*****
Nayler & Folly Wood: New & Selected Poems by Peter Bennet • We Go On by Kerry Hardie • The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin • On Earth, as it is by Jane Lovell • Once Was a Boy by Theo Dorgan • The Invisible Worm by Hannah Stone • Sublimity by Mary Gilonne • Body as a Home for This Darkness by Maeve McKenna • Remembering the Future by Janice Dempsey
*****
Nayler & Folly Wood: New & Selected Poems by Peter Bennet, £14.99. Bloodaxe. 978 1 78037 655 4. Reviewed by Kathleen Bell
The picture on the front of Peter Bennet’s new and selected poems is a surprise. So is the name NAYLER in large red capitals. I would guess few people today know who James Nayler was though he remains a disturbing and/or inspiring figure in contemporary Quaker circles. Was he a blasphemer as the B branded into his forehead suggests, a proclaimer of love in dire circumstances or, as many of his writings attest, a leading figure of the Commonwealth period who proclaimed his radical beliefs on the Christ within while denouncing the evils of inequality?
Peter Bennet is not the first poet to write a sequence about Nayler. In 1945 Kenneth Boulding composed a sequence of devotional sonnets while in 1993 Dorothy Nimmo published a long and complex sequence which includes the voices of James Nayler’s wife and children, left behind as he suddenly set off to preach. Nimmo’s sequence deserves to be much better known. Peter Bennet’s poems find him in dialogue with Nayler as his personal concerns and actions are juxtaposed with Nayler’s life, often employing his own words. For instance, after section XVII deals with the task of collecting spring water in contemporary Northumberland, section XVIII begins:
Yes James, I’m back, and catching up.
You tell me that iniquity has grown
to such an height that none should come to London
but those raised in pure movings of the truth,
for in this city is the Serpent’s wisdom
grown fully ripe. And yet we’re here.
The driver leans out from his cab to shout
that he has been instructed that the bus
must wait, three stops before our destination,
to even-out the service.
This seems almost like the novelist’s exercise of taking a character for a walk – except that in the exercise only the character’s responses are relevant. Here the juxtaposition between character and poet often finds them entangled so that it’s not always clear whose voice we are hearing:
Ministration of the world
is that is man, and doth not
lead to any end. We live in time, however,
and time itself must have an end,
for it is not of God.
The first sentence must be Nayler’s, if only because of the use of “doth.” However the second sentence could be the poet’s reply, a continuation of Nayler’s real or imagined words, or a view shared by both.
It’s hard to do justice to the complexity and variety of this long sequence which demands and repays several readings. There are swift tonal changes when the poet traces Nayler’s footsteps by visiting Swarthmoor Hall, which became in the late 17th century a kind of Quaker administrative headquarters. The shift between the house’s history, the spirituality that some Quaker pilgrims seek there and the house’s status as a tourist attraction is conjured by rapid tonal shifts:
this estate
is well kept-up, its ambience intact.
Friends are moved to contribute financially
that a pure fear be preserved in them. Enjoy
your visit, trusting if thou knowest it
the eye that never changes, and stand single.
Be not lifted up above thy measure
but yet delight thyself. Breathe in
the airs and scents of this six score of acres
close to the heart of Cumbria
The jumps in perspective may seem sudden and startling but this is how minds often work in jumps between past and present, the material, the practical, the imagined and what some might call the spiritual. Although the story of Nayler is told in order, from his sense of being called to preach to his death when attacked on his way home after lengthy punishment, there are whole sections when this is put aside in favour of a focus on the poet, his thoughts and the mostly manual tasks he undertakes.
James Nayler is not the only character in dialogue with the poet in this sequence although the sequence is studded with quotations from his writings and those of his supporter Martha Simmonds. Yevtushenko is quoted and demands a response while a cat called Malcolm Mooney (a real cat, I would guess, named in honour of W.S. Graham) puts in an appearance from time to time. There are also the voices of the men of substance in Bristol who denounced Nayler as a blasphemer after he felt led to imitate the ride Jesus took on the day now called Palm Sunday. Meanwhile the voices of the men who attack Nayler are taken (and acknowledged in an endnote) from Dorothy Nimmo’s Nayler sequence. Unsurprisingly, although an ending is achieved a conclusion is not; that is left for the reader to discern.
Focusing on a single sequence in a volume that contains several sequences as well as single poems (there are almost 250 pages of poetry) may seem narrow but it’s impossible to do justice to more than one sequence in the length permitted for this review. Nor is it possible to generalise about the variety of shorter poems included. However the seriousness is often leavened with a good degree of wit as in ‘The Scare’ which begins with what might initially seem a reference to the easing of lockdown after the pandemic, then invites the reader to participate in ‘peeping-in’ through curtains at a dinner party. The guests are pensive because:
They have heard the news.
Science has identified the microbe
that’s causing outbreaks of imagination
across the world. Its source could be
an inner eye, an inmost ear,
some obscure extra organ of perception.
But they suspect it’s spread by us. Take care.
Other poems speak without much regret of reaching old age, looking back and contemplating the inevitability of death. The nine lines of ‘The Lucky Ones’ bring in voices of those already dead – maybe referring obliquely to the lines from the end of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’, ‘Call no man happy ..’ or to banal references to those who don’t have to endure the current state of the world. The dead begin politely. ‘We don’t wish to upset you’ but end less comfortingly:
You’re scared to listen. That amuses us.
It’s as you say. We are the lucky ones.
You have your share of dying still to do.
There’s considerable erudition in this collection which concludes with a few pages of endnotes providing a little extra information about some of the poems and a few references. While some poems have immediate appeal (readers wanting a quick way in might choose to start on page 219 and read to the end before delving into the longer poems) this is a substantial collection worthy of attention and some googling of more obscure sources. It is likely to repay reading and re-reading.
Kathleen Bell lives in the East Midlands. She writes fiction as well as poetry. Her most recent poetry collections are Disappearances (Shoestring) and Do You Know How Kind I Am? (Leafe Press), both published in 2021. She is currently working on an extraordinarily long sequence about the life and times of the engineer James Watt.
*****
We Go On by Kerry Hardie. £12. Bloodaxe Books 2024. ISBN: 978-1-78037-701-8. Reviewed by Linda McKenna
We Go On, Kerry Hardie’s ninth collection is an astonishingly well-crafted and striking consideration of the glory of our fractured and increasingly fragile world. We Go On asks us to consider the edge as the centre, autumn as spring, ending as beginning, and invites us to reassess our ideas of growth and progress.
Again and again in this collection, the physical world in all its decay and unpredictable and sometimes unrewarding regrowth is to be treasured. The word ‘prayer’ recurs and this collection is a long prayer to and of the earth, sometimes overtly in verses that echo Hopkins such as: ‘I pray to the strumpet flare / of the wild cherry up on the hill, / I pray to the poplars, / their soft golden leaves’, and sometimes singing underneath the lines as in ‘Shell People’. Short poems are still rich and tactile. In ‘Walls Are Meant to Fall Down’, with its beautiful final line: ‘I feel the benison of broken walls’, we encounter not just broken walls as metaphor for death and destruction giving way to harbour for small plants: ‘sunlight and endings’, but the feel of warm stone against our backs. That is not to say that Hardie doesn’t give voice to when destruction is just destruction, when broken down walls and roofless houses aren’t places of vegetable growth but sites of terror. It is particularly moving, in these days, to read ‘How Was It That You Stayed So Long’, where: ‘Sky falling in through the roof’ is an urgent plea to leave a place of horror; or to be reminded as in ‘Post-War Story’ that: ‘Someone is always hungry’.
Ageing and the need to accept and face the fact of our mortality are key concerns in this collection. We are signposted to that from the quotations in the foreword: ‘The sculptor of life is the threat of death’, through poems where loss is vividly, achingly felt, although always modulated through the beautiful lyric that is the hallmark of Hardie’s style. In the moving ‘We Disassemble That First Home’, a poem for the poet’s sister, the simplicity of: ‘And I know there is nothing of yours that I want now / except what had been / a long time ago,’ becomes a beautifully shaped vessel for grief. Although the key-note in this collection is going on, acknowledging the world as a fractured place of beauty, deeply felt sorrow and rage are given their due. ‘Yesterday’ focusing on the funeral of a loved one has plenty of anger and exhaustion (although still elegantly spare and contained): ‘I don’t know / how many more / of these things I can stand -/ it isn’t even / the empty chair or the filled-in hole, it’s / the sandwiches, / the chatter, chatter, chatter.’
These are poems where the rhythms of hymns, ballads, elegies and laments, with more than a nod to the Bardic tradition, are honed and whittled to an arresting and haunting clarity. Nothing is superfluous here, every line and metaphor is carefully considered to stitch meaning and imagery together, securely and beautifully. The use of short lines and short lined couplets create poems of immense clarity but Hardie, in some longer poems, also uses spacing very effectively as an integral element to the poem. In ‘Just Another Bomb, Belfast 1974’, it is dislocating, almost gasping, in ‘Choosing Clothes for My Mother’, it mimics sobbing.
There is also an intriguing sequence poem, ‘The Muse Is a Red Dog’, which begins with the filling out of census forms, that list of the living that omits so much of life that Hardie analyses and celebrates; forest, blossom, moon, dreams and here, the Red dog. This sequence is where we can see very clearly the clever and lyrical reworking of elegy, ballad and folk tale. Red dog has his own language: ‘a dollop of blossom’ landing ‘slop-slap in a puddle’, his own dreams and fears, horses and horsemen, his own hatreds, his litter mate Black dog, is both prophetic muse: ‘Something about today doesn’t work / and the greenwood has gone missing’, and an actual, beloved dog, running, sniffing, frolicking. In contrast to the many still and contained poems in this collection, Red dog, the muse and symbol is a whirling, inquisitive ball of energy creating a centre point in the collection that while, on first reading, feels astonishingly different to the other poems, is a synthesis of the preoccupations in the whole collection: ‘Red dog is home in the world. / The world is home in red dog.’ This sequence is one to come back to again and again.
In contrast with Red dog, curious, engaged, and of the world, I was struck and indeed greatly heartened, with the sour, stubborn ewe in ‘Herself’, who has escaped the world and its burden of breeding and belonging. Old, barren and resentful, she is, nonetheless, the one who has reached the mountain where she: ‘stands against shoals / of lozenged sea glitter, / all shift and slide, / and gannets, stone-dropping’, witness to the beauty of the landscape. This poem is both an urgent call to look at the beauty of the world and a reminder that ageing, solitude, and even loss can create new ways to value the world as it goes on.
Linda McKenna’s debut poetry collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. The title poem won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year in 2020. Her second collection, Four Thousand Keys, will be published by Doire Press in 2024. She won the Seamus Heaney Award for Poetry in 2018. She has had poems published in a wide variety of journals. From North County Dublin, she lives in Downpatrick, County Down.
*****
The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin €11.95 Gallery Press 978-1-91133-864-2. Reviewed by Tim Dooley
‘Air: The Map of the World’, the title poem of Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin’s most recent collection, explores Ireland’s history of emigration. First how it was seen coming, like a piece of cloth expecting the tailor’s scissors, by ‘the peoples of the west’, the promontories and twisting roads shown on the map acting as a premonition. Then the sense of loss as those ‘lads’ who might have been ‘studying grammar to prepare for Maynooth’ (Ireland’s centre of training for the priesthood) are found to have their minds set on a new life in Argentina. Finally, the nostalgia expressed by migrants to England on a train from Fishguard as they listen to an air on the accordion. One among them, a figure of Erin or Kathleen Ní Houlihan, is singled out as spokesperson:
…the big woman with red hair
in the green and white dress with a gold belt and red shoes
told us over and over, they don’t come back from America,
they comes back from England, not America, they never comes back —
A shared sense of loss is assumed as something understood in Ní Chuillenáin ‘s poetry. As such it is often more suggested than stated. In ‘Home’, a servant girl stares at a distant light at dusk: ‘when it goes out / she sighs and heads back indoors’. In the same poem a man looks at a letter in ‘a language he can’t understand’ and ‘guesses well enough’ what the writer wished him to understand. This is seen by him as a better solution than opening the problem to the gaze of others (he has wondered if it would be ‘safe / to ask the schoolmaster what it all means’). In Ní Chuillenáin’s Ireland delicacies of expression skirt around shared trauma. Either the reader recognises what is said but knows something is being held back or, though what is said is opaque, the reader has an understanding of what is meant.
That there is a moral framework to this reticence is hinted at in the volume’s opening poem ‘The Miracles’ where ‘the poor / whose luck seemed to have definitely run out’ can hold back from ‘revenge, dressed up like justice’ believing in a reprieve ‘even though the clock had been put forward / so it would come too late’:
… those truths, that were nearly told
at the wrong moment, were able to wait —
just as tonight the parent climbing the stairs
after three warnings feels the brush of her sleeve,
swallows back the word that can’t be recalled if spoken
and goes quietly down again.
The Map of the World was thought by some too short a volume, with 54 pages, to have been shortlisted (as it was) for the T S Eliot Prize. What I find more striking is how much richness of perception there is to find in those pages. There are a good number of occasional poems in the collection (as might be expected of a respected older poet responding to public invitations) but even in these Ní Chuillenáin’s vision rises above the occasion. ‘St Brigids Well’, written for the catalogue of an exhibition to celebrate St Brigid’s day in 2022 — a festival growing in importance as Ireland begins to come to terms with historical harms done to women and children in the name of piety — ends with a vision worthy of Blake:
I heard the mill stream splashing downhill,
inside its prison pipe, out of the brimming pond
that I had not seen. Could I have forgotten
the excess of water, the excess of all the stories
I might have heard, as I searched for St Brigid’s well?
The unspoken stories of the missing can include stories of those in the mother and children homes and the Magdalene laundries, as potent an absence in Irish life as the migrants, yet only more recently acknowledged.
Ní Chuillenáin has been quoted as saying that in the 1970s, her writing was not recognised as a feminist because she wrote more about nuns than gynaecology. She may have been drawn to this subject because several of her female relations were members of religious orders, but in her poems the silence of the convent is often the setting for forceful images of active compassion. ‘J’ai Mal á nos Dents’ in The Magdalene Sermon (1989) memorializes an aunt who spent her life as a nun nursing in a French hospital through the Second World War, only returning to Ireland a year before she died. The strange grammar of the title ‘I have a pain in our teeth’ signals the suppression of individuality demanded by her service.
‘War Time’, the concluding poem in The Map of the World, is set in a convent — now a refuge for ‘women down on their luck / abandoned wives … nieces and daughters of men who needed / to vanish for a while’. A girl who ‘has nowhere to go / now, her home is beyond the new border’ plays an imaginary keyboard on a tablecloth — ‘the note so much older / than the hand that conjures, filling an empty room’. The scene could be from the Irish War of Independence (in which Ní Chuillenáin’s father fought) or from Ukraine in the present. In its celebration of the patience of the dispossessed, it is a poem of resonance and light in which the reticence of Ní Chuillenáin’s style demonstrates its full strength.
Tim Dooley is a tutor for The Poetry School. He was reviews editor of Poetry London between 2008 and 2018. His collections include: Tenderness (Smith Doorstop, 2003), Keeping Time (Salt, 2008), and Weemoed (Eyewear, 2017). 2022 saw the publication of a new collection, Discoveries (Two Rivers), his translation of Philippe Jaccottet’s In Winter Light (Two Rivers), and a chapbook, Notes on ‘The Waste Land’ (Hercules Editions).
*****
On Earth, as it is by Jane Lovell. £10. Hazel Press. ISBN: 978-1-7394218-1-6. Reviewed by Rebecca Gethin
Jane Lovell has a gift of researching the most extraordinary facts for her poems and then bringing them to life with her distinctively sensuous choice of words and image. She effortlessly weaves scientific understanding into her poetry. The poems in her latest collection On Earth, as it is published by Hazel Press are not just about the natural world but about man’s cruelty and ignorance. The ingenious title is a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer but the cover illustrating an OS map from the 1930’s keeps the collection firmly on the ground.
She is an award-winning poet and has read with Simon Armitage. Many of her poems have won or been placed in major competitions. On Earth, as it is contains ‘Ming’, the winner of the Gingko Prize in 2020, which is about a centuries-old bivalve mollusc which was accidentally killed by researchers:
Muscle and foot we scrape you
out, put you to one side,
globby and unfortunate.
Measured and elegant lines build momentum like lines on the mollusc’s shell:
Carved into your shell
we find trade routes, the wake
of explorers, contours of underwater
mountains, the migratory patterns
of whales.
It’s ironic that it’s the scientists who end up killing this most ancient creature and yet lovingly name it Ming:
We wrap your gummy form
in polythene, keep it on ice.
But mankind is not just careless of creatures but also of people and ‘Execution 1554, artist unknown’ hovers over the scene of Lady Jane Grey’s execution after which, it is said, her eyes were pecked by the Tower ravens:
It’s where the world disappeared
as the blade fell, the last scene
captured through a splint of light.
By focussing on the details of colour in the picture she renders this horrific scene both beautiful and mesmerising. The fragmented lines and stanzas add to this. The cruel execution of an innocent woman for political purposes is pointed up by the ravens’ gloating on their ‘treasure’.
There’s quite a lot of death and decomposition in this pamphlet including an Inuit fish skin bag, a butchered whale, a drowned skylark, Nabokov’s collection of butterfly penises. In ‘Laika, you must understand’ the stray dog is addressed directly. This was the dog that was sent into space so that scientists could measure and track:
your frantic heart inside
its shuddering cage,
mapped your fear from peak to peak.
In ‘Vitulus’ the poet imagines the calf whose hide was used to draw the Herefordshire Mappa Mundi. She delves into the minutiae of its life among ‘grasses, buttercups, a mash of nameless leaves’ before it was slaughtered, its ‘organs a muddle of bloody parcels’. The age-old craft of preparing vellum for important documents is graphically described until finally:
The world is drawn inside your skin,
its scribed parchment shrinking at light:
the endless raking of the lunellum
remembered in its translucence.
Lovell’s knowledge of birds is passionate and scientific. In ‘Snowy Egret’ she describes a carcass so vividly she brings it back to life along with the enigmatic suggestion of another ‘small unborn life’, the phrase repeated twice. She ends this poem:
It takes your breath,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthis symmetry,
the tattered beauty of the hunter
hunched about its final pulse.
‘Reasons for Sanderlings’ celebrates these easily-overlooked wading birds that live on the edge between sea and land ‘the long dark stored in their souls’. Plants are named. The detail is rich. This poem is addressed to a mysterious other, maybe mankind in general:
In the scurry of waves across grassland,
the sanderlings will guide you, show you,
how to hunt for burrowing crustacean,
isopods and plankton.
With its rhythm of melodic phrasing as well as the breathing of the longer and shorter stanzas the poem emulates waves, a tide coming in or going out by degrees:
We hold their future like a sphere of thinnest glass.
This marvellous poem set firmly on the shoreline as if on the map of the cover, is almost a hymn and ends:
They have learned to skip aside from the debris
clinging to the beaches.
They are here to remind us we cannot fly.
I will treasure this pamphlet for its remarkable imagery, precision, confident use of scientific vocabulary as well as its rich tapestry of colours and forms and the living, breathing layer of history.
Rebecca Gethin has written five poetry publications and two novels. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Her poems are widely published in various magazines and anthologies. She jointly won the first Coast to Coast pamphlet competition with Messages. Snowlines has just been published by Maytree Press. She blogs (very) sporadically at www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com
*****
Once Was a Boy by Theo Dorgan. £11. Dedalus Press. ISBN: 9781815629135. Reviewed by Ross Thompson
In his latest collection, the prolific creative Theo Dorgan, who once described himself as ‘poet, writer, translator and much else besides’, explores the familiar literary stamping ground of childhood. In this instance, Dorgan’s blue remembered hills take the form of chalky classrooms, leafy hedges and brewery fug of Cork during the 1950s and 1960s. However, while he writes with crystal clear specificity about this particular place, he makes the personal wholly universal by recounting with vivid sensory imagery experiences to which all readers can relate: the thrill of learning to read, the solidarity between pupils bonded by a common dislike of bullying schoolmasters, the vulnerability of forging an identity in an increasingly uncertain world. The question that this collection poses again and again is how we can best untangle the knot of those formative years that made us who we are today, and how as we age that time at once remains pin sharp in the mind’s eye yet recedes further away from us. It is this twin perspective on childhood that forms the beating heart of this collection. Take, for example, the opening suite ‘It Starts From Home’, whose evocation of infancy is introduced by the piece ‘Bells break on the morning air …’, with its echoes of Heaney’s ‘When All The Others Were Away At Mass’, reads:
Circling the mixing bowl with a finger, mock-reprimanded, I close
xxxxxmy eyes
and try to distinguish flour from egg in the mixture. I filch a slice
xxxxxof apple,
bite, the sourness puckering my cheeks. I dip the slice in sugar,
xxxxxbite again.
This poem is emblematic of the collection as a whole. First, note Dorgan’s use of the present tense that amplifies the sharp sense of immediacy, as if this memory, well-thumbed like a postcard or photograph, is projected onto a screen. The poet himself has commented that the writing in this book ‘haunted its way into existence’, and that verb is at the core of everything on offer here. Think of how D.H. Lawrence weeps ‘like a child for the past’ at the climax of his poem ‘Piano’, devastated at the realisation that youth exists within an impenetrable sphere that we can lift up and view from all angles but with which we cannot interact. Or, to use a less obvious analogy, think of Don Draper’s famous monologue from the television series Mad Men, in which the advertising executive describes ‘nostalgia’ as the ‘pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.’ By intuitively choosing to write in the present, Dorgan deftly conveys the twinges caused by replaying – or reliving – such memories that are rich with period details such as ‘Pond’s cold cream’, ‘The smooth Bakelite case’ and ‘Sun-bubbles in the back door paint.’ There is a very real sense of observing the world from the eye level of a child, where everything appears to be full of magic. Dorgan taps into something that is genuinely powerful.
This tactility continues in ‘A light wind comes up …’, in which the poet describes:
Madge Harrington’s penny ice-pops for all – she makes them by
xxxxxfreezing
cordial in egg cups. Suck the raspberry out, the null taste of the ice.
It is not only Dorgan’s usage of actual names – ‘Sergeant Moroney … Miss Coffey … Bomber Murphy … Sister Benedicta’ – that imbues the collection with credibility, it is also his genial argot and conversational style. For the most part, the poems in Once Was a Boy comprise long, uninterrupted lines in a similar way to Ciaran Carson or Billy Collins that eschew traditional rhyme and metrics in favour of a freewheeling structure. The fluency captures the fluidity of childhood where one day blurs into the next, and we are permitted to live without shouldering the weight of a mortgage, fetching groceries or the daily grind of work. One poem in particular that conveys this innocent state of wonder is ‘Learning to Read’ in which Dorgan perfectly describes the alchemy of this pursuit:
Now I am not in the room if I don’t want to be.
Now I can have a dog, a rich father and mother,
we can have a car, an apple tree, a stream in the garden.
Now I can be in places where everything comes out right.
Here, the speaker eloquently sums up not only the escapism offered by reading, the many elsewheres to which one can journey by the simple act of turning a page as described in the opening scenes of Jane Eyre, but also the autonomy that literacy brings. The ability to read is a gift that opens many doors, literally and figuratively, but also is the bedrock of perceiving our lives and the world around us. This collection, of course, would not exist without Dorgan’s love of reading fostered at an early age, and there is a palpable sense of gratitude for the alternative to being ‘fidgeting and trapped’ within a fusty classroom.
This is not to say that there are not elements of darkness present within Once Was a Boy. As the collection progresses and the titular child gets older, there is a notable tonal shift as the world around him becomes more volatile, and Dorgan realises, to paraphrase Don Draper, the old wounds of memory. The section ‘Boys’ Primary School’ recalls:
pushing, rough tackling, grunts and intimidation, chaos
everyone else seems to understand. Rules I can’t seem to grasp.
While not quite venturing into the same cynical territory mined by, say, William Blake or Pink Floyd, the later years of education are a place of machismo and a loss of wistful innocence. ‘Asking For It’, for example, describes that the most insidious form of bullying came not from Dorgan’s peers but from the masters themselves:
Carey is talking to the tall red-headed Brother,
their eyes tracking the yard.
I note their cold amusement and look away.
Shaken, feeling my back go stiff:
my hand still hurts a dull pain like you feel
after you’ve banged your elbow.
This unflinching account of corporal punishment (a grandiose term for what in actuality translates to the mean-spirited victimisation of children) is a trope familiar to anyone who has read Dickens or Dahl but only because it is true. The fellow schoolboys who Dorgan mentions have stories of their own to tell. This type of behaviour really happened and was permitted to happen, and not all who experienced it would be able to vocalise their mistreatment with such precision and grace. Impressively, while there is clearly both anger and sadness directed towards those teachers – ‘Madman. / Pocket the Box. Gorgeous George.’ – who perpetrated such inhumanity, there is no bitterness in Dorgan’s writing. It could be resignation, it could be acceptance, it could be the old adage that ‘this too shall pass’, but the implication seems to be that these manifold experiences transform us into the people that we are. The twelve-year-old boy in this collection is not too different from the adult man who wrote it, and their parallel timelines are overlaid rather than separated like whorls in a tree. Our respective pasts cannot be removed from our respective presents, and both constantly flow into one each other.
With this understanding in place, the final poem in Once Was a Boy, the quite magnificent ‘In the small closed yard …’, reaches towards some form of resolution. Dorgan’s former school is ‘dust / and rubble’, as are many of the people who worked there, and many of his fellow schoolboys are long gone too, transformed into snow and music and memory. A sense of liberation permeates this coda, not only in the sense of being freed from the imprisonment of schoolyard walls but also in the acceptance that life continues and other lives will continue after our own. Day will break, bells will ring and poems will be written.
Ross Thompson is a writer from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His debut poetry collection Threading The Light is published by Dedalus Press. His work has appeared on television, radio, short films and in a wide range of publications. Most recently, he wrote and curated A Silent War, a collaborative audio response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently working on several projects including editing a second full-length book of poems.
*****
The Invisible Worm by Hannah Stone £9.50 Indigo Dreams Publishing ISBN: 9781912876822. Reviewed by J.S. Watts
The Invisible Worm is a short collection of twenty-three poems, divided into two main sections, exploring the death and life of a close friend of the poet.
The preface explains the factual background to the poems and names the friend as Rosemary Mitchell, a Deacon in the Church of England. Hannah Stone herself identifies as a freelance ‘poet-theologian for Leeds Church Institute’. Not surprisingly, therefore, much of the imagery and language of these poems relates to the Christian liturgy and the New Testament. The opening poem, ‘Un-Magnificat’, for example, contrasts the dead friends’ situation with the life-giving announcement made to the Virgin Mary:
Who would have thought your maiden womb
could conceive such horrors?
Your ‘yes’ to God’s call deafened you
to that other annunciation;
you stopped your ears to the healing need
of the woman with a haemorrhage,
The poems in the first section of the book then proceed to chart, often unflinchingly, the swift physical decline of the friend, her death and what comes after, concluding with the scattering of the deceased’s ashes on ‘ 21 June, 2022, Hay on Wye’:
Today, we, too, shall be broken and remade,
as we gather to scatter your ashes: your death
the boulder in the living flow,
forcing us to find new currents.
The second section of five poems is more: ‘joyful’ and captures the pleasures of earlier holidays before Rosemary was taken ill. The framework for ‘A Testament of Friendship’, the title of the collection’s second section, draws on T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, though the title itself refers to the autobiographical book by Vera Brittain about her friendship with Winifred Holtby.
‘Evening Stroll from Gap Cottage’ explores a life-reviving visit the poet and her friend made to Hadrian’s Wall;
An evening stroll, the first for months, with friend.
Unlocked from Covid’s jail, new freedoms found:
A map to hand, a path ahead, our end
Not fixed. Relaxed, our ears take in the sound
Of tractors baling hay, and twitt’ring birds
Above us, or arising from the ground –
The collection ends with two poems written by Rosemary Mitchell herself: the last words being saved for the otherwise voiceless subject of the majority of poems in the book.
This short collection comes across (to me) as a very private set of poems about friendship, grief and loss and maybe, ultimately, hope, though doubt is also present:
I’m blind as Thomas, but suspect you’ll see
your risen Lord, configured as the gardener,
garnering souls beyond the empty tomb,
and sowing seeds of faith.
The preface sets the poems in the context of reality. The reader is not left to surmise what they are about. It also adds to the sense that the poems are committed to the truth of the experience being described, rather than any broader poetic truth. It doesn’t feel as if there is much leeway for ‘poetic licence’ here. The poems are frequently raw and exposed, and it must require both strength and love to share them publically. It is fitting that ‘A Testament of Friendship’ figures so significantly within the text.
J.S. Watts is a poet and novelist. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction appear in diverse publications in Britain and abroad and have been broadcast on BBC and independent radio. Her published books include: Cats and Other Myths, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Years Ago You Coloured Me, The Submerged Sea, Underword (poetry) and A Darker Moon, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight (novels). For more information, see her website https://www.jswatts.co.uk/
*****
Sublimity by Mary Gilonne. £10.00. Sublime Norfolk Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-3999-5680-2. Reviewed by Rona Fitzgerald
Mary Gilonne is a translator based in France. Her relationship with Norfolk is through her parents and friends. A prize winning poet, Mary is widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her pamphlet ‘Incidentals’ is published by 4Word Press.
This collection of poems includes brush sketches by Peter Norton that enhance the otherworldly texture of the poems, the ethereal nature of Gilonne’s connection with nature.
Gilonne is a poet of place. Vivid imagery, sounds and local phrases are woven into her text. For example, in the poem: ‘And When I Remember This,’ phrases like, ‘a pink-ruched-cossie sea- slug, lying on the surf line……I never told you that cockles really sing. That with ear to pools, down between tide- lapse and rising, very still, I could hear their bright bubbled notes.’
One of my favourite poems is: ‘Watching Snow- Buntings in Cley.’ It’s a strong example of how Gilonne uses language in an original and inventive manner. In fact, the inventive language addles my spell check. Alliteration and staccato word sounds conjure up Gerard Manley Hopkin’s use of prosody to bring acoustic and rhythmic impact:
WATCHING SNOW-BUNTINGS IN CLEY
Glasswort-Green wetland,
smelted light. A tumble-flash
of boreal hiss.
Buntings feather-scape
sea’s hinterland with white.
My lens flitters, clouds.
Air-fall confetties
In undulating chik-tik,
I’m cupped in calling
lulled in a dune quake
watching time and sky collapse
towards winging sleet.
Water links all this
to tidal creeks and marshes.
The bird silt-skim, settle.
Wind shift salty down
ruffling bird foam, net-scrapes dip,
bespeckled sand quiets.
Coast, marsh paling mere.
I move through evening scape
Where I don’t belong.
Rustles of keeled birds,
Moon-leeched shore, another place.
Homing like us all.
This collection is a journey, a pilgrimage through landscape, time and emotion. Each poem yields new gems of language. The poems are tender, poignant and perceptive.
The poem, ‘Day Trip to a Distant Edge. The Watch House,’ is a mediation on loss, on beginnings and endings. Gilonne uses the notion of sewing to rethread memories of family members. By stanza three we are into specifics:
Look that hand-bagged rectitude of granny’s posture,
hands cool as pious fish, a brown steady flow
of knick-knacker parlour tea, blanched widowing.
Brothers pegged and door slammed, fitful, fistful,
Taut as washing lines. Mum sweetly starched
Bleached by all she never chose to see,
and Dad, bricked, claggy with our mortar,
building us in. Home is a far dying star,
planetary nebula, such a distant constellation.
Gilonne brings us a rich collection that maps places and experiences, invites us to visit Norfolk, to read and read again these lyrical poems.
*****
Body as a Home for This Darkness by Maeve McKenna. 12Euro. Book Hub Publishing. ISBN:978-1-7392899-3-5. Reviewed by Rona Fitzgerald
Maeve McKenna lives in Sligo, Ireland. Her work is published across a range of publications including winning the Dreich Alliance Pamphlet competition with three poets, Rattle and Mslexia magazines. Her debut poetry pamphlet, A Dedication to Drowning, was published in February 2022 by Fly on the Wall Press. She is currently studying for an MA in poetry at Queens University, Belfast.
In, Body as a Home for This Darkness, McKenna charts her father’s life, her own journey with him, his decline into dementia as well as his death. The central theme is echoed throughout the collection. The poems are tender and vivid with a lovely eye for detail and scale.
In the opening poem, Him, McKenna’s traces her father’s demise though time. The language is straight forward, unfussy. Compressed emotion is ever present but carried lightly.
The opening line, talks about her father, ‘Our wonderful man with metal hands.’ We journey through time with detail of experiences from childhood to adulthood. Her vigorous dad ending in a care home:
Our gentle, kind, strong man.
His long leaving, his boxed glasses,
his check short-sleeved shirt
on a hanger, hanky in his anorak,
his slippers, him in hospital sheets,
his raised bed rail, his open mouth,
his closed eyes, his cold feet.
Silent him. His human hands
grey as putty. In ours.
The poem has a filmic quality where we share in life weakening, then death. There is a quiet authority to McKenna’s poems, well sustained throughout the collection. There are poignant moments, giddy moments of childhood joy and the adult grief intruding in a gentle but insistent way.
Nature and the elements are mobilised to great effect in the poems, changing mood, allowing nature to hold her grief:
Rain Knows of Waking
It rained until I woke. Awake the ground
from this height is cracked mirrors.
Blades of grass are scissors wielding tears
Thimbles of rain amplify the gully, until
A thumb at the latch unlocks a dreamt smile.
Many of the poems unfold like a story, an epic and above all, an elegy. Throughout the poems there are the ordinary details of family; the aftermath of reading of a will, a child searching for sweets while observing her father’s life as well as her own. McKenna evokes the Ireland of the time, the poverty and the pious nature of the society where rituals mattered and adherence was compulsory.
In the poem, ‘Lemon Drops in the Pocket of my father’s Overcoat’, McKenna traces this shift with precision:
The rusted nail is angled low, your handy work weakened
by a rampant damp that settled on the tweed overcoat
you wore to Sunday mass and ever more frequent funeral
processions of men who bluffed and laughed, drinking
whiskey straight from tulip glasses………..
The last stanza reminds us that her father is dying:
I can’t remember when you last wore a coat,
as I lift your head from pillow to window, point
your gaze to the wind, as if to capture
something imagined, then to your mouth, on the tip
of a spoon, a hint of lukewarm spirit.
This collection is imbued with McKenna’s love for her father. It is a testament to his life and his death.
*****
Remembering the Future by Janice Dempsey. £10.00. Vole Books. ISBN:978-1-913-32997-6. Reviewed by Rona Fitzgerald
Janice Dempsey trained as a fine artist and spent many years as an art teacher at London University Institute of Education. Janice has written poetry for some time, concentrating on her writing after her retirement. She has a number of publications including a pamphlet of nonsense verse in 2013, a collection of poems and another collection of illustrated poems about the Italian Amalfi coast.
This book collects together new poems with edited versions of poems from her earlier books.
Dempsey’s poems are playful, vivid and engaging. They are full of life, of lived moments, experiences from the light hearted to the profound foreshadowing of ageing and death.
In the poem, ‘Travelling,’ we see the word flow and lively observations in a playful way:
She was smirking in a convertible in Paris;
he was frowning in a street car in Saigon.
She was beaming on a bendy bus in Blackpool;
He was nervous in a transit van in Tring.
Alliteration, active verbs and vivid images allow the poem to move rapidly as a traveller would. The last line confounds all the differences: ‘she was glad to see him walking on her street.’
The range of poems included in this collection is extensive, covering travel, ambition, life, loss and experience.
Dempsey loves journeys, adventure and travel. The collection underlines this zest. Her poem ‘Cork Is’ captures so much of the city’s vibrant centre. The images are sharp and remarkably detailed. Her artist eye hones in on everything from breakfast, art galleries, to hurling legends and poetry. The naming of actual places adds an odyssey-like feel, reminiscent of Homer and James Joyce.
The sense of our own journey through life and our migration to old age is well captured throughout the collection. I can imagine Dempsey as great company on any journey. Her sharp eye and empathy adding so many layers to experiences.
Dempsey also uses shape to great effect. Her poems, ‘Sparkling Wine’ and ‘The architecture of the poppy’, uses the silhouette of both to capture their form, while her words capture their texture.
The theme poem ‘Remembering the Future’ is a beautiful elegy for loss as well as the tricks of time and remembrance. After an epigraph from Alice In Wonderland, Dempsey draws us into loss, grief, anticipation and acceptance:
If I mourn now – remembering I shall one day lose
the warm swell of your chest under my cheek,
the comfort of your gentle hands on my body-
like the White Queen , if I suffer now the pain
that will grip my chest as I lie here one day
in the future, knowing you’ve gone,
perhaps I can live time reversed,
all grieving done, no tears to shed
time cancelled, my fingertips
still exploring your beloved flesh
you and I in perpetual present time.
But no, my mourning will be of infinite duration.
Better not to step through the looking glass.
There will be no relief from remembering
that you’ve gone, and no end to the pain.
Best to keep my poor one-way memory
That holds the presence of you, and remember
Only our precious years together.
Dempsey’s collection is engaging. Her voice, words and images ring true. Her language choice clear and eloquent.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin. She now lives in Glasgow. She writes poetry, stories and non-fiction. She is published in a range of online and print magazines including; The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, the Blue Nib, Dreich, Littoral, Marble Broadsheet, The Storms, Fixator press and Culture Matters. In September 2023, she published a book of poetry called Aftermath: Poems of Repair and Renewal, on Amazon.
The High Window 