*****

The Letters of Seamus Heaney •  All the Birds by Mark Totterdell •  Book of Crow by Anna Barker • Edgar by Malcom Carson

*****

The Letters of Seamus Heaney. Selected and edited by Christopher Reid. Faber & Faber Ltd.  2023. £40 hardback.  ISBN 978-0-571-34108-5, Reviewed by Sam Milne

As John Banville has written (in The Guardian) these letters, covering fifty years of correspondence, show Heaney’s ‘generosity, warmth, joie de vivre’, and demonstrate ‘diligent, scrupulous editing’ by Christopher Reid (although we don’t know what was left out). Heaney’s tone is always sensitive to his recipient, knowing what they want to hear, making at times for a strange kind of caution and reserve.  He admits that he is ‘hurt to have to hurt other people’ (when he spoke his mind he seems to have immediately regretted it). This makes his letters much softer than those of Philip Larkin, for example (they are never curmudgeonly or cynical). He is more at home thanking people for kind reviews of his books, and helping friends find publishers. These letters are very personal in the main.  At times it feels almost obtrusive and embarrassing to be reading them, as if one were eavesdropping on something essentially private. Even when writing to the famous Reid rightly notes that ‘there is no evidence that his address to them is tilted, however slightly, towards any hypothetical reader of the future’, and that I think is the problem.  Much of the content comprises gossip only, and most are written in haste. Reid categorically states that ‘an increasing number of his personal letters were dashed off’ (there are also a significant number of faxes and postcard included in the selection) and a great deal seem to have been written on plane journeys between appointments. This pressure means that the letters are not as considered in their judgements as Heaney’s interviews and lectures are, for instance. Reid also tells us he has tidied up spelling errors, and corrected what he calls forgotten and aberrant punctuation (what he calls clearing up ‘all the minor accidents of improvisation and haste’). For this reason many of the letters read as surface impressions only, rather than considered reflections.  ‘The sense is that he is always writing to the moment’ as Reid comments.

The most interesting letters are concerned (perhaps not surprisingly) with poetry, as well as comments on poets he admires, and insights into influences on his own work. He writes to Seamus Deane, for instance, that he likes the way his poems sustain ‘a large open rhythm without formulating it into any monotonous pattern of beats’, carrying ‘the throbbing quality of rhythm’ (comments which can equally be applied to his own poetry). He advises him to avoid spontaneity. ‘None of your bloody impromptu effusions’ he says—the craftsman in Heaney coming to the fore here clearly. He likes Theodore Roethke’s ‘poems of formal mastery where the swathe has been tied into sheaves’; poetry he believes should be ‘pebbly-hard’ demonstrating ‘life-love and language-care’, conveying ‘an immediate impulse working itself out with vigorous intelligence’. He tells us he is always searching for ‘the good rich phrase’, cherishing the ‘continuum of the imagination’, the need for ‘an individual word or phrase carrying with it the charge of the whole poem’—always envisaging ‘the poetic enterprise as something larger than a personal achievement’, the true poet, as he sees it, serving ‘a tribal role’.  ‘We don’t want ideology’, he says, ‘and the whole thing there’ (echoing a phrase of William Empson’s). He praises ‘the vital joyful action of poetry itself’, its ‘sensuousness and spiritual refreshment’. He admires the poetry of John Kinsella, John Montague and Richard Murphy (and the plays of Brian Friel). He informs us the primary influences on his own work are Ted Hughes and Patrick Kavanagh, and that a poem should be ‘an object rather than a statement’, ‘regarding the word itself as somehow magical; turning the act of writing into an act of consecration where the bread and wine of daily life is consecrated in the host of language’. It seems then that for Heaney this is where poetry and faith converge. Poetry, he says in another letter, more categorically, has ‘a religious claim upon the poet’. And he quotes Czesław Miłosz approvingly: ‘I too “wept at the loss / Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead”’ he writes. ‘My consciousness was formed’, he writes, ‘maybe better say dominated, by Catholic conceptions, formulations, pedagogies, prayers and practices’, a statement that provides a clue (and insight) into the genesis of many of his finest poems. We find him agreeing with Peter Sirr’s summation that ‘Heaney has had to bear the weight of public expectation’ and his view that ‘Heaney’s imagination is to an extraordinary extent nourished by ritual’.

Heany tells us he likes ‘patter’ (his own word) and blarney, chit chat and gossip, craic, episodes of ‘booze and blather’, enjoying what he calls ‘bitching sessions’ in pubs. This tone can be heard in the likes of his comment that he regards (not seriously) Patrick Kavanagh (subject of his university thesis) as ‘a potato-centred poet’ (echoing his wife’s cheeky reference to Heaney himself as ‘the laureate of the root vegetable’—a comment I guess only a partner could get away with). He writes about the BBC making a film of him (in 1969), the poetry reading circuit, the lecturing circuit, school and university teaching, and dealing with fame. He is hardly shy about being famous.  ‘I am convinced’, he writes ‘that I am one of the lucky authors who has found an ideal audience’, a comment far removed from academicians like Geoffrey Hill (although he does admit to liking Hill’s poetry). This approach to the public is far removed from the modernists’ stress on difficulty, and goes some way to explain Heaney’s popularity.

We find him at first living in Belfast at the time of the Troubles, then later on living with the surprise (and disgust to some in Ireland) of his appointment to the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Early on (a sign of things to come) we find him at ‘a reading beano’ in Michigan, caught up in the whirl of ‘the poetry circus’ and ‘the summer school circuit’. We find him receiving writer-in-residence grants, going to poetry festivals and book launches, depressed at not writing for months on end, drawing up policies for literature and drama at the Arts Council, recording interviews, working on translations, dealing with publishers’ advances, his royalties, tax concerns, book contracts, attending poetry workshops in California where he teaches ‘the fragrant follies of lotus land’ as he calls them, ‘hippies, drop-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads, begging bowls and clothes made out of old curtains’—although he does enjoy the company of the Berkeley staff, revelling in the ‘intellectual community’ he finds there. ‘It has given me a glimmer of ambition’ he says, ‘and dislodged the Northern clay from my obstinate roots’. He complains of having a writing class containing forty-two students (‘Disastrous for the ego of most of them, stupid, illiterate, long-haired hippies, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible assholes’) and eventually gives up teaching in 1972, to see if he can live as a full-time writer, an enterprise that fails at first, as he has to resume pedagogic duties.  When he does retire from teaching we find him on exhausting travels (what Patricia Craig, in the TLS, has called ‘his daunting itinerary), ‘careering around like hell’ as he puts it, in the USA, South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, all over the UK and Europe, Japan, Russia (‘tremendous time in Russia… we were treated like heads of state’) and Hong Kong. Even his leisure time sounds exhausting: ‘Just back from six days in Portugal, before that a walkabout with Liam O’Flynn in Iceland, but so far, no Morocco’. Even towards the end of his life he flew to Oxford for a funeral, before taking a final turn for the worse in Glasgow. He never seemed to be at home for long though he does seek ‘an old stillness of stone walls’, places that ‘soothe and steady’, searching for peace and quietude, ‘a lotus interlude’ as he calls it. We do, however, see him relaxing at times, visiting friends like Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Walcott  and Sorley MacLean, watching rugby matches, fishing (in France), vising a bullfight, hoping to be free of deadlines and public commitments (‘I had fought to keep the month of February free of all commitments’) but one suspects he rather liked being busy, enjoying what Seamus Perry, in the TLS, described as ‘his willingness to assume the diverse, often burdensome duties of a very public figure’ away from his desk. The clash of the public and private persona is perhaps best evidenced when he is pressed to say something about the relevance of poetry to the young: ‘After being harried and bored I ventured to say that “this guy Em & Em” – the deplorable rapper – “has a kind of verbal energy and has sent a voltage through a generation”’—a hint of his tendency to indulge in trimming and play to his audience perhaps, but at the same time he can admire the poet Ciaran Carson for being ‘in nobody’s pocket’.  He can be self-critical at times, admitting that ‘I occasionally stay at a certain safe level when I could possibly go down into the shadier levels’ (another clue perhaps to his popularity), calling himself ‘the lookalike who goes to the platforms and the camera-calls… as against the scullion/scullery man’. He says (I think again somewhat disingenuously) that ‘I didn’t want the mystique of “the poet”, just to pay my way’—but one has to concede that his lifestyle rather belies this judgement. We discover that he didn’t use emails as he thought they only encouraged unwanted queries from students and academics (the ‘electronic medium is an offence against the scriptorium intimacy’ he says).

He rather disarmingly (and perhaps disingenuously) refers to his receiving of the Nobel Prize for Literature as ‘the Swedish interruption’ (perhaps recalling Samuel Beckett’s aversion to the whole enterprise).  ‘I feel like an old bull’ he says, ‘being stuck with rosettes’. He moans about having too many distractions, ‘doing too much hack work’ as he expresses it, having to attend banquets, dinners, receptions, functions, formal occasions and so on (‘I have fizzled out my life on finger food’ he says, on ‘phonecalls and fuckabouts’, ‘the confusion and cram of mail and obligations, pageantry and business’. These complaints do not prevent him, however, from boasting about sitting at table with the Queen, Prince Philip, David Cameron and Mary McAleese, or talking about his informal rôle as an ambassador (as Yeats was once a Senator I suppose). ‘Off in half an hour to do national service, as it were, for Ambassador Ryan in Prague’—showing off a little to his friends, as it were, pleased at the same time that his poetry is being translated into other languages.

It is difficult from these letters to isolate a particular pattern or rhythm to Heaney’s writing life (on the surface it appears very hectic) but we do get glimpses of it. ‘I’ve been writing like a whore’ he says at one point.  Periods of depression are noted (‘a torpor of aspiration’ he admits, ‘without action’, calling himself ‘a torpid swamp-creature…bogged down at his desk’. He laments what he sees as the erosion of rural living: ‘the historical tide is running against almost every anchor I can throw towards what I took to be holding places’ he writes elegiacally. In the main one receives an impression of a life lived on the hoof, a life of airports and radio stations, a life very different perhaps from the poems readers know and love.

There is not much on family life here, but we do get a vignette of the baby smashing his typewriter, of the poet checking with his father about farming jargon, of new houses and furniture bought, of getting married, of having children, dealing with fame, landscaping his garden at Glanmore and all the ‘builders-bollocksed-up’ goings on that that involved, and having his house rewired, mundane details that read much like text messages on the whole.

Towards the end of his life there appears a feeling of regret at his fame, of having lived a very uprooted life (the tension between art and life comes very much to the fore here). The frailty of old age creeps up on him—we see him dealing very bravely with the effects of a stroke. (Two weeks after suffering this stroke he is on the road again, reading at Stratford-upon-Avon, Grasmere and at the Edinburgh Festival). He suffers a broken leg, gout, bouts of flu, and has a pacemaker fitted—all ‘the absurdities of old age’ as he calls it, withdrawing from ‘readings, lectures, receptions, and –alas! – revelry’. He is under doctor’s orders to walk for half an hour three to four days a week, noting sadly ‘it would be good to get back to writing poetry’. But even then he is off to the States on a reading tour, and hopes to fly to Italy. His spirit remained restless to the end.

These letters (and surely there are many more to come) enlarge the private life of Heaney to a wider extent perhaps than his memoir Stepping Stones did, and are a must-buy for anyone who admires and loves his poetry. It should be on every poetry lover’s Christmas list.  Jane Austen wrote that ‘the true art of letter-writing is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth’ and it is that humanity, that empathy, that closeness, one admires here.

Sam Milne is a Trustee of Agenda and has been a regular contributor to the magazine.  He is an Aberdonian living in Surrey.  He has just finished writing a play on the Scottish communist, John Maclean, and has recently completed a translation of The Iliad in Scots, which is to be published next year.

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*****

All the Birds by Mark Totterdell. £10.00. Littoral Press. ISBN: 978-1-912412-49-5.

I admire this book enormously.  It is a riveting read, every poem bright with intelligence and attention, every one a gripping sequence of ideas that builds to a revelation. As a whole, All the Birds bears detailed witness to the accelerating loss of once-familiar species from the mosaic of ecosystems that make up local landscapes in England. Mark Totterdell achieves the almost impossible task of adequately expressing our feelings as we find ourselves powerless to halt the careless destruction of creation. He travels (usually on foot) with the reader alongside, pausing to view one scene after another, a shared gaze. Some end on a note of optimism, as in ‘Here’, where snowdrops surprise and console us with their survival in a bleak winter environment that has been battered by storms and the ‘pitiless chainsaw’:

Here at the edge of the forest track
are knuckles of folded bedrock. Solid stone
has buckled, mountains have been ground
down to stumps. You walk on.

Here is a felled ash, dismembered,
its flesh still pale, and there
by the fickle river is a fallen oak.
You curse the pitiless chainsaw and the storm.’

The guided walk continues, past beef cattle: ‘doomed red rubies in the mud’ and a graveyard badger sett, and ends:

This is the lane where the ground slipped,
an acre shifting after tons of rain.
It took the tarmac yards downhill,
and made your map obsolete overnight.

You’re on your way down now.
There are the snowdrops, looking too small,
too frail, to bear the weight you lay on them.
Here they are now. Here they are.’

One could write a whole essay on the unobtrusive skill that this one poem deploys, and this standard of writing and feeling runs through the whole book. Some poems delivered a powerful message with a painful twist. ‘Meat’ describes a butcher’s hanging carcasses, ending with the line: ‘seeing the face of meat that is in my mirror’.

I find the cover illustration (an 1864 coloured engraving of six different songbirds) unusually attractive compared with many poetry books, because it so sharply embodies a particular idea that energises many of the poems – how a bird, or mammal or fossil or human rewards the patient observer by coming into focus against the complex and mysterious background of its natural habitat. Modern taxonomic guides are usually illustrated with a portrait of the bird alone, losing sight of the fact that each is evolved in association with an ecosystem.  Many of the poems evoke this sense of unknowing, the fractal character of nature hidden in structured complexity of ever-decreasing scale, by the device of a riddle. What are ‘Grus’, ‘Crux’, ‘Marthasterias’, ‘Branta’ and ‘Steatoda’? How clever to use scientific genus names, precise but unfamiliar, as poem titles, and then to build a full picture with a succession of clues; part of the pleasure of reading is to enjoy the moment of recognition, as one might when observing the beast in the wild, in glimpses. Other titles, for example ‘Quetzlcoatlus’ and ‘Ken Allen’, gave nothing away to me, but sent me on a rewarding Google search which unlocked new layers of meaning when I reread the poem.

Standing out from poems that work their spell through a music of subtle shifts in stress, is Totterdell’s Covid sonnet, which, like Don Paterson’s ballad ‘April 2020’ in The Arctic, gains weight by employing the soothsaying quality of a time-honoured metrical form:

He likes to mark the autumn equinox
the massive moment in the tilt and spin.
He tries to get a picture in his head
of sun and earth, that textbook kind of thing.
The tables have it down for half past two,
this shift into the dark half of the year,
but when it comes he’s staring at a wall,
no watch, no clock, no sense of it at all
just signs for colour-coded uniforms
and eyes above a mask that subtly smile.
His mind’s fixed on those tiny studded globes
that might, might not, be drifting in the air,
while outside, all the world turns as it does,
and as it has to turn, and as it will.

I have friends, people who grew up in urban surroundings, to whom it has never occurred to think of themselves as part of nature. Mark Totterdell, by contrast, ‘was born in rural Somerset, now lives in Exeter’, and is deeply engaged with the realities of this landscape, its geology and palaeontology, its wild creatures and dark skies, the encroaching suburb, the sea. He is evidently one of those for whom being in nature is a daily necessity; he writes as a quietly appalled witness of the unravelling of the living fabric, empathically observing individual displaced creatures as they adjust to losing the habitats to which they are adapted by a hundred million of coevolution. We watch, ‘like powerless gods’ (a resonant image from the poem ‘Peregrine’), as individual birds of different species adjust, or fail to adjust, to our urban environments; a thrush nests inside a working traffic light; the ‘four gannets . . . dancing on the sand’ turn out to be surf-washed corpses. The repeats of a villanelle enact the ever-louder song of robins striving to assert territory over urban racket, and also, perhaps, the poet’s keening despair:

Though to our ears sweet as a violin,
his song’s a threat to every neighbour bird,
the robin singing through the traffic’s din,

the stakes raised in a battle he must win
and can’t opt out of, experts have concurred,
must alter to the altered world he’s in.

Until his frail heart bursts beneath his skin
as he belts out his final wordless word.
the robin singing through the traffic’s din
must alter to the altered world he’s in.

As climate change becomes ever more disturbing how can our rage, sorrow and guilt be tempered into poetically effective expression?  Totterdell’s work provides an inspiring answer by example; I feel I can learn from every poem in this book. All are highly visual and often involve the knowledgeable poet observing the ecosystem and displaying deep empathy with its inhabitants, their behaviour and demeanour. In spite of its sombre revelations – or perhaps because they are so beautifully handled – this book is a delight, one to keep at hand. All the Birds, as its reference to Edward Thomas promises, neatly takes issue with the ignorance and unconcern of the Anthropocene, with which, in our silence, we are complicit:

Behind train windows sealed for good,
through unseen shires, a crowd are hurled
in air-conned, micro-climate hush,
each in their private wi-fi world,

and as the carriages approach
the former station, there’s no drop
in speed. Displacing bird-hymned air
the diesel roars past Adlestrop.

This book demonstrates the power of poetry at its best. It makes me wonder if informed nature poets ought now, as COP28 approaches, to try and be less polite and far more explicit in attributing blame for damage. Is it enough to detail our personal distress at the irreplaceable destruction of the miraculous biosphere that is humanity’s own only habitat? Should more of us with privileged knowledge try naming names, as Shelley named Castlereagh in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819)?

Sarah Watkinson is Emeritus Research Fellow in fungal biology at the University of Oxford. Following an academic career, she explores the imaginative common ground between natural sciences and poetry. Books include three editions of the graduate text, The Fungi; poetry books Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight, Cinnamon Press pamphlet prize winner 2016; and Photovoltaic, Graft Poetry, longlisted for the 2022 Laurel Prize. Native Soil, a romance novel with science at its core, was published this year by Moore & Weinberg.

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*****

Book of Crow by Anna Barker. £10. Indigo Dreams Publishing. ISBN 978-1-912876-79-2. Reviewed by Ann Grant

Book of Crow is an already much-loved poetry collection exquisitely written by award winning novelist Anna Barker and produced by award winning innovative publishers Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling at Indigo Dreams. It’s no surprise this emotionally charged and expertly crafted collection is one of New Statesman’s Books of the Year 2023.

This collection full of impressively precise characterisation is an exploration into how we deal with loss, grief and the darkness we feel within ourselves. The poems are written as dialogue between two characters; a woman who lost her mother to suicide as a child and a Crow who she first manifests as a child and who represents the darkness, the grief, her mother and who is also her companion and a feathered God.

The strong narrative of the collection takes us from grief and dark despair to a feeling of hope, relief and embracing the light. As the collection is written in the characters voices, it’s easy to read. There’s a strong narrative arc which is satisfying. There’s a musicality in the rhythms of the language and the descriptions of the sounds around them. Also, with the use of space or silence within the pieces and the emotional journey of the characters. Poetry is the perfect vehicle to capture the intense emotion in this story through form, characterisation and use of space, I couldn’t imagine it being told another way.

We learn more about the woman and her grief through the poems, we learn about the suicide of her mother and about her other relationships with her father, her sister and even a counsellor with an Aztec blue sofa. Most of all, we learn about her inner struggles, loneliness, grief and despair but in such a way we want to be with her, we are intrigued and feel we are allowed into this private space.

The pace and journey of the book feels completely authentic and it’s easy to become immersed in the sometimes, self-destructive struggle of the woman and to see parallels with personal struggles in the safety of your reading space. As a reader I felt all those private dark spaces I’ve been to, were heard and I felt I could gain healing from the poems.

It’s not all darkness, there are moments of comedy within the collection and this is achieved by recognising the emotional truth of the situation, that which is hard to pin down but that is cleverly weaved into the character of Crow. We fall in love with Crow almost instantly from his first self-satisfied, intelligent and playful utterances:

Ah! My reflection in a glass –
A god with feathers!
Tink, tink, pleased to meet me,
No time to chat there’s work to do.

 Anna Barker is a writer that understands about the human condition and relationships. This is shown by not just the dialogue between the woman and Crow but also their voiced private thoughts and their actions:

In the house while you’re at work,
I’m hard at work.

I pull the wool from your scarf.
I shit on the wires at the back of the telly.
I stash my feathers in places you’ll not find
For years and years.

One day I’ll be gone
And you’ll miss me.

 As a reader I’m pulled in to the juxtaposition between the busy Crow out in nature surviving and the woman in bed not knowing how to survive and most importantly the relationship between the two. The Crow refers to the woman as: ‘Funny Feathers’ and although we know he was manifested by the woman as a child he feels completely real.

The forms of the poems serve the emotional states of the characters. When the woman is drunk the form is more experimental. We sometimes see the actions of Crow through the eyes of the woman or the actions of the woman through the eyes of Crow. Their lives seem to depend on each other and we become invested in their relationship. This shows the skill of Anna Barker an already accomplished novelist, she has created a world here that I want to understand and exist in, a world that feels urgent, necessary, honest and unflinching.

I must mention the beautiful book cover by Ronnie Goodyer, a perfect portrait of crow on a branch with text from the poems in the background, I couldn’t imagine more perfect cover art. Also the classy inside images by Sean Collins are great anchors for the text, they are used instead of poem titles to clarify which point of view we are hearing the poems from although the voices are very distinctive. They also add to the narrative flow.

Once you have read Book of Crow you are likely to keep it in a handy place so you can dip into it and be with the characters, it’s an absolutely stunning piece of work. Do yourself a favour and make sure there’s a place for it to perch on your bookshelf.

Ann Grant is a writer with MS based in Cumbria, UK. Her poems have been included in The Poeming Pigeon, This Place I Know by Handstand Press, Survivor UK Zine CSA issue and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She hosts Verbalise spoken word open mics at Brewery Arts.

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*****

Edgar by Malcolm Carson. £7.50. Shoestring Press. ISBN: 978-1-915553-21-8. Reviewed by  Helen May Williams

Who is Edgar? The legitimate heir to a bastion of the ruling class, and a man of honour, in both senses of the word. Shakespeare’s drama questions whether those who are born into the nobility necessarily embody individual nobleness or honour. Edgar’s sense of honour and of justice sustain him through the betrayal by a brother and the breakdown of a political system, due to the folly of an old man who should have known that his role was to be a wise ruler to the end.

Edgar is thrust into the precariat with nothing but his innate resources to sustain him. While Lear turns mad, Edgar retains his sense of honour, respect and love for his father and emerges as the sole surviving heir to Lear’s kingdom. His survival tactic is to feign madness, although at times the line between playing the holy fool and becoming it are perilously close.

His trajectory plays into post-war cultural narratives of Us and Them, the country and the city, sanity, madness and the family, etc. Is Poor Tom mad or wise? What does Edgar learn from his enforced sojourn on the heath, which stands for the country and nature? With his temporary dispossession comes a gift of insight and knowledge not accessible in the environment of an orderly court society.

Shakespeare’s world in Lear is that of a counterfactual history play. Carson’s is that of post-war, suburban and rural England, where individualism is paramount. His mode is consequently less dramatic and more confessional:

I seek lofted thoughts where light defies the gloom;
I will adopt ‘clerestory’ for in that word
Lies hope when Tom is in ill thoughts again.

‘Edgar visits the abbey’

Typical of his subtle ability with language is the concrete surprise of ‘lofted thoughts’, which renders the interaction between the poet as Tom and the historic edifice, where meanings bounce back and forth from mediaeval monument to contemporary mind.

So often this is how Carson’s poetry functions; the acutely observed – whether it be manmade or ‘natural’ or that suburban variant which is a blend of the two – meets the poet’s mind as Edgar struggles to stay in control of Tom, despite the vicissitudes of contemporary life. There’s something distinctly English in this scenario, described as if the poet is both dramatis persona and spectator:

My patch for a time, this, allotted.
I will clear it of persistent menace (…)
Cinders, soot, my vigilance
will deter marauders that would infect
the core of all that’s good.

‘Edgar takes an allotment’

This volume represents a lifetime’s engagement with Edgar/Poor Tom. It doesn’t pretend to read Shakespeare’s text in its original context. Instead, it finds and invents meanings based on poetic subjectivity. Carson responds to the linguistic potential in our time of Edgar’s lines. He refuses the fatuous, alternative, seventeenth century happy ending; even if that means seeking solace in clipping box and tending lavender (‘Edgar refuses marriage’). Yet he watches the disorder caused by contemporary politicians –the equivalents to Goneril and Reagan perhaps:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxOr yet
will nature have vengeance? Too much to hope? Perhaps,
but what else if there’s to be a rebalancing
of order after the dark hours of a disordered world?

‘Edgar regards the politicians’

Here’s where Carson gets closest to Lear’s disordered kingdom; yet realises that order can no longer be re-established by the survival of one just man who emerges unscathed from the chaos. This thought is balanced by ‘Edgar at harvest time’, where more optimistically he states: ‘I’ll (…) ignore life’s disproportion until / such time as I can deal justly.’ But not more convincingly!

More convincing is his description of how he keeps ‘the foul fiend’ at bay, in ‘Edgar is happy’:

I am distracted from dark thoughts,
join in delight, despite myself,
at small birds that dink at my feeder.

As well as the Shakespearean text, I found echoes of Dante, Yeats, the English hymnal and Springsteen. This volume dances in the dark in ways that are full of moments of recognition.

Bookended by two poems about bait digging, set in the liminal space that reflects his cultural position, the poet concludes: ‘only by gazing at / the darkest hour, can Edgar / be himself.’ Which is, I believe, sadly true for all of us at this point in history.

Helen May Williams taught at the University of Warwick and as Helen May Dennis wrote extensively on twentieth-century fiction and poetry. She is the author of June: a biographical novel (Cinnamon Press 2020), Catstrawe (Cinnamon Press 2019) and The Princess of Vix (Three Drops Press 2017). Her parallel text translation of Michel Onfray’s Before Silence is published by The High Window Press (2020). During lockdown she participated in a befriending-by- phone project, which resulted in a publication with co-authors Dominic Williams and Mel Perry: Hold the Line (People Speak Up 2021)

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*****