawn to it like breath to glass.
That ache of absence, wrench of nothingness,
Stark lacunae we all must someday face.

I imagine its letters freshly seared
A scribe sighing over the ebbing tape

                        (Proem: Final Sentence.p.11))

In my case I was standing in front of the Exeter Book, one of only four books containing Old English poetry to survive from 6 centuries of Anglo-Saxon England.  I was in the cathedral library, with the librarian hovering nervously in case I broke the glass, tucked the book under my arm and had me an escape out the windows.

It’s impossible not to imagine the scribe who wrote it, or the incidents and accidents of its history that lead to its survival, when so much else has perished.

Those vague thoughts are brought into focus by Balmer’s poems. They give human form to somethings as abstract as the love of books that allowed for their careful transmission and survival, for the lovers of words who scrawled a favorite line or two on the back of other documents, and for the hatred of ideas that lead to their burning, as well as the casual destruction in which they were ‘collateral damage’.

Each speaker participates in the chain of accidents, sometimes unaware of the significance of their actions.  Librarians, antiquarians and book lovers have their obvious reasons, but lovers who find in the fragments words to inspire them, scholars who are horrified by the content, people who hate ideas, paid copyists bored, hurrying so he can get to the brothel, and the flight crew of the 2nd world war bomber, one of the most anonymous of the voices, that records ‘Targets; both destroyed. Stray objects hit; one’ all participated.  

One strand running through the voices is an absolute belief in the value of the written word.  

                              Books are

The twisted paths of our past.
This is who we were and what we are.

(The Pagan’s Tip p. 43)

No books and we are condemned to memory and the immediacy of a physically present speaker.  In ‘The Librarian’s Power’ subtitled (The National Library, Baghdad, 2003) with its stark opening line,  ‘We carried what we could to safety’ the librarians have to cajole the locals into letting them use ‘their one precious generator’. Asked why they are struggling to save books when so many people were dying, they replied:

We could only say that, if not flesh,
here were dividing cells, bare blocks,
of collective memory. Conscience.

The vast record of all our knowledge
and of our faith. An ancient Quran,
the House of Wisdom we had built;
the learning we alone had salvaged
and then protected for the Greeks--.

Culture and civilisation are fragile. Culture is not an abstraction, some rough beast that slouched out of the Fairy Queen to lock us in the prison house of language. Culture is the sum total of people and their actions and Balmer’s voices give testimony to this. History includes the casual destruction of texts and people, and the knowledge that intolerance and stupidity are not new inventions:

We’ll storm their prized libraries
strip the dwindling shelves bare.
Who needs poetry or philosophy
When you have faith and orthodoxy

(The Christians’ Cheek. P.42)

Survival requires human agency. And often a bloody-minded refusal to accept defeat. After describing the sack of Constantinople, the clerk ends his witness:

                                    Let them mock.

Where they had cruelty, we had culture.
Where they had greed, we had Greek.

(The Clerk’s Crusade. P.32)

There is a different greed though, and one that is celebrated here, the greed for knowing which is a form of lust.

Back home. I caressed my acquisitions,
tenderly; afraid their soft skin might tear.
I had no lovers. I knew no passion
Except for this, for words. My life’s breath. Air.

            (Hoard. p. 30)

 

I’ve quoted so much to show the voices. The blurb calls them dramatic monologues, but that sounds too formal and substantial. They are more like fragments of speeches from an unwritten or lost play.

Balmer’s craft is enjoyably subtle; the variations between poems are small but significant.  An unobtrusive rhyme scheme varying and sometimes absent, sometimes a barely noticeable patterning of sounds. There’s nothing pyrotechnic to obstruct the speaking voice.

The intelligence lies in the architecture and the control, which is where I think it always should be.  The speakers are arranged in groups, each group described by a line or phrase from the play. Each group providing a comment on the line as the line comments on them. The sequence is organized by the text it responds to.

If the subject sounds esoteric: “the survival of a fragment of a play by some dead Greek Dude’ the poems aren’t.  The individual speakers are too interesting in themselves. And it’s a thought provoking book. It’s a rare modern example of the suitably classical Horace’s belief that poetry should ‘Delight and Instruct’.  Read it for the pleasure of the voices and learn along the way.  

You could give ‘The Paths of survival’ to any intelligent reader, to someone who doesn’t normally bother with poetry, and they would enjoy it. Then the next time they buy a Penguin Classic, or one of the Oxford World’s Classics, they might stop and wonder how Herodotus or Sophocles made it to paperback.

 

Colin Simms 'Goshawk Poems'

I’d never read anything by Colin Simms before which just goes to show that there are so many fine poets at work and I've never heard of them. A book of poems about Goshawks might not sound interesting, and it could have been disastrous, but this is a fine example of Donald Davie’s ‘poetry of right naming’, recording decades of close observation. It reminds me of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Ruskin with his notebook and pencil, trying to capture the sea or light on water or clouds. It’s one of the highest compliments I can pay a book.

At first the exuberant abundance is overwhelming: 150 pages of poems, often with two or three to a page. But once over being intimidated the book rewards repeated reading.

I don’t like poetry books that don’t need readers: this one does. It wants its Model Reader to pay attention, to look carefully, and then keep looking as the poems turn the subject in different lights, different settings.  The poems want the reader to share their fascination and to realize how paying this kind of attention is rewarded not with repetition but endless variation.  Perhaps the great achievement here it that for all the decades of attention Simms pays to them, the Goshawks never become domesticated or humanised,  are never translated into some comfortably symbolic figure. They remain beautifully, fascinatingly other.

The best poetry sometimes sounds familiar. There’s echoes of Ivor Gurney, Hopkins, Bunting, (Bunting and MacDairmid make fleeting appearances in the poems) but while there’s a sense of continuity and tradition, this is not to suggest that these poems are  just a combination of those poets, or other ones other readers might hear. Beyond the familiar echoes is something unique unto itself.

Many of the poems have the provisional feel of a rapid sketch, the language hurrying to catch the movement of the hawk across field, the scatterings of prey, the omnipresent weather, and the way it alters light and activity:

Wind lifts beech leaves progressively in a pattern of little waves
a tide towards the wood’s enclosing slopes, heaping-up this November
Alan and I looked vainly for woodcoks’s through. Under the timber
wings blow a path parting the same leaves in lesser musical staves
even the wings of Bramblings. (p.64)

 ‘Provisional’ is not a way of suggesting the poems are badly made or unfinished. Speak the lines aloud, listen to the way the verse moves. This is not accidental. It is enviable.

My only problem with this book is that there seems to be many other books by Simms I now have to read.  An economic problem,  but something I look forward to solving.